Neil Steinberg

1 week ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Neil Steinberg

If you could be exiled from your home forever for a speeding ticket, how fast would you drive? If the slightest brush with the law might result in you being torn from your family and sent to a country you last saw when you were 2, how cautiously would you go about your day? I mention this because, in the first draft of this column, I began with the hard statistics demonstrating that immigrants, as a group, are more law-abiding than citizens born in the United States.

1 week ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Neil Steinberg

Resolved: the Wrigley Building is a beautiful, beloved jewel of Chicago, though not great architecture. Discuss. “Beautiful” is a value judgment, one I endorse fully. Glazed terra cotta in six shades of white, shifting toward creamy yellow as it nears the top. Festooned with dragons, griffins, cherubs, rams. That four-faced clock, 20 feet tall. “Beloved” is not open to debate — any survey of popular Chicago buildings includes the Wrigley Building.

1 week ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Neil Steinberg

Jim and I rode our bikes over to Wallace Lake to check out a lifeguard, Laura. I can still see her, 16 years old, in her white bathing suit, gazing over the splashing crowd. That sounds creepier than it actually was since, at the time, almost half a century ago, Jim and I were also teenagers. Jim and Laura have been married for 43 years and have two daughters and five grandchildren. Kier and I drove to New York City once.

2 weeks ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Neil Steinberg

“We never make mistakes.”A credo for totalitarianism, echoing in my brain like a clanking chain after seeing the latest MAGA red hat slogan, “Trump was right about everything,” sported by President Donald Trump’s adviser, Elon Musk. Hard to believe people pay $19.99 to brand that on their foreheads. Points for candor, because belief in the infallibility of Trump is the guiding principle of this American era.

2 weeks ago | chicago.suntimes.com | Neil Steinberg

“War and Peace” is a great book. That might come as a surprise, since most people have only one thought regarding the novel: “‘War and Peace’ is a big book.”Also true. My copy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larisssa Voldkhonsky, is 1,215 pages long. The current thought is that such weighty classics such as “War and Peace,” written by dead white males such as Leo Tolstoy, are something of a scam, a burden, unfairly imposed by society to keep young readers from sharper, more relevant authors.