Teens at risk, from drugs and the state

July 23, 2008

Last Wednesday, Araceli Ramirez learned that she might lose her job. That didn't scare her.

Recent columns

• Calm steadiness in a life of change

  July 20, 2008

  Anyone wobbling through a change in life could learn something from Leslie Hunter.

• Bare is better than bearing pantyhose

  July 18, 2008

  This is the summer of our pantyhose discontent.

• How will you use the time you have left?

  July 16, 2008

  My mother put down her fork, picked up her glass of wine and took a sip. I had taken her out to dinner, and we were talking about nothing much.

• 2 very shy legends of the lake

  July 13, 2008

  When Jennie and Julie Papilli turned 12, their father gave them a little birthday money, so Julie said to Jennie, "Let's buy a bathing suit."

• Irony ignores Foods' hard workers

  July 11, 2008

  Rose Venditto was on her daily pilgrimage to the Whole Foods salad bar Thursday when she met the blockade of three employees and a closed front door.

• Angst flows from airlines' turbulence

  July 6, 2008

  Somewhere over Idaho the other day I realized I was suffering from acute airline anxiety disorder.

• Happiness: Is it as easy as a smile?

  July 4, 2008

  When I hear the phrase "the pursuit of happiness"—that inalienable right we celebrate on the 4th of July—I think instantly of one thing.

• Rules bring reason back to city life

  July 2, 2008

  I didn't have a nanny growing up, but I did have a father who thought that a family—at least one big enough, as ours was, to field a baseball team—should function with military discipline. This was perfect preparation for adult life in Chicago.

• Center on Halsted opens door to gay acceptance

  June 29, 2008

  This weekend you're likely to see some images from Chicago's gay pride parade, and if past coverage is any indication, you'll see at least one shot of some guy in bikini briefs and a feather boa.

• Gun-control views bigger than pro, con

  June 27, 2008

  If you listened only to the arguments that bellow from the media, you'd be sure that every person in America has a gun-control opinion that's as neat as the desktop of one of my colleagues.

• Sifting through views of life along the lakefront

  June 22, 2008

  My blood pressure goes down just hearing the words "summer place."

• Less graffiti well worth the trouble

  June 20, 2008

  Early last Friday afternoon, Michael Ellsworth walked over to the bus stop at Wallace and 36th near his Bridgeport home and found what he'd been waiting for.

• Loyalty starts to top off at $5 a gallon

  June 18, 2008

  Late one night in April, as I rode in a taxi past a BP station on LaSalle Boulevard in Lincoln Park, the cabbie made a prediction:

• Coaching a couple through the bases of marriage

  June 15, 2008

  What guiding words can you offer two people who are about to get married?

• How should he fight sign's hate graffiti?

  June 13, 2008

  Michael Ellsworth is looking for advice.

• Let Carrie and friends rest in reruns

  May 25, 2008

  A woman at my health club recently asked me what I did for a living. When I told her, she looked excited.

• To many girls, sex with adults just part of life

  May 23, 2008

  Sha'Dawn Young is not a lawyer. She is not a certified expert on teenage sex. She's not an R. Kelly protester or a groupie.

• In a word, a slice of perspective

  May 21, 2008

  Words sometimes land in your mind like birds on a wire. They flutter in, sit there, flutter off, come back, distract you at inconvenient hours.

• On 'Idol', parents live their dreams through their kids' talents

  May 18, 2008

  A lot of nights on "American Idol," the most heart-rending performers aren't the ones on the stage. They're the ones in the seats, in the shadows, invisible except when the camera flits past their paunches and jowls, their crow's feet and their tears of hope.

• Gay officers out of closet thanks to him

  May 16, 2008

  When Larry McKeon died this week, shortly after a violent stroke, he was memorialized as Illinois' first openly gay legislator. I remember him for something else.

• Oregon happy to play primary role in election

  May 14, 2008

  By the time the azaleas are in full bloom in Oregon, the presidential primaries are usually dead.

• Tough times call for crafty economizing

  May 9, 2008

  To: Mary Schmich

• Who'll win depends on spin

  May 4, 2008

  And now the long horse race

• Good soldier for Karma Army spares quarters

  April 30, 2008

  Some days, life is just a bed of tacks.

