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By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

INDIANAPOLIS — The end of Eras is upon us.

This won’t be the last time you hear that over the next few weeks. Taylor Swift played the final United States show on her ultra-mega-blockbuster Eras tour last weekend in Indiana. After a year and a half of concerts and almost 150 dates (including three sold-out nights at Soldier Field in Chicago), the tour concludes in Vancouver on Dec. 8.

And though you’ve likely had a lifetime fill of Taylor Swift since Eras began in 2023 — or you can never get enough and are already rallying fellow Swifties to avenge my sincere micro-plea of exhaustion — we need to consider why the Eras Tour will be remembered as a cultural milestone for decades to come, a spiritual cousin to Woodstock, a traveling micro-economy and a coming-out cotillion for the future, which, most certainly, is female.

We need to see why its influence will go on for years.

I attended the second night in Indianapolis, and like every previous night on the tour, it began with a statement: A clock appeared on a massive screen, counting down to the start of the concert, counting back from exactly 2 minutes and 31 seconds. Why so exact? Because that’s the length of the song that Swift has taken the stage to at every show on the Eras Tour: Lesley Gore’s furious, gauntlet-throwing “You Don’t Own Me.”

And don’t tell me what to do
Don’t tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don’t put me on display, ‘cause 
You don’t own me

Now picture 69,000 people, nearly all women, some elderly, some in elementary school, many in their teens and 20s, bedazzled, screaming that, thrusting fists, singing with alone-in-the-shower energy, not because they are collectively into AM pop radio hits of 1963, but because they felt it. And since little about the Eras tour is spontaneous, they expected it. Indeed, this is the first and most important lesson to pull from the Eras Tour:

1. Fans Are the Show Now.

A woman in her mid-20s sat in front of me wearing a ballet tutu so stiff and wide it flowed gloriously across nearby seats and even out into the aisle. It took up space. When Lesley Gore’s voice landed, the woman leaped from her chair and belted the lyrics skyward, howling at the soaring roof of Lucas Oil Stadium, usually home to NFL football. This woman was surprising and funny, angry and creative and thoughtful. She was like performance art herself, employing the canvas of the Eras Tour as both a catalyst and a sandbox. And again, she was just one out of 69,000 fans. After Swift played “Champagne Problems” alone at a piano, midway through the show, Swift stood for an ovation that went on 2 minutes and 30 seconds. It was endless, and from the practiced look of surprise and humility on Swift’s face during the ovation, expected. But never for a moment did I think that ovation was about Swift.

It was about a fandom reveling in its own stamina and voice, and Swift graciously playing the sounding board. Consider that ballet costume — a nod to an outfit Swift wore in the “Shake It Off” video. Here was a concert closely resembling a fan convention. Or a cosplay showcase. I saw someone dressed like Jake Gyllenhaal (a Swift ex), and someone dressed as the scarf Swift was rumored to have left at his apartment when they broke up. I saw women dressed as Christmas trees, because Swift grew up on a Christmas tree farm. I saw a man playing a banana, because there is a video of Swift having trouble with a banana after undergoing Lasik surgery. It was shot by her mother, who finds her daughter in bed trying to eat a banana, looking very spaced out.

“I’m not asleep,” Swift tells her mom, “my mind is alive.”

I also saw someone in a shirt that read: “I’m not asleep. My mind is alive.”

If you didn’t get those references … well, then what were you doing there?

Grateful Dead fans, Bruce Springsteen fans: You probably see similarities. Swifties without tickets roamed Indianapolis streets before the shows, holding a finger in the wind. That’s classic Deadhead for “I need one ticket.” Also known in Dead-ese as “a miracle.” Music may be the organizing force, but since we more or less know what we’ll hear, the music is merely a way into a coded universe constructed partly by that audience. Swift herself spends a huge part of the show staring directly into cameras, as if she’s staring at you alone. That’s when she isn’t staring into the crowd, smiling and winking — playing, at least, an answer to decades of self-congratulatory concert gods.

2. The Age of the Impersonal Pop Star is Over.

The irony of the Eras Tour is that even as it made Swift a global force, she comes off human in the show, not a caricature or even, despite all the theater involved, a posturing idol. In fact, whether you believe her or not, a chunk of her show features Swift singing that not everything is about her. I write that despite that, a few blocks from Lucas Oil Stadium, a Marriott installed a massive Taylor Swift on its facade, a mural rising nearly as high as the 34-story hotel itself. You could see this Tay-Zilla from clear across downtown. That’s not her doing. But even when Robert Plant was whole-heartedly drunk on his own glow, playing a golden god on Led Zeppelin tours, he wouldn’t have dreamed of such lionizing. Then again, no one sought his presidential nod — or accused him of interfering in politics.

He was also never accused of single-handedly inflating ticket prices, destroying the environment by using private jets, being a capitalist pig in service to an elitist power structure, dating racists or failing to call for a cease fire in the Middle East. Fairly or not, Swift has heard of all of that and way more — why can’t she show dogs some love, too?

My point is, if even Taylor Swift can fake a real smile night after night — as well as laugh a laugh that sounds like a genuine laugh — what excuse do other pop stars have anymore? Think about that next summer when Oasis holds you emotionally at arm’s length. A woman sitting behind me at the show had Neil Young lyrics scrawled on her arm in marker. I asked her why. She said Taylor used to do this before concerts, so this fan does this a lot, whenever she feels good, sad, anything, she does it for herself — to remind her to feel something.

3. The Only Universal Culture Left is Female.

There was a moment in the Eras Tour reserved for variety, a two-song bit where the show leaves its well-oiled track and alters nightly. Anything can happen, but typically Swift plays a medley on guitar followed by a medley on piano. More surprising, the night I attended, was the red, white and blue dress Swift wore during those songs, the colors less flag-like than melting together. It came, of course, days before the election. She paired that with a song titled “The Prophesy.” The refrain: “Who do I have to speak to /  About if they can redo the prophecy?” It’s not a political song but briefly became one.

It reminded me of the Olympics, how politics are present but often unspoken. The Eras Tour itself was like the Olympics, from the stage surface itself doubling as a screen to parades of dancers who enter the stadium with billowing sails above their heads. Like the Olympics, the Eras Tour was also that rare 21st century culture most Americans are aware of and sometimes form opinions about, even if they never bothered to watch. It’s like mainstream culture before streaming, iPods, the internet and TikTok; it’s of a piece with “M*A*S*H*” and” “Star Wars” and Michael Jackson. It’s closest in cheery spirit to Paul McCartney (a Taylor BFF), though a reminder pop music right now is named Olivia and Sabrina and Lana and Charli, decidedly female, crafted by females for females.

