March 26, 2026 Edition

MAR 26- APRIL 1, 2026 . VOLUME NO. 33

DR D R. . S SA AK K II R RA A J JA AC CK KS SO ON N II N N L L II V V II N NG G C CO OL LO OR R

E-NOTES Publisher Cheryl Mainor Norman

Editor-In-Chief

Kai EL’ Zabar

Chief Content Officer Managing Editor

Laura Miller

Editorial Assistant Creative Direction Art Director

Malachi Webster CNW Studio, LLC L.D. Hunter

Copy Editor Staff Writers

Intern & Illustrator

Max Blaisdell Malachi Webster Zada Johnson, PhD. Candi McCrary Mila Marshall. PhD. Cabryl Breotti C.L. Blackburn Ryan Willis Dr. Sanja Rickette Stinson Elijah Lee

Cover Photography

Dr. Sakira Jackson

Columnists

Chicago News Weekly, LLC 700 N Sacramento Blvd Suite 320 Chicago, IL 60612 (312) 877-5151 Volume No. 33 March 26 - April 1, 2026 Chicago News Weekly is Published on Thursday www.cnwmedia.com advertising@cnwmedia.com editorial@cnwmedia.com

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Breaking Up is Hard to Do Kai EL’ Zabar - Editor-In-Chief I can hear the words and melody in my mind, even though I can’t remember the group that sang the song, “breaking -up is so hard to do.” Is it? If you put it in context, ‘One of the hardest decisions we ever make in life is leaving a longterm relationship/married or not. You have committed and yet it just isn’t working. Even after you’ve done all the work to correct what isn’t working and why. It remains hard to leave.

You hear the reasons; you recognize the issues, and still, you’re unable to repair or work out those affairs that aren’t working. The matters that make the difference between, “is you or is you ain’t my baby?” So, there you stand at the crossroads in the flux. You know that it may be time to examine moving on and all that it means. But what happened to ‘love conquers all?’ Is that just ‘talk ‘orwhat?

The real question is what are the two of you willing to do, sacrifice and fight for? In my relationship, from where I stood, I felt that I was giving or sacrificing all of the emotional contextual effort while my mate felt that such was too demanding and took away from his ability to focus on his art which was his first commitment because it was an extension of himself The question of love was never in doubt.

We had expressed our mutual love for one another in so manyways over the years.

The hard truth was that we had grown in our viewpoint of shared experiences differently, each feeling unique to our personal views as they impacted us and our future as individuals.

We not only felt differently about the impact of those experiences, but we had changed. Both of us were left feeling unappreciated for our different personal surrender. It was the aftermath where we found ourselves on two different sides of the equation when we had once stood side by side as one. . . no afterglow.

We are emotional beings, and when our heartstrings are tied to those of another, separating from that person can feel like an act of self-inflicted suicide. But is it? Perhaps it’s an act of courage to be self-expressed whereas you may feel oppressed, forced to suppress your unique expression within the relationship in orderfor your partner to be all that they can be. It is not something most of us will take lightly, and many of us will not even recognize the glaring glitch.

We struggle with our desire to remain in a relationship that is unfulfilling simply to avoid emotional pain as well as the mental pain of failure. How could we have been so wrong when it felt so right for two decades?

If we can’t make it, is it an illusion or is it delusional to imagine that such a thing even exists? We may go there and question whether or not we might be better off simply settling where we are; accepting the situation because we do like each other. Yeah, so we choose to make the best of what we have even though it’s not working.

I recall the make-up moment--we had taken a trip that united our closest married friends... three couples plus us. What a good time we had. But when my man asked of me what I was not ready to give which was my unabandoned intimacy, I couldn’t. I heard him, “You have to forgive me, you have to forgive me, you have to forgive me.”And I knew that he was right. In my heart, I had forgiven him but in my mind, I couldn’t forget. . .There was that. Memory had sealed my heart.

On the one hand, we embrace the fairytale of prince charming and the princess; but we also hold on to the possibility that it’s all a farce. We almost savor the idea that true happiness is not out there so that we can avoid the pain of change. On the other hand, we feel within ourselves a yearning to fulfill our desire for relationships that are vital and healing. We note that they are natural and part of the human story. By and by, most of us will follow this call, because deep within ourselves we know that the deep yearning to be happy is innermost what we believe we deserve. Happiness is in our inheritance if we, in fact, live life openly with a sane mind, no matter where we find ourselves in this moment, and we are all justified in moving toward the light. With our heads lifted in the direction towards the sun, we are led to reach for our greatest fulfillment. To get there may mean walking away from one relationship and moving toward the future. From that stance, when you’re open and ready, your future will reveal itself because you have released all that appeared to be holding you in purgatory.

Taking that first step will be hard; it may feel like an asthma attack as you search deeply for that grasp of air. But breathe deeply and take in the happiness that is yours to have, once we have freed ourselves from a situation that has drained our energy. Inner peace will outshine any hardship we undergo to get there. Take that deep breath while keeping your eyes wide open and focused on the horizon. Now, right there, in that moment is when we begin the work of disentangling ourselves from the entanglement of what was once a relationship that no longer wraps around us snug, warm, and comfortable.

Every step after takes us closer to a relationship that will work because we are now in a relationship with ourselves first. That nuance will aid and abate us from the neediness of being with somebody, anybody to feel good about ourselves. You are not looking for a mate to make you whole, but someone with whom to share life. When you are in a relationship with yourself, you are open to the freedom we need to find the happiness we deserve.

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CITY NEWS A Student Is Dead. A City Is Being Used. What the Sheridan Gorman Story Leaves Out MALACHI WEBSTER - STAFF WRITER Sheridan Gorman was nineteen years old. She was a freshman at Loyola University Chicago. She was killed, and within hours her death became part of a national debate over immigration enforcement.

The grief is real and it demands respect. At the same time, her death has quickly entered a policy conversation that extends far beyond the details of the case itself.

By Tuesday, elected officials and national commentators were already citing the suspect’s immigration status in calls for stricter enforcement. In that shift, the facts of the case began to share space with a broader argument about crime and immigration — one that has been studied extensively and, in many cases, contradicts the assumptions driving it.

“There’s this kind of response to treat immigrants as the scapegoats for problems in American society. There’s always these kind of moral panics about immigration. On the one hand, it’s laughable and silly and ridiculous. On the other hand, it’s very dangerous.”

— Charis Kubrin, criminologist, University of California, Irvine A growing body of research has examined the relationship between immigration status and crime. A 2020 peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower felony arrest rates than both legal immigrants and U.S.-born citizens.

A 2025 analysis from the Cato Institute found that U.S. citizens ages 18 to 54 had an incarceration rate of approximately 1.2 percent, compared to 0.6 percent for undocumented immigrants in the same age range. Historical data shows immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than nativeborn Americans in every census since 1870.

These findings do not change the reality of Gorman’s death. They do, however, shape the broader policy debate that has followed it.

Research across institutions — including the Brennan Center for Justice, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the National Institute of Justice — has not found evidence that higher levels of immigration are associated with increased crime rates.

Legal aid organizations and community groups have reported increased concern about enforcement actions, as well as confusion tied to delays in federal immigration processing.

Those delays have been compounded by the ongoing Department of Homeland Security funding lapse, which has disrupted certain administrative functions and contributed to longer wait times for immigration-related cases and appointments.

At the same time, coverage of Gorman’s death has increasingly focused on immigration status as a central detail. Criminologists have long warned that the use of individual cases to frame broader policy arguments can distort how risk is understood, particularly when those arguments “When politicians amplify fears in the population, are not aligned with available data. and then claim they are the only ones capable of providing protection and security from whatever Gorman’s death is a tragedy. The policy debate surrounding it is ongoing. Both are now threat creates the fear, the politician benefits.”

— Graham Ousey, criminologist, College of unfolding at the same time, in the same public conversation, with consequences that extend William & Mary beyond a single case.

