Chicago Bears Quotes

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.

When did my house turn into a hangout for every grossly overpaid, terminally pampered professional football player in northern Illinois?" "We like it here," Jason said. "It reminds us of home." "Plus, no women around." Leandro Collins, the Bears' first-string tight end emerged from the office munching on a bag of chips. "There's times when you need a rest from the ladies." Annabelle shot out her arm and smacked him in the side of the head. "Don't forget who you're talking to." Leandro had a short fuse, and he'd been known to take out a ref here and there when he didn't like a call, but the tight end merely rubbed the side of his head and grimaced. "Just like my mama." "Mine, too," Tremaine said with happy nod. Annabelle spun on Heath. "Their mother! I'm thirty-one years old, and I remind them of their mothers." "You act like my mother," Sean pointed out, unwisely as it transpired, because he got a swat in the head next.

Before you can win, you have to believe that you are worthy.” — Mike Ditka, Chicago Bears Head Coach 1982-92

She feels like the first drags of fresh cigaretter but last crunches of cherry suckers. She feels like final coats of nail polish. She feels like lines of coke. She feels like knuckles you crack after a long day. She feels like Miami rain. She feels like empty football fields. She feels like full stadiums. She feels like absinthe. She feels like dangling from a helicopter. She feels like classical music. She feels like standing on a motorcycle. She feels like train tracks. She feels like frozen yogurt. She feels like destroying a piano. She feels like rooftops. She feels like fleeing from cops. She feels like stitches. She feels like strobe lights. She feels like blue carnival bears. She feels like curbs at 2 am. She feels like Cupid's Chokehold. She feels like running through Chicago. She feels like 1.2 million dollars. She feels like floors. She feels like everything he's ever wanted in life. […] “I love you more than I planned.

White ducks have big orange spatulas for feet. But will they kick over pancakes before they burn? No! They like their flapjacks flavored like The Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Whatever happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

She feels like the first drags of fresh cigarettes but last crunches of cherry suckers. She feels like final coats of nail polish. She feels like lines of coke. She feels like knuckles you crack after a long day. She feels like Miami rain. She feels like empty football fields. She feels like full stadiums. She feels like absinthe. She feels like dangling from a helicopter. She feels like classical music. She feels like standing on a motorcycle. She feels like train tracks. She feels like frozen yogurt. She feels like destroying a piano. She feels like rooftops. She feels like fleeing from cops. She feels like stitches. She feels like strobe lights. She feels like blue carnival bears. She feels like curbs at 2 am. She feels like Cupid's Chokehold. She feels like running through Chicago. She feels like 1.2 million dollars. She feels like floors. She feels like everything he's ever wanted in life. […] “I love you more than I planned.

Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions of Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the dark and dour tombs of Chicago’s richest and most powerful men, the tombs’ bleakness made all the more profound by their juxtaposition against the night-blued snow […] Outside the snow muffled the concussion of passing horses. Trains bearing fangs of ice tore through the crossing at Wallace.

Perhaps Sylvie’s body had been ultimately unable to bear the distance between Chicago and New York.

According to David Maraniss, the author of When Pride Still Mattered, Lombardi’s last words, spoken in a delirium on his deathbed, were: “Joe Namath! You’re not bigger than football! Remember that!

What’s football?” he asked. “It’s chess. Tackle chess. And what’s the quarterback? He’s the king. Take him out, you win the game. So that was our philosophy. We’re going to hit that quarterback ten times. We do that, he’s gone. I hit him late? Fine. Penalize me. But it’s like in those courtroom movies, when the lawyer says the wrong thing and the judge tells the jury to disregard it, but you can’t unhear and the quarterback can’t be unhit.

Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

Football is an angry game, played with punishing violence," he writes. "People get destroyed on the field, lives end. It makes sense that its first star was someone who'd already lost everything, a ruined man, ill-treated, stripped to his essential qualities: speed, strength, power. Jim Thorpe is the spirit of the game. Every NFL hit still carries the fury of the disgraced Indian, prowling the field, seeking justice.

Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago’s Hull House, wrote, “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.” The

On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.” The

Burnham knew how to deal with Chicago’s notoriously flimsy soil, but Jackson Park surprised even him. Initially the bearing capacity of its ground was “practically an unknown quality,” as one engineer put it. In March 1891 Burnham ordered tests to gauge how well the soil would support the grand palaces then on the architects’ drafting tables. Of special concern was the fact that the buildings would be sited adjacent to newly dug canals and lagoons. As any engineer knew, soil under pressure tended to shift to fill adjacent excavations.

All their men—brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons—had been picked off one by one by one. They had a single piece of paper directing them to a preacher on DeVore Street. The War had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the back roads and cowpaths from Schenectady to Jackson. Dazed but insistent, they searched each other out for word of a cousin, an aunt, a friend who once said, “Call on me. Anytime you get near Chicago, just call on me.” Some of them were running from family that could not support them, some to family; some were running from dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land. Boys younger than Buglar and Howard; configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men. Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy “talking sheets,” they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.

On the sixth of September, 1901, President McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz at Buffalo. Immediately an unprecedented campaign of persecution was set in motion against Emma Goldman as the best known Anarchist in the country. Although there was absolutely no foundation for the accusation, she, together with other prominent Anarchists, was arrested in Chicago, kept in confinement for several weeks, and subjected to severest cross-examination. Never before in the history of the country had such a terrible man-hunt taken place against a person in public life. But the efforts of police and press to connect Emma Goldman with Czolgosz proved futile. Yet the episode left her wounded to the heart. The physical suffering, the humiliation and brutality at the hands of the police she could bear. The depression of soul was far worse. She was overwhelmed by realization of the stupidity, lack of understanding, and vileness which characterized the events of those terrible days. The attitude of misunderstanding on the part of the majority of her own comrades toward Czolgosz almost drove her to desperation. Stirred to the very inmost of her soul, she published an article on Czolgosz in which she tried to explain the deed in its social and individual aspects.

Old snow was layered over the ground, the parked cars that hadn’t been disturbed, the tough little shrubs that would bear the snow’s impossible weight until spring. She could feel her own brittleness as the frozen air did battle with her coat. It was no worse than Chicago, it might even have been two degrees warmer, and still it was like walking into a wall of broken glass. She pictured those early settlers in their covered wagons crossing the prairies in search of a better life. Why did they stop here? Were the horses lame? Was it springtime? Were they so hungry that they brought their wagons to a halt and said, This is far enough?

Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

Doing things the right way, giving guys accolades for that. It’s important. In Burger King we used to call it taking a walk. Taking a walk means you get out of your office and walk around the restaurant. You walk outside and look for trash. Is the dining room clean? Are your employees dressed properly? Are they smiling? Are the lights on? We all need to take a walk more often. Just look around and say, ‘Is everything right? Is everything the way it should be? Are we giving ourselves the best chance to have success?’ And if we are, then what’s wrong with going up to that person that has that area cleaned up, and is focused, with a smile on their face, and saying, ‘Hey, I want you to know I appreciate it.’ If there’s one thing I learned as an owner, it’s that the players, people that work for you, they’re the ones that are going to make you successful.” Plank bought

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies,

More often, I’d meet people like Brett Favre. Not literally like Brett Favre, in the sense that they were forty-year-old football players, but that they were people who loved Wisconsin but couldn’t find a way to make it work there, took off for NewYork, crashed and burned, and then found a home for themselves here in the City of Lakes. Minneapolis is where the drama queens and burnouts and weirdos and misfits of the rural and suburban Upper Midwest wind up. It’s a city full of people who, though they’d never say it, secretly suspect they don’t belong here, that they’re not Minneapolis enough, because they didn’t go to a city high school, or because they didn’t hang out at First Avenue when they were teenagers, or because they came from the suburbs, or from outstate.They came from the Iron Range or Fargo–Moorhead or Bloomington or White Bear Lake or Collegeville, or from Chicago or California or the Pacific Northwest or Mexico or Somalia. Wherever they came from, Minneapolis is their home now, and it belongs to them. It belongs to us.