Swift thanked fans for all the “ceremonial traditions” created during the tour. She could have meant the Deadhead-esque caravans. (I met fans from Maine, Colorado, New York, but few from Indiana.) She could have meant how many women took off shoes and danced in bare feet. (Three-plus hour shows will do that.) But probably she meant the bracelets, beaded words spelling songs and albums, circulating throughout the Taylor-verse, traded or often gifted, among fans. I saw very few Indianapolis police officers or stone-faced security dudes without an arm covered in bracelets, like notes of solidarity. I passed a restaurant table covered in bracelets, all lined up orderly in rows.

“Wow,” a passerby said, “you made a lot.”

“I went nutso,” the bracelet maker replied.

Music writer Rob Sheffield has a charming, insightful new book “Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music” that includes a telling story about Swift as a kid, pre-social media, smitten with LeAnn Rimes. She presses close to Rimes after a show: “LeAnn, did you get my letter?” And Rimes says: “I sure did, Taylor.”

“For Taylor,” Sheffield writes, “that was the primal scene of instruction.” Rimes, he explains (cheekily), “warped this child into being the best to ever do what LeAnn did.”

Meaning, Rimes took a young girl seriously as a person, and Swift made it a culture.

4. Concerts Need to Tell Stories Now.

If there’s a reason why what happened onstage during the Eras Tour came across less phony than it probably sounded in descriptions, that’s because the production takes the concept of theater seriously, too. Beyonce does it. Bowie did it. Springsteen spun long intimate stories of family that went on the length of songs. Swift works this muscle, too.

Theatrical doesn’t have to mean fake, of course. It was a spectacle but there were a lot of homes and rooms on that stage — a rustic cabin in one segment, an office building during another. You could feel your attention being pushed in, then out — zooming for closeup, circling the grounds. Sometimes you were reminded of high school, other times gender inequality. There were knowing cliches and painful realizations and recognitions of privilege. But the plot never changed: The Eras Tour, bottomline, was the story of how a girl grows into a woman, and all the heartache and delight that comes with that time.

It also paradoxically makes Swift a character in her own story, an avatar for herself. Some of the conversations I heard on the way out of the show included: Does Taylor Swift cry like I cry? Does Taylor Swift scream in the car?

The Eras Tour was a lot of world building for a pop show, but then: She’s almost 35, the same age Springsteen was when he told stories on the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour about parental feuding and the struggles of returning Vietnam vets. He asked stadiums to question Ronald Reagan and blind faith, and Swift screams about blind faith and a boyfriend who talks about his childhood and carries a “(Bleep) the Patriarchy” keychain. That many of her young fans even know the word “patriarchy,” that’s a sign of progress.

5. The Past is Never Past.

Eras end messily, trailing slime like a snail.

That was the clever conceit of the tour: Each show was divided into acts, or eras, representing moments in life. When I first heard this, it sounded self-congratulatory, grandiose. Until I recognized The Beatles lasted a decade, and Swift is 17 years into an ongoing career. Her evolution hasn’t been as dizzying as veering from “Love Me Do” to “Tomorrow Never Knows,” but she’s still young, savvy enough say something about life that also nods to the future of live music: We are the eras we embody yet we still carry every era we have been, all the time. We are more like a medley than a song.

Performers have always banked on a mix of new and old songs but the Eras Tour suggests the way streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music present a body of work as a flat constant, playing everything all at once, shuffling evolution. Reinvention is real but past selves remain, it says. Regret and pride live beside pettiness and silliness. At one point in the show, Swift seems to struggle against a series of past Taylors trying to free themselves from glass cages. Corny, but telling: The kind of extended music career that allows enough patience to change shape and sound looks increasingly rare.

Who is still around, making relevant music, with enough material, ambitious enough for something like this, a nostalgic concert that points to the future? The Eras Tour became its own weather system, its own touring chamber of commerce, its own bit of folklore. It’s maybe never to be repeated. It just contained too much. It became too big. Taylor Swift played, no joke, 47 songs at the show I saw, in part or whole. At least one was 10 minutes long. By the end I was well into my exhaustion era. But leaving the stadium, I heard delight, a teenager singing to herself. She wasn’t singing one of those 47 songs. She was singing Lesley Gore:

I’m young and I love to be young.
And I’m free and I love to be free.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on Nov. 7, 2024.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

Tucked away in the United Center during the Democratic National Convention, on the first and third levels of the concourse, hidden behind thin curtains and shielded from interlopers by security guards and guest lists, were two sizable lounge areas that welcomed the future. And only the future, please. You’ve probably seen the stats: The DNC had 50,000 credentialed participants, including 15,000 credentialed media. But behind those curtains were a subset of credentialed guests named Creators. There were only 200 of them. At the ends of their lanyards hung passes that read: “Creator.”

Some had only found their voice in politics in the past couple of years or so. Some had only graduated from high school in the past couple of years or so. Most didn’t see themselves as journalists per se, yet they do offer information. So they’re … Creators, though you know them better as “social-media influencers,” the newest class of media.

The DNC will leave Chicago soon.

But the influence from these influencers — that will go on.

For the first time, the DNC invited influencers to be credentialed alongside those from traditional media, such as newspapers, TV and other species of Jurassic-era influence. It’s part of Democrat efforts to reach young voters where they are — in front of TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Also, it’s a lot easier to spread a consistent message when your messengers are unabashedly supportive. Cayana Mackey-Nance, director of digital strategy for the DNC, wrote in a statement: “Bringing creators to our convention will multiply our reach and ensure that everyone can witness democracy in action.” Or as one creator told CNN succinctly: “(Voters) trust us more than mainstream media.”

Probably.

But what exactly does this look like?

It looks like, on the second night of the DNC, Chris Mowrey, 22, of Atlanta, wearing an ice-blue suit and a black button-down shirt open at the collar, mingling in the Creator Lounge with peers, many of whom, to different stylish degrees, know they belong here. Most were Gen Z or millennials. Scrawled across one of the walls of the lounge was a kind of mission statement, a reminder of their purpose here: “Creators for Kamala.” Mowrey pointed around the room to several internet stars, some finally meeting each other IRL, and some catching up, and some fanboy and fangirling over favorite follows.

That woman there — one million followers.

That guy there — 10 million followers.

Collectively, the audience for the Creators in this lounge alone outstripped most legacy media groups. Mowrey himself has a comparatively meager 500,000 followers across social media platforms and only discovered his political voice in 2022. He explained:

“Really, the way this started was one day, randomly, I put down my phone in my car and started screaming passionately about politics. Friends have always known me as a raging liberal so I would post private stories on Instagram just for friends. One day I’m bored, I decided I going to post on TikTok and it kind of went viral. In 2022, during the midterms in Georgia, one of those first videos was me ranting about the Republican that Trump endorsed: Herschel Walker, a terrible guy, a mess. I was just ranting how (expletive) he was. Every day I posted something different, whatever was on my mind. But my main passion has really been just hating Donald Trump. I hate him so much.

