It's a familiar story: after taking an entry-level test, would-be firefighters claim racial discrimination kept them from getting a job and take their case to the highest court in the land. But unlike last year's New Haven, Conn. case where white firefighters were the plaintiffs, this year more than 6,000 blacks from Chicago are making the same claim, the Tribune reports. more ›

Coalfire is a new New Haven-style pizza parlor on Grand owned by longtime Matchbox bartender J. Spillane and partner Bill Carroll (Unrelated, Matchbox has the best margarita in the city, hands down). Now, anyone who's eaten at Piece is familiar with New Haven-style pie. The twist with Coalfire is that the pizzas are baked in a coal-fired oven, hence the name. The Reader's "Food Chain" blog has been keeping up on the Coalfire thread over... more ›

This week we turn our attention — and our beer-hunting skills — to the neighborhood Nelson Algren lovingly wrote of. Well, not that particular Wicker Park. That one's been gone for years. We don't presume to know what Algren would have thought of modern-day Wicker Park, but we're sure he would have dug around to find its seedy underbelly, somewhere between the designer handbags and strollers. Would he have written of the ambivalent detente between... more ›

Chicago’s famous for eating its own so it’s no surprise that the almost immediate backlash against Liz Phair started here. Whether it was her not-so-rock-and-roll upbringing (born in New Haven, Connecticut; attended New Trier High) or Brad Wood’s involvement with Exile in Guyville, critics of her work have often tried to explain away her success as a carefully constructed artifice. more ›