Stately and elegant, red brick with white trim, partly obscured by a row of trees, the house has nothing to set it apart from the other homes on this affluent residential block of Kenwood. Except that it is protected. In the driveway there is always a black SUV. At the end of the street, where University Avenue meets Hyde Park Boulevard, a black sedan is parked behind a long wall of waist-high concrete barriers and metal pipe fences. The blockade reaches along the street, across the sidewalks and back on the other side, enclosing half a city block in each direction. At every entrance, a blue metal sign covered with yellow and white letters declares in English and Spanish: ATTENTION: BY ENTERING THIS AREA YOU ARE CONSENTING TO A SEARCH OF YOUR PERSON AND BELONGINGS.

Barack Obama doesn’t live here anymore, but his presence does. Read the rest of this entry »

The journalism industry seems to be on its last legs these days, and everyone thinks they know why. Is it faulty business models? Corporate greed? An inevitable result of changing technology? Over the past year or so, as both the Tribune Company and the Sun-Times Media Group have filed for bankruptcy protection, fingers have been pointed and explanations advanced. Perhaps the debate is getting old, but here at the Weekly we thought we’d consult two groups whose opinions are often overlooked: the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a Maoist group based in Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Objectivist Club, which advocates the individualist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are their thoughts on journalism’s future and problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Churches dot the Woodlawn like freckles and underlie it like foundations. Some of them are historically significant, some have architectural merit, and some stand out only for their typicality. This photo essay includes a little of each.

Founded in the second Fort Dearborn in 1833, First Presbyterian Church was a pioneer in the temperance and abolition movements in the mid-nineteenth century. The congregation had moved to its sixth and most lavish building when it was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1871. Several mergers and nearly six decades later, First Church moved into its present home at 6400 South Kimbark Avenue. Its membership grew in numbers and racial diversity throughout the ’40s, and in the late ’50s the church helped establish T.W.O., or The Woodlawn Organization, to fight the encroachment of the University of Chicago campus. Since then, First Church has housed organizations and efforts as diverse as the Blackstone Rangers, Head Start classes, a community garden, and today the Woodlawn Collaborative, which unites Woodlawn residents and UofC students in promoting arts, education, and community empowerment. Read the rest of this entry »

Across the street from the Lubyanka prison, in Moscow, there stood in 1937 a nondescript building with a specially sloped floor, for drainage, and a wooden wall to muffle the sound of bullets. It was here that the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, executed enemies of the Communist regime. Between 1937 and 1938 this amounted to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, according to the Russian Memorial society. Among the victims were Nikolai Bukharin, once one of the chief Soviet economists; Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a Marshal of the Soviet Union; Genrikh Yagoda, former head of the secret police; and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. Those who were not murdered outright were frequently deported to the Gulag prison camps, based on the katorga system that had existed under the tsars. These were scattered throughout Siberia and in 1939 housed over a million people, slowly freezing or being worked to death in some of the most hostile environments on earth. Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Chicago is a bastion of resources and privilege in a largely underserved and segregated South Side. The University and many of its students regularly engage in outreach and volunteer programs aimed at bridging the gap between the University community and the broader South Side, and Hyde Park is often hailed as one of the most integrated neighborhoods in the United States. But there is an undeniable separation—an invisible wall—between the University and its surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »

We talk a lot about urban agriculture at the Chicago Weekly. It’s become an office joke that no issue is a real CW issue without an urban farming piece (spoiler: expect another next week), and even our staff shirts feature a farmer. Some of it is tied to our role as an arts and culture publication: we’re interested in creativity, and a lot of good food and inspiration comes from reinventing the traditional farm in a nontraditional environment. But more is related to our base on the South Side: farming is work, hard work that produces real goods, and our picturesque farming operations and fresh farmers markets grow from very different principles than do stereotypical yuppie rooftop beehives and gardens. Farming in the city is a political issue, and one that has immediate potential to affect lives on the South Side. Read the rest of this entry »

Popular opinion has led us to believe that the infection to be worried about this fall is swine flu. Given its generally mild effects, I beg to differ—the real epidemic we should be on guard against is the insidious rise of talking head-itis, easily identifiable by its common symptoms: disregard for evidence, angry invocations of historically unpopular authoritarian leaders (Hitler is the go-to guy if you’re feeling uncreative), and finally, frequent and strategic amplification of the vocal cords. Read the rest of this entry »

“To paraphrase Sir Richard Livingstone, ‘The sign of a good university is the number of subjects that it declines to investigate,’” Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote in 1953, 24 years after his tenure as the fifth president of the University of Chicago began. What Hutchins meant was that a proper university should be oriented around a few select subjects that have proven essential to social integrity and personal development throughout history. It should do so while ignoring intellectual fads and contrived fields made up to entertain dilettantes or credential lesser talents. Hutchins’s ambitions are signaled elsewhere in his writings: “The university should renounce any ambition to increase the ability of its graduates to acquire external goods…Instead, it should see to it that in the college or in the university itself students might first learn how to deal with ideas. This means an education in disciplines designed to teach the student how to discover, analyze, and utilize ideas. At the same time he should become acquainted with the principal ideas which have directed the activities of mankind. These are to be found in books.” Certain of these books would be “Great,” and they would form the basis for a Common Core Curriculum at Hutchins’s university, a model from which the University of Chicago has regrettably strayed. Read the rest of this entry »