Chicago – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

“Scars speak more loudly than the sword that caused them.” – Paulo Coelho

It figures. You plan a weekend of yard work and Mother Nature reminds you she controls more than you do. In these parts that makes this a perfect chilly Sunday for a little Sunday Morning Reading. I’m not sure how, but a theme emerges in the collection of links I’m sharing this weekend, somehow suggesting that regardless of our feelings, the forces that seem to be conspiring against us just keep rolling. At some point, just like with the shifts in the weather, you just want some unshifting force to make it all stop.

Here in Chicago we’re seeing a number of theatre spaces closing. (We’re also seeing a few open.) On the national stage, we’re watching with dismay, anger, and sadness as The Kennedy Center is being shut down by cultural barbarians. Josef Palermo had an inside seat to that dismantling and tells the story in My Front-Row Seat To The Kennedy Center Implosion.

And while Madison Square Garden is more a venue for pure entertainment than the arts, the story about how its owner is using surveillance on its patrons and employees that upset the powers that be is a harbinger of things to come in all arenas of our lives. Check out The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine by Noah Shachtman and Robert Silverman.

Having experimented a bit with Artificial Intelligence in seeking information about a statue this weekend, my ongoing suspicions that this “way of the future” isn’t ready for today, much less tomorrow. The technology might be not ready for prime time, but the hype has never been. Kyle Chayka says A.I. Has A Message Problem Of It’s Own Making. I like this quote in the subhead, “If you tell people that your product will upend their way of life, take their jobs, and possibly threaten humanity, they might believe you.” True enough. And if those things are as incompetent as humans, what’s the damn point?

It’s all math. That’s one way to sum up any computing activity. Unless it comes to emotion. And yet, some think feelings are somewhere in the numbers. Mike Elgan writes, No, Math Doesn’t Have Feelings in response to those who must not have any feelings of their own, but are trying to add that into the AI equation.

Gaby Del Valle, says The Only Way To Fight Deepfakes Is By Making Deepfakes. Sounds like an arms race to me. We should be up in arms about it.

Speaking of arms races, Gideon Lewis-Kraus looks at AI in the war that isn’t a war, that’s over every week, but begins again every weekend once the markets close in How Project Maven Put AI Into The Kill Chain.

Apologies for so much AI linkage this week, but it’s been on my mind lately, especially since the news of Mythos broke. It’s the latest demon to fly out of Pandora’s box, and I’m afraid it’s not the last. Margie Murphy, Jake Bleiberg, and Patrick Howell O’Neill examine How Anthropic Learned Mythos Was Too Dangerous For The Wild.

CNN has a report by Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy, Eleanor Stubbs, and Marco Chacon called Exposing A Global Rape Academy. It’s a hard, but I think necessary read considering the topic is just how horrible humans can be to one another. Maybe we should hope the robots develop feelings. Too many humans seem to have stopped developing theirs.

Gail Beckerman says If You Want A Better World, Act Like You Live In It. I concur.

And to close out this week, Scars is a short story by Sigrid Nunez. Some scars can’t be seen. The ones we’re watching form daily, can be.

(Photo by the author.)

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

They Mystery of Magdalene, My Skepticism, and AI

A journey with with public art and AI

I love a good mystery. Especially when it is in public view, like the statue pictured below. (Click to enlarge.)

While in downtown Chicago yesterday I had some time on my hands and took a stroll along Michigan Avenue south of the Chicago River. As I said here, I felt like a tourist in my own town. I stumbled across a statue that seemed new to me.

I was so taken by the statue and its placement between, and prominently in front of, two iconic statues from the 1920’s called The Bowman and The Spearman, that I wanted to know more about what I thought was newer artwork. Given that there was no identification plaque anywhere near the statue, I decided to do what most of us do these days and look up information on the Internet.

I plopped a copy of the photo I took into a Google search box and the result yielded the name of the statue as Magdalene by Dessa Kirk. That’s a link to a Facebook profile. Intriguingly Kirk doesn’t seem to have a website I can find, and examining her photos, I saw only one reference to the statue in question. As a spoiler, it appears Dessa Kirk is indeed the sculptor of this statue called Magdalene. But it took me a while to confirm that.

Magdalene can be found at the intersection of the Congress Parkway and Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and was installed in 2005. Sculpted with a combination of woven wood, branches, and found materials (recycled hoods and fenders of old cars,) combined with weathered metal. The “skirt” of the statue is filled with live flowers and climbing vines, which change the statue’s appearance with the seasons. On my visit I could see a few green sprouts starting to spring up.

Here is a link about the statue on the Chicago Park’s District website that lists her as the artist with a brief bio. I did not find that until after I had gone down the few rabbit holes I mention below.

In this age of dis- and mis- information, AI hallucinations, and AI everywhere — including Google’s search results — I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of just about everything.

Given my age, I’ve also grown increasingly less trusting of my own memory and powers of observation. Something rattling around in my brain didn’t quite sit right about the 2005 installation date. I’ve driven by and through that intersection many times since my return to Chicago in 2013 and I don’t recall seeing the statue.

Before turning into bed for the night, I decided to do another search, this time instead of using Google’s regular old search box, I used Google’s Gemini. It turned up a completely different result, saying the statue was named Terra Nuestra by Hector Gomez and was a part of the Chicago Park District and Chicago Department of Cultural Arts Monument Response Project which just recently launched April 8th of this year.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.17. Checking out the link to the Monument Response Project I found no mention of this particular statue at this particular site, although there was information about Gonzalez and Tierra Nuestra at another site.

So, at this moment I had two conflicting pieces of information from Google using different access to seek more information. Though Google’s search results presented the Dessa Kirk info in its AI summary at the top of the search results, I was still skeptical.

My initial thought was that if this was a part of an art installation project that had just begun 10 days ago, perhaps local news media, which yielded no results, and Google’s crawlers were just behind the curve. As was the Park District’s website.

The AI generated description along with the project’s narrative that these pieces of artwork were meant to counter existing narratives made perfect sense. Descriptions of this statue, very feminine, nurturing, and a rising from the earth’s posture made, in my mind, a perfect contrast to the often criticized go west young man mythology of the two behind it.

I queried Google’s Gemini further, saying that I didn’t think Gomez’s sculpture was correct and it yielded this correction.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.30.

Another artist, another statue, correct location, same city-wide initiative. I queried Gemini further and got another correction.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.32.

Different results. Then, another attempt.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.34.

And again with different results.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.35.

And then again.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.36.

I then preceded to query ChatGPT and Claude. Here’s the first Claude response. Another artist enters the picture.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.38.

And again later.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.38.

ChatGPT did no better, no worse, and like the others proved of no use.

The bottom line is that my skepticism and distrust are more than well founded. What triggered me to go down these AI rabbit holes was that there was something logical about a statue I thought was new, that I kept getting conflicting results about, that pointed to a brand new city-wide art project. It made some sense in my growing skepticism. I wasn’t the only one going down rabbit holes.

What disappoints me, and I think should disappoint and be a warning to us all, is that a photo of something — in this case a public artwork that has existed since 2005 — should come up in any of these AI searches with relevant information. There’s an entire industry being built with smartphones, smart glasses and pins, on a feature that tells us to point at anything and the robots will tell you what it is.

I should have trusted the first plain old Google search box even with the AI generated search summary at the top of the page. But long before this little search mystery I’d given up on that, given many of the previous errors that have yielded in the past. Tech companies relying on AI can throw up all the caveats about possible inaccuracies they want to. I’d venture that it’s almost too late, because their initial promises, having been so broken that they now require those caveats, have already sculpted such a deeper narrative of mistrust in most minds, that they’ll live on as long as stone statues.

As to Magdalene and Dessa Kirk, I’m still very taken with the artwork. Another thing this episode tells me is that artists are going to need to be extremely diligent in crafting websites and publicity about their efforts going forward. They only have themselves to trust.

The Wrecking Ball Comes For The Theatre Building

End of an era

A friend and fellow theatre professional, Walter Stearns, took this sad photo today. It marks the end of an era, the end of a theatre (multiple ones under one roof), and the closing of a chapter in my life.

The Theatre Building, later Stage 773, and even later WHIM, has finally come under the wrecking ball.

If you were a theatre practitioner in any of its disciplines, I’m betting you worked on one of its three stages. Big name stars worked there before they were big names, just like many others less famous doing their thing.

If you think of what has become known as Chicago theatre, The Theatre Building was one of the venues that made theatre in Chicago, Chicago Theatre. I was privileged to produce and direct shows on each of those three stages, was a tenant, worked on staff for a period of time, and helped manage a major renovation in the 90’s.

We’ve known this has been coming for a while now, but seeing this photo of the demolition sharply marks the end. The site of so much theatre magic and home to so many Chicago theatre companies will now be developed into residential units.

Here’s a link to a Chicago Tribune article from last summer announcing the impending final curtain.

I’d take a drive by today, but feel I would be too emotional. Instead I’ll commiserate with some theatre friends tonight when we see Walter’s latest show in another part of town.

Sad day for many.

