Chicago Tribune

42 fires and 61 deaths, in a city that knew about fire safety issues and didn’t fix them.

Long-distance train travel offers Alexandra Marvar and her fellow passengers a lift across the country, a break from their routines, and a chance to get to know each other.

Schools across Illinois have been punishing students by locking them into “seclusion rooms” — essentially putting them into solitary confinement. Schools say the isolated timeouts are a necessary tool to dealing with students who pose a safety threat to themselves or others, but many of the students put in these rooms have disabilities and receive no therapeutic value from being locked away. Not long after this Tribune/ProPublica investigation was published, Illinois took emergency action to end this practice.

Othea Loggan made minimum wage in 1964. He makes minimum wage now. The owners are somehow fine with that.

Brian Crooks moved to Naperville, Illinois when he was in the 5th grade. His stories of mistreatment and insults, both blatant and unintentional, show the daily, unrelenting racism flung at a person of color in America.

Cooking saved chef Curtis Duffy from a turbulent childhood, but it also exacted a price.

Poetry magazine started in Chicago in 1912, and during the ensuing century, the magazine’s history and the history of American poetry often were joined at the hip. It published an unknown T.S. Eliot, gave early support to Langston Hughes, discovered Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Gwendolyn Brooks. What Poetry rarely had was a history of picking fights, rising blood pressures or heated controversies. Until the money arrived.

A week earlier, Brandon Baltzley, 26, was the head chef at Tribute, an ambitious, 170-seat restaurant set to open in the Essex Inn in the South Loop. He spent months developing his menu, crafting a document to tell the world: This is who I am. Instead, on this morning in late May, he will check himself into a drug rehabilitation program on the West Side. The night before, he paid $100 he owed his dealer. He gave his apartment keys to a friend with instructions on locating his cocaine paraphernalia. Throw it all away, he told him.

With three Michelin stars to Grant Achatz’s name and many critics convinced that Alinea is now the best restaurant in the United States, Achatz and Kokonas are in an enviable position: They can do what they want. … Take, for instance, Next’s reservation system. There are no reservations. If you want to eat there, you will have to buy tickets through Next’s website. So far, 15,000 have signed up to be notified when tickets go on sale.

To understand why customers disappeared, why she entered a self-described period of rage, why the cannoli now costs $9, why the Zarzours will close the shop when their lease runs out in September and how Natalie Zarzour became Chicago’s most provocative pastry chef in a profession with little provocation, just ask her about the “Lobster Tail.”