HARD CRACKERS

Almost two weeks ago, I thought that I might have been exposed to someone with the COVID infection.  I waited for a week and then my wife, Laurene, and I went to a nearby testing site—consisting of a dozen trailers in what had been an empty lot.  This was right before Thanksgiving and the line […]

On Thanksgiving morning supporters of President Trump’s doomed reelection effort descended on the Loop neighborhood of Chicago to raise the battle cry “Stop the Steal!” The “steal” in this tortured locution is the purported Democratic Party theft of the November presidential election, chronicled in a convoluted conspiracy theory that one conservative federal judge recently compared […]

54-46 was Toots Hibbert’s prison number.  He sang it out loud on the electrifying track 54-46 That’s My Number (1969), one of a crop of tunes that made Toots and the Maytals a household name on the island of Jamaica and soon thereafter in a lot of other places too.  Toots Hibbert, the reggae singer, […]

There have been a number of reviews written about Aaron Sorkin’s film The Trial of the Chicago Seven (available on Netflix). The film is a fictional account of the trial of leaders of the anti Vietnam War movement who came to Chicago in 1968 to protest both the Democratic Party’s nomination of “New Deal liberal” […]

Note from the Editors:  A few weeks ago, we ran an interview with Marty Brown, a descendant of one of John Brown’s children. We had come across Marty via a letter that she wrote to the New Yorker Magazine. She allowed us to interview her for Hard Crackers. The gist of Marty’s letter and her […]

My mother Leah frequented the Durban Public Library in South Africa at least once a week.  As the youngest child, I was often forced to tag along with her.  I enjoyed those sessions.  I used to haul out the dinosaur books or the big portfolio tomes about the pictorial history of World War One.  I […]