Chicago Sun-Times

Iraq worked so well, is North Korea next?

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 02:16:18 -0500

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

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:24:19 -0500

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 60 miles west of Chicago. Still a haul, especially if you plan on coming back; then it’s 120 miles round-trip. Usually I solve this dilemma by not going to the party, which works, but is not all that friendly. This year though, well, we went to dinner and had such a fun time, I resolved …

Steinberg: Americans reflect on George W. Bush

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 02:22:27 -0500

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, “People were kinder when I was growing up” and my reply: “This era of kindness of which you speak, dad, would that be the Great Depression, or World War II? Because I just don’t see it.” I have done the same thing, though, with Richard Nixon, who proved as shifty in death as he was …

Change happens. But where do we draw the line?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 02:13:28 -0500

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 changed the name of Marshall Field’s to Macy’s so they could run one unified block of national TV advertising, and to avoid the inefficiency of ordering red bags for all their stores nationwide except this little island of dark green bags in Chicago. Part of our civic heart was cut out to save on plastic …

‘Keep your head up — you’re a Chicagoan’

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 02:50:06 -0500

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? They don’t do that sort of thing.” “Well . . . they made an exception for me,” I said, with a rueful laugh. “Maybe you should write a letter to the editor,” he suggested. “I’m not going to do that, dad.” We talked some more; I said I had to get going —promised a friend …

Illinois House stirs the marijuana pot

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:17:34 -0500

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 aging has good aspects, too. The technology that youngsters shrug off still will awe an older person — when I first used an iPod, it made me proud to be a human being, to be part of the same race that made this. You also live to see shifts in society that you never expected …

How do we react to Boston horror?

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:23:22 -0500

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 Richard, and injuring more than 170, including that boy’s sister and mother. Among the many bad things that such an atrocity radiates is a sense of danger, of terror. This could happen anywhere. Which is what it’s intended to do, as much as the intention behind such malicious insanity can be understood. Which means, as …

STEINBERG: ‘Happy birthday to you, income tax!’

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 02:16:36 -0500

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

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:09:08 -0500

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

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 02:24:31 -0500

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 limits of the form, aren’t we? Ann Landers once left the last quarter of her column blank, when writing about her divorce, as a tribute to a marriage that ended prematurely. Very dramatic, though it was an extraordinary circumstance. Someone who made her living telling others how to manage their lives couldn’t just shrug when …

Steinberg: Reviewing movies was the least of it

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 02:18:10 -0500

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, regular readers and admirers gathered at Holy Name Cathedral Monday to say goodbye to Roger on what started as a rainy, gray, chill Chicago morning and ended in warm, golden sunlight, the world of box-office numbers and star-fueled glamour and good reviews and bad reviews felt very, very far away. What mattered was his noble …

Book of Mormon: fun and important

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 02:12:32 -0500

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 in 1975 “A Chorus Line” hadn’t put the lives of gay characters up on the Broadway stage — shockingly, at the time — as if they were real people, too. “The Book of Mormon” was an unexpected smash hit when it opened in New York in 2011, coming to Chicago last December, where it has …

‘Repent Gay People to God, be saved’

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 02:35:33 -0500

‘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 find a moment of clarity where you least expect it. Such as reading Mr. Zuback’s letter, which arrived in an envelope decorated with an American flag sticker and the scrawled slogan, “I prefer believers in Christ, Not sinners like the Gay People.” “It shows their disrespect for Catholics like myself and my Church,” he writes, …

Mass shootings not a big problem

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 02:21:30 -0500

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 a problem. That’s a bold statement, and obviously deserves a caveat: Mass shootings sure are a big problem if your first-grader is killed in Newtown, Conn., or if you survive a massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. I don’t want to seem glib about the cause of unspeakable lifetime agony. But as a …

We’re all rooting for Roger Ebert as he fights cancer

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:05:35 -0500

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

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:25:34 -0500

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

Thu, 02 May 2013 06:24:03 -0500

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 at a pair of teams whose prospects for any kind of success are, well, bleak. “A growth year,” to reach for the cliche, and why not? A big part of sports is cliche, lovingly served up and appreciated, as if fresh. “It was a team effort.” Well gosh thanks Rip, I suppose it was. So …

Paris, love and a captivating blog

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:02:35 -0500

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 morsel now and then. But how to find those tidbits? Like many folks, I check my Twitter feed and my Facebook to see what my online sorta-friends are worked up about now. Being a newspaperman, I skim the news sites — the Sun-Times, of course, and the Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington …