Steve Chapman, the exit interview

Featuring my first AMA (Ask Me Anything) to celebrate 1 year of the Picayune Sentinel

9-8-2022 (issue No. 52)

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.

A year ago Friday I came off a two-month vacation after leaving the Chicago Tribune and sent out the inaugural issue of this … I want to call it a publication rather than a newsletter, but the Substack terminology is clear.

I decided to give it three months to see if readers liked what I was doing, and if I liked the process enough to make a commitment, or it I wanted to explore some other writing projects. By early December, I was all in and launched a paid-subscriber program to try to cover our health insurance premiums.

This is my anniversary issue and it features an Ask Me Anything section and a lengthy interview at the end of his career with the stellar columnist Steve Chapman.

Also:

• Last week’s winning tweet

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Mary Schmich interviews Barbara Ehrenreich (video)

• A promo for “The Mincing Rascals” podcast

• Re:Tweets — this week’s finalists

• Today’s Tune — answering a reader’s question about my fiddle playing.

When people ask me how it’s going, I tell them that writing the Picayune Sentinel (here is the story behind the title) is the most fun I’ve had as a writer — the freedom, the levels of engagement with readers, the format that suits my peculiar attention span. Putting each issue together takes a lot of time, but it rarely feels like work.

Thanks to all those who have signed up and are reading regularly. I’m honored by your attention and I hope to continue to be worthy of it.

Last week’s winning tweet

Papazilla667! @Scottzilla667

So, the robber shouted, everyone lay down. Then, I said, "lie" down. Oddly enough, I was the only one shot.

Scroll down to read this week’s nominees or click here to vote in the new poll.

Steve Chapman (photo by Cyn Sansing Mycoskie)

Steve Chapman, the exit interview

My former Chicago Tribune colleague and friend Steve Chapman announced with very little fanfare in the final paragraph of his column Friday that he was saying goodbye to his readers.

The paragraph just above, the kicker to his column, was pure Chapman — an elegant, almost epigrammatic conclusion to an argument that he’d buttressed with compelling facts and historical allusions:

It was once assumed that the story of America was one of steady progress in steadily improving our grand experiment in rule by the people. But nothing in this world is guaranteed to last forever — not even the world's oldest democracy. If it is going to survive, Americans will have to save it — or else be remembered for our failure.

Chapman did his best to save democracy over the years, writing column after column of relentlessly logical, masterfully constructed arguments that challenged the reader to think and never resorted to the sort of patronizing invective that some of us — ahem! — occasionally found irresistible.

“Steve is thoughtful, mature and reasoned,” wrote Phil Ponce on Facebook “He is a brilliant and supple writer who expresses his views with grace and intelligence.”

“I didn't always agree with him, but I always respected his well-reasoned opinion,” wrote Mary Kay Shutt.

“The most interesting and clearest-thinking writer at the Trib,” wrote Pete Prokopowicz. “I gained a lot by reading him.”

“One of the best, especially when I disagreed with him,” wrote Tyad Rooter. “His reason, clarity and pragmatism taught me more than a few things.”

All that. Steve is also a very kind, very generous, very funny and very unassuming fellow. No Editorial Board discussion was truly complete until “Justice Chapman” cleared his throat and weighed in.

He didn’t want to write a farewell column — he said he considers them self-indulgent, again ahem! — but he agreed to sit for an exit interview, which I present here, lightly edited:

Eric Zorn: I'm sure there were gasps all around the Chicago area last weekend when Tribune readers saw that brief note at the end of your column: "An announcement: Forty-one years ago, I began writing a regular column for the Chicago Tribune, which has been distributed by Creators Syndicate. Today, I’m retiring as a columnist. Thanks to everyone who helped me along the way, and thanks most of all to my readers."

SC: I don't know. There may have been some sighs of relief.

EZ: What made you decide to step aside now? 

SC: I've been doing it for 41 years. I'm 68. I'm ready to step off the deadline treadmill. I'm in good health, and you can't take that for granted at my age. My wife and I would like to be freer to travel and spend time with our kids and grandkids, who are scattered around the country. We don't get to see them as much as we'd like to. 

But I have very mixed feelings. I find writing a column very satisfying. And I'm sure there are going to be days when I’ll really miss it.

EZ: You took a buyout from the Tribune in June 2021, just like a bunch of us did, but up until Sunday you continued to appear twice a week in the paper through Creators Syndicate.

