Huge Clearance Sale At Chicago’s Oldest Comic Book Store

“The oldest comic book store in Chicago, Variety Comics, is closing after 41 years; their last day open will be on October 31st,” Bleeding Cool reports.
“It opened in the summer of 1974, in Chicago’s rundown Lincoln Square neighborhood. In 1975, it was bought by Rich Vitone, who ran it until illness stopped him in 2009. After he died in 2011, the store was taken over by Vin Nguyen and Victor Olivarez.
“And forty years worth of stock is on sale from now, throughout October, comics, statues, toys, supplies, books and magazines.”

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Posted on September 21, 2015

By Alister Doyle and Stine Jacobsen/Reuters

The effect of giving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to U.S. President Barack Obama fell short of the nominating committee’s hopes, and several awards in the past 25 years were even more questionable, the committee’s former secretary says in a new book.
Geir Lundestad, lifting a veil on the secretive five-member panel, also reveals that former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, late Czech president Vaclav Havel and several rock stars were among those who were considered for the award but never won.
Lundestad writes in Secretary of Peace that the prize to Obama was the most controversial during his time as director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute from 1990-2015. He attended committee meetings but had no vote.

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Posted on September 18, 2015

By Julia Angwin/ProPublica

Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.
But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts – a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous internet surfing – to run up against opposition from law enforcement.
In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.
Soon after, state authorities received an e-mail about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

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Posted on September 10, 2015

By Arianna Skibell/The Hechinger Report

What happened with the $100 million that Newark schools got from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? Not much. A new book delves into how the project went wrong.
For the last 50 years, a combination of poverty and commonplace corruption has plagued Newark’s public school system. In 2010 fewer than 40 percent of students in third- through eighth-grade were performing at grade level. And most students did not graduate from high school.
That year, when journalist Dale Russakoff learned that Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire Facebook founder, wanted to give $100 million to turn around the failing school system in Newark, she was amazed, “almost electrified,” she said. Hearing then-Mayor Cory Booker, Governor Chris Christie and Zuckerberg talk about it on The Oprah Winfrey Show, she thought they sounded like they knew exactly what they were doing. She soon learned they did not.

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Posted on September 9, 2015

By The Poetry Foundation w/The Beachwood Value Added Affairs Desk

The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are pleased to announce the five recipients of the 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships: Nate Marshall, Erika L. Sanchez, Danniel Schoonebeek, Safiya Sinclair, and Jamila Woods.
Among the largest awards offered to young poets in the United States, the $25,800 prize is intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry and is open to all US poets between 21 and 31 years of age.

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Posted on September 3, 2015

. . . Is The Curse Of Hollywood

“I saw more people die in high school than in the rest of my life,” Downers Grove South graduate Michael Hornburg tells the Daily Herald.

“One kid died in a car crash,” he said. “One kid drowned in a quarry. The girl who sat next to me in typing class, she was kidnapped outside of an arcade and was found murdered inside a garbage bag in Lisle. So there was a lot of murder and mayhem and people getting killed on a scale I never experienced again.”

A movie based on his book The Curse of Downers Grove is out Tuesday on Blu-ray, DVD and video on demand.

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Posted on September 1, 2015

Plus: The Wright Brothers In Chicago

“A Northwestern University professor has resigned her position at the Feinberg School of Medicine after, she said, her complaints of academic censorship were ignored,” the Tribune reports.
Alice Dreger, who worked part time as a clinical medical humanities and bioethics professor, initially complained in 2014 that the school dean removed a risque article from a website for the bioethics journal Atrium because of fear it would harm the school’s image.
“The university eventually allowed the essay, called ‘Head Nurses,’ to go back onto the website in May after Dreger said she threatened to take her complaints about school censorship public. But she objected to a newly established ‘oversight committee’ required to review and approve articles before they appear.”

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Posted on August 27, 2015

Plus: The Truth About The Siege Of Vicksburg

Emanuel Announces Citywide STEM Strategy To Triple The Number Of Students With STEM Credentials By 2018.
“Pronouncements like the following have become common currency: ‘The United States is falling behind in a global race for talent that will determine the country’s future prosperity, power, and security.’ In Falling Behind?, Michael Teitelbaum argues that alarms like this one, which he quotes, are not only overblown but are often sounded by people who do not disclose their motives,” Andrew Hacker writes for the New York Review of Books.
“Teitelbaum vehemently denies that we are lagging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, now commonly abbreviated as STEM. Still, he writes that there are facts to be faced:

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Posted on August 20, 2015

Plus: Recovering Attorney Savages Law

“The Chicago Teachers Union is pissed at a Tucson writer – who goes by the pseudonym Gabby Matthews – over a political erotica novel he wrote about a teachers strike that shut down part of Chicago’s public school system for about a week back in 2012,” the Tucson Weekly reports.
“The union has told the author they do not want to be associated with this ‘spanking novel,’ titled The Teacher’s Strike, citing alleged trademark violations, according to the author.
“CTU’s communications director, Stephanie Gadlin, says a fictional Teachers Union logo on a shirt worn by the teacher’s character on the cover should be removed from both print and online copies, because it is way too similar to the union’s actual logo.
“The union also demands that any copies of the book already printed be recalled, a letter from the union’s attorney says.”

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Posted on August 13, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

“In the late 1960s and early ’70s, if you wanted a book by Iceberg Slim, the best-selling black writer in America, you didn’t go to a bookstore. You went to a black-owned barbershop or liquor store or gas station. Maybe you found a copy on a corner table down the block, or being passed around in prison,” Dwight Garner writes for the New York Times.
“The first and finest of his books was a memoir, Pimp: The Story of My Life, published in 1967. This was street literature, marketed as pulp. The New York Times didn’t merely not review Pimp, Justin Gifford notes in Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim. Given the title, this newspaper wouldn’t even print an ad for it.
“Pimp related stories from Iceberg Slim’s 25 years on the streets of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit and other cities. It was dark. The author learned to mistreat women with a chilly elan. It was dirty, so filled with raw language and vividly described sex acts that, nearly 50 years later, the book still makes your eyeballs leap out of your skull, as if you were at the bottom of a bungee jump.”

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Posted on August 7, 2015