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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Paper or plastic? No choice for you!
NEIL STEINBERG: Unintended consequences. Two of the most important — and underappreciated — words in the English language. We see them all the time, usually after it’s too late. The handgun Biff buys to protect his family from notional perils abruptly becomes a very real peril to little Biff Jr. Chicago sells its parking meters because it’s going broke only to end up poorer than it would have been had it kept them.
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Why stop at merely fining litterbugs?
NEIL STEINBERG: Chicago has a long tradition of enforced sanitation, and the latest effort is from Ald. Howard Brookins (21st), who last week proposed an ordinance that would boost the fine for littering 900 percent — from up to $150 to up to $1,500. Actually more, because any vehicle litter is thrown from can be impounded too.
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‘Other Suns’ shines light on empathy
NEIL STEINBERG: Anything that breaks down the wall of indifference we have for people not exactly like ourselves, is a good thing, and why I’ve been raving about Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns, the current One Book, One Chicago selection.
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World’s roses coming to Chicago?
NEIL STEINBERG: To start to understand the rose business, you must first realize: you never really buy roses. You only rent them.
Computer crimes go way back
Fame is not fair. The names of bank robbers of the 1930s, for instance, still roll off our tongues: John Dillinger; Bonnie & Clyde; Pretty Boy Floyd. Crude thugs in souped-up Packards bursting into small town banks, waving guns and fleeing with a couple hundred …
Don’t toss drivers under their buses because of Cleveland case
NEIL STEINBERG: “Everybody on the news has been using the term, that Ariel Castro was a bus driver,” said Michael Thomas, a school bus driver in District 303 in St. Charles. “It throws a black cloud over all bus drivers everywhere.”
Steinberg: One pocket filled, the other picked
The joke was old in 1854 when Henry Thoreau told it in “Walden”: A man on horseback approaches a bog. He asks a boy standing there if the swamp has a hard bottom. Yes, the rustic lad says, indeed it does. So the traveler rides …
Church has big beauty, few members
The first notes of Bach’s “Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor” pumping out of the pipe organ at the Second Presbyterian Church of Chicago hit with an ego-obliterating power, a pressure you can almost feel on your face, causing it to tilt upward, toward the …
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.
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 …
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, …
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 …