SC: I've been syndicated by them since 1987. They were a startup back then. I was the second person they signed up after Ann Landers, if I remember correctly. 

EZ: How has the syndication business changed? 

SC: It used to be more lucrative. Twenty years ago, there were more papers, and I had more clients. Over the last 10 years, I lost a lot of clients because most newspapers have had to cut their budgets. Fewer of them are buying and running syndicated columns, and those that do are running fewer of them. I was a casualty of that.

And in all honesty, the money from syndication was not enough to justify the time and effort I put into the column. I was doing it more because I still liked doing it than for the money.

EZ: Let's rewind. Where did you grow up?

SC: I was born in Brady, Texas, a little town that calls itself "The Heart of Texas" because it's at the geographical center of the state. We moved to Midland in West Texas when I was 3 months old. When I was 10, we moved to Austin. My mother's still there. My brother's still there. I still go there frequently. I have a lot of relatives in Texas.

EZ: What did your folks do? 

SC: My dad was an insurance agent, chartered life underwriter. He and another guy started an insurance agency in 1960 and built it into a going business that's still operating 62 years later. It now mostly does third-party administration, which is basically handling insurance claims and so on for corporations that self-insure. My brother is just now phasing out of running it. He's done a great job. But it was not a business I wanted to go into.

My mother taught junior high English in her younger days. She went into my dad’s business after all the kids were out of the house, and she spent probably 10 to 12 years working alongside my dad.

EZ: Were you interested in politics as a kid?

SC: I got interested in junior high. I had decided pretty early on that I wanted to make a career of politics. And that was my plan right up until senior year in college when I decided I wanted to give journalism a try.

EZ: Electoral politics? 

SC: Yeah. I was planning to go back to law school and run for elective office in Texas as a Republican.

EZ: Your wife (Cyn Sansing Mycoskie) knew you in high school and once told me that she considered you a conservative nerd. 

SC: I think the way she describes me as a teenager is “a conservative pill.” She thought I was an obnoxious right-winger, which was not far from the truth. I was involved in Young Republicans. I handed out bumper stickers for Nixon and Agnew in a supermarket parking lot in 1968. I stuffed envelopes for George H.W. Bush when he ran for the Senate in 1970. That kind of thing was my passion. 

EZ: What was it about the Republican Party philosophy that attracted you?

SC:  One of the things that made me conservative back in those days was that Austin was the hippie capital of the Southwest. The rise of the counterculture coincided with my adolescence, and I didn’t have much use for it. You had all these pot-smoking, peace-marching, long-haired people at the University of Texas, and I can remember seeing anti-war demonstrators marching down Guadalupe Street waving Viet Cong flags. I thought civilization was collapsing. Everything in me rebelled against that.

EZ: Were your parents political?

SC: My parents were not ever involved in politics. My dad was a Goldwater Republican. I read his copy of Goldwater’s book "The Conscience of a Conservative" when I was in junior high. That had quite an influence on my thinking — maybe too much of an influence.

EZ: So you went from Austin, a liberal hotbed, to Harvard, another liberal hotbed. How did you fit in at Harvard?

SC: Harvard was not just a liberal hotbed, it was a left-wing, radical hotbed. I'll give you an example. When Saigon fell in 1975, the student paper, the Harvard Crimson, ran an editorial celebrating the victory of the Viet Cong — the North Vietnamese — as a step to the liberation of the South Vietnamese people.

I was involved in the Republican Club from day one. My junior and senior years I was president of the Republican Club. This did not make me a popular person with a lot of my fellow students.

EZ: I recall you saying you were fairly religious at the time.

SC: I was. The other career I considered was becoming a minister in the Presbyterian Church. I went to church regularly, which is not something every undergrad does.

EZ: How was it that you decided to pivot to journalism?

SC: In the middle of my junior year. I was hanging around one night at the grill in the basement of our dorm, talking to a friend of mine who was on the Crimson.

I was bitching about how left-wing it was, and she said, "Well, if you don't like it, why don't you get on the Crimson and do something about it?" 

I said, "They would never take somebody as conservative as me." 

She said, "I'll bet they would."

We argued for a while, and she basically dared me to do it. So I went out for the Crimson.

There's a process called the “comp” — short for competition — where you work with a mentor for a couple of months. And at the end of that time, they decide if they want you on the paper. And amazingly enough, at the end of that process, they wanted me.

