Portfolio

• Index of my Chicago Tribune articles
• Index of my Books&Culture stories and weblog
• My resume

• TV Star Without A Country
Chicago Tribune, May 13, 2003
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — When Ricky Harris got off the plane in Boston en route to his Calvin College reunion here, he braced himself for a rush of autograph seekers, then realized that on this side of the ocean, no one knew who he was. It was an odd feeling for the Detroit native, whose network talk show in Germany made him a household name there and still prevents him from walking down the streets of Munich without some sort of interruption. But these days, when his German fans stop and ask him why his hit show isn't on the air, his trademark grin hides a truth that privately plagues him: German television, executives there have made clear, is no place for an American—especially an African-American with dreadlocks in a world of blond-haired anchors speaking flawless German. 

• Survey Missed Key Buildings 
Chicago Tribune, January 15, 2003
Groucho Marx slept here. Before he and the other Marx Brothers —Harpo, Chico and Zeppo—were fooling around in the movies, they were fooling around on Chicago's vaudeville circuit in the 1910s. And they lived at 4512 S. Grand Blvd., in a graystone townhouse that their parents, Samuel and Minnie Marx, bought in 1914. The townhouse, with its latticed balcony and flamboyant turret, still stands proudly along what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. But the Marx Brothers house is not on Chicago's list of 17,371 buildings that are considered architecturally or historically significant. 

• Getting Older Younger
Books&Culture, July/August 2003
The emergence of tweens as a distinct population—there are nearly twice as many tweens now as in the early 1990s—is at once one of the most urgent and most underexamined social phenomena of the era. Physically, youth are maturing earlier; advances in public health and nutrition helped bring the first signs of puberty down into the tween-age years over the course of the 20th century—for girls, from age 15 to about 10—skewing our conventional boundaries between childhood and full-blown adolescence. Indeed, the very term "tweens" reflects the tension of feeling stranded between childhood and adolescence. 

• Politics Clouds 'Family Values'
Detroit Free Press, May 8, 2002
Family values" talk feeds off powerful social myths that families always used to be what they looked like in "Leave It to Beaver," before the tumultuous '60s came along. Actually, the social notion that men should be breadwinners and that women should be homemakers is a surprisingly recent prescription, dating back only as far as industrialization. Before that, women and men worked in close proximity on the farm or in the shop, with fewer unique responsibilities. To romanticize the '50s is to freeze a demographic aberration in time and make it seem righteous (despite what religious conservatives tell you, there's strikingly little about family in the Bible, and much more about serving society). We would do better to return to a preindustrial sense of balance among work, community and home life for both women and men. 

• Blackstone Hotel Polishes Presidential Past
Chicago Journal, Sept. 20, 2001
For now, history is written in pencil, on a hand-written sign. Posted on a makeshift plywood door frame inside the Blackstone Hotel building, the note warns construction workers of their surroundings: "Historic Site, Do Not Demolish." While the history made inside the former high-end Michigan Avenue hotel currently lies dormant, efforts to convert the building into luxury residences are conjuring the ghosts of American presidents. Located at Michigan and Balbo, the Blackstone hosted a dozen U.S. presidents before it was shuttered in 1998 due to code violations. Now, if you've got $7.95 million, the Blackstone's Presidential Suite--where Commanders-in-Chief ranging from Teddy Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter kicked off their shoes--could be yours.