Personal posts

Posts on architecture, obsessions, photography, poems, visits to art exhibits, essays, family, and or things about me organized under art, home, and work.

  • Logos for every City, County, and State Department

    Office of the Mayor The Mayor of Chicago, the city’s chief executive officer, directs city departments and appoints department heads, with the advice and consent of the city council. Office of New Americans Special Programs Your Ward and Alderman 311 City Services Call 311 for assistance with non-emergency City Services and for information on events,…

  • Family Time and the Decades-Long Churn of Equality

    I love the obituaries. More consistently than any other type of news story, they have the random power to inform me about something intensely personal while marking decades of movement in the broadest swaths of society. Today is one of those days. Throughout her career, she worked to study parenting as it was practiced, not…

  • Lincoln Marsh, Early November: Wet Full-Spectrum Color Field

    On Saturday I returned to the marsh to find it in full color and full flush. The expected Fall colors were present:

  • The Public Library + Me

    I was born in the Northview Heights Housing Project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is where Andrew Carnegie made most of his money and he built nine out of the 2,500 libraries that bore his name. At one point, the “Carnegie library system” was responsible for 75-80 percent of every library in the nation. In Pittsburgh,…

  • On the Odd Ubiquity and Invisibility of Speed Camera Data

    Over there weekend, there have been at least three news stories have referenced super-specific figures on speed cameras as released by the City of Chicago, but none of them link to the actual data. I read these stories, and marveled and the incredibly specific information they’ve pulled from what seems to be a specific document,…