Walter Lippmann, commemorating the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote, “The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.” That’s a pretty optimistic definition because among other things, it assumes that common sense abounds in society.
As everyone who has elected a leader who showed promise and then turned out to be…..
I wonder how many people, recognizing those four words, know who wrote them? It was Katharine Lee Bates, in 1893. Although some have said this song should be the American anthem – and certainly it is easier to sing than “The Star-Spangled Banner” – Francis Scott Key’s anthem commemorated a specific moment in the War of 1812, and a…..
Why are there so many guns used and so many people shot in my novel, “Skyscrapers?” Am I a gun nut? Do I favor concealed carry, keep my brass knuckles in my back pocket and my derringer in my bra?
What I do is irrelevant. Every single morning, I open “The Chicago Tribune” and “The Chicago Sun-Times” to confront multiple stories of gun violence. There’s yesterday’s shootings, which can…..
There are reasons language is taught by parents, schools and higher institutions. Communication is important. Some students learn all the details of a language without becoming fluent. They may recognize the names of arcane verb constructs but if they can’t hold a conversation in the language, they have to some degree failed the course even if they aced the…..
I live in Chicago, which always has been a multilingual place. The first non-native settler was a black French-speaker named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who established a farm at the mouth of the Chicago river in 1780. His being black was unusual, but his speaking French in the area was not: French had been spoken, along with a number of Indian languages, in the area starting with the colonizing adventures of Père Louis Joliet and Père Jacques Marquette…..
“Skyscrapers” reflects my experience as the CEO of a big-city independent non-profit for eight years. During that time, I became more aware of the role CEOs of for-profits played and the long years of ladder-climbing most of them put in before they reached the top. I also became aware of the disastrous effects of corporate mismanagement. My non-profit, which distributed 160,000 free books to inner-city kids each year, ended up homeless as a result of corporate greed at Enron, the…..