Sunday Morning Reading

A basket of good writing to share

For those who celebrate Easter and Passover, and all who do not celebrate either, may you find some bit of peace on this Sunday morning, however you see yourself and the world. I’d like to say this week’s edition of Sunday Morning Reading is filled with Easter eggs, but instead it’s just the usual basket stuffed with links to interesting topics and stories that I like to share. Enjoy.

It’s good to be seen, certainly the way you see yourself. When seen by someone who doesn’t know you, that’s eye-opening. Check out Natasha MH’s The Taxi Driver Knew.

The war that isn’t a war in Iran continues. Whatever that story is, it is still being written. Given that this might be heading to the culmination of a conflict that has simmered, and occasionally boiled over, for decades if not longer, there are a few stories out there that offer preface. He Helped Stop Iran From Getting The Bomb by David D. Kirkpatrick is one worth reading.

JA Westenberg’s The “Passive Income” Trap Ate A Generation of Entrepreneurs is also one heckuva a read. There’s nothing passive about this take.

Seva Gunitsky takes on The Incel Global Order. Somebody needs to.

As the technology we use advances, in some spheres some are stepping back. Joshua Cohen takes a look in Sweden Goes Back To Basics, Swapping Screens For Books In The Classroom.

Social Media is under the microscope again after two recent court verdicts against Meta. Chris Castle takes a look with The Social Media Verdicts Are In. Now Ask The Hard Question: Where Was The Board? Counting the money, I imagine. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

In the category of no easy answers, Mathew Ingram also examines what’s going on in social media with Social Media May Be Bad For You But The Remedy Could Be Worse.

On the Artificial Intelligence front there are always interesting topics cooking as the AI purveyors cook the planet. I wrote about two fascinating pieces yesterday, and today I’m highlighting Angela Fu’s An AI Company Set Out To Fix News Deserts. Instead, It Copied Local Journalists Work. Something tells me we’re going to be seeing more of this going forward.

Apple is, I assume, winding up its week celebrating its 50th Anniversary. So much has been written on that topic because there is indeed much to celebrate and much history to contemplate while looking ahead. Here are four pieces that caught my eye, the first three primarily because they are more personal than historical, the fourth is a look ahead.

John Moltz gives us Missed Connections: Me and Apple.

James Thomson is one of my favorite Apple developers. His Apple At 50: Gonna Be, Gonna Be Golden is indeed a personal journey.

Adam and Tonya Engst have been writing Tidbits since 1990. I started reading it shortly thereafter. What Apple’s 50th Anniversary Misses is certainly different than most, but one that mirrors the thoughts of many on this anniversary.

And Marco Arment, looking ahead, has penned A Letter To John Ternus, the guy everyone assumes will don the CEO mantle in the future.

Baseball is back. And every team and their fans are dreaming of a championship. David Todd McCarty spins a bit of fiction that’s baseball adjacent, but rooted deep in dreams in The Taste Of A Dream.

To conclude this week, this story by Audrey Pachuta very much sums up the contradictions we’re living through at the moment. Check out A Student Set A Goal To Run Every Street In Chicago And Inspired A City. Now He Must Leave The Country.

May you find peace however you can.

(Photo from the author.)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

The Presumption of Looking Ahead: Chicago In 2050

Don’t leapfrog the current moment as we look ahead

In today’s insanity that tears at every thread of fabric we have, there’s optimism. There’s hope. And then there’s a presumptive impulse to embrace both and take a look ahead. The Chicago Tribune is running a series called Chicago 2050: Envisioning The City in 25 years.

Shutterstock 1106009873.

From the article announcing the series:

Voices from around the city will explore what Chicago could and should look like in 2050 in a series of essays. These pieces will publish each Sunday through May 10.

This collection represents a collaboration between Tribune Opinion and World Business Chicago, whose Horizon Lines: Visions for Chicago 2050 initiative also includes a design competition inviting the public to share the bold ideas and civic investments Chicago could make in the next 25 years.

The first two essays I’ve read do in fact put forth bold visions for the future. Laura Washington Wants To Bring Glittering Downtown Institutions To The City’s Neighborhoods.

Tracy Baim Writes About The City’s Next Transformational ‘Great Migration’ sees a city where people move to Chicago for a variety of reasons, including access to reproductive and other health care, and a safer refuge from immigration crackdowns; all seeking a better life. Baim imagines the city passed a Bill of Rights for Chicagoans in 2027 that sparked the migration and the following investment needed to make it possible.

I applaud the Chicago Tribune for launching the series and look forward to reading more. It is important to look ahead and imagine a future beyond this current moment.

That said, I’d love to see the Tribune launch a similar series on how to confront the current realities of almost daily crisis we face as a city and as a country. Leapfrogging over those obstacles that blur any new vision for the future feels almost akin to looking at the city’s glorious skyline on a foggy day.