The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned: “You okay, Bronk?” Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.” In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.

We’d been together for a year when he lost his job in Chicago and I started noticing a change in him. Gone was his ever present smile when we were together; more often than not he would be withdrawn and seemed as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Then, he got a job offer from his Uncle in Dalton, Ohio. He needed a new mechanic and wanted to help Beau out. Beau begged me to go with him; said he loved me and couldn’t bear to live without me. My parents and my best friend, Kate, were dead against it. They had noticed the change in Beau. They’d never been happy with our relationship, so they weren’t shy at expressing their concerns about moving across a whole other state to live with my “bad boy” boyfriend, and were vehemently against me giving up nursing school to do so. In the end, Beau used the ace up his sleeve, something I didn’t see coming until it was too late. He blackmailed me into moving with him. We were lying in bed one night, having just made love, and I was stuck in the post-coital haze that had my mind thinking of fluffy bunnies and rainbows. He rolled over and brushed the hair out of my face. “I can’t leave you behind, so I’ve decided you’re coming with me, Mac. It’s you and me against the world. I can’t survive without you, baby.” And

The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of 'Mr. Belvedere.' I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

If Mamaw's second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to the neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters--about one-third--believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure--which means that a majority of white conservatives aren't certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor--which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up; His accent--clean, perfect, neutral--is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they're frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right--adversity familiar to many of us--but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right.

I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

In defending HUD before the Supreme Court, President Gerald Ford's solicitor general, Robert Bork, expressed the government's opposition to placing public housing in white areas: "There will be an enormous practical impact on innocent communities who have to bear the burden of the housing, who will have to house a plaintiff class from Chicago, which they wronged in no way." Thus, the federal government described nondiscriminatory housing policy as punishment visited on the innocent. The Supreme Court rejected Bork's objection, upholding lower court orders that HUD must henceforth construct apartments in predominately white areas of Chicago and its suburbs. The CHA-HUD response was to cease building public housing altogether.

The Listener’s Body Language A person’s body language often says more than words. After all, why wouldn’t you want know if a person is uncomfortable talking about butterflies and roses because they remind her of an ex; or talking about sports when the guy next to you hardly knows the difference between the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Bears?

We shared deep passions. John Hughes movies, the New Romantics, the Chicago Bears. We both loved chicken-flavor Ramen and hated the shrimp flavor. We liked thin-crust pizza over deep dish, and wine over beer, and gin over vodka.

It’s easy. Everybody else on the field, they look where the opposing line is. I look where they’re going to be. Then I just head somewhere else.” —BARRY ADAMS, RUNNING BACK FOR THE CHICAGO BEARS, ON HOW HE WAS ABLE TO RUSH 2,437 YARDS IN A SINGLE SEASON, SHATTERING THE PREVIOUS RECORD (2,105, BY ERIC DICKERSON IN 1984)

