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Miranda Spivack—Government Secrets
Forty percent of voters still trust Trump on the economy even though the man’s clearly lost his mind. Ben riffs. Miranda Spivack makes her debut! A decorated investigative journalist, she talks about the secrets the government keeps from you about things they should be telling you. Like…chemicals in the drinking water. It’s government by NDA. It’s all in her latest book—Backroom Deals In Our Backyards. Which you should borrow from the library or buy.
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Sept. 24, 2026
While I Was Eating Shrimp Dumplings...
Read an article the other day in The New York Times by a reporter named Teddy Rosenbluth, who I presume is a real person. Though in these days of A.I., you never know. It's about Zou and Pak, a couple of scientists at Stanford, who oversaw a team o…
Sept. 20, 2026
How Could They Forget About The Daleys?
In the category of if you live long enough, you'll see it all... How is it possible that a developer, even a billionaire, would try to build something in Chicago without really running it by the Daleys? Especially if that developer wants to buy th…
Sept. 16, 2026
A Friend Of Kafka
From time to time, I find myself compelled to read the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Or re-read, to be exact. As I'd read most of them by the time I was 30. Which was, as you might imagine, a long time ago. Reading all those stories is no smal…
Sept. 15, 2026
The Aging Road
As soon as word broke that Stevie Wonder was playing the United Center in November, my wife and I did what we've been doing with big-time concerts since 1972. Hopped into our car and drove on down to the United Center to buy our tickets directly fr…
Sept. 13, 2026
Wanda Hickey's Night Of Golden Memories
Let's start by carving this into stone... Should the Bears make good on their threat to move to Hammond, Indiana--as I still don't believe they will. As I still believe they want to stay in Illinois, but having painted themselves into a corner by e…
Sept. 12, 2026
Things Are Looking Up
As the sweet summer days turn into autumn nights, my family and I made our annual pilgrimage to Michigan. The northern regions, that is. AKA, MAGA land. It's hard to understand, much less explain, how a country so great could produce a political…