In Chicago, the impact of that debate is not abstract. Immigrant communities — including Black immigrants, long-term residents, and families with mixed immigration status — are navigating a period of heightened uncertainty.

The Classroom Without a Teacher: What Chicago’s New AI School Is Really Selling Alpha School promises to revolutionize education by replacing instructors with algorithms. In a city that has spent decades dismantling public schools, the question isn’t whether it works — it’s who it works for. MALACHI WEBSTER - STAFF WRITER The pitch is clean and the optics are futureforward: children in bean bag chairs, laptops open, learning at their own pace while artificial intelligence handles the curriculum. No teacher mispronouncing your name on the first day. No underpaid sub showing a movie because the district ran out of resources. Just you, a screen, and the algorithm that has supposedly figured out how you think.

Alpha School, a private institution with campuses expanding nationally, is coming to Chicago in fall 2026. The model has drawn praise from the Trump administration, including Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who recently highlighted the school’s AIsupported approach. Students spend about two hours a day on AI-driven core instruction, with the rest of the school day focused on what Alpha calls “life skills” workshops. At the Chicago campus, tuition is listed at $55,000 a year, placing it among the most expensive private schools in the city.

Charles Logan, an education researcher at Northwestern’s Center for Responsible Technology, Policy and Public Dialogue, told Block Club Chicago: “The research on personalized learning is mixed at best, and I think the Alpha Schools’ approach to adaptive tutoring is like an open experiment not supported by critical research.” A 2026 Stanford review of more than 800 academic papers found that while AI can help improve student performance, the benefits are less clear when students are later asked to work without AI support.

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“It’s sort of strange to be comparing Alpha’s students to students from a wide variety of very challenging circumstances, rather than comparing their students to other students in elite private schools.”

— Rob Reich, Stanford University — Block Club Chicago It would be easy to dismiss Alpha School as a boutique experiment for affluent families. But in Chicago, nothing about education is ever just about the school. In 2013, the city closed 50 public schools in what was widely described as the largest mass school closure in American history. The impact fell overwhelmingly on Black and low-income communities: University of Chicago Consortium research found that 88 percent of the students affected were African American, and later analysis found that 96 percent of students in the closed schools qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Ten years later, more than half of those school buildings remained unused.

Alpha School’s Chicago campus is in Lakeshore East, in the Loop. Its marketing materials emphasize student autonomy and personalized learning. What they don’t address is what happens when a child who is behind grade level, who has an IEP, who experienced the educational disruption that poverty produces, sits down across from a piece of software and is expected to perform. Alpha’s model replaces certified teachers with adult “guides” not required to hold education degrees. The Pennsylvania Department of Education, reviewing an affiliated charter school application from the same founders, described the model as “untested.” Alpha’s performance claims rest on internal analyses that have not been independently verified.

“DOGE already happened in Chicago. Our public school system was ravaged by the types of policies being implemented at the federal level right now: closing schools, privatizing schools, pushing out workers that have been anchored in the work for a long time.”

— Stacy Davis Gates, President, Chicago Teachers Union The Trump administration moved to eliminate the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology and, according to Education Week, terminated more than 400 federal grants aimed at advancing STEM education in K-12 schools and universities. At the same time, Melania Trump invited an Alpha School student to the 2026 State of the Union.

Chicago has seen this story before — dressed in different language, arriving with different branding, and often landing hardest on the families with the fewest options. Alpha School may or may not be a good school for the children who attend it. But it is arriving in a city that did not create the conditions that make it appealing, and the people most responsible for those conditions are not the ones paying $55,000 a year in tuition.

CITY NEWS 70 Degrees to 40 in a Matter of Hours. Chicago’s Infrastructure Will Not Survive This Forever A severe storm system is moving in. The city’s stormwater and power infrastructure — aging, underfunded, and inequitably distributed — tells you all you need to know about who absorbs the cost of a bad Thursday. MALACHI WEBSTER - STAFF WRITER Wednesday is a warm day in Chicago. By Thursday morning, the temperature will have dropped thirty degrees and the National Weather Service will be tracking severe thunderstorms moving through the metro area. This is climate change in the Midwest — not the slow creep of a rising ocean but the violent swing of a destabilized atmosphere that can go from spring to January in an afternoon.

The meteorology is interesting. The infrastructure question is more important. Approximately a quarter of Chicago’s water and sewer mains are more than a century old. When a major storm event hits, the overflow doesn’t distribute itself evenly. Research from the Center for Neighborhood Technology found that just thirteen Chicago zip codes accounted for nearly three-quarters of all flood damage insurance claims paid in the city between 2007 and 2016. In those thirteen zip codes, 93 percent of residents are people of color. More than 200,000 children live there. More than a quarter of households fall below the poverty line.

“We see more and more people’s homes flooding every year.

This is a severe problem, and it’s only going to get worse — and it’s only going to be felt disproportionately more in those areas that are non-white and lower income.”

— Matthew Shapiro, Illinois Institute of Technology, Stormwater Infrastructure Project

The Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stormwater Infrastructure Project found that Latino and African American communities bear the greatest vulnerability to flooding events in Chicago. The city’s Department of Water Management oversees more than 4,500 miles of sewer lines but does not maintain maps showing the age or capacity of those pipes. Officials rely primarily on 311 flood complaints to decide which sewers to replace.

Chicago is second in the country for the number of properties at risk of flooding, according to First Street Foundation. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District completed flood prevention plans specifically for the South and West Sides two years ago and has refused to release them publicly.

“Water goes into the system and it’s all trying to get to the same point at the same time, and that causes it to back up.

What we focus on is reducing that risk.”

— Brendan Schreiber, Sewer Management, Chicago Department of Water Management

It is unfolding through semiconductors—commonly known as chips—the small but essential components powering not only artificial intelligence, but also smartphones, vehicles, medical devices and the digital infrastructure that underpins modern life.

That overlap is where the pressure begins.

According to Reuters, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence is driving a surge in demand for chips that the global supply chain is struggling to meet. The same high-performance chips used to train AI models are also required by consumer electronics manufacturers, automakers and telecommunications companies, creating competition across industries for limited supply.

That strain is no longer theoretical. On March 18, Samsung said the semiconductor industry is entering what it described as an “unprecedented supercycle,” fueled largely by demand tied to artificial intelligence and the rapid expansion of data centers. A day later, Reuters reported that the company plans to invest more than $73 billion in 2026 to strengthen its position in the AI chip market, a signal that the industry is preparing for sustained, long-term demand.

It is the full weight of decades of deferred investment arriving in a single Thursday afternoon. Broken sewer systems contribute mold, moisture damage, and insurance claim gaps that leave many without recourse after the water recedes. The storms will keep coming. The swings will keep widening. The question the weather forecast does not answer is who has been left standing in the open when the temperature drops.

HOT TOPICS

Who Controls AI? The Fight Over Chips Is Now a Fight Over Power

Artificial intelligence is often framed as a software race, with companies competing over chatbots, image generators and increasingly sophisticated tools.

But the more consequential battle is happening deeper in the supply chain.

A thirty-degree temperature drop with severe thunderstorms is a weather event. But for families in a basement apartment in Greater Grand Crossing or Gage Park — where repeated viaduct flooding traps entire blocks and disrupts emergency response — it is something else.

But those chips are not being produced for AI alone.

They are also embedded in the devices consumers use every day, from smartphones to laptops to connected vehicles. As manufacturers shift production toward AIrelated components, supply for other products can tighten, placing upward pressure on prices and availability.

That is where the story shifts from innovation to economics—and increasingly, to power. On Jan. 14, former President Donald Trump imposed a 25% tariff on certain advanced AI chips, according to Reuters, as part of a broader push to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign semiconductor manufacturing. The United States currently produces roughly 10% of the chips it consumes, a gap officials have framed as both an economic vulnerability and a national security concern.