In 1871, much of the city of Chicago was on fire, hundreds of people died, and four square miles of the city burned to the ground. The Great Chicago Fire was one of the worst disasters in America during the nineteenth century. One Chicago resident, Horatio Spafford, was a good friend of D. L. Moody and a man who lived out his faith. Despite great personal loss in property and assets, Horatio and his wife, Anna, dedicated themselves to helping the people of Chicago who had become impoverished by the fire. After years of hard work helping others recover from their losses, the Spaffords decided to take a well-earned vacation to help Moody during one of his evangelistic crusades in Great Britain. Anna and their four daughters went on ahead while Horatio planned on joining them in a few days after tending to some unfinished business matters. One night en route, the ship that Anna and the girls were traveling on collided with another ship and sank within minutes. Anna and the girls were thrown into the black waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and only Anna survived. As hard as she tried, she could not save even one of her daughters. Anna was found unconscious, floating on a piece of wreckage. After her rescue, she sent a heartrending telegram to Horatio in Chicago that simply said, “Saved alone.” Horatio boarded the next ship to Europe to be reunited with his wife. As he was en route, the captain called Horatio to the bridge when they reached the spot where his daughters had drowned. As Horatio stood looking out into the blackness of the sea, heartbroken and no doubt with tears running down his face, with only his faith sustaining him, he penned the words to one of the greatest hymns ever written: “It Is Well with My Soul.” When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul Chorus It is well with my soul, It is well, it is well with my soul! My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part, but the whole, Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul! How can a man who has just lost his four little girls praise the Lord? Where does a person get that kind of strength? The answer: by being deeply rooted in the Word of God. Horatio Spafford was a man of the Word, so when tragedy stuck, he could face it with strength and confidence. The centrality of God’s Word plays a critical role in the life of every believer, and this emphasis serves as the Big Idea throughout Psalms 90—150.

One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes inclined nowhere in particular, when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace. Despite the sorry history of rapid transit in this city, the corporate neglect and high likelihood of collision, injury, and death, the weekday-morning overture blared along as usual. Men went on grooming mustaches with gray-gloved fingers. A rolled umbrella dented a bowler hat, words were exchanged. Girl amanuenses in little Leghorn straw hats and striped shirtwaists with huge shoulders that took up more room in the car than angels’ wings dreamed with contrary feelings of what awaited them on upper floors of brand-new steel-frame “skyscrapers.” The horses stepped along in their own time and space. Passengers snorted, scratched, and read the newspaper, sometimes all at once, while others imagined that they could get back to some kind of vertical sleep. Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams, nor easily attributable to the smoke-inflected sun beginning to light Chicago. He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear. He

By the time I returned to Albany that fall, I was committed to turning things around. I marched into the career-planning office and began researching the firms at which I might still have a shot. Most did their main recruiting from the second-year, not the third-year, class, so I was late to the party, and I knew it. One firm, however, did stand out: Bickel & Brewer. They were based in Dallas, with smaller satellite offices in Washington, DC, New York, and Chicago. They liked to hire third-year law students, and at New York salaries. William Brewer bears a decent resemblance to a young Robert Redford. He walks with a strong gait and wears a tan Burberry trench coat over perfectly tailored navy or gray suits. He was also legendary in the halls of Albany Law School, where he had studied law. I researched him and his firm with vigor and soon found that Brewer’s looks weren’t the only thing attractive about this firm. The term “Rambo litigation” was coined there. They took no prisoners. You hired them when you wanted a fight. At twenty-three years old, I loved that. Kill or be killed! We’re not here to make friends, we’re here to win! You sue my client? F— you and your request for an extension! You want a settlement conference? Pound sand! Our offer is screw you! Looking back, this feels a little silly, but as a young gun it sounded very sexy to me. I could enter a frat or a brotherhood of sorts. The bravado naturally appealed to me, given the protective armor I’d built up since being bullied, not to mention the fact that I’d probably always had a bit more testosterone than most girls. Going on the offensive was thrilling, and the more I acted tough, the tougher I felt. Being a litigator was the perfect job; it not only let me hide my insecurities, it felt like a tool for conquering them.

With the country effectively held at ransom, the IMF was triumphant: each candidate pledged his support in writing. 25 Never before had the central Chicago School mission to protect economic matters from the reach of democracy been more explicit: you can vote, South Koreans were told, but your vote can have no bearing on the managing and organization of the economy.

