Live Active Culture

Thoughts that I wrote, but failed to publish, about NPR programming sometime around 2005. Note, this was long before the Trump era, when NPR...

STUFF I WROTE WAY BACK WHEN in first- or second-grade reading class, reproduced with punctuation and spelling left as is. (Second gr...

YES! JUST THE SORT  of up-to-the-minute news and commentary you've come to expect from Live Active Culture! Here are my thoughts from ba...

UNLIKE MANY WHITE folks,  who practically break out the beachwear as soon as the temperature climbs above 40, black folks in the hood will w...

THIS IS REALLY F'D UP.   I consider myself extremely well informed, yet my first time hearing about this -- at least to my recollection...

JUST LAY DOWN, oh, maybe a few billion cubic tons of this stuff from Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico. No mas inmigrantes ilegales .... gara...

BUT IT'S GOOD we didn't have to see him go plummeting 1,500 feet into the Grand Canyon .  People who do incredibly stupid and dang...

THE CHICAGO READER'S Steve Bogira blogs: Greening a city can lower its crime rate, research increasingly suggests, and can make poor, ...

COMPARE THE CHORUSES . In the first song, you'll hear it at around 0:30, and in the second, around 1:20. The songs differ ...

ABOUT FOUR YEARS AGO, on a shortwave radio frequency I don't frequent, I heard the cutest little ditty. Apparently, it was a girl duo, ...

THE MUSIC OF THE late Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, sometimes gets labeled yacht rock , but this is unfair. The Carpenters'...

A MAN, WOMAN, AND three little kids -- two boys and a girl -- enter the 57th St. Metra shelter where I'm waiting for a southbound train...

"EVERYBODY'S INSANE with loneliness, but that’s OK. After a while you realize that’s part of the edge.” (One Chicago-to-NYC trans...

THE CHICAGO READER's Steve Bogira comments on a New Yorker essay, "In Defense of the Suburbs." (Reminding me of a similar es...

WHET MOSER ON THE H-WORD ("hipster") in Chicago magazine.  My response:  First: Wow. That Harry Raab/Gibson video is a t...

AND NOW I'VE GOT nothing but smoking, bloody stumps where my hands used to be.  Thanks, Perry Como.  

From the Chicago Reader : FEMALE BARNEY RUBBLE WANTED I am looking for someone who is just like Barney Rubble, with female body parts....

THE DOUKHOBORS, OR “spirit wrestlers,” were a semi-mystical Christian sect founded in the late 18 th century in Russia . (They later emigr...

These were my sister's kittens.

IT JUST OCCURRED to me that despite the recent passage of the ten-year anniversary, I have never shared the story in writing. That is, the ...