Like two floundering swimmers dragging each other beneath the waves. Saks bought Neiman Marcus. Little more than a year later, Saks is veering towards bankruptcy. Will it take down both stores in Chicago? Losing even one would be a major blow to Michigan Avenue. www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/a...

Will be posting more pics next week, but what makes the Chicago Architectural Biennial annex at 840 North Michigan even more spectacular is seeing it within the bare-bones remainder of the razzle-dazzle build-out for the short-lived Uniqlo flagship. chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/sites/840-n-...

Vinci-Hamp's rescue of the Portland Art Museum www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/179...

Notice anything? Like the peak years for Chicago homicides took place under Sts. Daley I and II? Barely noticed, because it clashed with the narrative. Just like now, with crime dropping, social media trolls amp crime as a cudgel promoting their disinformation. blockclubchicago.org/2026/01/02/c...

Trump has made the White House a Den of Thieves, protecting their own. His white nationalism extends to not prosecuting white collar swindlers, money launderers, drug dealers, bribe makers and takers - and pardoning them if convicted, no matter how egregious their crimes. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

From Chicago, Happy 2026!

"Japanese tradition holds that on New Year's Eve, foxes gather at a specific tree ... On their way there, the foxes produce distinctive flames, which local farmers use to predict the harvest..." May the flames of all you foxes point to a bountiful, saner 2026: Happy New Year! bit.ly/3Npldoj

Have a Puritan New Year! Free live audio stream of opening night of I Puritani tonight, Wednesday,from the Met: Oropesa, Brownless, Rucinski, Van Horn, Armailliato at the podium. Starting 4:55 p.m. CDT. www.metopera.org/Season/Radio...

Kyle MacMillan for the Sun-Times looks at the everfresh Chicago imagists on their 60th anniversary, with Gladys Nilsson adding a mural to the Art Institute's Modern Wing just this past June. chicago.suntimes.com/art/2025/12/...

Sometimes eclipsing the two dailies, Block Club Chicago has become essential to understanding what's going on in our city, and a prime example is this epic history of the Trump invasion spreading terror throughout the city this year. blockclubchicago.org/2025/12/30/c...

Your American Health Care System, II: Private equity now owns almost 500 hospitals, cutting care, loading up on debt to pay themselves dividends. After being acquired by private equity, short-term nursing homes saw deaths increasing 11% newrepublic.com/article/2035...

Your American Health Care System: Private ownership sells off hospital real estate, then rents it back at doubled rates, cuts staff, stiff vendors, reduces care, loads up on debt on road to bankruptcy. Are we no longer capable of being shocked? www.sfchronicle.com/projects/202...

Unlike most of journalism, The New York Times is highly profitable, up 26% last quarter. So of course they're treating their subscribers as suckers, raising monthly rates 20%. I cancelled the New Yorker, which I loved, years ago when they showed similar contempt.

It's "best-of 2025" time, and I must comply. It's the law - I think it's a federal law. I took over 60,000 photographs this year. Selecting "the best" is nuts, so, at the link, some I liked best. There's no accounting for taste. Click, if you dare. arcchicago.blogspot.com/2025/12/best...

Fire and fury, signifying nothing: Elon and his merry band of DOGE saboteurs lied through their teeth about savings. It was never about saving money; it was about ruthlessly consolidating power. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

I’m hungry. I know it appears to be a stupid thing to proclaim, but I haven’t been for the past two months.

Madness. Saudi Arabia exhausted its ground water growing crops like alfalfa, so it banned those crops and bought farmland in the U.S. to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia. Groundwater depleting 10x replenishment rate, land sinking up to 2 inches a year. www.latimes.com/environment/...

Trib architecture critic Edward Keegan looks back on 2025 as a series of who-would-have-thoughts, including Landmarks soiling itself landmarking a junk tower, "a laughably nonsensical move by the city to help the developer tap into public subsidies." www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/28/c...

There's an entire city beyond these balconies. The fog ate it. (And now, rumblings of thunder.)

Will law enforcement become a rolling advertisement for Elon Musk's recall-prone, hulking Cybertrucks? Musk billionaire techbro buddy donates fleet of 10 to Las Vegas police: "far bigger than just a police car. These are badass." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Fascinating story on how Hitler cast Europe's churches into silence, seizing and melting down 170,000 bells for the Nazi war effort, and then the long road back post-war. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/a...

Sears should have been Wal-Mart - it was a retailer with global presence. It should have been Amazon - it started out as a mail-order powerhouse. Instead, obtuse management threw it into the clutches of vulture Eddie Lampert, who destroyed it. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/b...

"A must-have catalogue" artlyst.com/product/kerr...

