Author: John Kass

Not every child can be saved. Not every kid who grows up broken can be steered away from bad choices by caring adults toward some new life, one with a purpose. But Valerie Groth, a veteran Chicago Public Schools social worker at New Sullivan Elementary School on the South Side, believed she had found that […]

As he seeks to rebuild the Russian empire, strongman Vladimir Putin has developed a terribly obnoxious habit. He keeps dragging the Obama White House back to a difficult place. It’s called “reality.” Putin’s military capture of Crimea, a region of Ukraine, is just the latest example. His could be an act of willfulness, or a […]

You probably won’t believe this, but I aim to help Hillary Clinton fulfill her destiny and rule the world. But the thing is, she has a problem. You wouldn’t know it from reading or watching the news. That’s because in most newsrooms across America — and perhaps even in some place called “real life” — […]

SOCHI, Russia — There are two things I probably forgot to mention about my time here at the Winter Olympics in Russia. But now that I’m wrapping up, I’ll tell you. One is that there are palm trees everywhere, the fronds wafting in the warm breezes off the Black Sea. Palm trees just say “Winter […]

SOCHI, Russia — About the only difficulty I’ve encountered here, wandering alone, far from the official Winter Olympics staging grounds, has been my inability to speak Russian. Still, I’m able to communicate somewhat effectively, as I often do at home with our earthier elected officials, through use of broad pantomime, exaggerated facial expressions and voice […]

SOCHI, Russia — What do you do in Sochi? I just arrived here, it’s late, I’m exhausted, but I’m going to find out. That is, after I sleep for about a day and a half. 05 The Winter Olympic Games open later this week, protected by a security cordon called the Ring of Steel. It […]

It’s sad, yes, but America probably hasn’t fully grasped the terrifying truth about President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. He has two more to go. Two more? Ye gods! The prospect of listening to him blah blah blah his way through two more of these annual speeches is enough to cause the nation […]

The post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories I liked best as a boy weren’t space operas on distant planets, involving warlike aliens who (weirdly enough) spoke guttural English, as if they were KGB officers in some action movie. The sci-fi I loved took place right here, on Earth, our Earth, the Earth of the future after the fall. […]

I wasn’t eager about seeing “Lone Survivor,” the new film about four U.S. Navy SEALs forced to fight a terrible and heroic battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan. What worried me was that it would turn out to be a typical Hollywood war movie, with archetypal characters (the city kid, the cynic, the country boy, […]

What if you woke after a night of uneasy dreams to find a strange man standing in your bathtub? Don’t be alarmed. The strange man isn’t some stark naked psycho. The strange man is fully clothed. Polite, even, efficient, neat and obviously well-educated. He has a camera pointed at you. And the camera is rolling. […]

Nice tan, Mr. Mayor! You came back from steamy and tropical Indonesia to a city frozen in ice and snow, where the side streets and alleys hadn’t been plowed and where schoolkids were almost sent into the worst of the cold. But Rahm Emanuel wasn’t worried. He held a Monday news conference about the cold, […]