Those tariffs are narrowly targeted, but the implications are broader.

When the cost of importing chips rises, companies that rely on global supply chains often pass those costs downstream, affecting everything from consumer electronics to industrial production. In a market where chips are embedded in nearly every modern product, the ripple effects rarely stay contained.

At the same time, access to chips is becoming a tool of geopolitical leverage.

LAURA MILLER - MANAGING EDITOR

On March 5, Reuters reported that U.S. officials were considering new rules governing AI chip exports, including proposals that could require foreign governments or companies to invest in U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure or provide security guarantees in order to secure access to advanced chips. The move reflects a growing shift in how semiconductors are being treated—not just as commercial goods, but as strategic assets.

Less than two weeks later, the global dynamic shifted again.

On March 18, Reuters reported that Chinese authorities approved Nvidia’s H200 chip sales in China, allowing one of the world’s most influential AI chipmakers to resume access to a key market after months of uncertainty. The approval underscored the fluid nature of the U.S.-China technology relationship, where competition, restriction and cooperation often exist at the same time.

Taken together, these developments point to a larger reality. Artificial intelligence may dominate headlines, but the real contest is centered on infrastructure—who can manufacture chips at scale, who controls supply chains and who sets the rules for global access.

For consumers, that reality may feel distant. But its impact is already showing up in the cost of everyday technology, the speed at which new devices reach the market and the broader question of which countries and companies are positioned to lead the next era of innovation. Because the future of artificial intelligence is not just being written in code.

It is being built, controlled and increasingly contested through the chips that power it. . . .

So who's zooming who?

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NATIONAL NEWS

Your Body Has Already Been Filed. What Biometric Surveillance Means for Communities the State Was Never Protecting CNW STAFF REPORT There is a Wired excerpt circulating this week from a new book by law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, and its central argument is this: the body you carry into the world — its face, its gait, its biometric signature — is increasingly treated as a searchable document, raising questions about whether the Fourth Amendment is equipped to protect it.

The piece is written as a revelation. For Black Americans who have watched facial recognition software misidentify their faces in cases that have led to wrongful arrests, who lived through COINTELPRO’s surveillance architecture, who have navigated a carceral system that has long treated Black bodies as evidence — the revelation is the part that requires the most careful interrogation.

The technology has advanced rapidly. Facial recognition is now deployed in airports, retail stores, stadiums, and police precincts. Fitness trackers and smartwatches generate continuous biometric data streams: heart rate, sleep patterns, location histories, movement signatures. That data sits in corporate servers governed by terms of service that few people read. Law enforcement access to it has created a parallel surveillance infrastructure, often obtained through subpoenas, data purchases, or legal gray areas that do not always require a traditional warrant.

In Chicago, this is not abstract. The Chicago Police Department’s Strategic Subject List — a predictive algorithm that ranked residents by their estimated likelihood of being involved in a shooting — tracked more than 300,000 Chicago residents at its peak.

African Americans accounted for more than half of all individuals on the list. According to data reviewed

by Chicago Magazine, 56 percent of Black men aged 20 to 29 living in Chicago had an SSL score.

For white men in the same age range, the figure was 6 percent. Of the individuals with the highest risk scores, 85 percent were African American men. The algorithm did not include race as an input variable.

It did not need to. The city’s policing patterns and arrest history encoded race into the output anyway.

“These databases — which captured data on more than 300,000 individuals, disproportionately people of color—have finally been decommissioned-. Given the years of public criticism and a study showing them ineffective, CPD never should have used them at all.”

— Karen Sheley, Director of Police Practices, ACLU of Illinois The SSL was retired under public pressure, but the underlying appetite for surveillance infrastructure has not changed. Biometric surveillance has only expanded nationwide.

Gait analysis software is being developed for use in public spaces. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has accessed driver’s license photo databases in ways that have raised legal and consent concerns in multiple states. State and local fusion centers are pooling commercial data with law enforcement records in ways that rarely generate headlines until someone is wrongly arrested.

Ferguson’s book arrives in a moment when the federal government’s data collection ambitions have expanded, when trans and immigrant communities are acutely aware that the data their devices hold can be subpoenaed, shared, or leaked — and when the gap between who is protected by privacy law and who is surveilled through it has rarely been more consequential. Know thyself, the old adage goes.

Right now, the state knows you first.

Delta Pulled Congress’s Perks. The Shutdown Already Pulled Everyone Else’s The government has been partially shut down since mid-February. A news cycle finally noticed when an airline cut services to members of Congress. That tells you everything about whose inconvenience counts. MALACHI WEBSTER - STAFF WRITER Somewhere in Washington, a senator had to wait in a regular line at an airport. And the country finally paid attention to the shutdown.

Delta Air Lines announced Tuesday that it is suspending special services for members of Congress, including airport escorts and certain VIP rebooking assistance — a pointed response to the partial government shutdown that is now nearing 40 days. The shutdown began February 14, when funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapsed, leaving the Transportation Security Administration operating on emergency footing.

For the country’s legislators, the consequence was an inconvenient Tuesday at O’Hare or Dulles. For everyone else, it has been something considerably more serious and considerably less covered.

“A Transportation Security Officer selling plasma to keep the lights on is unconscionable.”

— Everett Kelley, President, American Federation of Government Employees This is the third shutdown to hit DHS workers in less than six months. Roughly 50,000 airport security officers are working without pay, while more than 61,000 TSA employees are classified as essential overall — meaning they are legally required to report to work whether or not they are being paid.

Absenteeism has climbed sharply. On some recent days, callout rates have hovered around or above 10 percent nationwide, with thousands of officers missing shifts as financial strain deepens. At least 458 TSA officers have quit since the shutdown began, according to DHS.

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Union representatives and agency officials say the impact has been immediate and personal: workers taking on second and third jobs, applying for food assistance, sleeping in their cars, facing eviction notices, and in some cases selling plasma to cover basic expenses.

O’Hare International Airport is the busiest in the United States by aircraft operations. It is also a major employment hub for Chicagoans — particularly Black and immigrant workers in food service, ground operations, cleaning, and security. A sustained DHS disruption does not stay at the terminal. Chicago’s immigrant communities are now navigating a bureaucratic instability that historically lands hardest on the people with the least institutional access to navigate it.

“Most employees live paycheck to paycheck …

This is unsustainable.”

— Johnny Jones, Secretary-Treasurer, AFGE TSA Council 100 This is not the first time TSA workers have absorbed the cost of congressional dysfunction.

Many had barely recovered financially from the last shutdown when the DHS lapse began again in February. The machinery of the country’s aviation system is being held together by people the government has decided it can ask to work for free.

Delta’s move generated a news cycle. The workers who showed up without a paycheck did not. Nobody will pull their perks for that.

COVER STORY

DR. SAKIRA JACKSON The life she chose

BY LAURA MILLER - MANAGING EDITOR

After walking away from everything she built, Dr. Sakira Jackson is helping leaders align who they are with what they create—and own both.

There is a moment Dr. Sakira Jackson can recall down to the details, including the day. It was April 11, 1998, and she was driving when a question arose with a force she could not ignore. “Whose life is this?” she remembers asking out loud. “It’s not mine,” she heard herself clearly say to her higher self.

Even as a child, there were signs that she was not entirely comfortable accepting things as they were given to her. At five years old, she asked her mother if she could change her name. The answer was no, but the instinct behind the question mattered. It reflected a belief that identity was not fixed, that it could be questioned, examined, and, when necessary, redefined.

What made the moment significant was not that her life looked empty. By then, she had a marriage, children, businesses, and responsibilities, the kind of life that reads as full, from the outside looking in.

But what she understood in that instant is something many high-performing people come to realize much later, if ever. Success and alignment are not the same thing. A life can look complete and still feel disconnected by the person living it. That gap would eventually become the foundation of her work.

