Read Beat (...and repeat)

When you talk about great Chicago cuisine, you're talking about Italian beef sandwiches, deep dish pizza and the Chicago hot dog. Those are just some of what's covered in "Made in Chicago," a guide book to 30 different Windy City delicacies gathered by two Chicago journalists, Monica Eng and David Hammond.
While Eng is a reporter for Axios Chicago and cohost of the podcast Chewing, Hammond is the dining editor for Newcity/Chicago magazine.
The pair know their stuff. Hammond runs down several possible origin stories for the legendary Italian beef while Eng traces influences on the "culinary 10-car pile-up known as the Jim Shoe" to Greek, Italian, Jewish, African American, Pakistani, Palestinian/Jordanian, Mexican and stoner culture. 
For the uninitiated, the jim shoe has corned beef, roast beef and gyros meat on a sub roll topped with giardiniera, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, mayonnaise, cheese and "a liquidy approximation of tzatziki."
The guide also identifies the places that sell the Chicago goodies that Eng and Hammond write about--like Fat Johnnie's Famous Red Hots in Marquette Park on Chicago's South Side, "a landmark of Chicago food greatness," noted Hammond.
Fat Johnnie's is believed to have originated the Mother-in-Law, a Chicago corn roll tamale in a hot dog bun, covered in chili, dressed like a dragged-through-the-garden Chicago hot dog, he stated.
Eng goes back to WWII and the transfer of some Japanese American citizens to Chicago to lay out the origin of Akutagawa--hamburger meat with chopped onions and green pepper, bean sprouts and scrambled egg served with a side of race and gravy.
The two writers also helped Steve Tarter understand the no-catsup provision on a Chicago hot dog although Hammond did say that some Chicagoans may have gone too far in their objection to the red stuff. 

When you talk about the state of rural America, the story usually involves boarded-up storefronts and shrinking downtowns. Declines in jobs and population in small towns in Illinois and across America stretch back decades. 

But Norm Walzer and Chris Merrett have just produced “Rural Areas in Transition,” a book that sees new hope for rural America, hope spurred on by technology. 

The book shows that rural areas are in a major long-term transition and that local leaders who take advantage of these opportunities in their community and economic development strategies can create a very positive future for residents.

“We now have opportunities for people who live in places where they’d like to live and couldn’t in the past because they had to go to work every day,” said Norm Walzer who founded the Illinois Rural Affairs Institute at Western Illinois University in 1989. 

“It’s debatable as to what’s going to happen in the next few years—whether companies will call people back to work in the office—but without question I think there’s going to be a segment of the population who will continue to work not in the office every day. They’re going to work from home, wherever,” Walzer said.

“That opens the opportunity for them to live elsewhere,” he said. In addition, Walzer said advances in telecommunications also allow telemedicine to serve rural citizens who may not live close to a medical facility.

Institute director Chris Merrett said Mattoon offers affordable, dependable broadband and also benefits from being located near an interstate highway and is a town with passenger rail service. Small towns need to examine what assets they have, he said. “Then the challenge is can you bundle them and market them to attract people?” said Merrett.

“I’m optimistic that if you can convince local places to proactively think about their future, come together to think about their future, great things can happen whether it’s setting up a cooperative grocery store, increasing broadband service or filling up empty storefronts in the downtown,” he said.

“We underestimate the ability of rural communities to make a positive change,” said Merrett, adding, “When a community makes a plan, it strengthens relationships within that community.”

Walzer and Merrett wrote two of the book’s 13 chapters. Other contributors include some of the nation’s top rural economic development specialists.

Rachel Koller Croft is on her first book tour …and loving it. A screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles, Croft has added novelist to her job description with the recent publication of “Stone Cold Fox,” a thriller about an ambitious woman who wants to leave a dark past behind to marry an heir to one of the country’s wealthiest families but first must go toe-to-toe with a female adversary.

Croft shared “breaking news” with Steve Tarter that “Stone Cold Fox” had just been picked up as a possible TV series to feature her both as writer and executive producer.

But Croft didn’t settle into success immediately. After college (a 2008 graduate from the University of Minnesota), she headed west to California to make her mark, she said. “The first job I got there was a very popular celebrity gossip blog. I remember thinking then that I had made it but it really was not my calling,” said Kroft who moved back to Chicago “a little deflated about my writing dreams.”

“I needed a real job and ended up working in sales (in Chicago) which was pretty fortuitous for me. What people don’t tell aspiring screenwriters is that you have to go into a room and pitch yourself and your story so I’m actually very glad I got that work experience,” she said.

Her return trip to the Golden State turned out to be more productive. Using her own experience taking road trips to Nashville from Chicago with her girlfriend (both love country music), she fashioned “Torn Hearts,”  a screenplay about two women musicians who travel to the Music City in a story blending country music and horror.

As she tours the country, Croft blends an extrovert’s delight with meeting new people with stories about her “Stone Cold Fox” characters which she described as “little monsters.” 

