Search Results for: Chicago-Magazine

It’s a Lovely Day for a Bike Ride

Photo by Mack Male via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Tom Justice was an Olympic cycling hopeful. Tom Justice’s life didn’t work out quite the way he’d hoped. Tom Justice found an unlikely escape hatch: bank robbery, but just for the thrills — not the cash. In October 1999, he robbed his second bank, the Lake Forest, Illinois, branch of Northern Trust, escaping by bike with over $3,000. He put the cash in paper bags and left them in spots where homeless people would find them.

He eventually robbed 26 banks of nearly $130,000 before descending into drug addiction. Steven Leckart‘s story in Chicago Magazine is as engaging and cinematic as one could want for this sad, twisted Robin Hood of a tale.

But before he could flash his lights, the cyclist pulled over and hopped off his bike. When Thompson pulled up, the guy was fidgeting with his back wheel. It started to drizzle again.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Thompson asked through the open window of his patrol car.

“Hey, yeah, sorry, it’s gonna take me a second,” Tom said, continuing to tinker.

Thompson parked a few feet ahead, turned on his flashing red and blue lights, and walked back to the cyclist.

“I live in San Ramon. I’m riding home,” said Tom, pretending to adjust his brakes before climbing onto the bike and clicking his left foot into the pedal.

“Do you mind if I take a look in your bag?” Thompson asked the cyclist.

“Yeah, no problem. I just have to unclip,” replied Tom. “These pedals are actually counterbalanced, so I need to click into both in order to get out at the same time.”

There’s no such thing as counterbalanced pedals. But Thompson didn’t know that. He watched as the cyclist lifted his right foot, clicked down into the pedal, and — whoosh! — bolted into the street in a dead start as hellacious as any Tom had ever mustered on a velodrome.

“I knew it!” cried Thompson. He desperately grabbed his radio, but another officer was talking on the channel. The cyclist shot down Main Street and out of sight.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Maps4media via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Nathaniel Rich, Ronan Farrow, Jeff Maysh, Helen Rosner, and Nick Greene.

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Long Live the Oddly Charming Poetry of the Mail-Order Catalog

Image by Mike Mozart (CC BY 2.0)

In this age of near-universal despair, could America’s longest-running mail-order retailer be the sleeper hero we didn’t even know was still among us? At Chicago Magazine, Nick Greene makes a compelling case that Hammacher Schlemmer, founded in 1881, might just be the goofy, retro anti-Amazon we need.

The catalog’s most obvious hook might be the ridiculous gizmos and novelty items — motorized unicycle, anyone? — that appear on its cover. But what I found especially endearing is the level of care the catalog’s makers invest in the product descriptions.

Beyond being older, today’s prototypical Hammacher Schlemmer customer is also wealthy and educated. “They would definitely be considered top 10 percent in household income, a lot of postgrads,” Farrell says. “That’s why we feel the copy is important.” Where else can one find a backpack described as “Brobdingnagian” or a walking stick crafted from “sustainably coppiced blackthorn (Primus spinosa)”?

The text is matter-of-fact, with odd literary flourishes, and the titles are concise, yet deceptively clever. “I could go on for hours talking about titles,” says John Gagliardi, who, as Hammacher Schlemmer’s senior creative manager, oversees the catalog’s unmistakable copy. “We agonize over titles.” The company employs two full-time copywriters and a stable of contributors to write the extensive product descriptions.

The NASA Strength Sun Hat harnesses “the same technology used in space suits.” That galactic selling point doesn’t overshadow the product’s earthly benefits, like the “wide brim” and a “radiant barrier” that “imparts a UPF 50+ rating to the hat.” If a product is unisex (the sun hat is), then that will always be noted, as will whether or not it requires batteries (it does not). At 153 words, the hat’s description is about the average length for Hammacher Schlemmer. A standard catalog is 88 pages long, give or take, meaning that, at four products per page, there are roughly 53,856 words in every issue. That’s more verbose than The Great Gatsby (47,094 words).