By all accounts, a great retrospective of Kerry James Marshall's work. From London, it moves on to Zurich and Paris, but apparently not Chicago, his home city. There is a catalogue, though. wapo.st/4sgCyji

Excited to see one of the best modernist buildings in Memphis, the 1956 Rust Hall by Roy Harrover, under renovation to reopen in 2026 as the home of the National Ornamental Metal Museum!

Happy Start of the Hot Tub Boat Season!

Acquainting myself with the often wonderful recordings of Constantin Silvestri. If you're looking to wake yourself up: Tchaikovsky 5, last movement, turn up the sound, strap yourself in, and wait for the drumroll. youtu.be/FkgtdIBN-t4?...

Orbanization of the American press: Jeff Bezos' Trumpified DC Post's editorial board posts this disinformation piece that ignores the basic fact that the U.S. -with the most expensive health care and mediocre outcomes - is the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare. wapo.st/4jf01gD

The House of Tomorrow, Today. For the Sun-Times, Lee Bey looks at the restoration of George Fred Keck's glass-house, 20 years before Farnsworth, from Chicago's 1933 World's Fair, which made the move to Indiana 90 years before the Bears. chicago.suntimes.com/architecture...

Merry Christmas!

Preview of the next Great Crash: Private equity is taking over the economy, buying and sometimes looting once proud companies, and now, increasingly, private equity gooses returns by selling companies - to themselves. What could possibly go wrong? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/b...

Not even Trump's own Supreme Court can stomach his mad king posturing. (His support was confined to the habitual scoundrels appointed long before him, and Neil Gorsuch.) chicago.suntimes.com/donald-trump...

The very definition of traitors. Like Trump, Witkoff is a Russian asset. Not a diplomat, but a real estate grifter, taking Trump's "peace plan" for Ukraine directly from text supplied by the Russians, for whom they are useful stooges in destroying America. www.wsj.com/world/putin-...

"More Liberace than Le Corbusier..." For Mas Context, Elizabeth Blasius offers up a deep dive on the life and work of one-of-a-kind architect, designer, musician Bruce Goff, now subject of a massive new retrospective at the Art Institute. mascontext.com/observations...

Rewatching bits of The Apartment it struck me that the Billy Wilder/IAL Diamond screenplay is a masterpiece, keeping the sour and the sweet, the laughs and the heartbreak and the inevitable romantic ending - all in perfect balance, perfectly paced. www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

Thinking I’ll have to lower my rates….

With his daddy's billions, David Ellison is Orbanizing American journalism into an authoritarian mirror, first taking over Paramount and installing Trump mole Bari Weiss to gut CBS news, now billions more daddybucks to take over WB and destroy CNN. www.wsj.com/business/med...

As a kid, I was mesmerized by pictures of the massive Fraunkirche in Dresden, destroyed by WWII firebombing. Totally reconstructed after German re-unification, this splendid Advent concert on DG Stage+ includes a spectacular visual tour of the building. $9.99 www.stage-plus.com/video/vod_co...

For your last minute Christmas shopping, Colores Mexicanos, which was forced out of its lovely Michigan Avenue store last year, has opened a pop-up in the Cocobar space at 316 North Wabash, at the river. Highly recommended. Also on-line. coloresmexicanoschicago.com

Miesian family photo with reconciled Santa and Grinch, IBM Plaza

Miesian family photo with reconciled Santa and Grinch, IBM Plaza

I'm not really sorry I missed Jake Paul being battered down to the canvas, but I thoroughly enjoyed this great, witty sportswriting from Jason Gay in - wait for it - the Wall Street Journal. www.wsj.com/sports/jake-...

Koch, Musk, Adelson and their fellow oligarchs run amuck buying elections and destroying America for their personal profit. The constitution needs an amendment restoring democracy: 1. Under law, only human beings - not corporations - are people... www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/u...

Regarding the new 300-unit high-rise at 2800 North Sheridan, I wonder what will happen to Egon Weiner's Brotherhood sculpture. chicago-outdoor-sculptures.blogspot.com/2009/08/linc...

Say goodbye to the round-cornered building at Sheridan and Diversey, originally built In the 1950's for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, once 200,000 members strong. (Remember when you couldn't buy meat after 6pm?) Soon to be demolished for a 300 unit tower. www.costar.com/article/7989...

From the 22nd floor.

Madness. We've become the United States of Big Oil. MAGA= the right to swindle you, to sicken you, to destroy your intelligence. If Putin were running the White House, it couldn't be any more destructive to American sovereignty, power and values. wapo.st/3N68x5z

Is there anything more useless and regressive than on-line sports betting? At least with a casino, there are jobs. On-line, it's just money vanishing into the coffers of one of the out-of-state betting behemoths. Tax it up the wazoo. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/18/o...

I seem to recall NBC broadcasting an earlier production of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors each year around Christmas. This later TV film has a great cast and the sublime Teresa Stratas. youtu.be/Cm1Apj92hu0?...