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?
(fiction)
Author: Another Chicago Magazine
Addressing one of the US’s true emergencies, five former mayors told Chicago how they had reduced the murder rate in their cities.
(The Loop)
It’s 1957 and I remember it this way . . .
(The Loop)
Whenever I heard “Michael Cohen” it was if it were a name not my own.
(The Loop)
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.
(fiction)
Hell, he probably looked like Michael, himself, who had taken plenty of girls home from plenty of parties, too – horny, hopeful; no shame for him in that – but had backed off if they said no, and just said goodnight.
(fiction)
It’s always interesting to hear the term “free market” used in The New York Times, as well as other major media outlets. It’s rarely, if ever, done in a negative sense.
Birds on a Wire
There’s an image I saw somewhere online: two or three dozen blackbirds are perched up on powerlines. All are on the highest powerline except for one; on the bottom wire, there’s a lone blackbird smack in the middle. A caption reads, “Who did you notice more?”
Sometimes pain blunts my memory of myself.
For no reason I can remember I happened to glance uphill to my left.
Tell jokes about “minorities” to “minorities” to show you’re “down.”
More and more, in late winter especially, I have the feeling that I am dying—or, to put it more accurately, that the best of my life has happened and my decline has begun. And this is a bitter feeling—wrong, too, I hope.
“These shows, and others like them, pulse with near-pornographic magnetism. It’s hard to pull your gaze away.”
“I’ve only been to France a handful of times since I moved away…and each time it gets into me with weird intensity.”
Her words were tender, but raw in intonation and contained the kind of truth you can come to only after having lived through something.
We recited vows as poems, while our hippie rabbi strummed his guitar and hummed nigun that…
“When it comes to Brown’s latest, the White (or even in some cases Grimy) City should be proud,” Laurie Levy writes of Rosellen Brown’s “The Lake on Fire.”
If you take down Confederate statues, who gets on the pedestal? Steve Harvey reports on Madre Luz.
In Trump’s America, Leanne Grabel just can’t help herself.
Finally Natalia Ginzburg’s “Family Lexicon” is English and couldn’t be more timely, Natalia Nebel writes.
A writer always takes a risk when writing about a work of art that’s not reproduced on the page. Will the reader step away from the text? Reviewed by Mary Harris Russell.
How to capture what is lost in immigration, exile, and death? Maggie Kast examines Brodsky/Baryshnikov in context. “Their friendship must have been a comfort, even if deepest sorrow is too personal to share.”
“The sport, like so many other sports in the US, values accomplishments above athletes’ health, safety, and well-being.”
Reading Tim Kreider’s essays on love feels like living in a kinder world for 200 pages. A review by Katharine Coldiron.
Of course there was a male response to #MeToo. And to the “Shitty Men in Media List.” Shaindel Beers found herself listed. Briefly.
After the death of science fiction pioneer Ursula K. Le Guin, ACM asked four writers about her work and what she meant to them.
A story, in photographs and words, about children of immigrant families growing up in America.
Another Chicago Magazine 