By 1970 the CPD’s budget was more than 900 percent larger than in 1945, approaching $200 million per year. By the mid-seventies, the city was spending one-quarter of its budget on its police.46 It bears knowing that it was over the course of that same period that the urban crisis began to wreak further havoc on black Chicago’s educational infrastructure, housing markets, and employment sectors, hurling citizens on the margins into deeper states of deprivation and desperation. And it is surely worth considering that as that happened, the one major investment that Daley and the city council made in those neighborhoods was to send in more police.

Now, supposing we should abolish all other taxes direct and indirect, substituting for them a tax upon land values, what would be the effect? In the first place it would be to kill speculative values. It would be to remove from the newer parts of the country the bulk of the taxation and put it on the richer parts. It would be to exempt the pioneer from taxation and make the larger cities pay more of it. It would be to relieve energy and enterprise, capital and labour, from all those burdens that now bear upon them. What a start that would give to production! In the second place we could, from the value of the land, not merely pay all the present expenses of the government, but we could do infinitely more. In the city of San Francisco James Lick left a few blocks of ground to be used for public purposes there, and the rent amounts to so much, that out of it will be built the largest telescope in the world, large public baths and other public buildings, and various costly works. If, instead of these few blocks, the whole value of the land upon which the city is built had accrued to San Francisco what could she not do?  So in this little town, where land values are very low as compared with such cities as Chicago and San Francisco, you could do many things for mutual benefit and public improvement did you appropriate to public purposes the land values that now go to individuals. You could have a great free library; you could have an art gallery; you could get yourselves a public park, a magnificent public park, too. You have here one of the finest natural sites for a beautiful town I know of, and I have travelled much. You might make on this site a city that it would be a pleasure to live in. You will not as you go now—oh, no! Why, the very fact that you have a magnificent view here will cause somebody to hold on all the more tightly to the land that commands this view and charge higher prices for it. The State of New York wants to buy a strip of land so as to enable the people to see Niagara, but what a price she must pay for it! Look at all the great cities; in Philadelphia, for instance, in order to build their great city hall they had to block up the only two wide streets they had in the city. Everywhere you go you may see how private property in land prevents public as well as private improvement.  But I have not time to enter into further details.

This was America's new cable-wired, online nationalism, honey-combed lives intersecting during collective agony, the knee-pad titillation of Oval Office sex, the rubbernecking of celebrity violence. Until the Women's World Cup, the two biggest sports-related stories of the 1990s were the murder trial of O.J. Simpson and the knee-whacking shatter of figure skating's porcelain myth. Fans cheer for professional city teams and alma maters, but there is no grand, cumulative rooting in the United States except for the disposable novelty of the Olympics. With the rare exception of the Super Bowl is background noise, commercials interrupted by a flabby game, the Coca-Cola bears more engaging than the Chicago Bears.

the Supreme Court in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) added: “The right to keep and bear arms was considered no less fundamental by those who drafted and ratified the Bill of Rights.” For that proposition, Justice Samuel Alito, author of the opinion, referred the reader to five chapters of this book.

In the midst of this soul-searching, I had also started lining up real job offers in the event that my search for utopia didn’t bear fruit. One was with the Boston Consulting Group in its Midwest headquarters in Chicago.

While the symptoms of CTE can include difficulty with math or memory, some common early symptoms also include disorientation, dizziness, headaches, irritability, outbursts of violent or aggressive behavior, confusion, speech abnormalities, and major depressive disorder (McKee, et al., 2009). A large number of CTE symptoms have very little to do with how “smart” you are, and CTE can make daily life or maintaining simple human relationships extremely difficult. A disproportionately large number of retired athletes with CTE commit suicide, including Chicago Bears defensive back Dave Duerson, who texted his family to ask that his brain be used for research into the disease before fatally shooting himself in the chest in 2011.