“I just knew that the existence I was living was not my life,” she says. That awareness did not come with a plan, but it did come with direction. By 13, she had already found her way into a job, determined to create options for herself. When her mother told her that college was not financially possible, Jackson made a decision that would define how she approached obstacles moving forward. “I forged her name on the paperwork,” she says. It was not an act of rebellion. It was a declaration of refusal.

“Whose life is this? … It’s not mine.”

If you meet Jackson now, what stands out first is not force, but ease. Her presence feels composed, intentional, and fully her own. Her photos are vibrant, her style expressive, and she wears a smile that does not read as performance, but as comfort.

There is nothing loud about her authority. It is steady. It shows up in the way she listens, in the clarity of her language, and in how she speaks about hard-earned lessons without needing to dramatize them. You sense everything about her is intentional without being performative. It’s genuine and authentic. What reads as ease today is not the absence of struggle. It is the result of someone who has done the work to become grounded within herself.

“I’m a little girl from the projects.”

Jackson says that without hesitation.

She grew up in Springfield, Illinois, in the John Hay Homes, one of several children raised in a household shaped by both limitation and expectation.

After her mother left her father when Jackson was 12, the structure of the home shifted, but the standards did not. She and her siblings were raised with discipline, responsibility, and a clear understanding that they were expected to think for themselves.

Around that same time, a psychology class introduced her to a way of thinking that felt both new and familiar, hence two things can be true at the same time. An assignment meant to be three pages became twenty-seven. “I knew at that moment that there was something about that field,” she says, “that connected with me. The instinct was there long before the credentials.”

“I thought that’s what love was.”

Jackson married young, and the violence, she says, began almost immediately. By the second or third day of the relationship, he had already hit her. What followed was a 22-year abusive marriage, though at the time she did not yet have the clarity or distinction to fully name it that way. What she was experiencing did not feel foreign. It felt familiar.

“I thought that’s what love was,” she says again, this time with the clarity of distance. Even within that reality, she continued to build. She raised children, created businesses, and moved through life with a level of productivity that concealed what was happening beneath the surface of who she was being.

But functioning is not alignment. A person can be effective and remain disconnected from themselves.

The shift came in a moment that she still remembers clearly. “And something inside of me said, no,” she recalls.

Not long after, that clarity sharpened into something undeniable. On April 11, 1998, while driving, the question returned, this time with an answer attached.

“Whose life is this? It’s not mine.”

“What I did know is that I was no longer going to have the life that I had.”

That eventful of realization came with undeniable clarity. Yet the moment of leaving did not come with a detailed plan. It came with a decision.

Jackson says she gave up everything—the car, the furniture, the life they had built—not because those things didn’t matter, but because peace mattered more. She was willing to figure out what came next if it meant she no longer had to live inside what she had already outgrown.

Her mother’s approach to learning was direct and unwavering. If Jackson asked what a word meant, she was told to look it up. If she still didn’t understand, she was expected to continue the pursuit until she achieved her end goal. That expectation molded more than her academic habits. It shaped how she moved through the world. She learned early that answers were not something you waited for. They were something you pursued.

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COVER STORY What followed was not immediate reinvention, but reconstruction. After the divorce, she spent two years in therapy, twice a week. “I had to learn how to love me,” she says. Before there was a framework, there was ‘the work.’

In the years that followed, she also found love again. “I actually met him online on BlackPeople Meet,” she says, recalling how they met in person on July 23 and married on that same date the following year. “We’ve been married ever since.” She speaks about that relationship with a kind of grounded certainty. “My husband is this person that I… I know God knew what he was doing,” she says.

It is in the smaller details that she describes him most clearly. At one point, she mentions that he built her a greenhouse while he was in a wheelchair. “No, he’s wonderful,” she says, almost brushing past it. The image lingers—a quiet act of care, constructed piece by piece, in a life she once thought might never hold that kind of steadiness again.

“I ran myself into the ground.” Long before her current work took shape, Jackson had already built multiple businesses, navigating growth through experience rather than instruction. One venture expanded into a private label manufacturing company with 10,000 square feet and 50 employees. She secured major contracts, created large-scale activations, and built momentum in spaces where she was often the first.

From the outside, it looked like success. Internally, it came at a cost. “I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” she says.

She knew how to build. What she had not yet learned was how to build in a way that sustained her. Some opportunities worked. Others did not.

She speaks openly about losses, including the financial impact of producing a large-scale Super Bowl event that did not return what she expected.

“I ran myself into the ground,” she says again, now as instruction.

What Jackson came to understand is that success, when it is built from survival rather tha alignment, will eventually ask to be reexamined.

“What they don’t talk about is the soul.”

Her work as a consultant exposed a pattern that extended far beyond her own experience.

Business owners came to her for strategy, systems, and solutions. And while those things mattered, they rarely addressed the deeper issue.

“What they don’t talk about is the soul,” she says. The issue wasn’t information. It was alignment. Many of the leaders she works with have already built something successful, but what they’ve built often reflects a version of themselves they’ve outgrown.

“What creates friction isn’t a lack of knowledge,” she explains. “It’s a lack of alignment between identity, decisions, and direction.”

Instead of leading with strategy alone, Jackson focuses on recalibration. Because once the internal shift happens, everything else begins to move differently. Decisions become clearer. Leadership becomes more grounded. Growth becomes more intentional.

“The internal shift drives the external results,” she says the precision of an exacto Knife.

She describes her work as sitting at the intersection of business, behavior, and belief. It is not just about what a company does. It is about how the person behind it thinks, what they believe, and whether the life they are building actually belongs to them.

“My job is to bring clarity.”

Jackson is also clear that her work is not simply about helping people grow businesses. Now approaching the 10-year anniversary of her Intentional CEO Mastermind, she has refined a model that asks deeper questions about structure, sustainability, and legacy. Through initiatives like Solomon’s Council, her invite-only advisory circle, she works with leaders who are not just looking to scale, but to build in ways that reflect who they are now.

For Jackson, business is never just business. It is an extension of belief, behavior, identity, and stewardship. “I need the psychology of business. I need the biblical business principles that God already set down so I can help people bring those tools into their business practice,” she says.

In her view, the Bible is not separate from business. It is structure. It is instruction. It is stewardship. It is a framework for how to lead, how to build, and how to sustain what you create. And at the center of it all is ownership—not restricted to a company, but the center of a life.

Her backstory gives weight to that belief. She is not speaking from theory, but from a life that required her to rebuild more than once. She knows what it means to perform from strength while carrying private pain. She knows what it costs to build without alignment.

And she knows what becomes possible once a person tells the truth about their life and chooses to live differently.

For years, the question followed her as she continued to build a life thas she could call hers.

Whose life is this?

Now, the answer is no longer complicated. She lives her life.

And this time, it fits.

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SPECIAL FEATURE STAY READY PLAYBOOK TEASER : Imani Maatuka Is Thinking Beyond the Corner Office Before 30, Imani Maatuka, Esq., stepped off the traditional partner track at a major law firm to help lead her family’s Black-owned firm. Here’s why legacy, ownership and access matter.

LAURA MILLER - MANAGING EDITOR Before 30, Imani Maatuka, Esq., made a decision that runs against the way success in corporate law is usually defined. She stepped away from the traditional partner track at a major law firm and into a leadership role at her family’s firm, Maatuka AlHeeti Emkes LLC (MAE Law), where she now serves as managing partner of the Dallas office. MAE Law also has an Illinois office, a detail that makes the conversation feel less distant than it otherwise might.

The move was not driven by a lack of opportunity.

If anything, it was the opposite. “Nothing could have gotten me to leave that place except for the opportunity to litigate alongside my mother,” Maatuka said.

That decision says a lot about where she is in her career and what mattered more. Before joining MAE Law, Maatuka had already built experience inside one of the largest law firm environments in the country, with a clear path forward. But the choice in front of her was less about what she was leaving and more about what she was stepping into: a family firm built over decades, with longstanding clients, institutional knowledge and a reputation that has to be maintained in real time.

It also came with a timeline. “It’s now or never,” she said, describing the moment it became clear that stepping in was not something to put off.

That expectation was not abstract. After watching how quickly stability can shift when a firm is forced into transition, Maatuka said her mother made the plan clear early. “After that experience, she made all of us promise that we would go to law school so that she could one day pass the firm on to the next generation,” she said.

It was not just talk inside the family. Her brother is already practicing law, and her younger brother is on the same path.

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Somewhere in the background of that decision is a conversation many business owners avoid until they are forced to have it. Succession planning is often treated as something that can wait. Maatuka framed it more directly. “Succession planning is you having the foresight to understand that you will not always be here ... but you want the firm to have that continuity,” she said.

It is not just about ownership. It is about whether a business can continue to function when leadership changes. Maatuka pointed to what happens when that planning is missing. “I’ve seen firms close down because the sole partner passed away ... clients left scrambling, staff losing their jobs, and years of institutional knowledge vanishing overnight,” she said.

That reality is part of what makes her perspective resonate beyond law. The same risk exists across industries, particularly for smaller or family-owned businesses where so much of the operation is tied to one person or a small group of people. For minority-owned firms, the impact can be even more pronounced. “When a minority-owned firm is closing unexpectedly, it can leave a void that takes years to fill,” she said.

Still, what stands out most about Maatuka is not just that she stepped into leadership early. It is that she is thinking beyond her own position. In addition to her work at the firm, she is the co-founder of the Bridging the Gap Scholarship Program, an initiative designed to support minority law students entering corporate law. It is a direct response to a pipeline problem that continues to shape who has access to the profession and who does not.

Access, continuity and ownership show up in both parts of her work. It is not just about building a career. It is about understanding what it takes to sustain something and who gets the opportunity to be part of it moving forward.

The full Stay Ready Playbook newsletter will go deeper into Maatuka’s perspective on succession planning, leadership and the practical considerations business owners should not ignore. If you are not already subscribed, this is one worth signing up for

Don’t miss out! Join the Stay Ready Playbook Now!

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SPECIAL FEATURE Closing the Gap: Why Black Homeownership Still Lags—and What It Will Take to Change It CNW STAFF REPORT

Mayor Brandon Johnson Black homeownership in America has never fully recovered. In 1968, when the Fair Housing Act was signed into law, the Black homeownership rate stood at roughly 41 percent. More than five decades later, it has barely shifted. Today, it hovers around 44 percent, compared to nearly 74 percent for white households, according to U.S. Census data. The gap is persistent, and by most measures, deeply structural.

In Chicago, the disparity is even more pronounced.

Black homeownership in the city sits closer to the mid-30 percent range, while white homeownership exceeds 70 percent, a divide shaped by decades of redlining, disinvestment, and uneven access to credit that continues to reverberate across neighborhoods.

Ashley Thomas III has spent decades working within that reality. As National President of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, his focus is direct: expanding access to homeownership and closing a gap that has proven resistant to both time and policy.

“I’m a housing advocate,” Thomas said. “Our mission is simple but urgent: building Black wealth through homeownership,” He expressed when he stopped by CNW Offices in Chicago.

The urgency is not abstract. For most American families, a home is the single largest asset they will ever own. It represents stability, leverage, and the ability to pass something tangible from one generation to the next. Without it, wealth building becomes significantly more difficult.

“This matters because homeownership is still one of the primary ways people in this country build wealth,” Thomas said. “If you’re not in the game, you’re already behind.” .

That reality shows up clearly in the numbers. The median white household holds significantly more wealth than the median Black household, a disparity driven in large part by differences in home equity.

While figures vary by dataset, the gap consistently reflects a compounding disadvantage: those who own homes build equity over time, while those who do not are left without that foundational asset.

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For Thomas, the issue is not just access, but awareness.

Keeana Barber “There’s a knowledge gap that we have to close alongside the wealth gap,” he said. “If people don’t understand the process, or they assume it’s out of reach, they won’t even try.”

That gap begins early. Research from the National Association of Realtors has shown that Black Americans are less likely to receive early financial guidance around homeownership, which can delay entry into the market or prevent it altogether. By the time many prospective buyers begin to consider purchasing a home, they are already navigating a system that feels both unfamiliar and inaccessible.

At the same time, the market itself has grown more difficult to enter. Home prices have risen sharply in recent years, while higher interest rates have made borrowing more expensive. For first-time buyers, especially those without family wealth to draw from, the barrier to entry has only increased. “People still want to own homes,” Thomas said. “That hasn’t changed.

What’s changed is how attainable it feels.”

That sense of distance is shaped by more than just market conditions. Structural barriers continue play a Keeanato Barber significant role. Access to credit remains uneven.

Appraisal gaps—where homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods are valued lower than comparable homes elsewhere—can limit both purchasing power and long-term equity growth. And for many families, the absence of generational wealth means there is no financial cushion to rely on for down payments or closing costs.

“Affordability is a major issue,” Thomas said. “But it’s layered. It’s credit, it’s valuation, it’s the fact that many families don’t have that generational support.” Each of those factors reinforces the next, creating a cycle that is difficult to break without intervention.

That is where policy enters the conversation. Programs tied to the Federal Housing Administration, including efforts to modernize lending standards, are often positioned as tools to expand access. But Thomas is clear that policy alone is not enough—it has to evolve in step with the market.

“Policy shapes access,” he said. “If the policies don’t evolve, then access doesn’t expand. We can’t keep using systems that were built for a different housing market and expect them to solve today’s problems.”

For younger buyers, particularly millennials navigating high costs and economic uncertainty, the path forward requires both preparation and persistence.

“Start with understanding your credit. Understand your finances,” Thomas said. “And don’t count yourself out before you even try.” There are programs designed to support first-time buyers, including down payment assistance and FHAbacked loans. But as Thomas emphasized, those tools only work if people are aware of them and willing to engage with the process.

“Homeownership is still possible,” he said. “But it requires intention.” That word—intention—comes up repeatedly in conversations about closing the wealth gap. It reflects both individual action and systemic responsibility. Because while education and preparation matter, they exist within a broader framework that continues to shape outcomes.

For cities like Chicago, where housing disparities are visible block by block, the stakes are not theoretical.

They are embedded in who owns, who rents, and who has the ability to stay rooted in their community over time.

Thomas does not frame the gap as inevitable. But he is clear about what it will take to close it.

“We can’t accept this gap as permanent,” he said. “It’s not. But it’s not going to fix itself either.”

CNWSTAFF STAFFREPORT REPORT WOMEN ON THE MOVE CNW

WOMEN ON THE MOVE

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, we are reflecting on the spirit of possibility. Pharrell Williams once asked, “Don’t you know that we’re able?” and that sentiment feels especially fitting as we spotlight this final group of remarkable Chicago women. In putting this series together, one thing became clear: this is only the surface. The city is full of dynamic, brilliant women building, leading, creating, and pushing forward every single day. In telling their stories, we found more than inspiration. We found hope for what is still to come. These women are on the move, and Chicago is better because of it.

Ivana Miles

Ivana Miles is an entrepreneur, educator and speaker with more than 30 years of experience in cosmetology, business ownership and educational leadership. She is the founder and CEO of Ivana Miles LLC and Ivana Miles Beauty Academy, a multicultural, healing-centered cosmetology school that equips students with technical skills, business training and leadership development to thrive in the beauty industry.

A graduate of Cornell University’s Bank of America Institute for Women’s Entrepreneurship and the Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women in Business program, Miles has successfully owned five salons and served as a field education leader overseeing 126 salons and 1,400 stylists across the Midwest.

Her academy has reached more than 5,000 young people through cosmetology programs in Chicago Public Schools and surrounding districts, helping bridge education with real-world career pathways.

An active member of Iota Phi Lambda Sorority, Inc., Zeta Pi Chapter, Miles is dedicated to service, mentorship and building generational wealth through education. At the center of her work is a commitment to helping youth and women build confidence, leadership and lasting opportunity. Through Ivana Miles Beauty Academy, she is shaping the next generation of beauty professionals and business leaders with an approach grounded in skill, purpose and legacy.

Ariel DeNey Rainey

Ariel DeNey Rainey is the CEO and founder of Hustle Mommies, a social service agency rooted in policy, advocacy and social work that is transforming how mothers are empowered to lead within their families, businesses and communities. She is also a creative strategist focused on brands, innovation and community building, with collaborations that include Nike, Amazon, Walmart and hip-hop icon MC Lyte.

Guided by her lived experience and a vision for systemic change, Ariel has created groundbreaking initiatives under the Hustle Mommies brand, such as Paint The Hood Orange, a violence prevention and healing movement, and Pitch Like a Mom, a pitch competition that invests in Black mom-owned businesses. These efforts reflect her commitment to addressing community needs through innovative programs that blend advocacy with direct impact.

In addition to her community-based initiatives, Ariel has expanded Hustle Mommies’ reach through programs like #EducateUS, which champions equitable education for urban and rural Black families, and Mom Means Business, a platform designed to cultivate entrepreneurship and financial independence among mothers. Her signature healing program, Mom Who Grew From Concrete, highlights the resilience of mothers overcoming trauma and adversity while creating pathways to wellness and stability. Through these programs, Ariel has positioned Hustle Mommies as more than an organization; it is a movement that builds bridges between mothers and the resources they need to thrive.

Recognized for her leadership and global vision, Ariel was named a 2025–2026 Obama Foundation USA Leader, an honor that underscores her influence in shaping policies and solutions that uplift women and families worldwide. Through Hustle Mommies, Ariel continues to inspire a national and international network of mothers, advocates and changemakers dedicated to ensuring that moms are not only seen and heard but also equipped with the tools to lead change in every sphere of life.

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Deida K. Massey Deida K. Massey is a beauty industry entrepreneur, nonprofit leader and community advocate whose work blends creativity with purpose. A South Side Chicago native, she is the founder and CEO of Reel Beauty Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization that has served girls in Chicago and Chicago Public Schools for more than 20 years, with international programming in Mwanza, Tanzania.

Massey began her career after leaving her role with the Cook County Public Guardian’s Office to pursue makeup artistry in Los Angeles. She went on to build an extensive career in television and film, working on projects including Divergent, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, Transformers 3, Netflix’s Beats, Widows, NBC’s Chicago Fire, FOX’s The Big Leap, Disney’s Saturdays and The Emperor of Ocean Park. Her work spans more than two decades in the entertainment industry, including serving as a key makeup artist across major productions.

As a serial entrepreneur, Massey also founded Bixa Beauty Inc., a vegan-friendly luxury brand that celebrates cultural identity while supporting educational and entrepreneurial opportunities for young women. Through Reel Beauty, she has led large-scale initiatives providing mentorship, education and hygiene resources to girls and families across Chicago and beyond.

She is the author of Face Values: The Foundation of Beauty and co-owner of Last Looks Chicago and Social STEAM Global. At the core of her work is a commitment to service, empowerment and creating pathways for the next generation to lead and thrive.

Karen Ford Karen Ford, a native of Chicago’s south suburbs, has built an impressive career rooted in leadership, resilience, and purpose. Her leadership journey began early as a high school class president and varsity tennis captain. She later graduated Summa Cum Laude from Hampton University with a degree in finance and a minor in leadership studies, where her HBCU experience helped shape her passion for excellence and advocacy.

Karen began her professional career as a financial analyst at IBM in New York before answering her true calling in the automotive industry — returning to a family legacy founded by her parents, Mallory and Nate Sutton. She went on to build her expertise at Toyota Motor Sales in California, excelling in management roles before earning her MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

Today, Karen serves as Dealer Principal of Sutton Ford in Matteson, Illinois, where she and her sister, Karmala, are breaking barriers as two of only three Black female-owned Ford dealerships among more than 3,100 nationwide. Passionate about leadership, legacy, and community impact, Karen is redefining success in an industry historically dominated by men while raising her two sons with her husband, Mario Ford.

And still, this is only the beginning. For every woman featured here, there are countless others making an impact in boardrooms, neighborhoods, classrooms, businesses, nonprofits, and beyond. That may be the most powerful takeaway of all. The talent is here. The vision is here. The momentum is here. As Women’s History Month ends, our appreciation does not. We leave this series encouraged, inspired, and reminded that the future is already taking shape through the women bold enough to build it.

These women are on the move, and we cannot wait to see what comes next.

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ARTS & CULTURE Breakfast at The Auditorium with Alicia Graf Mack

BY KAI EL’ ZABAR

Christian Anderson (@TheKodakChris) As the quests of the media gathered with a few other special guests at the Chicago Auditorium to meet the very special guest. Kenya Merritt, DCASE Commissioner served as the interviewer. As she stood after being introduced the tall slender Alicia Graf Mack standing nearly 6 ft tall who left the Alvin Ailey American Dance theatre in 2015 began her story. She sat gracefully with perfect posture as she spoke, “I have always been in love with dance and often share that I arrived here dancing in the womb.” She added that her mother co-signed that.The young dancer was named the new Artistic Director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on July 1, 2025. She oversees the main company, Ailey II, The Ailey School, and educational/community programs.

Since then, she has spent time planning and making ready the repertoire of work to be presented throughout the country in 2026.

The former star dancer with the company, spoke of her mentor, Judith Jameson who immediately approached Alicia and imparted wisdom pointing to her height explaining it as an asset and to utilize the length of her lines as the power that they are. Alicia spoke fondly of her experience while a member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater but held her professional experience after her departure as important and invaluable in its contribution to her overall ability to all that she wants to do in her current position. She is the fourth person to lead the institution in its 66-year history, succeeding Robert Battle.

Graf Mack previously served as the director of the dance division at The Juilliard School. Just one of the leadership roles she’s held previously.

CHRISTIAN ANDERSON (@THEKODAKCHRIS) YOUR PARAGRAPH TEXT

What we were left with from our shared moment with her is a sense of rebirth for the dance institution and renewed enthusiasm. She brings a youthful exuberance that has been absent, not to take away from the consistant power of dance that the company has continued to bring since Mr. Ailey’s passing. But the sense of a breath of fresh air emanates and permeates from Ms. Graf Mack is undeniable and exciting. I am waiting with bated breath for the upcoming performances at the Auditorium in April.

World renowned ambassadors of Dance and Culture, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to its Chicago home – The Auditorium, Chicago’s Landmark stage at 50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive – with four dynamic performances debuting six new works, April 24-26, 2026. Marking its 57th Chicago engagement at The Auditorium, the company will perform two distinct programs, each featuring Chicago premieres and a finale of the must-see Alvin Ailey masterpiece Revelations. Tickets start at $46 and are now available at auditoriumtheatre.org, by calling 312.341.2300, or at the Box Office at 50 E Ida B Wells Drive in Chicago.

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LIVING CHICAGO Before the Breakthrough: The Questions About Water We Haven’t Asked MILA K. MARSHALL, PHD. - STAFF WRITER On the far South Side of Chicago, where steel once defined both skyline and livelihood, a new future is taking shape. At the former South Works site, the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) promises transformative jobs, investment, and a place in the global race for next-generation technology.

Those issues matter. But they are not the whole story. What has not been publicly examined are the specifics: What environmental covenants govern IBM’s operations at IQMP and how do they explicitly protect the source water that feeds Lake Michigan and the region’s drinking water systems?

At the center of that promise is key tenant IBM. The company plans to bring its Quantum System Two computer to the campus and partner with the state to build a National Quantum Algorithm Center.

The headlines have been optimistic, even celebratory. Illinois has committed roughly $700 million to support the project, helping fund remediation, infrastructure, and the institutions meant to anchor this new innovation hub.

What discharge monitoring requirements are in place, how frequently will they be enforced, and how will they account for cumulative impacts to waterways that ultimately connect back to our drinking water supply?

But beneath that optimism sits a harder, largely unasked question: what guarantees exist that the water sustaining this community, its most basic source of life, identity, and security, will be protected with the same urgency as the technology being built above it?

To understand why that question matters, you have to travel about 700 miles east to the Village of Endicott. Endicott isn’t where IBM’s story as waterpolluting juggernauts begins, but it is the most recent legacy of contamination and ongoing litigation.

For decades, the company used chemical solvents like trichloroethylene (TCE) in its manufacturing processes to clean and produce electronic components. Over time, those chemicals seeped into the soil and groundwater. The contamination didn’t stay contained. It spread beneath homes, schools, and neighborhoods, creating long-term environmental and public health concerns.

Today, that history is not just environmental it is legal. IBM is still facing lawsuits tied to contamination in Endicott and nearby communities, including claims connected to polluted municipal water supplies. Residents have alleged that exposure to these chemicals has affected their health and quality of life, while cleanup efforts and monitoring continue under regulatory oversight. The litigation is ongoing, a reminder that the impacts of industrial decisions can stretch across generations.

Back in Chicago, the land chosen for the quantum campus carries its own environmental past. Heavy metals were identified in soil studies decades ago. Developers have entered the state’s remediation program and received approval to move forward. On paper, the site is being prepared for safe redevelopment.

But paper assurances are not the same as lived experience. Because this is where the two stories meet. A company with a documented history of solvent-related contamination and active environmental litigation is now a central partner in a publicly funded project, located in a community that has already borne disproportionate environmental burdens. And yet, the public conversation has remained narrowly focused on jobs, on displacement, on economic opportunity.

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Who has real-time access to that data and will it be transparent and accessible to the communities whose water, health, and homes are on the line.

If contamination occurs or treatment standards tighten, who pays for the increased cost of cleaning the water: the company, the state, or the ratepayers already struggling with rising water bills?

What financial safeguards are in place to prevent future cleanup costs from being passed on to residents through higher water rates or taxes?

How will regulators ensure that the burden of maintaining safe drinking water does not fall disproportionately on Black and Brown communities already facing higher water affordability challenges?

And ultimately: what guarantees exist that protecting Lake Michigan as a drinking water source is treated not as an afterthought but as essential infrastructure, equal in priority to the technology being built on its shores?

In Endicott, those questions came after contamination. In Chicago, there is still time to ask them beforehand. And Chicago already knows what it looks like when communities do ask loudly, persistently, and together.

On the Southeast Side, residents and environmental advocates recently forced a different outcome along Lake Michigan. After years of organizing, legal pressure, and public testimony, a proposal by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expand a toxic dredged waste landfill along the lakefront was stopped.

In its place, the city has committed to transforming that same site once filled with decades of contaminated sediment into longpromised public parkland.

That victory did not happen by accident. It happened because residents understood something fundamental: protecting the lake is not just about land use it is about drinking water, public health, and who bears the cost when things go wrong.

Because Lake Michigan is not an abstract resource. It is the source of drinking water for millions. It is infrastructure. It is identity. And when it is threatened, the consequences do not stay contained; they show up in water bills, in household budgets, in long-term health outcomes.

Community organizers have begun raising concerns, even attempting to bring the project to a referendum. But the focus has largely remained on economic and social impacts, not the environmental track record of the company at the center of it all.

And that absence is striking. Because the story unfolding on the South Side is not just about innovation. It is about memory. It is about whether we connect the dots between past and present or treat each new project as if it exists in isolation. Remember, Chicago sells Lake Michigan water to over 120 cities, and more will be vying for gallons as their groundwater dries up.

Chicago has an opportunity to lead not just in quantum computing, but in what responsible development looks like in communities that have already given so much. That leadership starts with transparency, with scrutiny, and with the willingness to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions.

Questions like this: If a company’s past includes groundwater contamination, Superfund obligations, and ongoing lawsuits tied to public water systems, what guarantees exist right now that history will not repeat itself here?

Because the future being built at IQMP is real.

But so is the past.

LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS Before You Get Attached: Ask Better Questions This Time Spring brings new beginnings and second chances in dating, but many relationships fail for reasons that were visible early on. The right questions can help you spot alignment before it’s too late LAURA MILLER - MANAGING EDITOR

Every spring, it happens like clockwork. The apps get downloaded again. Profiles get a quiet refresh. People who swore they were done with dating sometime around November find themselves back outside, a little more open than they planned to be. There is something about longer days and warmer air that makes connection feel possible again. Not just casual, but real.

And if we are honest, a lot of people are not just looking.

They are hoping. Hoping this time feels different. Hoping this one sticks. Hoping they are not wasting their time.

But hope, on its own, is not a strategy.

According to the American Psychological Association, a significant percentage of marriages in the United States end in divorce. The exact number is often debated, but the underlying truth is not. Many relationships fail for reasons that were visible early on, but never clearly discussed.

Divorce attorney James J. Sexton has spent years watching relationships fall apart in real time. In interviews, he has said most relationships do not collapse because of one dramatic moment. They unravel slowly, through a series of smaller decisions, overlooked tensions and conversations that never quite happened. That part matters.

Because what often gets missed in the early stages is not chemistry. It is clarity.

The right questions get softened, delayed or skipped altogether in favor of keeping things light and enjoyable.

Nobody wants to be the person who makes things feel too serious too soon. So instead, people go with the flow. They let things build. They assume.

And those unasked questions do not disappear. They settle into the foundation of the relationship. Later, they show up as confusion, misalignment or resentment. What could have been handled in one conversation becomes a pattern over time. Those smaller, unsettled things, the ones that felt insignificant in the beginning, are often the very issues that grow into something much harder to ignore.

I think about that in the context of my own marriage.

Shortly after my husband and I eloped, a friend offered to buy us a cake to celebrate. When she asked what kind we wanted, I said caramel cake without hesitation. My husband paused and said, “Actually, I don’t like caramel cake.”

It caught me off guard.

A couple of years earlier, I had made one from scratch, and he ate it without complaint. In my mind, that meant he liked it. But standing there in that moment, I realized I had made an assumption based on something I had never actually confirmed. He had been gracious. I had been certain. And somewhere in between, the truth had gone unspoken.

Now, in the grand scheme of a marriage, that is a small thing.

We are talking about cake. But it stayed with me.

Because if you can be that sure about something that small without ever asking, imagine how easy it is to do the same with bigger things. Communication. Expectations. Emotional needs. What commitment actually looks like.

That is usually how it starts. Not with deception, but with assumption.

And if people are being honest, a lot of early dating is built on that exact dynamic. Things feel good, so we fill in the blanks.

We tell ourselves a story about who this person is, what they meant and where this is going. Instead of slowing down to ask, we move forward like we already have the answers.

That is how people end up deeply invested in something they never fully understood.

I also spent an embarrassing amount of time watching Blue Therapy on Netflix, and one thing that stood out to me again and again was how often the conflict was not rooted in one huge betrayal, but in basic things that had never really been discussed in the first place. In many cases, the couples seemed to be wrestling with problems that had grown in the silence, the assumptions and the skipped conversations.

Watching it, I kept thinking the same thing: a lot of this might have surfaced much earlier if the right questions had been asked at the beginning.

So if you are starting fresh this spring, the goal is not to interrogate someone or turn a first date into an interview. It is to stay curious long enough to actually understand who you are dealing with. Because attraction is easy. Alignment is where things either build or break. What does a relationship look like for you right now?

This question matters because people often use the same words to describe very different intentions. Someone may say they want a relationship, but that does not necessarily mean they want the same kind of relationship you do. For one person, it may mean consistency, emotional availability and a genuine desire to build. For another, it may mean something that feels good but does not require much structure.

