Rick Kogan

The suburb of Burr Ridge was founded in 1956, when Dennis DeYoung was a tiny 9-year-old boy living in the Chicago neighborhood of Roseland, fooling around with an accordion and dreaming some sort of musical dreams.

Comedian Hannibal Buress recently went on a rant aimed at Bill Cosby, a rant — "You raped women, Bill Cosby" — fueled by the many allegations over the last decade of rape or sexual assault by more than a dozen women that have shadowed Cosby's otherwise charmed creative life.

If his life had taken a different turn, Joseph Farina might now be a cop or he might be lugging boxes of fruit and vegetables around the South Water Market. But he is doing neither of those things and instead has his sights set on an acting career. And a few weeks ago, on a bright afternoon, he...

It is remarkable in this celebrity-obsessed age that it has taken so long to receive a full-length biography of Phil Hartman.

That I have spent more than four decades writing for newspapers has done nothing to enlighten me to the mystery of photography. Working with dozens of men and women with cameras who accompanied me on hundreds of stories, I have watched as they did their work and then been consistently amazed at...

The current production of William Shakespeare's "King Lear," playing through Nov. 9 at the handsome and justifiably renowned Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, stars Larry Yando as the increasingly delusional title character and features the music of Frank Sinatra. It is has gotten...

Ebola is now part of our daily lives, inescapable in headlines and on TV, in conversations and nightmares.

Nelson Algren used to write books in and about Chicago. Though his name and reputation have diminished over the last decades, he lingers in the shadows. The Tribune has presented yearly literary awards for short stories in his name since 1981, though some of the winners have not read a word...