Franklin, back in the legislative chambers where he had announced the indictment of Gardner, could not have got his presentation off to a weirder start. Making perhaps the soberest and most consequential appearance of his career, he wanted to talk about the NFL running back Gale Sayers. “Good afternoon. Before I get to the Gardner matter, I just want to acknowledge the passing of one of the living legends who lived in Omaha. Some of you all know that I’m a huge Chicago Bears fan, and Gale Sayers is one of my all-time favorite football players and the running back who I personally consider to be the greatest running back in the history of the National Football League. My father would argue with me all day about the fact that he thought that it should have been Jim Brown. But his passing is meaningful to me and I just felt like I needed to acknowledge that.” There was an awkward silence.

The Times ad marked a seminal intersection in the history of cancer. With it, cancer declared its final emergence from the shadowy interiors of medicine into the full glare of public scrutiny, morphing into an illness of national and international prominence. This was a generation that no longer whispered about cancer. There was cancer in newspapers and cancer in books, cancer in theater and in films: in 450 articles in the New York Times in 1971; in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, a blistering account of a cancer hospital in the Soviet Union; in Love Story, a 1970 film about a twenty-four-year-old woman who dies of leukemia; in Bang the Drum Slowly, a 1973 release about a baseball catcher diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease; in Brian's Song, the story of the Chicago Bears star Brian Piccolo, who died of testicular cancer. A torrent of op-ed pieces and letters appeared in newspapers and magazines.

It was Plank who gave the defense its name: the 46. Many fans assume it came from the on-field alignment of players, as with the 3-4 defense and the Cover 2. In fact, 46 means nothing more than we're coming hard, in the way of the man who wears that number, Doug Plank.

On 14 September 1869, one hundred years after his birth, Alexander von Humboldt’s centennial was celebrated across the world. There were parties in Europe, Africa and Australia as well as the Americas. In Melbourne and Adelaide people came together to listen to speeches in honour of Humboldt, as did groups in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. There were festivities in Moscow where Humboldt was called the ‘Shakespeare of sciences’, and in Alexandria in Egypt where guests partied under a sky illuminated with fireworks. The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill. In New York City the cobbled streets were lined with flags. City Hall was veiled in banners, and entire houses had vanished behind huge posters bearing Humboldt’s face. Even the ships sailing by, out on the Hudson River, were garlanded in colourful bunting. In the morning thousands of people followed ten music bands, marching from the Bowery and along Broadway to Central Park to honour a man ‘whose fame no nation can claim’ as the New York Times’s front page reported. By early afternoon, 25,000 onlookers had assembled in Central Park to listen to the speeches as a large bronze bust of Humboldt was unveiled. In the evening as darkness settled, a torchlight procession of 15,000 people set out along the streets, walking beneath colourful Chinese lanterns. Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all. Every speech across the world emphasized that Humboldt had seen an ‘inner correlation’ between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was ‘one of those wonders of the world’. His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was ‘in some sort bound up with the universe itself’. In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt and many other cities. The greatest German celebrations were in Berlin, Humboldt’s hometown, where despite torrential rain 80,000 people assembled. The authorities had ordered offices and all government agencies to close for the day. As the rain poured down and gusts chilled the air, the speeches and singing nonetheless continued for hours.

a year when he lost his job in Chicago and I started noticing a change in him. Gone was his ever present smile when we were together; more often than not he would be withdrawn and seemed as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Then, he got a job offer from his Uncle in Dalton, Ohio. He needed a new mechanic and wanted to help Beau out. Beau begged me to go with him; said he loved me and couldn’t bear to live without me. My parents and my best

The funeral home might be McInerney’s, which has matchbooks that bear a poem beginning, “Bring out the lace curtains and call McInerney, I’m nearing the end of life’s pleasant journey.

Thanks also to the Chicago Bears, the Chicago White Sox, the Washington Capitals, the Tulane Green Wave, and, above all, Everton Football Club, for providing me with sporting narratives that accompany my existence like a joyous bass line. For all of them, glory is a precious, rare emotion. I appreciate that as a reflection of life itself. Never take a second for granted. Make memories while you still can.