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Author: Another Chicago Magazine
“People have certain views even about building walls, etc., but that doesn’t mean they’re racist, it means they’re genuinely afraid. Of course there were the weird, psychotic people but the majority of people it seemed to me were reasonable and kind, even the ones who hold certain views,” Tarek Mounib tells ACM.
Solve this problem: Your daughter’s playing with a doll, a gift she just received from a friend. The doll is white. 1968: John Carlos gives the black power salute Arthur Ashe wins the first US Open. 1970: Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye the problem of “whiteness” as a standard of beauty Arthur Ashe wins The Australian Open. 1972: Bettye Saar The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 1975 the liberation continues Arthur Ashe outthinks Connors to win Wimbledon “no matter what I do, or where or when I do it, I feel the eyes of others watching me, judging me.”
“I help my clients open their chakras, channel their sensual energy, and find their heart space.”
“Heart space?” I ask.
“Yeah…like, you know,” she says, placing her hand just above my left breast. “Many of my clients have trouble with love.”
I stare at her.
Krystal developed into a first-string basketball player, and in junior high she’d been scouted. The acting-out years began and Krystal was sent to Elan, a residential school for troubled teens. It was here that the staff treated residents criminally. Often new students would be told that their throats could easily be cut in the night if they failed to get along with staff and other students.
When it became clear that Azar did not have the speed, synchronization or physical strength to filet an adequate number of codfish per hour, the manager moved him to the women’s line. He learned to find his station and turn on the intensely bright overhead lamp that would help him see if there were worms that had to be picked out from the flesh of the cod.
The day before the world was supposed to end, Kasumi woke up in the morning and slipped into her school uniform as usual. She had nothing else to do. Besides, she didn’t dislike school. On the other hand, her best friend, Tomo-chan, had left for a trip a few days earlier, saying she would spend time with her boyfriend. By this time, she would have lost her virginity.
It is in this bed, after all, our bed, that I have most exposed myself, that I have been both sick and happy: secure, protected, and yet in the next moment, utterly, existentially alone. In a real dark night of the soul, Fitzgerald writes, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
It all seemed too much to successfully handle, but there was nothing else to do.
It isn’t genteel to point out, but spit can be beautiful. It’s an ordinary beauty—the parabola, the clearly practiced skill.
You won’t find much radical analysis in contemporary fiction: Trump is stupid, rude, a racist and a misogynist; his election was a completely unsuspected usurpation of both a deserving candidate and the norms that bound an imperfect but fundamentally good country together. Now it falls to the few good people left to struggle against him, like Dumbledore’s Army, like District 13, like The Fellowship of the Ring. It must be done, and it must be done now, but it must be done in a kind, hopeful, affirming way, or we will be no better than he is.
“Each inch of the park is designed to trick visitors into thinking they’ve left New York for a Parisian garden, the Catskills, Wonderland, or that they are themselves Henry Hudson discovering Manhattan…,” David Andrew Stoler writes of Stephen Wolf’s book on Central Park.
“Growing Up With Brothers Meant Machines–”
“My Grandmother’s Candy Jar”
“Jeremy T. Wilson shares Victoria Patterson’s gift for creating empathy for initially unlikable characters whose destructive and compulsive behaviors hurt themselves and those closest to them,” Laura Johanna Waltje writes.
On 17 July 1936, the day the Spanish Civil War broke out, W. H. Auden arrived, by milk cart, to Hólar. He spent the morning inspecting the wooden carvings in the local church. Their violence shocked him.
When he returned to his hotel for lunch, he found the staff busily preparing for the arrival of a small party of Nazis.
Religious, you say? What’s religious? And when there are so many shades, so many tones and semi-tones of religious, who really qualifies as merely religious and who, as a nut job?
Addressing one of the US’s true emergencies, five former mayors told Chicago how they had reduced the murder rate in their cities.
Whenever I heard “Michael Cohen” it was if it were a name not my own.
Welcome to ACM issue #56! This is our second online issue, and the second and last issue where we release all the genres at the same time. After this, we will send out individual pieces into the world.
I made no friends in Granada, which seemed natural enough to me. I read though. Oddly enough it was then I became fascinated by the American Civil War.
