Sarajevo, Chicago, and the memory of cities old and new.

Thirty-three years ago, a Chicago man was sentenced to death for murder. In 1999, another man confessed to the crime. Today, they are both free.

Fear, racism, and the historically troubling attitude of American pioneers.

The story of Tyrone Hood, who served 21 years for a murder he didn’t commit, and the Chicago criminal justice apparatus that allowed a serial killer to go free.

A Japanese photographer examines the scene of the St. Valentine's Day massacre; a story from the author of The Black Hour.

"Was it the worst I’d seen? I turned to the camera, viewing the scene anew. Four men lay in a row, as though they had been tucked into a large bed. One slept at their feet, face down. The last hunched on his knees at a round-backed wooden chair. Blood ran toward the center of the room. Later that day when I returned to the newsroom, I would release the image from the machine in my hands, like a dragon from a cage. The city would see the blood, black, and no one would remember that someone—call him Togo or call him Fujita, the name will not be printed—had stood in the dust of men’s bones to face the dragon so that they did not have to."

A Chicago housing project resident reports intruders breaking into her apartment through a medicine cabinet. Days later, she’s found dead.

Inside the criminal operation illegally buying, selling and killing tigers – and selling their meat at the local butcher.

On the “queer roots” of Disco, House, and beyond.

When an antsy tech entrepreneur takes over a struggling newspaper.

How Chicago is key to a business moving tons of drugs for billions of dollars.

An unemployed banker drifts along Occupy protests, his crumbling life, and a crime scene.

"Against the bleachers’ far end, beyond the scope of the cameras, Michael was thinking again about Brussels. The bullet had rung out with plunky subtlety he knew to expect but found disappointing, still. He remembered a cathedral there and the sound he had heard inside of it. This was years ago. The sound he recalled was a cane that he’d heard falling onto the cathedral’s marble floor. The way sound survives inside a cathedral. He remembered looking across the aisle to a hairless woman with earrings dangling halfway down her neck. In the darkness of Chicago, the boy’s body called to him for a closer look, he still had his phone after all, a camera. He could hear the sirens approaching."

How the foreclosure crisis ignited a new form of activism in Chicago’s vacant homes.

How companies and large temp agencies benefit from—and tacitly collaborate with—an underworld of labor brokers, known as “raiteros,” who charge workers fees, pushing their pay below minimum wage.

On the brick stackers of Chicago.

How a Chicago drug organization did business.

The decline and fall of Cabrini-Green, Chicago’s infamous public housing development.

A coffee shop owner finally gets to shut down his store.

As Playboy magazine moves to Los Angeles, the writer considers its place in the Midwest.

No other general interest magazine tried to reach readers in the wide swathe of land between New York and California. “It was a Midwestern magazine, designed for people there. If you wanted it to be hip, edgy, go toe-to-toe with GQ, you were making a mistake,” said Chris Napolitano, a former executive editor who began at Playboy in 1988.

A history of Soul Train’s Chi-town origins.

Life inside the original Playboy Mansion.

When Chicago’s Stevens Hotel opened in 1927, it was the biggest hotel in the world. By the time it was closed, it had bankrupted and caused the suicide of a member of the Stevens’ family (which included a seven-year-old future Justice John Paul Stevens), and changed the city forever.

A veteran reporter investigates his own beating.

On the enduring racial segregation in Chicago and why it’s an issue no mayoral candidate is willing to touch.