steinberg
Neil Steinberg biography
Neil Steinberg began writing for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1984, and joined the staff in 1987 as a feature writer.
He became a columnist in …
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Iraq worked so well, is North Korea next?
Boy, I said to myself, it’s been a while — a week, maybe two — since we’ve heard something nutty from North Korea. Almost as if it realized it couldn’t compete with the Boston bombing and decided to dial back. But something about crazy craves a spotlight, and when I went trolling for North Korean news it took 10 seconds to snag something weird: They have decided to try an American citizen, Washington state tour operator Kenneth Bae, for attempting to overthrow the North Korean government.
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Best way to get to Sycamore? In a new Bentley
A buddy throws a yearly party, which is good. Parties are good. But the party is in Sycamore, which is bad. A lovely town, Sycamore, but when storytellers of old coined “in a land far, far away,” they had Sycamore in mind. OK, it’s only …Read More
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Steinberg: Americans reflect on George W. Bush
Time softens. Passions cool, and history takes a more nuanced view. What seems one way now seems another. It might soften too much, in the complex interplay between our own lives and the historical eras we pass through. I’ll never forget my father telling me, …Read More
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Change happens. But where do we draw the line?
The default position — the hard-wired opinion that most folks naturally revert to — is to resist change. Change frightens us — offends us, almost, particularly when we realize on the small, hard, practical reasons behind the trashing of our beloved icons. Federated Department Stores …
‘Keep your head up — you’re a Chicagoan’
At 5 p.m. I lowered the venetian blinds, put on my sport coat and then my raincoat and stood in the office, mustering the strength to leave. The phone rang — my father. “Mom told me,” he said. “It’s hard to believe. Are you sure? …
Illinois House stirs the marijuana pot
Growing old has drawbacks — you tire easily, you start to look like hell and you get jostled by packs of young folk sporting full sleeve tattoos, braided beards and Polynesian ear lobe discs, all earning what you earn at their entry-level tech jobs. But …
How do we react to Boston horror?
Most people are kind. Most Americans live in comparative safety. We are lucky that way, generally. Not lucky Monday however. Not at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, where two crude bombs sprayed death and mayhem, killing three, including an 8-year-old boy, Martin …
STEINBERG: ‘Happy birthday to you, income tax!’
The federal income tax is exactly 100 years old. In a society gone mad for anniversaries, where every cookie and cracker sees its demi-sesquicentennial ballyhooed in the news, it seems odd that the big dates leading up to such an important and much debated aspect of American life are being overlooked.
Bloomingdale Trail to be Chicago gem
The good news is that the City of Chicago has not only discovered 13 acres of new park, but found it in the green-space deprived near northwest side of the city. Unused land, just sitting there, hiding in plain sight, year after year, waiting for somebody to notice it. The ... well, not quite bad news, but the challenge has been that the property for the new park is long and thin. Very long and thin.
Egg salad (eww) delicious for many
I don’t like egg salad. That’s it, end of column. Thank you very much for reading, please exit to your left and enjoy your visit with the other fine features in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. Still, here? Oh all right then. We are bound by the …
Steinberg: Reviewing movies was the least of it
In the end, the movies weren’t the important part. Oh, being a film critic certainly made Roger Ebert a rich, famous, influential man. But — and as with all good surprise endings, I didn’t see this coming — when his loved ones, his friends, colleagues, …
Book of Mormon: fun and important
Sure, musicals are fun, for a night on the town. But do they mean anything? Are they important? Usually they’re just entertainment — think “Wicked.” But sometimes they matter. It’s hard to imagine we’d be having this debate now about gay marriage, for instance, if …
‘Repent Gay People to God, be saved’
‘To Mr. Steinberg,” writes reader Robert Zuback. “Once again the Sun-Times intervenes when they shouldn’t. They should remain neutral on the Gay Marriage issue. But the media like yourselves wants to go against the Catholic Church and its Bishops, who oppose Gay Marriage.” Sometimes you …
Mass shootings not a big problem
Mass school shootings are not a big problem in the United States. In fact, mass shootings, period, are not a big problem in the U.S., at least not in the sense that cancer is a problem or heart disease is a problem or accidents are …
We’re all rooting for Roger Ebert as he fights cancer
NEIL STEINBERG: “My newspaper job,” Roger Ebert once said, “is my identity.” So naturally word that Ebert, the most famous and influential movie critic in the world, is stepping back from that beloved newspaper job is a thunderclap. The cancer he has been fighting since 2002 has returned and he has to dial back his workload to fight it.
Emanuel’s fire fest could spark new tradition
All civic celebrations sound strange when stripped of their cliche descriptions and standard holiday trappings. Do Chicagoans festoon themselves in green and prance in the street to greet the spring? Yes, and call it St. Patrick’s Day. Do we disguise our children in masks and send them out every autumn to beg for sweets from neighbors? Yes, we call it Halloween. Yet propose some new festival, and strangeness is the first thing we see. Thus the head-scratching that greeted Rahm Emanuel’s new “Great Chicago Fire Festival,” set to light up the river in 2014.
No disappointment in baseball
The weather, warm, or warmer anyway. The bulbs, planted with such care last autumn, like laying mines, push their pointed green tips through the dirt. At last. And Opening Day 2013 is Monday — April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough for die-hard Chicago fans, gazing forlornly …
Paris, love and a captivating blog
Every moment, the Internet dangles the entire world — or an electronic simulacrum of the entire world — under our noses. But, as with the actual world, we do not want the whole thing — who has the time? We just want a bit, a …
Ready to run the Antarctic Marathon
Earlier this week, while you and I were shuffling through our daily routines, Brendan Cournane was running through the streets of Buenos Aires — temperature in the 70s, though humid and the pavement more broken up than in Chicago. On Tuesday, while we sighed over …
Steinberg: Coming out of the closet worked
So why now? With so many issues facing our country, what puts gay marriage on the forefront of the American political debate at this particular moment? Yes, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments Tuesday on California’s Proposition 8 ban against gay marriage, and Wednesday …