“My main focus now is making sure Kamala Harris gets elected, and (the DNC) are very receptive to what we need, giving us access, interviews — just treating us like media.”

Nearby, at the Creator Lounge’s (open) bar, Olivia Julianna waited for her drink. She wore a purple suit, and around her neck hung another symbol of her status, even among fellow Creators, a badge reading: “Suite Level Access.” She’s 21, has more than one million social media followers, and as she once told TeenVogue, she’s a “plus-size queer Latina from rural Southeast Texas enrolled in community college classes.” She was also one of five Creators picked to give a speech on the floor. Many politicians and activists spend entire careers trying to secure that kind of A-list platform.

Asked if she thought of herself as a kind of journalist, she laughed and said, “I think of myself as a kind of Democratic Party operative,” then she added, “No, the ability to see the process here, and to comment on it as you watch the process? That means I get to open the process up to people who have no idea about it. Creators have very special connections that can make something like this so personal to people who follow them.”

Hence, being treated remarkably well.

Creators had these two lounges inside the United Center that offered open bars, free shaved prime rib sandwiches, free soft pretzels, free cookies, and lots of room to stretch. They had a dedicated perch on the convention floor for making fresh content. They had a snazzy “blue carpet” area set against a large curved video screen to shoot interviews. They got exclusive parties, but mainly: They got the kind of access to the United Center that many working journalists did not.

Sitting in a leather chair, reading his phone, was Jamel Franklin, a Chicago native relocated to Los Angeles. He wore a tangerine cap with “God Bless the South Side” in white lettering across the front. The day before, he attended a Creator yacht party on Lake Michigan and chatted with Gwen Walz, first lady of Minnesota, and Meena Harris, vice presidential niece. He had a packed schedule. He was headed to caucus meetings. His audience, he said, is largely young, Black and educated, and his content is a mix of politics, pop culture and wellness.

“Jaime Harrison (chair of the Democratic Party) came to talk to some of us the other day, and he said they’re investing in Creators, and because of that, some of the older press might seem a little … annoyed. But the way he put it, they weren’t doing more for Creators, they’re just giving us our own space, too.”

No, no, he was told, they were definitely doing more.

Indeed, tell a traditional journalist here scrounging for a phone cord or even an open electric socket for their laptop about the free prime rib and the arena access and the yacht parties, and they look stricken, unbelieving, but then understanding, resigned. At first, it could be somewhat hard to tell Creators from journalists here — many of both had a tendency to rush through crowds carrying folded tripods topped with cellphones.

But there’s only one Knowa De Baraso of Georgia. He’s 12 and possesses the kind of confidence most adults don’t show in their dreams. He has 30,000 followers on Twitter alone; he came to Chicago with his parents, a security detail and press agents. He said that the first thing that he does when he wakes up is Google the name “Kamala Harris.”

Earlier in the day, he said, he stopped Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy (and Trump supporter), in the United Center. For his camera, De Baraso got into it with Lindell about 2020 Georgia election misinformation. “He disrespected me,” De Baraso said. “That’s OK. He didn’t have his facts and it showed. On Monday, I interviewed Charlie Kirk and I exposed him, too.” Specifically, De Baraso got the conservative activist to admit on camera he thought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake.” De Baraso has also met with Harris and President Joe Biden, both of whom, he notes, “remembered my name.”

Talk to enough Creators, though, and you realize it’s not the size of their audiences that landed them credentials, but rather the demographics of those audiences. AustinShow, an online personality with around four million followers who posts about show business, said: “People by now understand I am openly queer and openly passionate about LBGTQ rights, typically aligned with the Democratic Party,” and so the night before he was invited to a Creators-only warehouse party named “Hotties For Harris.” Sam Schwartz, a Florida influencer whose accounts focus on gun control, said, “I like to post the news when a Democrat delivers on something because a lot of young people believe Democrats don’t do anything.”

They’re really bad at promotion, he said.

In the Creator Lounge on the third level of the United Center, Abbie McAdams, 21, of Colorado, whose 8,000-ish social media followers made her one of the smaller Creators at the DNC, prepared her next posting at a long tall bar table across from the free pretzels. She is a self-described “menstrual equity advocate, focused on reproductive freedom and normalizing period experience — the things we’re told not to talk about in public.” She said that her TikTok following has grown three-fold during the DNC alone.

“Really, I’m not used to this treatment,” she said. “But I also don’t need to be wined and dined to go to something like this. I have been passionate about electoral politics, so all this is bonus. There’s like a Creator here for every cause and industry. I met the creators of a lesbian podcast. I met a Creator who just runs a meme account. It makes so much sense. Someone (for the DNC) was very intentional with all this, making sure that Creators could create while they were here. As far as I have seen, it also working.”

Between all the parties and meet-and-greets.

Julianna said she had been running around so much during the convention, she hadn’t really had time to post. Just a few selfies of her posing with governors and other elected officials. “The way I see it, you bank a ton of content while you are here, then later you release it. Everyone is posting from the DNC right now, but if I wait with material, in a few weeks, leading up to November 5, it’s all new again. You keep the momentum going.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was published originally in the Chicago Tribune on Aug. 22, 2024.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

The Legend of the Bike Whisperer of Beverly began four years ago, during quarantine.

A mother was trying to teach her child to ride a bike, but the lessons were not sticking. Frustrated, she posted a note to a Facebook group for moms of the South Side of Chicago: Did anyone have advice on how to teach her kid to ride a bike? Or know anybody who could?

Heidi Burrel saw the message and wrote back immediately: Louie, her husband, could do it. He taught 12th grade physical education at a Gage Park high school, he coached girls’ volleyball and boys’ basketball, and he had earned a reputation for possessing remarkable amounts of patience with young people attempting new skills.

That patience had been a surprise to even Louie Burrel.

When he taught his son, Brayden, to ride a bike, he let him crash a few times. He was more of a “boy dad” back then, he explained. He wanted his son to fall and pick himself up and all that.

“I wanted him to learn the hard way, which is not always the best way,” Burrel said. When bicycling became one of the few outlets for his kids in the early months of the pandemic, his younger daughter, Nia, was still using training wheels. Family rides were torturous. So Burrel took Nia to an empty lot, but this time, Burrel was gentle; in fact, he had promised Nia that no matter what, rule No. 1, Daddy would never let her fall. And 15 minutes later, Nia was riding a bike. She never crashed once.

Burrel told his wife, and his wife told thousands of moms online.

Within a week, Burrel had students for informal lessons, then more students. One mom posted a video showing how much Burrel could do with only a clear day and 30 minutes. He was fast becoming the Bike Whisperer, probably the only parent in Chicago who could teach a kid to pedal a bike without having a stroke or swearing like a sailor.

Four years later, he’s taught more than 400 Chicago children how to ride a bike.