So I started writing for the Crimson. Mostly opinion stuff, book reviews, record reviews, things like that. The more I did it, the more I liked it. And it occurred to me that I could advance my political convictions through journalism instead of running for office.

By the middle of my senior year, I decided to see if I could make a go of freelancing instead of going to law school as I'd always planned — I'd gotten into law school at the University of Texas, but they let me defer my admission for a year.

 EZ: What publications did you write for?

SC: I got a part-time job with the National Taxpayers Union in Washington, D.C., so that I'd make some money and still have time to do freelance writing. The first thing I ever had published was an article for the National Review — it was about Fred Friendly’s book “The Good Guys, The Bad Guys and the First Amendment.” I was arguing against the Fairness Doctrine.

I also wrote for The American Spectator-- which in those days was called The Alternative -- which was another conservative magazine

In about 1978, I quit working at the National Taxpayers Union because I thought I could make an adequate living writing. I was not living lavishly, but I was scraping by.

Eventually, I managed to get published in The Washington Monthly — “What’s Wrong with the civil service. Inflated Pay” (April 1977) — and Michael Kinsley, who was the managing editor at The New Republic, saw that article and asked me to write for him.

I did that for a year or so and eventually got hired full time at The New Republic. Kinsley's always been sort of a contrarian and an unconventional liberal, and he decided that I had enough promise that he was willing to have a house libertarian around. 

EZ: Libertarian? When did you switch your identification from conservative to libertarian?

SC: I thought of myself as a libertarian conservative in college. I don't remember exactly at what point it was, but there was a seminar at the Institute of Politics run by David Brudnoy, a conservative writer. He would invite conservative speakers —William F. Buckley, people like that — to come talk. And sometimes the group would just have a seminar and argue about things in the news. 

We had a discussion one night about legalizing marijuana. I found myself defending the idea, and I realized, if I were in favor of legalizing marijuana, I was probably not really a conservative; I was probably a libertarian. 

EZ: When you were at the New Republic, were you thinking that you’d stay in Washington forever?

SC: Yeah, I figured I was going to be there the rest of my life.

EZ: What got you to Chicago?

SC: Well one day at The New Republic, I got a call from Jack Fuller, who was deputy editorial page editor at the Tribune. They had an opening on the Editorial Board for somebody to write about business and economics. And he liked my stuff and wondered if I might want to come out for an interview for the job.

I later found out that there were two other people they offered the job to before they contacted me — one was Alan Reynolds, the chief economist at the First National Bank of Chicago. The other one was Al Ehrbar, who wrote for Fortune Magazine — and there may have been others. I may have been like 17th on their list.

The only reason I agreed to fly up to Chicago for an interview was that my sister lived here and it was a free trip to see her.

And I figured, what have I got to lose? I didn't particularly want the job. I was a magazine writer. Newspapers just didn't seem like they offered the kind of space and depth that I wanted to have as a writer. So I was completely relaxed during the interview. 

Then Fuller called me a couple of days later and said he'd like to hire me. I gave it some thought and decided I didn't want to be an anonymous editorial writer, so I thanked him and told him the reason I was turning him down.

A week or so later, I got a call from Max McCrohon, who was the editor of the Tribune at the time.

He said, "I understand you don't want to be anonymous. You're used to having a byline and I can appreciate that. How about if we gave you a syndicated column?" 

I was 26 years old, right? And, here's a major newspaper offering me a syndicated column. In those days, a syndicated column was a pretty big deal. This was before the glut of opinion punditry that the internet has given us.

So I said, "Yeah, I think I'd like to do that."

I took the job and went and joined the Editorial Board. The deal was that I would spend six months writing editorials to get me used to the daily deadline experience, and after that, my column would start. But in that interim, McCrohon was replaced as editor by Jim Squires, who was not at all sure he wanted to give me a column. But eventually, he was prevailed on to honor the agreement. 

EZ: Tell me how your religious views changed over the years.

SC: I've never really written about the process I went through. As I said, I was a very religious person, a Presbyterian. And the common experience you hear about is that people fall away from religion in their college days, and young adulthood. But when they get married and have kids, they return to the church, if only for their kids' sake.

I had the opposite experience. When I had kids, I had a crisis of faith. Because if you take Christianity seriously, it's a little bit like living in a totalitarian state. Everything you do is under constant scrutiny. Everything you do is potentially fatal, in terms of eternity.