(Image from blvdone on Shutterstock.

Baseball Is Back

Play Ball!

Baseball is back. Or so they tell me. Opening day kicks off today and the long hard march begins to whatever the season will yield.

Wrigley Field 3 _ED45DFF7 AB11 43F6 BF313F2C8618680C_f06b4426 1453 44cf 9fac9bd4ccdef67f.

While I primarily root for the Chicago Cubs I’m a baseball fan and like with most sports I follow, I’m most interested in a good game more than I am rooting for a particular team or matchup. I like to see close contests and races, not runaway division races.

I follow the White Sox as well, because hey, I live in a town with both American and National League clubs. Interleague play between the American and National leagues has taken some of the specialness out of that. And since the White Sox have felt like a minor league team for so long it’s a change in the game that works in my favor.

Chicago papers used to have great baseball writers. Those days are gone. But this column from Paul Sullivan caught my eye as we head into the season. I don’t think it ranks up there with the best of years ago, but Baseball Returns After A Long, Hard Winter, And We’re Grateful To Welcome It Home, does sum up how most Chicagoans feel as we approach opening day in a game that keeps changing, but never changes.

But for much of the next seven months, a three-hour game provides a temporary respite from spiking gas prices, growing airport lines, conflicts abroad and madness at home. Any chance to ignore the real world and immerse ourselves into a fantasy world, even one with nonstop gambling ads, is most welcome.

No, the game is not as good as it used to be. Just ask your parents.

He captures the feelings, the changes, and the feelings about the changes well. When he says radio is still the best medium to enjoy the game, I agree. I listen to the radio broadcast most times I’m watching a game because TV commentators are more carnival barkers than they are baseball announcers.

It also reminds me of my younger years when that was the only way I could catch a game except for the Game of The Week on Saturdays. That always felt like a terrible Catch 22. I’d rather be out playing the game on a Saturday afternoon and would have to give that up to watch a game with my grandfather.

When cable TV game along to our neck of the woods, so too did Chicago’s WGN which brought Cubs games into my world. So I became a long suffering fan long before I moved to the Windy City in an apartment eight blocks from Wrigley Field.

The Cubs were terrible then, and if you waited until after the beginning of the third inning you could saunter into ball park and watch the rest of the game without a ticket. A friend and I did that often.

Of course living in Chicago in later years and watching the Cubs finally win a World Series a decade ago was one of the sports highlights of my life. Those were certainly different days in what seems like a different world.

But a triple is still one of the most exciting plays in sports. The games are back. Let’s hope for some good ones and a few triples along the way.

Play ball!

Took A Little Trip Into The Theater of the Mind

Take me to the water

My wife and I took a little trip downtown today to check out David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar’s immersive theater production, Theater of the Mind. I’ll be writing my thoughts up about it soon. I will say it’s quite an experience.

Until then, enjoy the juxtaposition of these signs and banners for Theater of the Mind and the next door World of Whirlpool. As we walked up I found the proximity more than amusing, and somehow fitting given the body of Byrne’s work and the fact that both are housed in historic Reid Murdoch Building adjacent to the Chicago River.

The latter is not a theater experience. But then again, who knows?

Below is a promo for Theater of the Mind.

Snow Day

I hate to call it a snow day, but in essence that’s what today turned into. We had one crazy weekend of weather in the Chicago area. Rain, cold temperatures, high wind and tornadoes (not immediately near us), and then enough snow overnight to break out the shovels this morning. Last night with heavy rain we had temperatures in the 60’s that dropped into the low 20’s this morning.

Though none of the above is unique to Chicago in March, I have to admit that it set me back. So, I’ll blame it on the weather.

Sunday Morning Reading

Slicing life close to the bone

It could be said that the world is off its axis. Or it could be said that we’re just slicing the meat closer and closer to the bone. Because we don’t know what we don’t know about the war the U.S and Israel launched against Iran I’ll leave off any direct links on that topic for this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. Be warned though, some might be peripherally related. Things happen that way. I’m sure there will be plenty to share in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, here is the usual serving of links on a variety of topics that caught my eye this week. You’re on your own for the tzatziki.

Parthenon 14.

David Todd McCarty is bringing his writings from other platforms to his own site, and some of his earlier writings often strike with new currency. This piece, Defiantly Daft, Duplicity Delicious is certainly one that does.

What is journalism for? Good question these days, but it’s actually been an important one for quite awhile. Take a look at this piece from 1989 from Janet Malcolm called The Journalist And The Murder-I.