Earlier this month, one of them was Alex White, a 6-year-old from Beverly. She waited shyly behind the wheel of her Frozen bike, silver streamers dangling off the handlebars. Her father, Kevin, wearing dark sunglasses, admitted to me, deadpan: “Look, we tried to do this ourselves. My wife and I. We tried. I feel like I am testing my manhood not teaching her myself! But everyone in her grade rides, and so I am going to try anything.”

He leaned over and said to Alex: “Baby girl, are you nervous?”

She shook her head no.

He righted himself and said, “We’ve gone up and down the block, but now I’m thinking that she probably does better with someone else teaching this. My wife is against it. She said we can still teach her to ride a bike, but look, I just want to see what I get out of it.”

Burrel, still wiping the sweat off his head from the previous lesson, nodded. He’s been told something similar dozens of times, from parents across the South Side and, increasingly, the suburbs and the North Side, where the Legend of the Bike Whisperer has spread. He stepped in front of Alex’s bike and crouched down.

“I am Coach Louie,” he explained. “You are here to ride without training wheels.” Alex nodded. “Good, for your lesson, I have two rules for me, three rules for you. Your rules: No. 1, keep your hands on the handlebars. No. 2, keep your feet on the pedals. And No. 3, look forward so you can see where we are going. Now my rules: No. 1, I can’t let you crash into anything, no matter what. And No. 2, I  can not let you fall. You follow your rules and I’ll follow mine. Alex, can I get a high-five from you?”

Alex obliged.

“You broke my rule!” Burrel said in mock outrage. “Hands on the handlebars!”

They started off slow, Burrel’s right arm on Alex’s right shoulder. Her father watched and turned to me and, thinking out loud, said: “I don’t want her little brother to learn before her. It’s not the end of the world — right? Some of this stuff we hold on just needs to go.”

Burrel, in a way, is paid for his patience. He charges less than $40 for a half-hour lesson, and he earns it. When I tried teaching my daughter a couple of years ago to ride a bike, I would have paid double. Riding a bike is a skill that tends to click and stay clicked so tightly you forget there was a time when you couldn’t do it. When I asked friends and several parents who hired Burrel how they learned to ride a bike, it was striking how many could not remember. They fell, they all recalled. Then one day, they could ride. You tend to gloss over the hows and whos.

Burrel, though, sees the unformed clay. He takes kids who are scared of pedals, scared of balancing, scared of brakes, but he also gets kids so eager to start riding they take off without him. He’s always surprised how many don’t need his steadying hand within 10 minutes of the first lesson. But the names, the kids, the lessons, it blurs. There are only so many Aidens and Calebs one man can teach before everyone is an Aiden or Caleb.

Earlier in the day, Dee Atkins was watching her 7-year-old son, Noah, ride slowly beside Burrel, who was sweating buckets, jogging alongside the small bike, softly encouraging, making loop after loop in an empty bank parking lot on a warm Sunday.

“I reached out to Mr. Louie — my son calls him Mr. Louie — over the winter to get ready for spring, because Louie is a hot commodity. I wanted a jump on everyone before he booked up. This is Noah’s third lesson. My husband and I tried. We took a weekend. We figured we could do it in a weekend! But between the two of us, we struggled to give Noah the confidence to do it himself. I think, as parents, we might have been too close, you know? I had heard the Bike Whisperer was kind in spirit, and he taught kids to ride very quickly. He had the touch. Right now, Noah is working on controlling the bike and brakes, but the confidence Mr. Louie has boosted in him! My husband is a firefighter. He’s all about getting down and just doing the job, because that was his childhood experience. Baptism by fire. Funny thing, because he’s our child, we didn’t want that for him. We bought him shin guards, all kinds of guards, and we could not make this happen. So, Noah was flustered, we were flustered. But at the previous session, when Noah’s bike started to fall, Louie caught him and rolled onto his back. And that simple show of kindness …”

Noah stopped at her feet.

“Doing great, bud!” Dee smiled.

Burrel tugged a hand towel out of his pocket and swiped at his neck and sides of his face, but still sweat came. He took a swig of water. “OK, Noah,” he panted, “one more around?” They take off with Burrel’s right hand pressing against Noah’s right shoulder. The purple rims of Noah’s bike spun faster, faster. “Strong,” Burrel said quietly, “strong.”

A light breeze flapped the red and yellow awning of Joey’s Red Hots at the other end of the parking lot, but the sky was harsh and cloudless. Burrel acclimates well to the heat, he insisted. He keeps microfiber T-shirts in his car. He teaches a few times a week after school lets out for summer, then when school returns and he goes back to his day job, he does it on weekends. The demand has been so strong he’s been training a second Bike Whisperer, a younger one.

Burrel grew up around Morgan Park, and is in his mid-40s now, but looks a decade younger. He moves well for a guy who was briefly hospitalized in February because of tearing of abdominal muscles. He said with a laugh: “You reach a certain age and there are precautions you do need to take — for instance, stretching.”

When Noah’s lesson ended — he would need a fourth lesson to improve his braking.

Seven-year-old Yusuf Zvizdic of Oak Lawn, a student from earlier, still practicing loops around the parking lot, wearing a helmet topped with a faux Mohawk, zoomed past Burrel. His mom, Samra, said that she wants one more lesson for Yusuf. “He’s almost perfect but I want him perfect,” she said. “Yusuf doesn’t think he needs it, my husband doesn’t think he needs it, but I kind of just want him to be in that safe zone, you know?”

Burrel agreed and then walks across the lot to meet his next student, a 7-year-old from Bucktown diagnosed with ADHD who has issues with developmental coordination. He’s on his fifth lesson, but his mother, like the others, said he does better “with a third party.”

Burrel said, from his own experience, “parents seem more willing now to outsource the kind of things that we think parents should traditionally accomplish. I see both parents sharing duties, I see both working, and as much as they want to do this, time is now the biggest factor. But I also hear from parents who can’t run alongside a bike. Parents who have back issues. Maybe they don’t have a great relationship with the child. They would rather pay someone to do in 30 minutes what might take them three hours to fail at.” He said none of his students have crashed yet. He claims a 100% satisfaction rate.

His secret is no secret at all, he said.

He tries not to touch the bike. (“I want them to feel like they are in control the whole time.”) He likes to position himself to the left of the bike and touch a student’s right shoulder as they pedal, building a sense of security, a bubble around the student.

The summer tradition of riding a bike as soon as school lets out has taken hits in recent years: A 2019 study by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association said the number of American children who rode bikes at least 25 times a year fell by 1 million from 2014 to 2018. Other studies suggest those statistics have climbed upward since the pandemic. But realities remain: Bikes are costly, social media and video games have an outsize role in kid’s lives, and parents simply don’t let children roam like they once did.

As Burrel sees it, without the motivation to ride, learning to ride becomes less urgent.

“I was the youngest of three. I was trying to keep up. There was a lot of crashing into park benches and lampposts, but also my big brother saying, ‘OK, get up, we’ll clean off that scratch at home.’ My parents helped, but the real motivation was to just keep up.”

