text

Night to day

Premium post · July 11, 2022

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she told me that I do the best job with creative work when I oscillate between periods of public exposure and...

---

Anarchy roar

July 8, 2022

In 2008, on the fourth of July at sundown, I posted up with a few friends on the seawall facing Lake Michigan, and watched some fireworks. The city would...

---

Community work is repair work

Premium post · July 6, 2022

In my recent text about community matters, a couple of people remarked on our code of conduct, asking: how do you deal with bad actors? This is not a short...

---

Community-supported marathon

July 4, 2022

For the past 11 years, I have participated in one form or another of community-supported agriculture, where every week I either go to a farm and pick up a...

---

How we relate

Premium post · July 1, 2022

In order to see more text you like, you need to reply to it. And a lot of you replied to the text I wrote a few weeks back about the barbeque. I think people...

---

New pour, old practice

June 29, 2022

The pour is a habit; the pour is a practice. For about a decade, the pour went like this: Grind to the consistency of sand, approximately. Boil your water to...

---

Hipster church

Premium post · June 27, 2022

I almost have compassion for Rey Colón. He picked a fight, as aldermen do; it was, very profoundly, the wrong fight. A political rival campaigned against him...

---

How to pick a serviceberry tree

June 24, 2022

You’ve heard of other berries, but not serviceberries. In June, they speak to abundance. They are small, sugary, in season for only a few weeks, and kind of...

---

The sandwich we deserve

Premium post · June 22, 2022

Time changes a place. We never want to admit this. Our favorite stores should stay open forever. Our favorite restaurants must serve the exact same food...

---

We have reached this point with respect to the soap bag, and there is no turning back

June 20, 2022

Travel toiletries are one of the weirdest things to me. They are a ritual that could only exist based on the essential tension between international law,...

---

Clear tonic

Premium post · June 17, 2022

Your city can tell me a lot based on its relationship to gin. London kind of tucks gin under the rug, not wanting to admit its colonialist history,...

---

The barbeque is not medicinal, despite appearances

June 15, 2022

I threw a barbeque over Memorial Day weekend. It was the usual sort of thing: a garage sale, a grill, lots of seltzer and beer. People rolled through on...

---

Drawn line

Premium post · June 13, 2022

All stitching, on everything you own, is drawn, manually, with two hands. On every t-shirt you own, the cuffs are drawn with two hands, the seams are drawn...

---

Hate right

June 8, 2022

I have come up with a new rule, and it is related to a topic nobody wants to talk about, for which I am already profoundly sorry. I promise the rest of this...

---

The tiny tool tote

Premium post · June 6, 2022

You have a bag with 5 pockets, MOLLE webbing, ten sleeves. It opens like a pointy accordion. Knife, pen, leather-sleeved AirPods (it is always AirPods), and...

---

Precisely like BBC Planet Earth, but lower stakes and far less interesting

June 3, 2022

So we need to talk about a misfortune that happened to me that is uniquely American for a variety of reasons, and in order to do that we need to go on a...

---

Three boring, easy recipes

Premium post · June 1, 2022

All three of my most famous recipes are extremely simple. They don’t involve much; you can do them yourself. Two of them involve small pantry upgrades that...

---

Brief notes on garlic & incompetence

May 30, 2022

I’ve lived in a grocery-poor, food-mad neighborhood for the past 11 years, once filled with eco-hippies who, at one point, started one of Chicago’s only co-...

---

Ritual Practice

Premium post · May 27, 2022

Here are some things that I do that are conceptually related, I swear: I don’t ship unfinished work. This means you’re never going to see a public work in...

---

Canon Flex

May 25, 2022

There is rarely a better option at a cocktail bar than dealer’s own, where you list a base spirit and some flavors, and the bartender does some clairvoyance....

---