Journalism, like everything else, might be under fire at the moment, some of it friendly, some of it not so. Check out Zack Whittaker’s adventure in FBI Agents Visited My Home About An Article I Wrote, And Now I Can’t Go To Mexico.

Tom Nichols says The Republican Party Has A Nazi Problem. Well, duh.

One of the many charges against Artificial Intelligence is what it will do to the cost of the energy needed to power it. Chris Castle takes a look in Update: Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection” Pitch Becomes A Private Power Plan for AI — But Grassroots Revolt Won’t Fade. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

Apple is about to release a number of products this week at a time that it is under increased criticism on a number of fronts. Recently, Jason Snell of Six Colors released The Six Colors Report Card, in which he surveys a number of the Apple faithful on how things went in the last year and compares that to year’s previous. The scores are always interesting, but the commentary is even more so, which you can read here. Also of interest is Kieran Healy’s charting out the bad vibes based on that commentary.

Speaking of Apple, Wesley Hilliard takes a look at some of those bad vibes in Apple’s Week February 27: Chasing The Puck.

On a local Chicago front and also on the tech beat, The Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board takes on a local (yet owned by Albertsons) grocery store’s shopping app in Fix Your Lousy Shopping App, Jewel-Osco! Having suffered through using this app, and watching store personnel and other customers show their distaste for it, I can agree. Fix the lousy app.

Libraries, like so much else, are under attack these days. So this piece from 2017 from Eliza McGraw reminds us of a bit of history. Check out Horse-Riding Librarians Were The Great Depression’s Bookmobiles. Knowledge, like life, finds a way.

Sunday Morning Reading

Weird plants, weird politics, and weird tech

Winter’s back. Though less here in the Midwest than it looks to be on the Atlantic Coast. And it’s another Sunday. So time for some Sunday Morning Reading between shoveling sessions.This day of rest features a collection of writing on tech, politics, science, botany, and bots. There’s even a bit of satire. All written by humans. Not sure who hired them though.

Shutterstock 232794637. Writing satire is tough these days with the world being what it is. David Todd McCarty found a way with The Risk Of Inflation In The Age of Plutocracy. You don’t always get what you overpay for.

Speaking of overpaying, Ed Zitron takes a look at what he sees is a yet another looming financial crisis. This one is The AI Data Center Financial Crisis. It is intriguing that we haven’t heard much about how AI might help fix the rigged accounting game. I mean “fix” as in actually make the numbers resemble reality. h/t to Ian Robinson for that one.

Imagine that. A scientist has discovered a way to harvest water from dry air in the desert. Natricia Duncan takes on the discovery in ‘Reimagining Matter’: Nobel Laureate Invents Machine That Harvests Water From Dry Air. A boon to humanity if it scales. Next work on doing the same for political hot air.

Meet Strongylodon Macrobotrys. Or rather let Neil Steinberg introduce you to the botanical find and the entomological roots of this plant that has its roots in the “intersection of botany and colonialism.” It’s also an interesting story in accountability which seems as rare as that plant these days.

Mike Elgan asks Is AI Killing Technology? The headline might challenge the Betteridge Law of Headlines depending on what vibe you have about AI.

Continuing on the Artificial Intelligence beat for a beat, Kyle MacNeill takes a look at The Rise of RentAHuman, The Marketplace Where Bots Put People To Work. I’ve often said the place to start with replacing humans in the workforce is at the top.

Political winds might seem like they are shifting faster than anyone can predict these days. One thing’s for certain, neither U.S. party owns the mantle of most incapable. Mark Leibovich thinks The Democrats Aren’t Built For This. I happen to agree. But then is anybody? Because who knows what “this” is? It certainly isn’t politics. Bean bag, hardball, or otherwise.

Apple seems to want to change things up with its iPhone hardware lineup over the next few years. Of course that means changes to software as well. Matt Birchtree thinks it’s inevitable that Apple Will Kill iPadOS. I think that’s correct as far as how we think of that OS today.

Whether it’s the Olympics or any other form of competition, once you reach the top, the air is always rare. But it eventually becomes stale. David Pierce takes a look at what it means to be number one on the Apple App Store in The Biggest App In The Whole Wide World.

The Chicago Bears have turned football into a hot political potato with news that they might be moving to Hammond, Indiana. Is it a negotiating tactic or the real deal? Nobody really knows. The Editorial Board of the Chicago Tribune like everyone else is confused saying The Chicago Bears of Hammond, Indiana, Is Bad News For Illinois. But What About Chicago? Oh. In case you didn’t know, we’ve got an election for governor happening in Illinois. Fumbling will occur.

(Image from ppl on Shutterstock)