There are six living former U.S. senators from the state of Illinois.
How many employees does U.S. Steel currently have working in Gary, Ind.? I put the question to three colleagues.
Give South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson credit for brevity. His two-word catcall -- "You lie!" -- delivered during President Obama's speech on health care Wednesday before a joint session of Congress neatly encapsulated all that the Republican Party has been saying on the issue for months.
What is it about Americans? Change terrifies us. Even little changes. We fought the introduction of ZIP codes. We resisted direct dial telephony. We battled fluoridated water -- some fight still -- as a communist plot.
In Italy, they know not of spumoni. "Spumoni? What is this? I have never heard of this," says Marianka Campisi, of Bologna, a 25-year-old intern at the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago. "I don't think we have this in Italy."
On Monday, Jan. 20, 1969, Richard Nixon delivered his inaugural address. It was a powerful, forward-looking speech, filled with yearnings toward brotherhood and peace, quoting poet Archibald MacLeish on the Earth as seen from outer space: "small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence."
Time throws a black velvet blanket over the brilliant mosaic of the past. Then we run our fingers over the soft bumps and feel satisfied that we have taken in history's full multicolored splendor.
Out of the fetid floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, where most public figures associated with the 2005 disaster drowned in their own incompetence and failure -- a negligent president, an overwhelmed FEMA director, a bumbling mayor -- paddles a true American hero, Abdulrahman Zeitoun.
Chicago doesn't have a proper Jewish deli. Some will grumble at that statement, will point to Manny's on Roosevelt Road. But Manny's serves cafeteria-style, so it doesn't count -- cafeteria-style deli is like take-out French: the food could be wonderful, but the format undercuts it.
The Economist recently ran a grim cover story -- "America's Unjust Sex Laws" -- documenting how our nation's 674,000 registered sex offenders end up tarred for the rest of their lives, often for relatively minor offenses.
Neil Steinberg: Gry Haukland is a nurse who lives in Norway, not far from the North Sea. Lee Klawans is an artist who lives in Chicago, not far from North Avenue. Until recently, the two would never have met. But the Internet has shrunk the world, and both were hanging around the same patch of cyberspace -- my Facebook page -- where Gry would post frequent, heartfelt streams of verbiage in her distinctive creole of badly misspelled English. Each comment included a photograph, which caught Lee's attention.
'I'm looking for a boisterous Norwegian woman," I explained to the maitre d' at the Heartland Cafe.
Scotland sent the Libyan convicted of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie home to a hero's welcome Thursday, a "compassionate" release because he's dying of cancer, supposedly.
As someone who has eaten steamed sand worms in Quemoy and still-wriggling shrimp in Tokyo, I know the Far East is a mecca for unexpected gastronomical delights . . . OK, perhaps "delights" is not the right word; you cannot call the snake bile sold in Taipei a "delight."
Chris Kennedy phoned Tuesday morning. We chit-chatted a bit — about my recent vacation out West, about his melancholy journey to Hyannis Port to bid farewell to his aunt, Eunice Shriver — and then, out-of-the-blue, he said, “I’m not running for elective office.”
