Chicago magazine September 2022

IN THE SPRING OF 2020, CONTRIBUTING WRITER JAKE Malooley heard from a friend about an elementary school teacher in his substance abuse recovery meeting. The teacher had spoken about how a student’s accusation against him of inappropriate touching had irreparably damaged his reputation, even after he was cleared in criminal court. The friend told the teacher he would ask if Malooley might be interested in telling his story. He was. “We have all read about people who have been canceled or publicly shamed,” Malooley says. “I wondered, What would it look like riding shotgun as that’s happening, when you are being dragged through this nightmare?” That teacher was Matthew Baron. Over the next two years, as the case was investigated by Chicago Public Schools and Baron remained suspended, he and Malooley were…

@sarahcigrang For Sarah Cigrang, the Chicago hot dog isn’t merely a meal — it’s an obsession. The Lincoln Park resident grew up going to the original Superdawg Drive-In at Milwaukee and Devon Avenues and remembers watching the 1999 PBS documentary A Hot Dog Program. “It’s something that we all really liked as a family,” she says. In 2020, Cigrang and her friend Jen Bradley made a list of popular local hot dog stands, then methodically visited and documented as many as they could, filling in their friends and family about their finds. “We’ll do a little summary and an overall rating,” says Cigrang, who photographed each stand. She took the contest-winning shot at Duk’s Red Hots in West Town, where she likes the old-school exterior. But it’s not among her top…

1 More than the usual rivalry could be at stake when the Bears visit the Packers Sept. 18. Thanks to Mr. I Still Own You, Chicago enters the season just one game ahead of Green Bay in all-time NFL wins: 783 to 782. 2 Aldermen are set to get a big raise this month. Their hikes are tied to inflation — 9 percent. That would put the top salaries above $140,000. With elections in five months, how many will reject the increase? 3 When the Democratic National Committee meets Sept. 8–10 in Maryland, Chicago reps will be there to pitch the city as the 2024 convention site. We have held 25, the most, but none since 1996. 4 Lifeguards go off duty after Labor Day, closing the beaches. Yet September is one of…

THE NIGHT BEFORE HE WON THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION FOR GOVERNOR, STATE senator Darren Bailey held a “Fire Pritzker” rally at the Des Plaines Theatre. It was the last stop on his campaign’s 102-county tour of Illinois. A hundred and fifty or so blue-jeaned baby boomers in “Bailey-Trussell” and “Mama Bears for Bailey” T-shirts clustered in front of the art deco stage. Bailey’s followers weren’t just angry at his general election opponent, Governor J.B. Pritzker, whom they called a “tyrant” for shutting down businesses during the COVID outbreak; they were mad at the Illinois Republican Party for decades of compromising with Democrats on guns, taxes, and abortion. When Pritzker’s predecessor, Republican Bruce Rauner, signed a bill expanding public funding of abortions in 2017, that felt to them like the final stab in…

IN 2016, CHR ISTINA Whitehouse, then a Northwestern University master’s student, was cycling in the Loop when a commercial truck turned right, veering into the bike lane and nearly running her over. The next year, after realizing how pervasive the problem of drivers not respecting dedicated lanes was, she launched the app Bike Lane Uprising. It allows cyclists to log the location and submit photos of vehicles parked in bike lanes, which is illegal in Chicago. The nationwide data is sortable, enabling users to spot trends. Whitehouse provides the information to city officals and companies employing drivers so they can identify problem areas and repeat offenders. Still, it’s been an uphill climb to improve bike safety in Chicago. In the first seven months of this year, there were five cyclist fatalities…

1 Nathan Leopold, not Richard Loeb, was likely the dominant partner and the actual killer of 14-year-old Bobby Franks. This is the major new claim advanced by Greg King and Penny Wilson’s Nothing but the Night: Leopold & Loeb and the Truth Behind the Murder That Rocked 1920s America, out September 20. “History (and Leopold) portrayed Loeb as the psychopathic impresario, with Nathan positioned as his weak, infatuated disciple,” the authors write. “But we discovered evidence contradicting this view.” Correspondence between the young men suggests Leopold was the aggressor in their sexual relationship. After the 1924 kidnapping-murder, Loeb was the first to crack under police questioning and to express remorse. And while Loeb enjoyed planning crimes, Leopold thrilled in violence and embraced Nietzschean ideas about “supermen” exempt from laws. “Richard wanted…