Chicago Reader

“Police unions were born of resistance to discipline for brutality. Do they belong in the labor movement?”

In 2016, more than 2,000 adults who were sent as kids to die in prison were given a second chance. Marshan Allen was one of them.

“Chicago’s population would be increasing if not for the black exodus. How can it be explained?”

The Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. front man was talented, prolific and a “balladeer of heartbreak.” Max Blau chronicles his career and tragic descent into alcoholism.

Lois ran the education program at Joliet. Dan was serving 85 years. This is their love story.

On eating squirrels:

“But somewhere along the way, squirrel declined in popularity as a game animal, replaced by bigger quarry, such as deer and turkey, whose numbers had grown in the countryside as the number of humans dwindled. Mainstream views on squirrel eating began to drift toward disdainful—it became something hillbillies and rednecks did. In the late 90s a pair of Kentucky neurologists posited a link between eaters of squirrel brains—a time-honored delicacy among hunters—and the occurrence of a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a theoretical but terrifying new mad squirrel disease. (Peer review later deemed this connection unlikely.) And though noted woodsman and Motor City Madman Ted Nugent devoted a few pages of his wild game cookbook Kill It and Grill It to “Limbrat Etouffee” in 2002—written with a vengeance he typically reserves for sitting Democratic presidents—when the 75th-anniversary edition of Joy of Cooking was published four years later, for the first time in the book’s history it didn’t include an illustrated how-to for pulling the skin from a squirrel.”

A look back at the DJs, drugs and roller-rink raves that made Chicago a house music hotbed:

“‘We were hearing more and more: “Chicago is where house was from,” says electronic musician Kate Simko, who went to her first rave in 1995. ‘We realized [from] the magnitude of people that were playing [at events] how important Chicago was. We definitely had a sense that history was being made. I couldn’t believe that this shit was going on, that we’re going to a roller rink and it’s full of 1,500 or 2,000 kids and it’s going all night long until six in the morning.'”

One evening that summer, Clark, then 19, walked his dog from his home at 5213 S. Green to a weedy vacant lot a half block west at 52nd and Peoria. A group of white kids was gathered in an alley next to the lot, and Clark soon was dodging rocks and bottles and hearing the usual taunts: “Get outta here, nigger!” “You don’t belong here!” His mother had instructed him to turn the other cheek, but that ran against his nature. He flung a few rocks back. … Clark headed back toward his house. More jeers; a bottle crashed next to him. Then, suddenly, he heard a gruff voice snapping at his attackers. He turned and saw a middle-aged white man shooing the troublemakers away. The man approached Clark and introduced himself: Sam Navarro. He said he lived nearby, and he offered to walk Clark home. He apologized for the mob’s actions. Clark responded, “This ain’t nothing new.” Navarro frowned, shook his head, and said, “Some people are just ignorant. But we’re not all like that.”