Chicago - A message from the station manager

The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

Summer 2019 came to a close Tuesday when a Florida trapper caught the Humboldt Park Gator on his first try in the dark of night after a week of fun in an otherwise shitty season we’ll call Bummer. Now that the fun is over, horrible weather is closing in again and the city returns to a depressed condition induced by climate change and the worst presidency ever. Thanks for the good times, Gator Whose Name Should Be Humboldt in part because Chance the Snapper is too slick and too much of a mouthful. (The other part: Humboldt, duh.)


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World News Tonight.


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La Presse.


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Smaller than I imagined.


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Press conference thread.


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And now, the Brown Line Bird.


But is the first dude really mad at the CTA? Pigeons gonna happen, man.
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Monty For Maldy


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New on the Beachwood . . .
Neo Reunion!
Featuring six original Neo DJs.
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ChicagoReddit

Portillo’s Launched a Clothing Line and it is Horrible. from r/chicago


It is horrible, except the baby swaddle blanket. That one’s pretty good.
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ChicagoGram

View this post on Instagram

Rubberband Man

A post shared by Allison Grote Gerlach (@allisugerlach) on


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ChicagoTube
Fast Times Chicago.

This is awful, and not even in a fun way.
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BeachBook
Goodbye, Red Apple Buffet.

Nothing gold stays.
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Exclusive Investigation: Sex, Drugs, Misogyny And Sleaze At The HQ Of Bumble’s Owner.

Not a well-edited story – the throughline isn’t exactly smooth, resulting in some repetition and sloppy organization – but still an astonishing one.
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A&W At 100

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Behind The Odd Couple Of Pence And Trump.

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Subway To Model 10,500 Stores By 2020

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TweetWood
A sampling.


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Stop romanticizing “local journalism.” It almost wholly sucks.


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At least the one we seemed capable of having, despite the fact that it’s never been all that.


The central idea of America was that you could be from anywhere – that being an American meant subscribing to the ideals of freedom, no matter how disastrously limited at the time; that it wasn’t simply an identity imposed on you from the nation of your birth. That anti-nationalism was a big part of the notion that America was an Idea as much as a Country. Autocratic – and inevitably religious – nationalism was for the backwards countries of the Old World. Hyphenated identities are awesome! They display where each of us came from to join in this experiment and become “American,” a mixed-up, muddled-up identity of mores melted into a pot to produce something new.
A friend who has traveled quite a bit recently recently told me that I was wrong to not think America was exceptional in at least one particular way – that in Europe everyone’s identity is still tied to their country in a concrete way that can repel immigrants much more than even current America, and demand a type of assimilation far more hardcore than is generally demanded here, right-wing jingoists notwithstanding. We may be a melting pot, but Europe and beyond is still a (reluctant) salad bowl. But you know what? You can’t fight the transmission of culture. You can, however, embrace it in all its glory. (If I was religious, I might say we are all God’s children, made in His image. Unless I was an evangelical, in which case I might be an ignorant Trump supporter driving this nation into utter depravity though blind, devilish superstition and adherence to everything Jesus opposed.)

America is hugely, horribly flawed and in some ways the scourge of the planet, I mean, the truths about this country that so many people are so unaware of, the history they do not know . . . we suck just about as hard as any country has sucked.
And yet, at our core is precisely the country The Squad describes and exalts, despite what it has done particularly to people who look like them. That, my friends, is something. They are where hope lies – that we still have room for that in this country; that the most oppressed among us still have hope and try to drive change. Donald Trump and his jackboots have a different but familiar vision: of a white, rapey Christian nation that betrays the whole point of this country. Their hate and ignorance has been sown deep into the land, so deep it will take decades to dig out of, but dig we must. Once again, folks, into the breach. Light that fucking lamp besides the golden door, we are the New Colossus!
America has had its chances to show the world something better, to truly lead instead of destroy, and it has fumbled most of those chances. It’s a cliche now to observe that after 9/11, we could have renewed our vows as a beacon to freedom and redoubled our resolve to be a free people. Instead, we fucked shit up but bad. This is a dark, dark time in America, one some thought would never come, but it is also a chance to again show what we could be – even if in this case the enemy is within.
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The Beachwood McRibTipLine: Future shock.

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Posted on July 16, 2019