After a couple of preliminary rides around the parking lot, Alex Winter stuttered to a stop before her father. “She has a good foundation, I can tell,” Burrel said. “We’re two minutes in and I can tell it’s going to be a good lesson, Dad.” Kevin White looked relieved.

Alex pushed off and Burrel jogged beside her.

But as she made the last curve, her handlebars locked up and she pulled hard to the left and started to fall and threw a leg sideways, to the ground, but Burrel was there, righting her again.

“No problem,” he whispered. “Happens. Happens. You’re getting it. Almost there.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on June 21, 2024.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

One strategy for summer reading — and yes, there are strategies — is to begin a project.

Dabble in short punchy books, but devote the season to an epic. You get three months.

I read “The Lord of the Rings” this way, one installment a summer, for years. Now I’m picking through Robert Caro’s (still unfinished) Lyndon Johnson biography this way. Another strategy: Give yourself a quasi-degree in something very specific. Read the complete short stories of the late Alice Munro. The crime novels of Stephen King. Or underrated Penguin Classics: This summer offers a couple of fresh contenders — Harry Crews’ “The Knockout Artist” (about a boxer with a talent for knocking himself out), and “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,”unclassifiable writing about being gay under a dictatorship, by Chilean legend Pedro Lemebel.

You’ll clip right along.

Same goes for an excellent new edition of a monster: The Folio Society’s wonderful “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” Susanna Clarke’s contemporary classic about magicians in 19th century England. As a single adventure, it was an 800-plus page cinderblock in 2004. Folio divides all of that into a much brisker trilogy, as it should have been, ideal for devouring in adult-size chunks that you can pass along to a precocious child or spouse, while continuing yourself.

As for the rest of you who just want a new mystery or history for the backyard, this summer is overstocked, even more so than the coming fall season. Yes, I read all of these; now get started.

No-guilt beach reads: One of the great American mystery series continues with “Farewell, Amethystine,” Walter Mosley’s 16th novel about Los Angeles detective Easy Rawlins. This one finds him in 1970, tracking an ex-husband, navigating gender upheaval. “The Sicilian Inheritance,” by airport favorite Jo Piazza, nails a clever twist on a contemporary cliche: Newly single American woman moves to Italy, discovers herself. The twist — she’s pulled into ugly family business — plays like a Palermo breeze.

You got the top pulled down and radio on, baby: “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell” (June 11) is the best kind of summer bio. It’s too critical and wandering to read like hero worship. NPR’s Ann Powers, among the smartest of music critics, captures the restlessness of a Mitchell album, walking through her catalog with eyes and ears open for both unease and transcendence. “Hip-Hop is History” (June 11) nails a similar feeling: It’s less like a timeline than a long hang with the Roots’ Questlove, who digs through the classics, offering reminiscence and discernment.

Family time: ‘Tis the season for other people’s problems. “Same as It Ever Was” (June 18), by Oak Park native Claire Lombardo (“The Most Fun We Ever Had”), and “Long Island Compromise” (July 9) by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”), check a lot of boxes — relatable but never dull, reliably bonkers family, funny. But they’re also breezy satires of privilege without sacrificing gravitas. Lombardo hems with modesty to the way minor breaks in routine spiral into epic crisis. Brodesser-Akner, who twists her knife with more relish, begins with actual crisis (a mysterious kidnapping and release), then leaps to the surprising ways it stamps fear into each member of the wealthy family. For austerity: “This Strange Eventful History,” Claire Messud’s somewhat autobiographical saga about several generations of a French family, severed from each other during World War II, and the way time and distance become inevitable.

Tales of future past: “What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean” (July 16), by Helen Scales, a marine biologist who doesn’t write like one. Here is a clear-eyed survey of what ails ocean life, shaped by Scales’s own experience and a bracing look at what’s being done. For something completely different: “The Book of Elsewhere” (July 23) is not quite science fiction, or fantasy, but as hard to pin down as you might expect a book authored by British surrealist China Miéville and Keanu Reeves. It’s also fun, a novel-length continuation of Reeves’s hot comic book, “BRZRKR,” a kind of Conan the Barbarian tale with black helicopters.

Rebel yells: “Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History” (Aug. 13) begins with what you (might) know: In 1831, an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner led an uprising that was inevitably quashed, yet promised more to come. The late historian Anthony E. Kaye, with Gregory P. Downs, retells this in a fascinating new way, centering Turner’s conviction that he was a vessel of God. “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People” (June 18), by National Book Award-winner Tiya Miles, takes a similar approach to a more familiar American hero: It focuses on Tubman as a spiritual leader and self-taught ecologist. It’s the lyrical biography we’ll need before Tubman — already more myth than person — begins gracing the $20 bill, starting in 2030.

Cruel summer: Personally, it’s not summer unless I stretch out with a new Stephen King, and if that sounds familiar: “You Like It Darker,” his latest collection of stories, is among his smartest, yet tipping toward crime tales and the slightly paranormal. The centerpiece, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” is a stealth, 140-page mystery novel tucked beside a “Cujo” postscript and the gorgeous “Answer Man,” a late-career classic. For best results: Follow with Harlan Ellison’s “Greatest Hits,” a new compilation of vintage tales that shaped sci-fi and horror, inspiring King and Neil Gaiman (who writes the forward). Sentient AI, dystopias, alien copulation, evil twins …

Two absorbing sports books that aren’t actually about sports: Joseph O’Neill’s “Godwin” — like his celebrated 2008 novel “Netherland” — defies quick description. It reads like a fable, opening with the corporate chill of a Pittsburgh office then travels to suburbs of London and soccer fields of Africa. It follows the story of a soccer agent who talks his estranged brother into finding a soccer phenom. “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball,” by former Chicago journalist Keith O’Brien, would make a nice double-header: It’s not biography but taxonomy, a pungent epic about hubris and, in the figure of the disgraced Cincinnati Red, moral vacancy.

It’s not the heat; it’s the brimstone: “Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil”(June 18), by Chicago-based Ananda Lima has an eye-catching premise — you’re reading a collection of stories by the author following a one-night stand with Satan — so clever, it’s a relief to report that’s merely the hook for a substantive first book of major confidence, and belly laughs. Speak of the devil: Randall Sullivan’s “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared” and Ed Simon’s “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain” (July 9) are ideal histories for the warmest weeks, cultural spelunkings into our centuries-old need to portray unencumbered immorality, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to the ‘80s Satanic Panic.

One lit life: “Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers” is part author bio, part literary memoir, told by Rebecca McCarthy, a former student of Maclean who kept a lifelong friendship with the Hyde Park legend, a beloved professor at University of Chicago who — famously, very late in life — wrote “A River Runs Through It.”

