I live in Chicago so my out-of-town friends assume that I must be well-acquainted with violence. Luckily that is not the case. Despite Chicago’s reputation, our city’s travails are hardly unique in urban America. Our particular crisis in leadership predates Covid, and it does not look like real change is coming anytime soon.

On Friday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot left City Hall for the last time. It was not a fond farewell.

Demonization and its economic consequences, and a peek ahead to the 118th Congress

Are central banks overreacting to inflation? Are we in for a positive surprise?

Is Covid just a dress rehearsal? What have we learned about living with our biological and geopolitical adversaries?https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/19/long-covid-brain-effects/

Most Russian experts and military strategists I follow doubted Putin would invade Ukraine. I agreed with their rational arguments, but here we are. I’m reminded of the Haruki Murakami novel 1Q84. The heroine alights from her taxi and gradually discovers that she is living in a world where everything is almost the same, except there are two moons. Since Covid began, I doubt I’m alone in feeling that I have somehow gotten off at the wrong stop, and am living in a hellishly perverse alternative universe.

In just a few weeks, the Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing. Both Japan and China were unlucky in their timing; these Games without an audience must be bittersweet for participants as well. For me personally, they bring back memories.

Last month, a bit past the peak of fall foliage, I went to Vermont to visit family. Along the way I decided to stop by one of the many small cemeteries that dot the state to see the only monument to the 1918 Pandemic in the US. Hope Cemetery was beautiful, graced with stone gates, on a shining autumn day and a place where the eternal and the impermanent exist side by side.