And I realized that belief system was not providing the answers I wanted.

What drew me to politics and libertarianism and Christianity was a search for certitude, which a lot of young people have. And as an adult, I grew less confident in the certitudes they offered. So shortly before my second child was born, I was confronting whether and how I was going to raise my kids in my religion, and I realized that my convictions were not strong enough for me to inflict my religion on my kids.

At that point, I realized I really didn't believe anymore. It felt very bleak for a time, but it pretty quickly became liberating. It turned out to be the most freeing decision of my life. It did more for my mental health and happiness than anything I've ever done. I've never really discussed this publicly, but now I'm baring my eternally damned soul.

EZ: Did that deconversion affect the way you looked at any political issues?

SC: I think it did. Once I fell away from religion, I sensed a separation between me and the way true conservatives think that couldn't be bridged anymore. I used to think that conservatives and libertarians were pretty much on the same side of things — for free-market economics and limited government, against communism and so on. But once you step away from religion, social conservatism just doesn't make as much sense anymore. It’s hard to think of any reason to oppose gay marriage, for example, unless your religion tells you it’s wrong.

EZ: Your wife Cyn, is delightfully sharp and opinionated. Tell me about the influence she’s had on your thinking and your writing.

SC: She's more liberal than I am, and her life experiences were a good deal different from mine. She was adopted, and she sometimes reminds me that not everybody grew up in an "Ozzie and Harriet" household like I did.

She’s helped me become more aware of the difficulties that many people face in overcoming obstacles that I didn’t encounter.

She's also had an effect on my thinking when it comes to abortion. She had three kids by her first husband, and I doubt she would ever have considered abortion for herself, but she has a real appreciation for the importance of bodily autonomy for pregnant women and would not want to stop anybody else from doing it.

EZ: She knew you as “a conservative pill” in high school. What in the world made her give you another chance?

SC: My good looks and charm is all I can figure. Actually, I took an interest in her way back when she arrived at our high school, having moved from Chicago before our junior year. She didn't take an interest in me then, and we didn't date, but we were friendly, had a lot of friends in common and were involved in some of the same activities. So about three decades later, she was in San Antonio working at a marketing firm and looking at the hard copy of an ad her company had placed in a newspaper when she happened to turn it over and there was my column. It had my email address at the bottom.

So she wrote to me just to say hello and ask how I was doing. I remembered her well and told her I was in Chicago but still had family in Austin and I came down fairly often to visit, so maybe we could get together for coffee or a drink or something.

We did, and I was immediately smitten, even though she was still ready and able to put me in my place.

EZ: That good luck reminds me some of your daughter's story.

SC: Isabelle also waited until her junior year in college to get into journalism. Some of her friends at DePauw University (Greencastle, Indiana) talked her into joining the school paper, and she found that she loved it. She became managing editor by her senior year, 2013. 

She decided she was going to get a master's in journalism and applied and was accepted at Columbia University. The summer before, she came down to the Tribune Tower to have lunch with me and hang out a bit with the people on the Editorial Board.

At the time, we had a summer intern, David Uberti, who had just graduated from Northwestern, and by coincidence, was about to start in the master's program at Columbia.

So I introduced them and said,”You two are both going to be there. It'd be good for each of you to know somebody when you arrive.”

I thought Dave was a wonderful guy, and if Isabelle would have let me pick her boyfriend out of all the 20-something guys I knew, he would have been the one I'd have picked. So I guess it worked. One thing led to another, and they got married in January. She's a producer on the investigative unit at CNN, and he covers cybersecurity for The Wall Street Journal. 

EZ: Tell me about your other kids. 

SC: I've got two two sons, both older than Isabelle, and three stepsons through Cyn. My oldest son, Ross, is a firefighter in Arlington Heights. And my younger son, Keith, has his own PR firm called Chap PR. My stepson Chris handles communications for a school district in Texas and does freelance sports broadcasting — including the regular play-by-play for SMU volleyball and Stephen F. Austin football. My stepson Craig and his wife, Amy, own and run a craft brewery in Atlanta. 

EZ: Unlike a number of us who’ve left, you decided not to do a farewell column, but instead simply to say goodbye to your readers in the last paragraph of your final column. Is there anything else that you would like to say to people who have followed you for all these years? You have a lot of fans. I know this because they sometimes write to me.

