Tag: 2025

5 Best Books of 2025

Selections mine, summary via Amazon. In order of publication date.

The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994
Publication date: June 3, 2025

In 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing books to make ends meet and searching the city for his own purpose and fulfillment. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surge in New York City, the ever-bustling epicenter of literary culture and gay life, alive with parties, art, and sex.

Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly
Publication date: June 10, 2025

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles was an unknown young writer taking whatever job he could while pursuing his distant literary dreams. He’d instead become an eyewitness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”

The Jailhouse Lawyer
Publication date: July 8, 2025

Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Publication date: August 5, 2025

On New Year’s Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as “an island of stability “ due to “your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.” Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran. The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country. He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America’s standing in the world. How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?

The Uncool: A Memoir
Publication date: October 28, 2025

The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe—one of America’s most iconic journalists and filmmakers—The Uncool is a joyful dispatch from a lost world, a chronicle of the real-life events that became Almost Famous, and a coming-of-age journey filled with music legends as you’ve never seen them before.

Proposition MM – School Meals

Surely we can all agree on this one?
byu/randytc18 inDenver

Darkstar197
As a beneficiary of reduced or free school lunch for most of my childhood and someone who hasn’t needed government subsidies since i graduated college.. I feel obligated to ensure the future generations never have to be food insecure. Yes from me.

MarionberryFew7660
I have no kids and, at 47 years old, will never have them. I still vote yes for every positive child-related proposition because I’m not a heartless degenerate

Ballotpedia:
Colorado Proposition MM, Tax Deductions and Revenue for School Meals Measure (2025)

The Colorado Tax Deductions and Revenue for School Meals Measure is on the ballot in Colorado as a legislatively referred state statute on November 4, 2025.

A “yes” vote supports lowering the state income tax deduction limits for taxpayers earning $300,000 or more from $12,000 to $1,000 for single filers and from $16,000 to $2,000 for joint filers, generating an additional $95 million annually for the Healthy School Meals for All Program.

A “no” vote opposes lowering state income tax deduction limits to provide an additional $95 million annually Healthy School Meals for All Program, thereby leaving in place the current limits of $12,000 for single filers and $16,000 for joint filers.

Chicago – September 9, 2025

Lincoln Park
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Park,_Chicago

Chess Records
https://bluesheaven.com/

From Keith Richard’s memoir Life:

2120 South Michigan Avenue was hallowed ground—the headquarters of Chess Records in Chicago. We got there on a last-minute arrangement made by Andrew Oldham, at a moment when the first half of our first US tour seemed like a semidisaster. There in the perfect sound studio, in the room where everything we’d listened to was made, perhaps out of relief or just the fact that people like Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon were wandering in and out, we recorded fourteen tracks in two days. One of them was Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” our first number one hit. Some people, Marshall Chess included, swear that I made this up, but Bill Wyman can back me up. We walked into Chess studios, and there’s this guy in black overalls painting the ceiling. And it’s Muddy Waters, and he’s got whitewash streaming down his face and he’s on top of a ladder. Marshall Chess says, “Oh, we never had him painting.” But Marshall was a boy then; he was working in the basement. And also Bill Wyman told me he actually remembers Muddy Waters taking our amplifiers from the car into the studio. Whether he was being a nice guy or he wasn’t selling records then, I know what the Chess brothers were bloody well like—if you want to stay on the payroll, get to work. Actually meeting your heroes, your idols, the weirdest thing is that most of them are so humble, and very encouraging. “Play that lick again,” and you realize you’re sitting with Muddy Waters. And of course later I got to know him. Over many years I frequently stayed at his house. In those early trips I think it was Howlin’ Wolf’s house I stayed at one night, but Muddy was there. Sitting in the South Side of Chicago with these two greats. And the family life, loads of kids and relatives walking in and out. Willie Dixon’s there….

Lakefront trail
www.choosechicago.com

Miscellaneous

Chicago – September 6, 2025

Palmer House Hotel
https://www.palmerhousehiltonhotel.com/

Hop on Hop off Bus
Chicago Bus Tour

The Bean (Cloud Gate)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Gate

Crown Fountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Park

Protestors
https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/09/06/thousands-march-downtown-to-protest-trumps-deportation-threats/

Buckingham fountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_Fountain

Taste of Chicago
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/taste_of_chicago.html

Drone Show