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The Best of City And Regional Magazines: A Reading List

Last month, the City and Regional Magazine Association, a membership-based body of local magazines and alt-weeklies, announced the winners of its annual awards. This year, Texas Monthly, Portland Monthlyand Sarasota Magazine won overall excellence awards in their respective categories.

Local and regional periodicals fill an important space in the media ecosystem; voices rooted in the sights and sounds of a place can reveal the complexity of what’s really happening in an area. We all know by now that our time is one where the press is imperiled and the pursuit of truth is threatened. There is commercial pressure on journalists due to a fragmented marketplace, and mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations that have shorn staff sizes and budgets.  As we have said before, it is important to support their work.

In honor of the awards, we compiled a few local and regional deep cuts, including some of the winning pieces from CRMA publications. What do they have in common? A rigorous approach to the truth, a convergence of the of the personal and political, implicit — and some explicit — calls to action, and excellent writing.

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Dear New Owners: City Magazines Were Already Great

As the president sucks up the oxygen from the media atmosphere, it’s easy to forget how important local journalism is right now. The regional press—the holy trinity of newspapers, alt-weeklies, and city magazines—is where we can find true stories of friends and neighbors impacted by immigration raids, fights over funding public education, and the frontline of relaxed environmental standards that will impact the water we drink and the air we breathe. We need to support their work. Read more…

Finding a ‘Prepper’ to Go on the Record Is No Easy Task

Preppers are, not surprisingly, a paranoid bunch. Locating people willing to speak with me about their habits was more challenging than finding vegans at a gun range. After emailing a dozen members of Northern Illinois Preppers, a Meetup online community whose membership has grown from about 110 to more than 150 in the past six months, I received two responses. One was from someone who told me to take a hike (“I have no interest in being involved in your article. I also do NOT give you permission to quote me,” he wrote, which was perplexing, considering that no interview had been conducted). The other was delivered via a peer-to-peer encrypted email service:

“Due to OPSEC (operational security) and PERSEC (personal security) you’ll never see my stored materials. Though I personally take no offense at your question due to the nature of this interview the question itself is exceptionally rude in prepping circles. By way of analogy it’s the equivalent of my coming over to your home for the first time and, in front of your wife or girlfriend, telling you I think she’s hot and I’d like to see her without clothes. It’s simply not done. Any prepper who would be willing to show you their stocks, anonymously or otherwise, has violated so many rules they may as well just put their stocks on the curb for all to see and take.”

Rod O’Connor writing in Chicago Magazine about suburban survivalists.

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Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Short Life of Robert Earl Hughes, Who Weighed Half a Ton By His Late Twenties

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Jane R. LeBlanc is a freelance journalist who writes for the Dallas Observer where she covers the local comedy scene and anything strange and interesting. She has written for Denton Live, Mayborn magazine, Spirit magazine and the Denton Record-Chronicle. She has a humor blog, Everyone Hates You, where she pontificates about everyday life. You can find her online.

Inspired by a single black and white photograph from the mid-20th century, Robert Kurson explores the short life of Robert Earl Hughes, a young man born in 1926 with a youthful face, a steel-trap mind and a disposition that drew people in. He was also a Guinness World Record holder weighing more than half a ton by his late 20s. Staring at the photograph for much of the day, one thought repeated in Kurson’s head — ‘I knew the heavy man was lonely.’

In ‘Heavy,’ which appeared in Chicago Magazine in 2001, Kurson not only tells Hughes’ story, but that of his own father, a man he worshiped as a young boy and whose weight caused a young Kurson to worry that a ‘person could get lonely being fat in America.’ Through interviews with Hughes’ friends and family members, Kurson lifts Hughes from the pages of yellowed newspaper clippings and into the living, breathing world once more. He finds that ‘it is in the crevices of their memories, where details drop almost accidentally, that their recollections resonate.’ The author’s own memories take us into the mind of a son who was acutely observant of the world that surrounded him and his father. Kurson offers a revealing look into the lives of these two men, who are connected despite the separation of time and circumstances, and takes us into the hearts of those who loved them most.

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The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly

The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly