Stories by Alexandra Silets

Dozens of talented journalists are leaving the Chicago Tribune after its new owner, Alden Global Capital, offered employees voluntary buyouts. Among those who have announced their departure are some of the newspaper’s most notable columnists. 

Interdisciplinary artist Faheem Majeed is using graphite to mark the past, present and future of the South Side Community Art Center, the oldest African American art center in the country.

After record floods in 2019, northern Illinois farmers are now contending with severe drought. According to state data, this spring was the third driest on record — and those records go all the way back to 1871. Two area farmers join us to share their insights.

City Council members are expected to vote on a proposal to rename Lake Shore Drive after Chicago's first non-Indigenous settler, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, after a parliamentary maneuver delayed the vote last month. We discussion that plan and other city business with four alderpeople.

Chicagoans ages 12 and up who choose to get vaccinated at home will get their shot for free and a $50 gift card from food delivery company GrubHub, officials said.

President Joe Biden plans to lay out new steps to stem a rising national tide of violent crime, with a particular focus on gun violence, as administration officials brace for what they fear could be an especially turbulent summer.

The delay comes as city officials wait for U.S. Treasury Department officials to decide whether they will give Mayor Lori Lightfoot the green light to use $465 million in federal funds to pay off high-interest debt the city incurred to balance its 2020 and 2021 budgets.

How much is nature worth? The Forest Preserve District of Cook County is about to find out. The district’s board of commissioners has thrown its support behind a proposal for a ballot referendum that would put a property tax increase for the preserves directly in the hands of voters.

President Joe Biden said Tuesday that his administration needs to “bring every resource to bear” to deal with natural disasters as huge swaths of the country have already endured extreme weather with the summer season just starting.

When U.S. law enforcement officials need to cast a wide net for information, they’re increasingly turning to the vast digital ponds of personal data created by Big Tech companies via the devices and online services that have hooked billions of people around the world.

The U.S. government is stepping up efforts to get younger Americans vaccinated for COVID-19 as concerns grow about the spread of a new variant that threatens to set the country back in the months ahead.

Chicago Public Schools is advising administrators against contacting police in non-emergency situations and will remove “criminalizing” language from its student code of conduct in an effort to help eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline, according to a proposed set of revisions.

The third time did not prove to be the charm for a proposal to build hundreds of apartments near Higgins Road and Cumberland Avenue. Instead, the City Council’s Zoning Committee voted 11-2 Tuesday to table the plan from GlenStar.

A Chicago man robbed two Iowa gas station employees at gunpoint and confined them in a cooler before he fired 10 shots at a sheriff’s deputy who responded to the crime, seriously wounding him, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Homeowners and businesses cleaning up from strong storms that produced two tornados Sunday night, including an EF3 that tore through the Naperville area, should be on alert for scammers, according to Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul.

A year after the launch of a program aiming to provide 100,000 Chicago Public Schools students with free high-speed internet for four years, city officials have announced plans to extend the program further.

An EF0 tornado, with maximum winds of 85 mph, touched down in Plainfield late Sunday, carving a 3.2-mile path to southwest Romeoville before dissipating near the Mistwood Golf Club, according to the National Weather Service.

In the eyes of the law, pets are property when it comes to divorce, but new ways of working out custody of the dog, cat or parrot have sprung up with special mediators and “petnups” to avoid courtroom disputes.

Two people were fatally shot and another 10 were injured this weekend on the city’s West Side. How a local anti-violence group is working alongside the community to prevent further violence.

Have you ever thrown out a broken bike or any of its spare parts? There’s a chance a local bike club scooped up that trash to make a work of art on wheels. We visit Logan Square to learn about the city’s bustling custom bike culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought Chicago’s nightlife scene to a halt. How businesses are faring — and hoping to rebound — now that the city is fully reopened. 

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday the NCAA can’t limit education-related benefits that colleges can offer their sports stars, a victory for athletes that could help open the door to further easing in the decades-old fight over paying student-athletes.

Chicago’s police superintendent said Monday that his decision to strip an officer’s police powers was tied in part to the officer’s ownership of a house on the city’s South Side where gunmen killed five people and injured three others. 

A cutback in flights for a major airline. Crain’s Chicago Business editor Ann Dwyer takes us behind the headline of that story and more business news.

After conducting a preliminary survey of Sunday’s tornado site in the western suburbs, the National Weather Service said it has determined the twister was an EF3, the strongest to touch down in the Chicago metropolitan area since 2015.

Though many Chicagoans found refuge in nature during the pandemic, the physical Nature Museum in Lincoln Park has been shuttered since spring 2020.