“Burner” is the new action adventure novel, the 12th in the “Gray Man” series by Mark Greaney, but it could also describe the author’s career who’s definitely been on a hot streak in recent years.

“The Gray Man” was the most-watched movie of 2022, according to Netflix, and there’s now a second film in the works. Meanwhile Greaney keeps pouring out the novels. This year he’s due to turn out his 13th Gray Man story and the second in the Joshua Duffy series, a new character who debuted last year in “Armoured.”

Greaney got the idea for the Gray Man (Court Gentry) while traveling in Central America, he said. He saw an American at a bar and made up an entire back story that the man was a former CIA agent, living off the grid and taking jobs as they came.

As a collaborator with Tom Clancy in the last three novels Clancy wrote before he died, Greaney was steeped in the intricacies of writing the adventure novel, even continuing to pen Jack Ryan stories after Clancy's death (though Clancy's name still was prominent).
 
In “Burner,” Greaney ties in the Russian invasion of Ukraine into the action—not with any involvement in the Ukraine but in terms of Russian money laundering. A story right out of the headlines, as the movie trailers used to say. Greaney told Steve Tarter that it was a calculated gamble to write about a war that broke out last spring without knowing what was going to happen a year later.

As it turns out, the war goes on and Russian actions (and finances) have never been more newsworthy. Greaney scores again.

Writing books about international intrigue involves plenty of travel and Greaney noted he’s now visited 38 countries in the course of writing his novels. The most recent effort took him to Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, Milan and Zurich, he said.
In the course of the interview, Greaney revealed that his favorite action movie was "The Man From Nowhere," a gritty Korean film about a former assassin who befriends a little girl.

Jeff Karzen is a sportswriter who’s now telling the world what Peoria sports fans already know: that basketball plays a major role in the community.

A hotbed of talent since the 1980s, Peoria has produced a number of standout players, such as Shaun Livingston, A.J. Guyton, Marcus Griffin, and Sergio McClain – just to name a few. The city captured six high school state championships – including Manual High’s run of four straight championship titles from 1994-97 – and boasted four Illinois Mr. Basketball winners.

But Karzen’s book, “Playgrounds to the Pros: Legends of Peoria Basketball,” along with coverage of the game, also includes a view of Peoria’s South Side, the poor side of town where the income is low and the crime rate high. But the neighborhood has strong people--and talented players. He notes the positive effect basketball has had not only on this area but the entire region.

“It just kind of popped in my head that there might be some great stories to tell here that haven't been told before,” said Karzen, who pulls the curtain back on the great players and coaches that made Peoria a basketball hotspot.

The history of air travel in this country has been marked by a number of celebrated moments in history—the Wright Brothers’ first ascent, Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and the crash of the Hindenburg crash of 1937 (that effectively ended the airship era) are among the best known. But the air race of 1919 that drew 63 flyers in a competition that pitted them against each other in an effort to cross the country not once but twice might have escaped your attention.

John Lancaster’s “The Great Air Race” documents the effort of these air pioneers who competed at a time with planes that lacked the many tools that help navigate the skies today and before airfields were fully established in many parts of the country.

It was a time—just after WWI—when airplanes were being looked at for transporting mail. Billy Mitchell, a military man who saw airplanes as a future necessity, is profiled as the catalyst for a race that would promote the potential of flight—even at a risk.

As Lancaster told Steve Tarter, nine people died (two on their way to start of the race) out of 63 entries, a pretty grim percentage. While the race drew attention and crowds who welcomed the brave, young men who flew and worked on the planes (a mechanic was a valuable addition at a time when gas-engines had a tendency to misfire in flight), it also drew the ire of editorialists who condemned the whole thing as a publicity stunt, noted Lancaster.

Planes that had been used to engage in wartime encounters were not built to cover long distances. They also lacked instruments to help pilots when they faced blinding rain, fog or snow, all conditions faced in the 1919 race.

Lancaster also tells the story of Belvin Maynard who won the race, an expert flyer and navigator who was fortunate enough to avoid the storms that slowed other participants. While meticulous in his approach to the great race, Maynard may have gotten complacent. He was killed at the age of 29 when his plane crashed at an air show just three years later.

A pilot himself, Lancaster also included a chapter on his own flight in 2019, recreating the course the flyers took 100 years earlier. Despite the many improvements and safety precautions, danger still lurked. 

“More than the wind or any other aspect of the weather, fatigue was my biggest challenge,” he wrote. “Landing at a satellite airport near Salt Lake City after a memorable flight over the steep forested canyons of the Wasatch Range, I skidded my turn to final approach and let my airspeed sink dangerously low. It was the same sort of low-altitude carelessness that had killed Dana Crissy and Virgil Thomas just a few miles away and a hundred years earlier, on the first day of the race.”