Just a dream and the wind to carry me: It’s hard to relay how exhilarating, and unsettling, being a speck on the ocean is, with no other specks in sight, horizon to horizon. “Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea,” by maritime historian Richard J. King, gathers dizzying case studies of what drives people to do this, improvising steering systems for sleeping, talking to dolphins out of lonliness. Consider the complicated hero at the heart of Hampton Sides’ excellent best-seller, “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.” Cook represented the best of global exploration. Until he represented the worst. As forward-thinking as he was with native cultures, he died on a beach in Hawaii, stoned by its people. Sides’s compulsively readable 16th-century history is about the gulf between decency and a boss’s orders.

Summer ennui: If you have read Rachel Cusk — and if you haven’t, there’s your summer reading list — you’re safe to assume her latest novel about creative life, “Parade” (June 18), starts with a darkly funny come-on (an artist paints a portrait of his wife, makes it ugly and it sells), only to end up very far afield. “Fire Exit,” the lacerating debut novel by Morgan Talty, whose story set “Night of the Living Rez” was a 2022 critical smash, delves again into the families in a Native American community, for a tale of a man haunted by descendants present and just out of reach. Speaking of haunting: “We Burn Daylight” (July 30), by the underrated novelist Bret Anthony Johnston (“Remember Me Like This”) delivers another thriller less visceral than traumatic: The story of a cult in Waco, Texas, about to be taken by law enforcement, and the drama that unfolds inside and out. (Any similarities to Branch Davidians are purely intentional.)

Rethinking summer programming: “Something authentic, buried beneath something fake.” That’s how New Yorker TV writer Emily Nussbaum perfectly explains the allure of both “The Bachelor” and “Candid Camera” in “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” (June 25). She works magic, walking on that wavering line between fandom and disgust but never scolding. “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982” (July 30), by “Caddyshack” historian Chris Nashawaty, begins with the maxim “Film critics get it wrong all the time,” then proves it. This is Gen-X catnip, a backstage rewind through a momentous movie summer that delivered us “Blade Runner,” “The Thing,” “E.T.,” “The Road Warrior” and far more.

Summertime sadness: “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space,” by Adam Higginbotham — whose remarkable “Midnight in Chernobyl” established him as the go-to narrator of tragedies — reads like a backward mystery, starting with the Space Shuttle explosion in 1986, then unwinding through institutional arrogance and the queasy assumption of “acceptable risk” that dooms even the best intentions. Eliza Griswold’s equally immersive “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power and Justice in an American Church” (Aug. 6) documents the conflicts and frayed idealism that pulled a Philadelphia church apart over 30 years, but Griswold — whose “Amity and Prosperity” won the nonfiction Pulitzer in 2019 — grounds much of the story in old-fashioned fly-on-the-wall reporting, tagging along until she’s invisible.

Summer Art Fare: At some point this summer, you may duck into the cool marble halls of a museum. “Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums,” by New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein, is a lovely wish list of American options, dreamily illustrated, full of histories of the classics (the Art Institute of Chicago), but also battleship museums, Kentucky’s Noah’s Ark, the Rothko Chapel in Texas … “The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing,” by former New York magazine editor Adam Moss, should get you through the rest of summer. Here is a brick of insight into that creative purgatory called the process, featuring notebook scribbles, sketches and chats with Sofia Coppola, Gay Talese, Suzan-Lori Parks and many more artists in far-flung fields. “Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party”(Aug. 6) could be an engrossing anecdote from those books, the story of why history museums are now occupied by creatures none of us have seen. It follows the accidental discoveries that led to piecing together the first dinosaur skeletons, and what that meant for naturalists and clergy alike.

Election-year reading that isn’t a chore: What ails us, Frank Bruni writes in “The Age of Grievance,” isn’t grievance — this is a nation, of course, founded on the stuff. But rather, “a manner of individualism often indistinguishable from narcissism,” fostering “a violent rupture of our national psyche.” It’s an illuminating rant about humility, and one that echoes throughout “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War,” by James Shapiro. Here, the history is the birth and death of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, and the question of whether a country so fractious can sustain a national theater. Each chapter, often centered on loathsome political hearings, is part rousing, part enraging.

Dipping into the deep end: One of the year’s best books is “I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays” by Nell Irvin Painter, a digressive, accessible summer course on visual aesthetics (Black Power art), Southern history, Black figures both well-known (Sojourner Truth) and obscure (Alma Thomas), but primarily, the art of writing a pointed essay. “The Art of Dying: Writings 2019-2022” collects the final 46 stories by late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, from his 2019 essay about learning he had advanced lung cancer to his final piece on German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. It’s another art course in a book (with a bonus introduction by Schjeldahl pal Steve Martin). For a decidedly more fun essay: “Any Person Is the Only Self” (June 11), by Elisa Gabbert, which collects her thoughts on Sylvia Plath, Motley Crue, “Point Break,” Proust …

I know what you read this summer: Gabino Iglesias, whose “The Devil Takes You Home” was one of the best books of 2022, summons similar darkness for “House of Bone and Rain” (Aug. 6), returning the author to his native Puerto Rico for more gangs, bad weather and traditions that slowly draw in creepy crawlies. Iglesias is where Paul Tremblay (“Cabin at the End of the World”) was a few years ago. “Horror Movie” (June 11), Tremblay’s latest, is a new jewel, the story of a cursed film, alternating between the screenplay and “the unreality of the entertainment ecosystem” that worships it. (Read before the inevitable horror movie of “Horror Movie.”)

Summer sleepers: “The Swans of Harlem” tells a vibrant, lovingly researched group biography of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, the five Black ballerinas who, at the peak of the civil rights movement, brought new urgency to a segregated art form. “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue” is another unheralded history, a fascinating excavation of the midcentury women — including two Chicagoans, Dorothy Shaver and Geraldine Stutz — whose designs and ideas reinvented American department stores and consumer fashion. In each of these books, a set of women is assembling a world they want. Bringing that history into today: In “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” Kathleen Hanna of Le Tigre and Bikini Kil writes about the grassroots Riot Grrrl movement and her fidelity to a low-fi, DIY independent music scene with bluntness, stumbling through the ‘90s, loaded with exclusionary politics and hope.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on June 5, 2024.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

Garry Wills, who just turned 90, looks unencumbered by history these days. He lives in a swanky building for seniors in Evanston, and if his walker wasn’t waiting there beside him, if he didn’t lean in to hear you, if he didn’t talk with such a deliberate pace, you might assume one of the United States greatest historian intellectuals was on extended sabbatical from Northwestern University, where he is still professor emeritus.

His hair is long in places, white and curling upwards at the bottom. He has light peppered stubble that doesn’t quite qualify as a beard. For a lunch date at least, he didn’t bring the boxy eyeglasses he wore for decades. His eyes were pale ocean blues.