SC: Well, I'm really grateful. There was nothing more gratifying than getting a letter from a reader who appreciated what I was trying to do with my column, which was to be as logical, evidence-based and sensible as I could be. 

It's nice when people appreciate you for that. But even hate mail, which I also got, of course, is a validation of sorts that you got somebody's attention, struck a nerve, evoked a response. 

But the best are the ones who wrote to say, "You know, I had never thought of it that way, but you, you made me think," or "You changed my mind,” or, " I thought I was the only one who thought this, thank you so much for letting me know I'm not alone." 

I'll miss that a lot. I’ve gotten more emails than I ever expected from readers telling me they’ll miss my column. That makes my retirement somewhat bittersweet.

EZ: I agree with your fans wholeheartedly. There were times when I read the headline on your column or the first paragraph or two and think, "Well, Chapman's off the deep end today." But by the end, you'd have either persuaded me or at least made me realize that your position was reasonable.

And that is an amazing feat for a columnist. Your columns were always very persuasive -- even if they didn't always fully persuade me, they moved me to think. So I want to thank you for doing that on behalf of all those readers who have admired you for so long and who will really miss your voice.

Steve Chapman can still be reached at stephen.j.chapman13@gmail.com.

AMA — Ask Me Anything

To mark the one-year anniversary of the Picayune Sentinel, I invite readers to ask me anything, with the proviso that I had no intention of answering every question. Here are some that came in.

How has the Picayune Sentinel performed financially compared to your expectations? What percentage of your Tribune salary have you been able to retain through this project? What tweaks will you make to your business model going forward? — Mike B.

This publication has performed quite a bit better in every way than I’d expected when I launched it. The Tribune wouldn’t give me the mailing list for my old newsletter so I had to build one from scratch, asking readers who wanted to stay in touch to reach out. A little more than 4,000 contacted me to ask to be on my new mailing list, and I was hoping for a solid 5,000. And that list now contains close to 10,000 addresses, with an “open rate” that averages about 70% and total page views that have climbed to more than 20,000 most weeks, though last week was just 19,100.

Paid subscribers — the generous supporters who get the boffo extra Tuesday edition and access to the bumptious comments threads along with my deep gratitude — are now helping me earn close to but not quite half of what I made in my last year at the Tribune, but without benefits, of course.

Thing is, though, I really enjoy composing and connecting through this format, so it feels a lot more like a hobby than a job. I work pretty hard at it three days a week — Monday through Wednesday — and then idly gather string for the other four days.

My “business model” is to type what I hope are interesting things and then to hope that word gets around inspiring more people to sign up. I’d like to do more actual reporting and to add some other standing features, which might at some point involve some partnerships. But I plan never to expand beyond two issues a week, no matter how suffocatingly long they may get.

Why should I continue to subscribe to the Chicago Tribune? Steve Chapman has retired. I have lost all the writers I enjoyed. —Jill T.

Because the Tribune, though diminished, continues to be an important voice in this region that keeps an eye on City Hall, the County Building, the courts and many other institutions, businesses and issues that need a flinty eye kept on them.

Yes, you can get most of the information you need for free (for now) on the web, but the Tribune remains atop the local journalistic food chain, and, trust me, as annoyed as you may get about some aspect or another of the paper, you do not want to live in a big city without a strong daily newspaper. The crooks and bastards run wild — or wilder — without the investigations and the solid coverage and analysis that papers provide.

Just consider, “Salaries for top staffers at Obama Foundation are outpacing their counterparts at other presidential centers,” this week’s deeply reported front-page opus by the Trib’s A.D. Quig. Subscriptions support that kind of work.

That said, I want to reiterate my plea to the Tribune to appoint a few new local news columnists to add some personality back into the paper. Adding the weekly contribution from freelancer Laura Washington was a good start. Now how about a three-times-a-week voice?

And in answer to a related question, the customer service number at the Tribune for Sunday home delivery customers to call at least once every six months to avoid being charged $8 extra a month for “Premium Issues” (insert supplements you probably don’t want) is 312-546-7900.

Will there be Songs of Good Cheer shows this December? — Susan L.

Pandemic permitting, yes. We’ve booked the auditorium at the Old Town School of Folk Music Dec. 7 through 11 for the annual winter-holiday singalong hosted by me and Mary Schmich and featuring an all-star cast of local musicians. Tickets are not yet on sale, and we’ve yet to hold our first organizational meeting, but I’ll keep Picayune Sentinel readers abreast when I resume the “Cheer Chat” feature.

