steinberg
Neil Steinberg biography
Neil Steinberg began writing for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1984, and joined the staff in 1987 as a feature writer.
He became a columnist in …
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Rev. Graham morally consistent, alas
Breakfast, Sunday, black coffee and scrambled eggs. My wife waves a page from the pile of newspapers spread over our kitchen table. “Did you see this?” she asks. I glance up. “Mmm, hmm,” I say, going back to my eggs and my section of the …Read More
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Surf’s up! ‘These are the epic days’
While the gales of Hurricane Sandy are causing millions of East Coast residents to stock up, hunker down or even evacuate their homes, for a few hundred hearty souls along the Lake Michigan shore, the storm’s arrival means only one thing: Surf’s up! “These are …Read More
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Surf’s up on Lake Michigan thanks to Hurricane Sandy
While the gales of Hurricane Sandy are causing millions of East Coast residents to stock up, hunker down or even evacuate their homes, for a few hundred hearty souls in Chicago and along the Lake Michigan shore, the storm’s arrival means only one thing: Surf’s …Read More
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Steinberg: Ultimate political spin roars to shore
If a meteor were expected to destroy the Earth later today, my guess is we’d spend our last few precious hours caught up in debate over how the planet’s complete obliteration might effect next week’s presidential election.
The man fixing the morgue: Stephen Cina and his big project
Dr. Stephen Cina’s charge is to clean up a Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office rocked by reports earlier this year of bodies piling up, unsafe conditions and underperforming workers. The new chief medical examiner says his office is on the way to recovery — but don’t confuse it with the morgue of prime time dramas.
NEIL STEINBERG: Barack Obama goes blue in latest bump in the 2012 road
The end of the interview is the most perilous part, as any politician will tell you and Barack Obama learned anew earlier this month. As Rolling Stone journalists were leaving the Oval Office Oct. 11, one editor told Obama that his 6-year-old is supporting him.“You …
‘Prairie Home Companion’ on its way
Mark Twain made a lot of money. Both from his own best-sellers, like “Huckleberry Finn,” and from the work of others — he owned a publishing house — particularly the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. But he also lost a lot of money. Trying to …
Steinberg: Mourdock’s mistake is speaking for God
Here’s the difference. And pay attention, because while it is not a particularly complex concept, some people just can’t seem to wrap their heads around it. ...
Poetry calls to us, like wild geese
An interview with Mary Oliver was posted on Facebook last week, tipping me off that she has a new book of poetry out. I marched over to the Book Bin and asked if they had a copy. They did — it’s that kind of store …
Preckwinkle hoping, praying Obama, and ObamaCare, win
With so much electoral politics descending into the trivial, it sounds like typical partisan hysteria to say that lives are at stake. But one look at the frayed health care safety net in Cook County and there is no other conclusion.
Sandburg awards dinner gathers literary celebs in glittery cavalcade
Mine is not one of those columns studded with bold-faced celebrity names, mainly because the closest I usually come to mingling with celebrities is having an office right in between the offices of Richard Roeper and Bill Zwecker. But whatever malign force in the universe generally keeps me from star-choked events lifted Wednesday night, and I found myself at the annual Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner, the advent of which I of course dreaded, predicting “a series of minor humiliations as punishment for the hubris of reaching toward a tiny honor.”
Resolved: school debate thrives...
Unlike you — well, unlike the vast majority of you — I have debated, formally, in public pressure situations, at least what passed for pressure in high school. Debate is hard. I think that’s why, while all my school stuff was deep-sixed into the basement …
Steinberg: With theater, a little knowledge goes a long way
Horrible things are supposed to be horrible, to jar and linger. We forget that, so accustomed are we to our easy, instant gratification culture where, when trouble hits, the grief counselors are rushed in, the popular pills are prescribed, and we’re all expected to dance upon the fresh graves of our personal heartbreak.
Dieting not so hard when compared to dialysis
After I wrote about an obese Wisconsin TV newscaster who took to the air to defend herself against a viewer who criticized her for being a poor role model, a number of readers accurately pointed out that being overweight is not merely a matter of …Read More
Steinberg: Vice president should be half pit bull, half idiot
You do realize that the vice president is supposed to be an imbecile? If not quite an imbecile, then a cross between a zombie (“the vice president of the United States is like a man in a cataleptic state,” Thomas R. Marshall said in 1920. “He cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain and yet is he is perfectly conscious”) and an attack dog, half asleep, half snarling. The extremes at each end of the spectrum are Dan Quayle and Richard Nixon.
A milestone in the fading of religion
Neil Steinberg: Shouldn’t there be some kind of ceremony? A ritual to mark the end of the Protestant majority in the United States. Maybe Pat Boone singing “Amazing Grace” as a baloney and mayo sandwich on Wonder bread is lowered into a grave....
Two names for one place: Holy Name could go by “SEVEN30”
A building in Chicago having two identities is nothing new. The Wrigley Building has two addresses, reflecting the fact that it is actually two separate buildings, built at different times. As is the City Hall/County Building, which looks like one enormous block square structure, but is actually two buildings, built separately — first the county, which was nearly done and occupied before City Hall was built (the County Building — and this is one of those facts every Chicagoan should know — despite being an exact mirror of City Hall, cost 50 percent more to construct, a reminder that whatever
Kennedy clan up-close in ‘Ethel’
Ethel Kennedy is not the Kennedy whose name usually comes up when people are engaged in the endless process of celebrating or condemning what is inarguably America’s most famous family. With neither the power of her husband, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, or her brother-in-law, John …Read More
We know fat is bad — but it’s OK to be fat?
So is being fat bad? Or is it good? Fat is bad, right? It’s unhealthy, unattractive, limiting and a sign a person needs to take control of his or her life, to diet, exercise, become less fat. Most believe that. Yet lots of people are …Read More
Debate? What debate?
Why do people insist on calling what is scheduled to transpire Wednesday night between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama a “debate”? A “debate,” according to my dog-eared New Oxford American, is “a formal discussion on a particular topic in a public meeting or legislative assembling, …Read More