But that remarkable mind is there, the pithy commentary on American history, the casual nods to political contradictions and the way American myths trap us in our own narratives, the references to ancient Greeks, the love of Saint Augustine, all still flowing out like a tap.

Only slower.

Thankfully slower, you might say: For six decades, including 30 years at Northwestern, Wills was an intimidating, supremely confident, fearless intellect, a provocative iconoclast so prolific that his 50-odd books include classics (“Inventing America,” “Nixon Agonistes”), game-changers (“The Kennedy Imprisonment”) and one Pulitzer winner (“Lincoln at Gettysburg”), as well as works on religion, theater, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, politics and religion, politics and paranoia, opera, the A-bomb, the Greeks, the Romans. To say he challenged conventional wisdom is to understate the subversion that Wills became known for: His books advanced the idea of Nixon as the sympathetic “last liberal” and Reagan as a self-mythologizer. He argued a president is not really a commander-in-chief. He argued the United States does not have a Constitution if one politician holds the unilateral authority to launch nukes. Here was a Catholic who wrote a book on why we didn’t need priests. Here was a pacifist whose father taught boxing.

Here was a conservative — “I’m still conservative by temperament” — recruited to the National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. himself, who would then be arrested for protesting Vietnam. Here was a historian summoned to the Obama White House in 2009 to give a new president some advice. The room included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, Douglas Brinkley and Wills, and when it came time for him to offer wisdom, he told the president to get the hell out of Afghanistan, quick.

He was never invited back to the White House.

As journalist Sam Tanenhaus once wrote, sooner or later “anyone who writes about America must reckon with Garry Wills.” He described the feeling of being reviewed by Wills akin to feeling “like a vagrant caught urinating in the master’s hedges.” Indeed, even that pitilessness towards authors whose hot takes don’t measure up to Wills’ scrutiny — it’s still evident in 90-year-old Wills. When I asked if he was still a pacifist, he nodded, reached into the seat of his walker and pulled out a book, on loan from a friend.

This, he waved, this book was supposedly an anti-war book! And really it’s pro-war! He shook his head and said the he appreciated the loan, but — he shook his head again.

A smiling older man, a fellow resident of his building, stopped at our lunch table.

“He’s come to wish me happy birthday,” Wills said, explained, gesturing at me.

“Oh, how old are you?” the friend asked Wills.

“The big 9-0,” Wills said.

“That was a good deal we got, when you were born. We’re all better for it.”

“Happens to all of us.”

“Being born?”

“Getting up there.”

And yet, no less willing to drop a bombshell: Wills decided recently he’s no longer Catholic. The guy who attended church weekly, said his rosary daily, completed five of 13 years of Jesuit training to become a priest (only to get cold feet during the vows), wrote “What Jesus Meant,” “What Paul Meant,” “What the Gospels Meant,” “The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis” and “Why I Am a Catholic,” left the Catholic church.

He explained:

“My hero, for a long, long time, has been Saint Augustine. He didn’t believe in the eucharist, he didn’t buy transubstantiation (the conversion of a host into the body and blood of Christ). He fought against a papacy. He was more anti-sex than anyone, and abortion would not have been a problem since, to him, there was no sex outside marriage. But in other ways, he was enlightened. I consider myself an Augustinian Christian.” Wills could not embrace Pope Francis’s canonizing of Pope John Paul II, or continue to reconcile taking communion but not believing in transubstantiation himself.

But mainly, Natalie, his wife of 60 years, died in 2019, and the more he reflected on her own opposition to having a pope, the more decided he could not continue to be Catholic.

While we talked, most everything he said, in time, wound back to Natalie.

“(Her death) changed everything,” he said slowly, looking around the room. “I would always say that I got up in the morning happy because I would be smarter by nightfall because she was there. Almost all of the major changes in my life, she was there for. The night we met, we were both 23 and we realized we had two things in common: Catholicism and the opera. She was brought up in a Catholic household in Connecticut. I was brought up in a Catholic household in Adrian, Michigan. She asked, you buy all the church teachings? I said yeah. She said, even on contraception? I said yeah. She said, come back in 20 years. It didn’t take that long for me to see differently. On abortion, on pacifism, Natalie taught me where I should be going. She was smarter than me. You know I met her on an airplane? She was a flight attendant. She said, ‘You’re too young to be reading that book.’ I was reading Henri Bergson’s ‘Two Sources of Morality and Religion.’ I said, you’ve read this? She said no, but her sociology professor had condemned it. So we talked and argued. There was an empty seat beside me.” They married two years later and moved into her Italian neighborhood, not far from Yale University, where Wills was still in graduate school.

He was not born into a family of intellectuals. The family settled in Michigan after his father left Georgia looking for work during the Great Depression. One grandparent was a strict Christian Scientist. His mother’s brother married his father’s sister. “It became a complicated arrangement of religions and views.” He was brought up anti-communist and became a fan of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose demagogy fueled the Red Scare.

He mainly wanted to become a literary critic. After sending some writing samples to Buckley at the National Review, he was invited in. Buckley had just lost his theater critic — maybe Wills would go to Washington, watch Jimmy Hoffa get questioned by a Senate committee and treat it like theater? After that, Wills met more journalists, only to split ideologically with the National Review and became a fixture of Esquire as the magazine (and others) pioneered a more literary, less rigidly objective New Journalism. He covered Martin Luther King Jr., Nixon, Vietnam, linking past and present, rooting his reporting in historical spelunking, showing exactly what it felt to live through a moment.

He thought of every story “as an opportunity to learn,” he said. “That made me broaden my world. Harold Hayes (the legendary editor of Esquire during the 1960s) would say, ‘I’m interested in this, why not write something about it.’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ And so he would say, ‘Well, then you have a chance here to learn.’”

Natalie was there the whole time.

“She challenged everything I knew, in a way that was convincing. She wore me down.”

Since she died, Wills has not stopped writing. His last byline was in the New York Review of Books a year ago, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and he’s halfway through a new book on the history of women’s rights. But his contract lapsed with book agent Andrew Wylie (who is also literary agent for Bob Dylan and Salman Rushdie, among others) and there’s still no publisher attached. He’s talking to his daughter, literary agent Lydia Wills, about a book on leaving Catholicism. He said he doesn’t get many requests to write these days, presumably because “they think I’m old.”

He smiled blankly.

You know, he said, though he moved here in 1980 to join the history department at Northwestern, Natalie was not thrilled. She preferred the East Coast, “but I remember, once, coming home from Scotland, her saying it was a relief to go home. I remember that because it was the first time she called Chicago home, and it had been two years.”

After her death, Wills sold their home on Sheridan Road. He also got rid of most of his library, donating it to Loyola University. But he kept his favorites, which he calls “the core.” Books on the Greeks, Saint Augustine, the dictionary written by Samuel Johnson.

He doesn’t write at night anymore. He writes after meals. He sleeps more. He talks to his three children, all of whom live in the Chicago area, and to his many grandchildren.

