I've learned to dread calls from my editor at Austin Weekly News. Used to be that he'd only call me to either do some fact-checking (which means that chances are pretty good that I messed something up) or to berate me from the way I wrote something, which often involved cursing me out. These days, he does occasionally call for other reasons, but ( Read more... )

Today, Chicago and the state of Illinois lifted most remaining COVID-19 mitigation-related masking and social distancing requirements and capacity limits. It isn’t quite the end of an era, but it is a step forward.

But when I wrote a decent chunk of this post (on June 7), many of those limits were still in place, and Chicagoland region was caught in ( Read more... )

In the midst of a global pandemic, news breaks fast, and things can change quickly. Case and point - back on Thursday, I filed an article for the Chronicle Media newspapers about how libraries throughout the six-county Chicagoland region responded to COVID-19. At the time, most of the libraries already closed, with some doing a few extra things to ( Read more... )

Growing up in post-Soviet Russia, there is this narrative that got repeated a lot. That Americans meant well, but they don't understand our reality. They have the luxury of being in America, instead of living in Russia. They don't have to deal with the consequences of their actions ( Read more... )

The Hiawatha Amtrak route occupies an interesting niche in Midwestern public transit. It's the only Amtrak route that runs several times a day. It connects Chicago and Milwaukee, providing a reasonably quick, convenient connection between the two downtowns. But even with two tracks for its entire length, the route can only handle so many trains at ( Read more... )

Though I have to point out that this bus stop is usually way busier than this on Fridays.

And that it would have been cuter without the transit study plug.

Two Pace employees recently got married and hopped onto Route 307 to get to the reception! Pace and RTA recently finished a Central Harlem Ave. Corridor Study, which lays the groundwork ( Read more... )

As my mom would say, in spite of the best efforts of some of the people involved, I was able to get New Year/Hanukah presents to some of the Soviet World War II veterans living Skokie ( Read more... )

Last night, Chicagoland was hit by a rainfall that, somewhere along the way, turned into a snowfall. In the city, at least, it didn't look that heavy, but I guess the suburbs got it worse. So it's only fitting that Metra put out a video showing how it was making sure its commuter trains were still running during snowy weather.

Click to view

Those of you who ( Read more... )

Back in the summer of 2016, I went to the city of Highland Park, a pretty damn well-off North Shore suburb of Chicago, to do an article for the Highland Park Landmark. I was at the city's Metra station, which doubled as a transportation hub for the Pace bus that serve the city, when I saw something I've never seen before. One of the buses wasn't ( Read more... )

Chicago area has more than its share of immigrants from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union those lives have, one way or another, been touched by World War II. Soviet military veterans, guerilla fighters and survivors of many stripes - Siege of Leningrad survivors, survivors of Nazi prison and/or labor camps and, of course, Holocaust ( Read more... )