So watch this space.

How do you budget your time to listen to so many podcasts each week? I realize that podcasts work great for commuters each day, but you don't commute and you seem to keep up with dozens and are always recommending more. How much time do you devote each day to listening to podcasts? What did you used to do with that time? — Craig S.

Before podcasts were a thing I was such a news nerd that I used to hook a digital audio recorder up to the TV and “download” such shows as “Chicago Tonight,” “Hardball,” “Meet the Press” and so on. I would hook the same recorder up to a stereo tuner and record literally hours of talk programming.

Before that? I dunno what I did with my time. Talked to my family or something?

I listen to everything at double speed, which helps me get through a lot of material,though it mortifies my wife, a podcast editor and the founder of the Third Coast International Audio Festival n (See “Speed listening — efficient, blasphemous or just nutty?” and “Top podcast producers weigh in on speed listening. Team Eric or Team Johanna?”) I listen when puttering around the house and in every odd moment. I listen as I fall asleep. I listen almost as soon as I wake. I listen whenever I’m alone in the car. It’s almost like I’m afraid to be alone with my thoughts.

But my podcast consumption is down from when I commuted downtown at least two days a week.

Where did you grow up and how did you decide to get into journalism? Was it because of an influential teacher or writer? — Phillip S.

I grew up in Ann Arbor (Burns Park neighborhood), where my parents were on the faculty at the University of Michigan — Dad in physics, Mom in composition and also medical careers. I always loved to write as a kid, and the feedback loop from teachers and my parents only encouraged me. I wrote novels in 6th and 7th grade. At least three of them, more than 100 pages long! May they never be found.

I thought I wanted to write fiction for a living when I went to college at Michigan and enrolled in a lot of literature and creative writing classes. It was on a special literature program in New England that I met another aspiring novelist, Bruce Weber, who was a few years ahead of me and who advised me to read a lot of contemporary fiction — to be inspired, to see what was selling — and to write reviews of those books for the Michigan Daily — to sharpen my thinking, to learn to write for an audience and to get free books off the review table.

So I did. Then, in an incident described in my farewell column, I decided to join the staff of the Daily to demonstrate to my ex-girlfriend that I was carrying on well without her. I wrote mostly about the arts for the Daily and at the time still thought of journalism as merely a broadening pursuit. I thought it would introduce me to a far wider world than academia, ensuring that my future novels would not all be about angsty members of the professoriate who slept with their students and stabbed one another in the back over trifling scholarly insults.

The real world — talking to real people and writing real stories about what really happened — came to seem to me far more relevant and interesting than the fictional world. I’ve come to appreciate fiction as a vehicle for truths that nonfiction is unlikely ever to discover, but only as a reader.

I don’t seem to have the imagination to write fiction — to conjure people and situations out of thin air and reflect with any relevance the verities that demand reflection.

Bruce Weber never became a novelist either, but he went on to a brilliant career at Esquire and The New York Times, and he’s written several nonfiction books.

If you had to do it all over again what career would you pick and why? — Sarah

I would pick journalism again. It’s an opportunity, privilege and education even for those covering small stories for small outlets. If I had my career to do over again, I’d have paid more attention to politics and public policy earlier and developed more areas of expertise. I don’t think I asked myself often enough, “How can I write something that will make a difference?”

I also would have asked for more frequent breaks in the column writing schedule in order to delve at greater length into particular stories. I did this only a few times, and if I were editing a newspaper, I would require my columnists to take one month off the column every year to complete a special project that would stretch them and perhaps effect real change.

My editors would probably have been amenable to such an idea, but I never really pressed for it.

How is your mom doing? — Mark K.

I wrote about my mother’s dementia in Picayune Sentinel No. 7 and — thank you very much for asking — since then she has, inevitably, declined somewhat. She has better and worse days, but it’s a one-way fade. She hasn’t fallen and broken her leg again — she’s done so three times in the last few years — and she and my father have a very good 24/7 care team in place at home.

We still sing with her for at least an hour a night when I visit them in Ann Arbor, which is usually for four or five days a month. And she has increasing difficulty in summoning the words even when we repeat the choruses many times. She’s not exactly clear anymore who anyone is, with the exception of my father. But there remains the light of recognition and joy in her eyes, and we all have the sense that this disease has not robbed her of her essence.