 Joe Sawchak is a collection assistant for the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pa. We called him to talk about the hell pig, the prehistoric creature that was completely in charge of the planet for more than 10 million years.
You always have to wade through a lot of names when it comes to paleontology but don’t let that stop you from marveling at this specimen. A strange warthog-like creature (only a lot bigger) with four sets of teeth falls into the category of entelodonts. 
It’s referred to as Dinohyus at the Carnegie Museum. That means “terrible pig” (now you can see where the hell-pig label came from). Oh yes, it’s also referred to by another name, Daedon, but don’t let that throw you; that’s just one of those apatosaurus/brontosaurus things where a creature of the past gets tagged with two names. 
Whatever you call it, the hell pig must have done a lot of damage in its day.
We called Joe because his museum is home to what is probably the most complete, best-preserved fossil skeleton of this terrible pig that’s ever been discovered. In 1905, Carnegie Museum field collector T. F. Olcott unearthed this skeleton from the Agate Springs Fossil Quarry in Nebraska. But the museum has something else, something that’s no longer on display but is stored away in the museum’s Big Bone Room.
To snake a peek, check out the Carnegie Museum website with Joe's description athttps://carnegiemnh.org/dinohyus-terrible-pig-in-more-ways-than-one/ 
It’s a replica of the hell pig, made shortly after the museum put their entelodont skeleton display early in the 20th century. “To several members of the (vertebrate paleontology) staff, including myself, the model—lovingly known as the Hyus—is perhaps even more horrifying than the actual creature itself,” noted Sawchak in a blog on the museum site.
It’s the model’s eyes, said Joe. “They seem so ‘emotive’ or ‘human’ that it’s disturbing. It almost seems as though they’re staring right into your soul,” noted Sawchak.
If anyone ever had run into a real-life hell pig,  it's disturbing to think about is what it might have done to a mere human. As big as a buffalo with a three-foot head full of teeth and an appetite for just about anything living or dead, this pig meant business. Thankfully, they exited the planet over 15 million years ago.
It was fun talking with Joe, a dinosaur fanatic who clearly loves his job, and the man who took us inside the Big Bone Room for a glimpse of the past.

Alice Boyes believes you can be more productive. You just need to learn what helps you innovate, produce, and flourish... without the burnout. Her book, “Stress-Free Productivity,” gives you the ability to formulate your own personalized system.

Now with more people than ever working outside the office, there’s a greater need than ever to be personally productive, the former clinical psychologist said. “People do need a strategy to cope with uncertain times,” she told Steve Tarter.

You can boost your own creativity just by trying, she said. “Creativity is easier to ignite than people think,” said Boyes. 

There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all productivity plan, she said. The tricks that work for your colleague may not work as well for you. Or perhaps they don't work at all. The fact is that everyone has their own productivity quirks to make them work efficiently and effectively. They just don't know how to crack them, said Boyes..

So the Midwest is fly-over country, is it? Everything that’s worth anything is found on the U.S. coasts, is that what you think? Then you need to hear from Jon Lauck. His book, “The Good Country,” helps offset what some scholars’ have put out there. Lauck, who edits the Middle West Review and teaches history and political science at the University of South Dakota, serves up a more detailed picture of the American Midwest. 
 The American Midwest, by Lauck’s account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the 19th century. The region developed a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date.
 The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest’s dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity, the author noted. 
The “good country” was, of course, not the “perfect country,” and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest’s openness to women in higher education.
Lauck told Steve Tarter that the decline that's hit the newspaper industry across the country has hit the Midwest hard. "The Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch used to be major forces in American life but they've been cut back so much that they don't have the presence they used to have. We need to reverse that and give our region a stronger voice," he said.

If you can keep up with all the names, this is a prehistoric creature that may interest you. The entelodont, otherwise known as dinohyus or daedon, was a strange looking animal that spent almost 20 million years on the planet, finally going extinct about 17 million years ago.
There's a catchier name for this beast: hell pig. As paleontologist Scott Foss put it, this was a pig-like animal as big as a bison with huge teeth. "There was no other animal like it," said Foss, who did his dissertation on the hell pig at Northern Illinois University.
You can find an excellent entelodont skull at the Field Museum in Chicago, said Foss, who did most of his museum work there while working on his doctorate at NIU.
Foss compares the hell pig with a bear in that the animal ate a little bit of everything.
"A bear is an opportunist. It can take down a deer but it will also eat salmon, berries or insects," he said.
Likewise, the hell pig, with four different kinds of teeth in its huge mouth, could munch on flesh or vegetation. Foss believes the entelodont was a top predator/scavenger. Just as hyenas will steal a carcass from the lion, the entelodont had the tools to take any carcass it wanted, he said.
The fact that the creature roamed across America for millions of years is proof of its dominance but Foss, the division chief of education, cultural and paleontological resources with the Bureau of Land Management in Santa Fe, N.M.,  thinks the animal has been generally overlooked by the public when it comes to prehistoric predators. 
"I don't understand why entelodonts aren't on the cover of every fossil book. Look at the face of that thing," he said.