Chicago - Jan. 14, 2025 A message from the station manager

By Christopher Murray/The Conversation

Stan Lee was the voice of my childhood. As I sat transfixed by Spider-Man cartoons on Saturday mornings, his energetic narration welcomed me into the story; made me feel part of the gang. Never mind that the animation wasn’t up to much; it looked like a comic, had a great theme tune, and Stan “The Man” Lee, my buddy, was giving it his personal seal of approval.
Famously, Lee originally honed this warm persona in print. The words “Stan Lee Presents” in the Marvel comics I was also feverishly devouring – black and white British reprints of the American originals – were a guarantee of quality. When he signed off a letters page or editorial with his trademark “Excelsior!” I never failed to smile. I was, and remain in many respects, a “True Believer,” as Lee called all dedicated Marvel readers. As we shall see, however, the man’s performance masked some uncomfortable truths.

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Posted on November 14, 2018

michelle obama book notes

For anyone who’s wondering: No, she’s not running. In her new memoir, “Becoming” — a book whose reportedly enormous advance rendered its contents almost as closely guarded as the bullion at Fort Knox — Michelle Obama puts to rest any speculation about her political ambitions. “I’ve never been a fan of politics,” she writes, “and my experience over the last 10 years has done little to change that.”
SO EVEN HER PREACHY HUSBAND CAN’T PERSUADE HER. REMEMBER HOW MUCH HE WAS GOING TO ASK OF US?
A month after President Obama started his first term in 2009, Michelle Obama was sitting in the balcony during a joint session of Congress, where she could see a cadre of Republicans scowling while her husband delivered his address. “They would fight everything Barack did, I realized, whether it was good for the country or not.” She continues, “It seemed they just wanted Barack to fail.”
PLEASE. YOU COULD SAY THE SAME OF DEMOCRATS.

SHE LOVES GEORGE W. BUSH!

Politics, though, turned out to be a weird mix of elite pretensions and schoolyard bullying, amplified by opposition research.
WHICH HER HUSBAND NEVER ENGAGED IN.

“When they go low, we go high”
THAT’S ABOUT THEM, NOT US.

Her father tended boilers; her mother stayed at home to care for Michelle and her older brother. Even as her father’s body began to break down from multiple sclerosis, he insisted on going to work. His illness taught her the necessity of meticulous planning, of showing up not just on time but early — “the lesson being that in life you control what you can.”
HER FATHER WAS A PRECINCT CAPTAIN.

the couples counseling that saved their marriage when she felt as if his political career “would end up steam-rolling our every need.”

For all the attempts by conservatives a decade ago to paint her as a radical, Obama seems to be a measured, methodical centrist at heart. But hers isn’t a wan faith in expanding the pie and crossing the aisle. Her pragmatism is tougher than that, even if it will come across as especially frustrating to those who believe that centrism and civility are no longer enough. As she writes in “Becoming,” she long ago learned to recognize the “universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.”
SH WENT TO WORK FOR RICHARD DALEY AND TOOK A MAEK UP JOB AT UC FROM HER FRIEND AND TRIED TO KEEP POOR PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR ER.

OF COURSE THEY AREN’T THE RADICALS THEY WERE MADE ABOUT TO BE. THEY AREN’T CHANGE-AGENTS EITHER. THEY’RE CORPORATE DEMOCRATS.

At promotional events in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and elsewhere, Mrs. Obama will appear at sports stadiums with high profile moderators like Oprah Winfrey, Sarah Jessica Parker, Reese Witherspoon and Valerie Jarrett. (In some venues, front row seats with a “meet and greet” package are priced at $3,000; 10 percent of the tickets in each city are being given away to local charities, schools, and community groups.)
[ Read The Times’s review of Michelle Obama’s “Becoming.” ]
With the publication of “Becoming,” the Obamas now seem set to make their mark not just in politics, but in popular culture. Last year, they announced a joint book deal with Penguin Random House that was rumored to exceed $60 million, a large portion of which is going to their foundation and other charities. This year, they signed a multiyear production deal with Netflix, to produce films and television shows through their company, “Higher Ground Productions.” (They recently acquired screen rights to Michael Lewis’s new book, “The Fifth Risk,” for their company.)

Posted on November 12, 2018

Crusade Against Slavery

By SIU Press

Edward Coles was a wealthy heir to a central Virginia plantation, an ardent emancipator, the second governor of Illinois, the loyal personal secretary to President James Madison, and a close antislavery associate of Thomas Jefferson. Yet never before has a full-length book detailed his remarkable life story and his role in the struggle to free all slaves. In Crusade Against Slavery, Kurt E. Leichtle and Bruce G. Carveth correct this oversight with the first modern and complete biography of a unique but little-known and quietly influential figure in American history.

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Posted on November 7, 2018

View From True North

By SIU Press

In these edgy poems of witness, Sara Henning’s speaker serves as both conduit and curator of the destructive legacies of alcoholism and multigenerational closeting. Considering the impact of addiction and sexual repression in the family and on its individual members, Henning explores with deft compassion the psychological ramifications of traumas across multiple generations.

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Posted on November 1, 2018

How America’s Tax Laws Encourage Inequality

By Anthony C. Infanti/The Conversation

Talk of tax reform always seems to be in the air.
Last fall, Republicans in Congress hastily pushed through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, hailing it as “historic legislation” and “once-in-a-generation tax reform.”
But that legislation has proved unpopular because it is widely and accurately viewed as tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, with any effort at reform being merely coincidental.

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Posted on October 26, 2018

Nostalgia For A World Where We Can Live

By SIU Press

Monica Berlin’s Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live resides at the turbulent confluence of relentless news cycles and the repeated rending of our interior lives. In Berlin’s poetry, sorrow makes its own landscape – solitary, intimate, forward-looking. Whether we attempt to traverse it or choose to bypass, her poems show us where we live, how we carry on.

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Posted on October 24, 2018

Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom

By Simon & Schuster

As a young man, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time.
In this remarkable biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. There has not been a major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.

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Posted on October 22, 2018

Storytelling | Dia De Los Muertos

By Story Club South Side

Commemorate, commiserate, and celebrate with Story Club South Side!
Join us as we invite spirits living and dead to tell stories and celebrate Dia de los Muertos together!
We will be creating an altar de ofrenda at the show, and our audience is invited to participate by bringing a photo or memento of someone who has passed on. We’ll have art supplies on hand, as well, for those who’d like to make a tribute on the spot.

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Posted on October 18, 2018

Conway Barbour And The Challenges Of The Black Middle Class In 19th-Century America

By SIU Press

Focusing on the life of ambitious former slave Conway Barbour, Victoria L. Harrison argues that the idea of a black middle class traced its origins to the free black population of the mid-19th century and developed alongside the idea of a white middle class. Although slavery and racism meant that the definition of middle class was not identical for white people and free people of color, they shared similar desires for advancement.

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Posted on October 12, 2018

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