Mayor Emanuel scores a unanimous council victory on his first day in office. A new rubber-stamp council? Or just opening-day jitters? Plus: City Council guides. Read more
An appreciation of Juan Pierre's neoclassical style; the Cubs give up seven runs in a shutout; LeBron James has a cold; a new site about long-form sports journalism. Read more
The New York Times's Bill Keller comes to bury Twitter, not to praise it. I've come to lift his fail-whale of an essay to the skies, so that the medium can be appreciated for what it is, (virtually) here and now. Read more
Thanks to Lee Bey, I now know that I can lease an early Skidmore Owings Merrill house in Lake County. Coming up with the $1.6 million for restoration could be tricky, though. Plus: an art deco gem in Milwaukee. Read more
Basketball allowed Derrick Rose to get out of Englewood. But it also kept him, and his family, safe. According to Rose, he was actually safer in Englewood than he would have been elsewhere, because of the game. Read more
Steve Bogira challenges the conventional wisdom about the old "Beirut by the Lake" cliche and suggests an alternative to reflect the evolution of race and politics in Chicago after Harold Washington. Read more
Yale prof Bill Rankin uses dot maps to show the diversity and lack thereof in Chicago and the Bay Area. Chicago is as segregated as you'd expect, but the far north side along the lake looks to be as diverse as any big-city neighborhood in the country. Read more
The first new mayor in 22 years takes over for real today. Here's a sampling of what to look out for, from school days to beat cops to searchable budgets. Just don't ask him about tampons. Read more
Like Mayor Daley, Emanuel's doing this for the kids. In other words, there were no big surprises in the new mayor's speech, but he did address the issue that many suspect will the focus and the big tension of his early tenure: Chicago Public Schools, teachers' unions, and Jean-Claude Brizard. Read more
The original Mayor Daley's inaugural speech was something less than a barnburner, but encapsulated the man and his civics-class-era tenure as mayor. Read more