I wish I had more insight or advice. I miss her — the long conversations we used to have at the kitchen table and during dog walks in the neighborhood — but I’m so used to her condition by now that the grief feels incremental.

Do you consider yourself a good fiddler? — Denise F.

Good enough to nominate myself — just this one time! — for Tune of the Week. See below for a demonstration and explanation.

You’ve mentioned that you golf. What’s your handicap? — V.G.

[Insert ritual “handicap'“ joke here.] I don’t keep track, but I’m reliably in the 90s as long as we’re playing winter rules from fairly forward tees and giving one mulligan a side. But to give you an idea of how it can go with me, I lost balls out of bounds or in the water on holes 3, 7, 11, 14, 17 and 18 last Thursday morning at Indian Boundary Golf Course, which is as wide open a track as my regular group ever plays. Those were some execrable shots. Yet I knew why they happened As I wrote in 2015:

I choose to be a mediocre golfer.

I could hit straighter drives, crisper chips and truer putts. I could regularly shoot 3 or 4 over par for nine holes. But that would require professional instruction and, most important, practice — hours at the range and on and around the putting greens, turning swing thoughts into reflexes. And I've chosen not to do that.

I've taken three lessons in the last 20 years and made maybe a dozen separate trips to practice facilities. Week in and week out I've made the decision that I'd rather not spend the time and money to get better. The frequency with which I hit errant shots isn't confounding, it's inevitable.

In this light, every shot of mine that sails out of bounds, drops in the water or skitters pathetically along the grass in front of me isn't a failure so much as it is a consequence.

Are you going to send reminders of some sort to those of us who became paid subscribers to the Picayune Sentinel when it’s time to renew? — Jeffrey W.

Substack says: “Monthly and annual subscriptions will automatically renew and you'll receive an email reminder about a week before your subscription is set to renew.”

I didn’t start a paid supporter program until December, so we’re still a few months off from those notices going out. I personally don’t mind automatic renewals — I keep track on my calendar for if and when I want to cancel — but I wish that all subscriber programs had an option allowing those who sign up to choose an expiration date. That seems only fair. By the way …

Did the universe really begin with the “big bang” or was there some sort of divine intervention? You did say to ask you anything. Jack M.

Yes, I did say that, and the answer is that we are a fluke result in one of perhaps billions of iterations of a “big bang,” and that while some may see this as a result of divine intervention, I contend that the question itself isn’t particularly relevant in that divining intention is utterly inscrutable. Every theological explanation, even perceived commandment or mandate, seems wholly invented by meaning-seeking humans.

For more on my cranky theology, read “No graven images and other reflections on morality,” a speech I delivered on this idea in 2001.

Land of Linkin’

• “At some point, one truly runs out of euphemisms for lawless partisan hackery” writes Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern in “The Solution to the Trump Judge Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About.” Vanity Fair expresses similar thoughts in Bess Levin’s “Trump’s special-master situation is shady as fuck, say legal experts.”

• “In 2021 you had a thread go viral, where you wrote about how journalists at major newspapers in the United States have been complicit with rising fascism in the United States,” said Jennifer Reitman ,founder and publisher of Dame magazine in her “Five Questions” interview with former Tribune Metro Editor Mark Jacob. “Was there one instance of this that sparked the idea? Or, perhaps, several?”

• “Gangnam Style,” the bluegrass version.

• Former tennis legend Margaret “Court is a nasty, hateful, irrelevant old woman who remains angry she blew up her own reputation and legacy because of her prejudice,” writes SB Nation’s James Dator in “Margaret Court should keep Serena Williams’ name out of her mouth.” He backs it up with evidence, such as Court’s statements endorsing apartheid and slamming Martina Navratilova for being an out lesbian.

• "There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child" is not a candidate for Tweet of the Week, but an observation by Vladimir Nabokov that made American Scholar's list of the 10 Best Sentences.

• I was startled to read “LIV, the PGA Tour’s challenger, is reinvigorating a sport and its fans,” a guest commentary by economist Cameron Belt in the Tribune posted Saturday, because it neglected to mention that a major reason the breakaway LIV tour is so controversial is that it’s backed by the brutal Saudi Arabian regime that bears responsibility for the 2018 dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. That (not) said, Belt is right that professional golf could use a little juicing to make it more fan-friendly.

