Plus: The Absurdity Of USA-1000

“Robert Teitelbaum has been a casting director for films such as Born on the Fourth of July and La Bamba, and TV shows such as Hill Street Blues and Moonlighting,” the Desert Sun notes.
“He served in the Marines from 1962-’65, and owned and operated his own rare coin businesses in Los Angeles. He’s run a local improv comedy chapter of TheatreSports that has competed throughout North America since 1993. He and his wife of 52 years, Carol, have two married children and three granddaughters. They’ve been presenting Creating Change Conferences with influential authors and speakers since 2005.
“An All-American success story, right? Except for the fact that Bob’s father was Al Capone’s attorney, a life-long friend of Bugsy Siegel and a mentor for Sidney Korshak, the attorney credited with helping the Chicago Outfit integrate into legitimate businesses.”

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Posted on November 11, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

“Chicagonomics, a new book by Lanny Ebenstein, a prolific author on the history of economic thought, sets out to investigate the history of the Chicago school of economics, to see what can be learnt for today from its past,” the Economist writes.
“The author chronicles the intellectual history of what began life in the 1890s as the Department of Political Economy. Before the 1940s, Chicago’s professors were much closer to the liberalism of British political economists such as Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill than the libertarianism of Hayek and Friedman in the 1980s and early 1990s. Mr Ebenstein looks at the ideas of scholars such as Jacob Viner and Frank Knight, and concludes that while they favoured individual freedom, their policy prescriptions did not exclude government action. Both perceived Smith as justifying the state intervening in the economy at times, such as with the provision of infrastructure, education for the young and the funding of arts, culture and science.
“By the 1940s, the use of redistribution to ensure that everyone had a basic standard of living was accepted by most Chicago economists. For instance, Henry Simons, when he worked at Chicago between 1939 and 1946, set out how redistribution, by diffusing economic power in a society, was necessary in a free society. Even Hayek, in his libertarian polemic of 1944, The Road to Serfdom, supported the use of environmental regulation and state-run social-insurance systems.”

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Posted on October 28, 2015

Apparently It’s The Weird Possibility Of Transcendence

“Thrown Is The Only MMA Book Anyone Ever Needs To Write,” Deadspin’s Tim Marchman declared last year.
“Kerry Howley’s Thrown is so good in large part because, so far as possible, she ignores this entire sports-industrial complex in favor of her subjects’ humanity. Rankings, purses, pay-per-view orders, judging, won-loss records, sober discussions of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, marketing strategies, and the like come in here only when they’re truly unavoidable, and are quickly dismissed. Howley, who spent three years in the company of two serious fighters for this book, is writing about something else entirely.
“What she’s interested in is what makes people watch, and what makes them fight. As ridiculous as it seems to the uninitiated – and Howley is both too self-aware not to know how ridiculous it seems, and too self-assured to care – it’s the possibility of transcendence, of a moment like the one she experienced watching the first fight she ever saw, held at a convention center in downtown Des Moines in 2010 not far from a phenomenology conference from which she was fleeing.”
You’ll have to click through to see what that was. And/or maybe Howley will talk about it on Thursday when she speaks at Roosevelt University (5 p.m. in Room 700 of the Gage Building, 18 South Michigan Avenue).

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Posted on October 26, 2015

By The Literacy Volunteers of Illinois

Whether you’re a parlor player or an experienced pro, here’s your chance to compete in the 12th Annual SCRABBLE for Literacy Challenge!
Sponsored by Literacy Volunteers of Illinois (LVI) with support from local chapters of the North American SCRABBLE Players Association (NASPA), the SCRABBLE for Literacy Challenge will by held on Sunday, October 25th at the Grossinger Honda Center, 6600 N. Western Ave., Chicago from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The event offers three ways to play: Competitive, Just for Fun, and NASPA Tournament.