• For feral cats, a blanket of kindness

  April 27, 2008

  Jill Adams discovered a tiny colony of Chicago's half-million feral cats last summer on a walk in a Hyde Park alley with Mr. Bojangles, her Welsh terrier. She hurried home to her studio apartment and came back to the alley with food.

• Ground-level theories on rise in deaths

  April 25, 2008

  The weather's getting warm, and the forecast in Chicago is for more gang-related deaths.

• Lessing's work leaves a lasting mark

  October 14, 2007

  Without the refresher course of last week's news stories about the Nobel Prize, I couldn't have named the characters in "The Golden Notebook" or reconstructed a scene or even given a good synopsis of the plot.

• City may work, but its gears are full of crud

  July 9, 2006

  I have an out-of-town friend, a news junkie, who periodically calls or writes to say in dismay, "What the heck is going on in Chicago?"

• George Ryan, Can you blame her for tryin'?

  April 2, 2006

  For National Poetry Month, a few verses on the George Ryan trial.

• The journey of Judge Joan Lefkow

  November 20, 2005

  A few days ago, Joan Lefkow was walking down a Chicago street flanked by federal marshals when a panhandler walked up to her and said, "God bless you, Judge Lefkow."

• For Chicago, no superlative too grandiose

  July 27, 2005

  Chicago loves to brag.

• A reading list to while away waning winter

  February 20, 2005

  Today, my not-quite-annual cabin fever book list. Some of the books are new, a couple are old, but all are ones I enjoyed in the past year.

• No need to swap principles on gay marriage

  February 29, 2004

  A few months back, before the issue of same-sex marriage had escalated to a full boil, I found myself uncomfortably unsure of what to think.

• Cabrini world mourns loss of its guiding light

  August 15, 2003

  There's a good chance that someone will stand up at Miss Hen's funeral Saturday and call her the Mother Teresa of Larrabee Street, Cabrini-Green. If you didn't know her, though, that description doesn't evoke the person you'd have seen if you'd seen Miss Hen, who died Sunday at 73 with hardly a wrinkle in her face.

• In Cabrini, cash offers chance to live--and escape

  August 10, 2003

  `One point five million. A million, five hundred thousand. Shoot."

• Need a book for summer? Pick up these

  June 22, 2003

  Are you one of those people who spends half your summer reading time reading summer reading lists? Good. Here's another one. Not the newest books around, these are merely a few books I've enjoyed since my 2002 summer list, which can be found at www.chicagotribune.com/schmich. Click on "reading lists."

• Passage of time can't dim power of love stories

  February 9, 2003

  Let's talk about love.

• On moving day, past gets packed away at Cabrini

  October 13, 2002

  Miss Parker is the last tenant on the last day of the occupied life of 1121 N. Larrabee St., Cabrini-Green, Chicago. It's Friday morning and, though she's been ordered to be out by nightfall, she cannot pack one more gadget or romance novel into one more box until she's squirted Dove into the kitchen sink and washed those unused dishes. No way is she moving into a new place with plates stained by cockroaches.

• Summertime and reading is bold, breezy

  June 9, 2002

  If it's summer, it must be time for way too many summer reading lists. Here's mine. Some are new books, some are old. All are books I enjoyed discovering in the past year.

• 'Hardball' hits 9 tough critics where they live

  September 21, 2001

  On the first weekend after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the most popular movie in America--perhaps only coincidentally--was the story of scrappy Chicago kids playing baseball.

• Summer no time to be listless or without a book

  July 1, 2001

  To: Eric "Beach Boy" Zorn

• The last policewoman

  February 20, 2001

  As of Friday, Chicago has no more policewomen. The last one, Pat Hays, retired her star this week to make more time for shooting pool.

• Vivid memories light way home for Christmas ghosts

  December 25, 1996

  The father of my friend Laura died last Christmas Eve, and for all the grief it brought her family, there was a certain poetry in her father's timing. He was of Icelandic heritage and so Christmas Eve, in accordance with Icelandic custom, had always been the high point of the Christmas holidays for him and his wife and children.