He talked so much that he didn’t eat lunch. He boxed up his sandwich and began the slow process of standing with a walker. I thanked him for the time, and he said: “All I got is time.” When I got home, he emailed me the final chapter of his women’s rights book.

It was titled “Natalie.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on May 30, 2024.

By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune

“Shame of Chicago, Shame of the Nation,” which airs Thursday nights for the next four weeks on WTTW, has one of those great old-fashioned muckraking titles, the sort once attached to exposes of the meatpacking industry and Al Capone. Except there’s nothing truly old-school or entirely vanquished here. This four-part documentary journeys from Trumbull Park to the northern suburbs. It picks apart Chicago’s disgraceful legacy of housing discrimination and weaponizing real estate policy, and perp walks that ugly past into an often uglier present and makes a compelling argument for housing reparations.

The past is never really past, history is never done with us, and so on.

Yes, hours of black-and-white reels full of hateful white faces screaming through neighborhood marches, patient Black families dodging spittle and bombs, tastefully lit contemporary talking heads giving rational context to irrational images. This is PBS. If you’re even a B student of Chicago history, much will look familiar: You’ve seen the clips of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Sidney Poitier being told by a hat-in-his-hands white neighbor that Poitier’s character (based on Hansberry’s father, who bought a Lawndale home in 1937 partly to force integration) doesn’t have anything in common with harder-working neighbors. Maybe you’ve read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark journalism, “The Case for Reparations,” of which this documentary at times seems to adapt. (Coates is among the historians, homeowners and writers interviewed.)

But there’s a saying about new works on familiar topics, and it applies to any medium — books, films, what-have-you. It says that there’s always room for accessibility and clarity.

What “Shame of the Nation” brings to the history of Chicago and social justice is a terrible clarity at a time when at least half the country refuses to accept structural racism is a thing, and assumes their own grievances take priority over the pain of others. The film plays at times like a brisk walk through a model home that’s been crumbling for decades, opening up doors to rooms that were bricked over, spotlighting the architects. There are plenty of heroes to cheer, of course. Filmmakers Chris L. Jenkins and Bruce Orenstein may not be the most stylish of storytellers — Jenkins is a former Washington Post reporter, Orenstein is a native Chicagoan who has been making documentaries on local history for years. But they are terrific at identifying pocket histories within a history, connecting the way, say, a single brave act echoes in a suburb miles away, decades later.

They’re even better at laying out the villains behind the villains, the policy makers behind the architects. It’s a darkly funny thing about American life that the conspiracies many want to believe bind their arms and sap their freedom are never those that exist.

Take the University of Chicago/Northwestern University Conspiracy.

Jenkins and Orenstein don’t call it that, but I do.

See if you follow: Nathan MacChesney, a former special state’s attorney for Illinois, serves as general counsel for the National Association of Real Estate Boards and drafts a “Chicago Restrictive Covenant” to bring “order” to how local real estate boards evolve neighborhoods. Supreme Court decisions dissolve big challenges, but MacChesney needs an “intellectual argument” to justify it. He needs a buy-in if he wants a nationwide standard. So he contacts leading economist Richard Ely, who goes about training students at Northwestern to devise a hierarchy of who should own homes in the United States. They draft an actual pecking order: Danish at the top, then German, English; further down Italians, Hindus, Hebrew, Chinese; and at the bottom, Black Americans (followed, at the very bottom, by Native Americans). This becomes a real estate industry standard, and later the foundation for Homer Hoyt, a UC economist contacted by MacChesney, who writes a manual that cites race as the key to a neighborhood’s value.

And that’s not to mention the rise of local neighborhood associations as proxy tools for segregating blocks — a tactic other cities adopt to bypass legal restrictions. Or the pocket history of Hyde Park as a pioneer in shamelessly alienating non-whites, no matter how long they’ve lived there.

As insensitive as it sounds, Jenkins and Orenstein nail the tick-tock streamlining of housing segregation in Chicago with such clean, insidious pacing — even employing animated explainers at times, which become cloying and unnecessary — I flashed to Martin Scorsese and Steven Soderbergh movies dedicated to the art of the hustle. The fix is in here. The difference is there’s no perverse joy in identifying with the criminals.

Consider the Deerfield Conspiracy.

Again, my name. To be fair, it could be the Western Springs Conspiracy or Oak Park Conspiracy. Each took pains to ensure Black families were not welcome. But “Shame of the City” is especially sharp on the history of Deerfield, which organized against a development in the late 1950s intended to show integrated neighborhoods can work. There’s footage of a town meeting in which resident after resident explains they are not racist but segregation has worked so well in the South … why something new? Deerfield solves this in not-quite novel yet audacious fashion: It puts the question to voters, schedules a vote days before Christmas and takes race off the ballot. Instead of a real estate development, voters are asked to approve a new park on the same land. Which gets approved, by a 21-to-1 margin. Then they name the park after its champion.

There are plenty of heroes: The esteemed Black chemist Percy Julian who moves to Oak Park, gets his water shut off the city on day one, but eventually makes that suburb a model of integration. West Side homeowners who push back on redlining. The Contract Buyers League, a North Lawndale group that persuades realtors to sell homes to Black residents at (lower) white prices; it’s estimated the League saved Black Chicagoans at least $3.2 billion. 

Astounding numbers like that get inserted throughout the series. You piece together the picture: Racial covenants — agreements among realtors and homeowner associations excluding Black families from homes in certain neighborhoods — eventually apply to at least 40 square miles of Chicago. And home ownership is a leading indication of generational wealth within a family. So, of course, even decades after redlining and restrictive racial covenants ruled Chicago, there’s a 20-to-1 gap in generational wealth between white families and Black families.

Sounds like a conspiracy.

When the economy collapses in the Great Depression, the New Deal creates the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which refinances a fifth of American houses — but does not offer services to neighborhoods with “inharmonious races,” as defined by Northwestern and UC scholars. Maybe you’ve heard this. “Shame of Chicago” does not feel fresh, but in arranging so much so thoughtfully — the birth of the Chicago Housing Authority, the bombs of Trumbull Park, the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway, “Birth of a Nation,” the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, how fictions can manufacture evidence — you can see how the way things are were not always meant to be the way things are.

Three years after the Chicago race riot of 1919, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations released a 672-page report remarkably prescient for its time. This city, it says, will get worse the more it segregates. It lays blame on realtors, politicians, journalists. Davarian Baldwin, an American Studies professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and author of books on race in Chicago, tells the filmmakers it’s very politely worded. It identifies issues, then predicts the future of Chicago. Instead, city leaders double down and plunge ahead with redlining. “You have to look back and say, ‘How could the world of today have been different if political leaders in that moment had taken seriously one or two of the modest recommendations that came out of that report?”

We’ll never know.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

This story was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on April 18, 2024.