Adam Langer is the Forward’s executive editor. Born and raised in Chicago, he is the author of the novels Crossing California, The Washington Story, Ellington Boulevard, The Thieves of Manhattan, The Salinger Contract and Cyclorama, as well as the memoir My Father’s Bonus March.
This is the part where you first read the news. This is the part where you still think it might be a hoax. This is the part where you learn that it isn’t. This is the part where you recall where you first became aware of his music — in a friend’s family home in…
I had been on the fence about who I’d support in the Democratic primary and it sounded like a good pair of field trips — take my 5th grade daughter to one Bernie Sanders event and one Hillary Clinton event and, on the basis of her reactions, decide who I’d vote for. Whitney Houston may…
There’s a lesson in Kenneth Lonergan’s new play “Hold On To Me Darling,” which opened on Monday, March 14 at the Atlantic Theater Company. But I kind of doubt it’s the lesson the author intended. Lonergan is one of my favorite playwrights, which isn’t to say that he’s the author of my favorite plays. Like…
Haskell Wexler, one of the film world’s most gifted cinematographers, has died at the age of 93. A two-time Academy Award winner and three-time nominee for movies such as “Bound for Glory,” “Blaze” and “Matewan,” Wexler was born in 1922 to a Jewish family in Chicago where he befriended future influential publisher Barney Rosset and…
We grew up Irish on Chicago’s northwest side. Or maybe Scottish. Possibly Welsh. Somewhere from that general part of the world, anyway. My mother has always been fond of Irish names — she would’ve named me Shawn, she said, if she hadn’t named me after her father, Abe, an inventor with fiery red hair; whenever…
Donald Trump’s use of the term “schlonged” may have been the most recent example of a Yiddish curse hitting the mainstream. But it’s hardly the first. In fact, the term schlong has been swinging around pop culture for quite a while. Here are seven of the most noteworthy uses of the (rather unpleasant) term: 1969…
In “Changing Places,” a terrific academic novel by David Lodge, a professor and his colleagues play a literary parlor game called “Humiliation.” In the game, the players attempt to one-up each other in admissions of ignorance by confessing the most inexcusable examples of books they haven’t read. When Professor Howard Ringbaum admits he never read…
In analyzing the presidential race, former Mitt Romney strategist Stuart Stevens was quoted in today’s New York Times as saying, “Every day in a campaign is ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ And that’s the hardest thing. You’ve got to decide where you’re going to live and where you’re going to die.”
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