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Posted on October 14, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

“The Federal Trade Commission plans to start refunding customers duped into buying fraudster Kevin Trudeau’s diet book ‘as soon as possible’ after a judge gave final approval to the plan, its lawyer said,” the Sun-Times Media Wire (whatever that is) reports.
“Calling it the ‘fairest way we can do this,’ U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman gave his blessing [last] Wednesday to the FTC’s proposal to use $8 million of Trudeau’s fortune to begin compensating people who were conned through false infomercials into buying the TV pitchman’s book.
“The book Trudeau promoted as ‘an easy weight-loss program’ actually offered a 500 calorie-a-day diet, off-label injections of a fertility drug, frequent colonics and ‘extraordinary, lifelong’ diet restrictions, according to the FTC.”
Here’s my favorite part:

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Posted on October 14, 2015

Plus: A Penny For The Farthing Of This Book, Sir!

“The In$ane Chicago Way is the untold story of a daring plan by Chicago gangs in the 1990s to create a Spanish Mafia – and why it failed.
“John M. Hagedorn traces how Chicago Latino gang leaders, following in Al Capone’s footsteps, built a sophisticated organization dedicated to organizing crime and reducing violence. His lively stories of extensive cross-neighborhood gang organization, tales of police/gang corruption, and discovery of covert gang connections to Chicago’s Mafia challenge conventional wisdom and offer lessons for the control of violence today.”

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Posted on October 7, 2015

By SIU Press

Flatboats were the most prolific type of vessel on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers during the early 1800s. Thousands of these boats descended the two rivers each year, carrying not only valuable cargo to New Orleans but also western-bound emigrants to newly opened territories. By the late 1800s, flatboats had completely disappeared, and no intact examples were known to exist.
Our knowledge of these historic vessels had been limited to illustrations, memoirs and traveler accounts. That changed in 2000 after local residents found a wreck on the Ohio River shoreline in Illinois. Archaeologist Mark J. Wagner and his colleagues from Southern Illinois University investigated extensively and established that the wreck was a pre-Civil War flatboat, which they named America, after a nearby town.

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Posted on October 5, 2015

Big Brains, Small Minds, Tough Bodies

“Sperm whales have the largest brains on earth – around six times larger on average than our own – while bottlenosed dolphins have the largest brains relative to body size, with the exception of humans,” Tim Flannery writes in “The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals” for the New York Review of Books.
“Along with killer whales, these species have a place beside the elephants, dogs, and great apes in the animal intelligentsia. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins [University of Chicago Press] is a comprehensive academic work by researchers who have devoted their careers to studying sperm and killer whales.

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Posted on October 2, 2015

Plus: Smell Chicago Later! & Paging Doc Hollywood

“Born to bourgeois Jewish parents in Chicago in 1899, [Vera Caspary] went out to work almost as soon as she turned eighteen and rarely stopped churning out copy from that day until she died,” Michelle Dean writes for The New Yorker. “There was no college and no finishing school, no slow courtship of traditional critical respect. She had to make a living, so she wrote.
“Her first jobs had her writing the materials for scam correspondence courses on everything from ballet to salesmanship to screenplay writing. She did a little journalism, of the ‘RAT BITES SLEEPING CHILD!’ sort, but credited a job at the Trianon ballroom in Chicago with opening her mind to experiences not her own. ‘I became both editor and staff of Trianon Topics,’ she explained, ‘an eight-page tabloid-sized weekly devoted to clean dancing.’ She worked the way most journalists once did: she hung around, talking to every sort of person who came through the place. And though she could not print scandals, she found that “through the gathering of inane and trivial news I was educated and profoundly changed . . .

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Posted on September 24, 2015

Growing Up Poor – And Rich – In Chicago

“For as long as I can remember, certain relatives of mine were always dismayed and often enraged by the daily headlines and nightly news stories of crime,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad writes in his New York Times’ review of Black Silent Majority.
“As a kid I heard countless tales of the terrible outrages visited on black people by other black people: burglarizing homes, pulling guns and shooting at one another, too often claiming innocent bystanders in the crossfire. Some of these stories were personal testimonies of victimization. In my ’70s childhood on Chicago’s South Side, I was taught that some black people behaved despicably.”
You’ll have to click through to see where he’s going with that.

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Posted on September 22, 2015