• I gave an interview to WGN-Ch. 9 on the Marilyn Lemak story, a version of which ran in Sunday’s Daily Herald.

• The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Mary Schmich: The Barbara Ehrenreich interview

My former colleague Mary Schmich usually posts column-like entries on Facebook on Tuesdays that I repost here. This week, she offered readers a link to the video of her 2014 Printer’s Row Book Fair interview with author Barbara Ehrenreich, who died last Thursday at age 81. The subject was Ehrenreich’s book, “Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything.”

Mary wrote, “We talk about her as a young woman--and later an older one--wrestling with the big questions like: Why are we alive? In a very entertaining, compelling way she goes very deep into the meaning of it all.”

Minced Words

Shakeia Taylor, who covers the Sky for the Tribune, joined host John Williams, Heather Cherone, Austin Berg and me for a segment to discuss Chicago’s best team and the surging popularity of the WNBA for this week’s “Mincing Rascals” podcast. We also discussed the unveiling of the Bears plans for Arlington Heights, the aldermanic exodus, special masters and more.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can now hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the classic Tweet of the Week contest where the template for the poll does not allow the use of images. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

Thanks to Jay Gerak for the suggestion!

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

•  Told my mom that GFY means "good for you" to make Facebook more interesting. — @SchmuckOnAHorse

• One good thing about apples is that they don’t make you go through a lot of drama about whether they’re ripe or not, unlike some other fruits I could mention. — @gabrielroth

•  Me: I pour my blood, sweat, and tears into every dish. Health Inspector: So you see why this is happening. — @Browtweaten

• My Google search history is me checking how to spell “hors d'oeuvres” 3,729 times. — @BlondAmbitionTO

•  I like my women like I like my Starbucks. Expensive, bitter and calling me by the wrong name.— @UnFitz

• Seeking external validation is a sign of unresolved trauma, she tweeted. —@Bripping_Talls

• Satan: Is there any way to make camping worse? Inventor of the music festival: I'm about to blow your mind. — @sofarrsogud

• I watched my cat play with a string for 30 minutes and thought to myself how easily cats are entertained. Then I realized I had just watched my cat play with a string for 30 minutes. — @clichedout

• My dad died when someone poured some sugar on him, you son of a bitch. —@BuckyIsotope

• By age 30 you should have two childhood friends who would come to Denmark at the request of your uncle to ascertain the cause of your madness. — @SparkNotes

Vote here in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

In answer to the question above, “Do you consider yourself a good fiddler?” I offer this video shot in our kitchen with my son Ben backing me on the guitar. I consider myself good enough — good enough to play for dances from time to time, to lead jams and, most importantly, to amuse myself practicing at home without driving my wife insane.

Being good enough was not good enough for me 40 years ago when I moved to Chicago and latched onto the old-time music and dance scene. The fiddle players here were — and still are — dauntingly great. So rather than try to compete, I foolishly, perhaps vainly, put the instrument away, bringing it out only once in a while.

When Ben took up fiddling around 2014, I had a good reason to give it another go and not worry about competing with anyone. And though he quickly surpassed me (his composition “Cullom’s Reel” was the first Tune of the Week one year ago), I’ve kept at it and am content now being decent.

As Algernon says in Act I of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “I don't play accurately — anyone can play accurately — but I play with wonderful expression.”

Here’s my attempt at an unusual version of a fairly common old-time tune, “Cumberland Gap.” The story behind it is that in the 1950s, a man named Gene Bluestein recorded Fiddlin’ Bill Jones, a septuagenarian traditional musician from Kentucky, playing something like it on the banjo . Bluestein altered the melody so it would be easier to play it in a different banjo style, and his son, Evo Bluestein, turned that version into a fiddle tune. Evo taught that tune to Heath Curdts and Don Minnerly of The Possum Trot String Band in the mid 1970s. The Fly By Night String Band borrowed that version and added an extra measure when they recorded the tune in 1980, and so here we are, with apologies to Fiddlin’ Bill Jones:

If you want to hear what good fiddlers sound like playing this tune, try the recordings of this tune by The Fly By Night String Band or The Tall Poppy String Band.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

The Picayune Sentinel is a reader-supported publication. Simply subscribe to receive new posts each Thursday. To support my work, receive bonus issues on Tuesdays and join the zesty commenting community, become a paid subscriber. Thanks for reading!