Asking this early moves the conversation beyond vague language and into something more honest. You are not looking for a perfect answer. You are looking for clarity about what they want and what they can realistically offer.

How do you handle conflict when it shows up?

Everybody is pleasant when things are easy. Conflict is where people reveal how they actually operate.

Research from relationship expert John Gottman shows that communication patterns during conflict are one of the strongest indicators of long-term relationship success. So when you ask this question, you are listening for accountability. Do they shut down? Do they escalate? Can they reflect on how they behave when something goes wrong, or do they place the blame everywhere else?

What are you still healing from?

Everybody is carrying something.

The question is whether they are aware of it. This is less about getting every detail and more about listening for ownership.

Someone who can acknowledge what they are still working through is often far more prepared for a healthy relationship than someone who insists they have no baggage at all.

What does consistency look like to you? Consistency sounds simple, but it is interpreted differently by everyone.

People can like each other and still be in completely different seasons of life.

One person may be building something that requires most of their time and energy, while the other is looking for a relationship that requires more availability and consistency. That disconnect matters more than people like to admit. What does emotional safety mean to you? Emotional safety is one of those phrases that sounds universal until two people realize they define it very differently.

According to Esther Perel, modern relationships are constantly balancing closeness and independence. This question helps uncover how someone gives and receives care, and what they need in order to feel secure enough to be vulnerable.

Asking the questions is one thing, but listening to the answers is another.

Vague answers usually signal a lack of clarity. Overly polished answers can sometimes mean someone is telling you what sounds good instead of what is real. Thoughtful, imperfect answers tend to reflect a higher level of selfawareness. But more than anything, pay attention to what happens after the conversation. Do their actions match what they said? Because that is where the real answer lives.

Spring has a way of making everything feel possible again, and there is nothing wrong with that. But if you are going to try again, try differently. Ask better questions. Pay attention to the answers.

And do not confuse potential with compatibility just because something feels good in the moment. The people who avoid asking hard questions early often find themselves answering much harder ones later, when they are already too far in. And by then, the stakes are a lot higher than cake.

For some, it means regular communication, intentional plans and a steady presence. For others, it means something far less structured. A lot of frustration in dating comes from people assuming they share the same definition when they do not.

This question brings expectations into the open before disappointment has a chance to build. What are you building right now? This question is about direction.

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COMMENTARY

The Book of David: When Policy Becomes Tragedy DAVID SEATON - COLUMNIST

The tragic killing of 18-year-old Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman on Chicago’s lakefront is more than just another headline—it is a sobering reflection of the consequences of public policy decisions that too often ignore real-world outcomes.

According to reports, Gorman was walking with friends in the early morning hours when she was approached by an armed assailant and fatally shot.

The suspect, Jose Medina-Medina, a Venezuelan national, has since been charged in connection with the crime. (New York Post) This was not a targeted attack, but rather a seemingly random act of violence that has left a family grieving and a community shaken.

At the center of the controversy is the role of sanctuary policies in Illinois and the city of Chicago.

Federal immigration authorities have stated that Medina-Medina had previous encounters with law enforcement and was released despite those interactions. (New York Post) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has now lodged a detainer request, seeking cooperation from local authorities.

This raises a difficult but necessary question: when policies designed to protect certain populations conflict with public safety, where should the line be drawn?

Supporters of sanctuary policies argue that they foster trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement, encouraging individuals to report crimes without fear of deportation.

Critics, however, point to cases like this as evidence that such policies can create gaps in accountability— particularly when individuals with prior arrests are released back into the community.

But this issue extends beyond any one administration or political party. It speaks to a broader national debate about immigration enforcement, local autonomy, and the responsibilities of government at every level.

The truth likely lies somewhere in between. Public safety and compassion are not mutually exclusive, but policy must be grounded in reality—not ideology.

When even one preventable tragedy occurs, it demands serious reflection, not political deflection.

What happened to Sheridan Gorman should never be reduced to a talking point. She was a young woman with a future—one that ended far too soon. Her story should compel policymakers to re-examine systems that may be failing, and to ensure that safeguards are in place to prevent similar tragedies.

For leaders like Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson, the challenge is not simply managing optics—it is restoring public confidence.

Citizens expect their elected officials to prioritize safety while upholding the law. When that trust erodes, frustration grows, and division deepens.

Accountability is not about assigning blame for political gain. It is about acknowledging where systems fall short and having the courage to fix them.

Because at the end of the day, the role of government is not abstract. It is measured in outcomes—real lives, real families, and real consequences. And when those systems fail, the cost is far too high.

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FOOD & WINE

Peach-Whiskey Barbecue Chicken MARE EVANS - STAFF WRITER If you’re anything like me, you love southern comfort food and there’s none better than the rich Peach-Whiskey Barbecue Chicken dish that grabs and stick to your bones.

I mean you can’t go wrong with two beautifully Southern things: whiskey and peaches! Add barbecue chicken to the mix, and you've got yourself a meal to remember.

INGREDIENTS: 12 whole Chicken Thighs, Bone-in, Skin-on 2 Tbsp. Olive Oil 2 Tbsp. Butter 1 whole Yellow Onion, Diced 1 1/2 cups Whiskey 12 oz. fluid Barbecue Sauce 1 jar Peach Preserves 1/2 cup Water 2 Tbsp. Worcestershire Sauce 4 cloves Garlic, Peeled 3 whole Green Onions, Sliced Thin Reheat oven to 300 degrees.

Heat oil and butter in a heavy pot over medium-high heat. Place chicken thighs, four at a time, in the pot, skin side down. Brown both sides, then remove to a plate and repeat until all chicken is browned.

Pour off half the grease, then return pan to stove. Add onions to pan and stir, cooking for 2 minutes. Pour whiskey into the pot, being very careful if you're using an open flame. Stir and scrape the bottom of the pan, allowing whiskey to reduce for a minute or two.

Pour in barbecue sauce, peach preserves, water, and Worcestershire sauce. Throw in garlic cloves. Stir until combined, then return chicken to the pot, skin side up. Cover and put pot in oven.

Cook for 1 1/2 hours, then remove from oven.

Serve pieces of chicken over a big pile of smashed potatoes.

Sprinkle sliced green onions over the top.

Smells like booze! Stir this around and cook it for a couple of minutes, allowing it to bubble and reduce just a little bit.

Next, pour in a bottle of your favorite barbecue sauce.

And when they’re golden brown and lovely, grab the Jack Daniels (or another whiskey) from your bedside table.

Next, grab some peach preserves.

And *glug-glug-PLOP* Throw in the whole jar. Then fill the jar about halfway full with water. Shake it up to loosen all the leftover bits stuck in the jar. Then pour in the water. And really, it’s not necessary to shake the water in the jar. Just a little tip if you don’t like to waste.

Next, throw in some Worcestershire… Oh! And throw in some garlic cloves. It just… it just feels right. Next up: the CHAAAAAANGE! Then whisk it all together. Give the sauce another stir, then put the chicken back into the pot.

18 MAR 26 - APRIL 1, 2026

Next, grab some peach preserves. And *glug-glug-PLOP* Throw in the whole jar. Then fill the jar about halfway full with water. Shake it up to loosen all the leftover bits stuck in the jar. Then pour in the water. And really, it’s not necessary to shake the water in the jar. Just a little tip if you don’t like to waste.

Next, throw in some Worcestershire… Oh! And throw in some garlic cloves. It just… it just feels right. Next up: the CHAAAAAANGE! Then whisk it all together. Give the sauce another stir, then put the chicken back into the pot.

And pour in the juice from the plate where the chicken was resting.

Not time to eat it yet, though. First you have to stick it in the oven for a good hour and a half. The chicken will finish cooking, the sauce will become magical, and the meat will eventually fall off the bone.

And if you don’t know, meat falling off the bone is good for your health.

And your attitude. And your religion. Moving on…

Cook the chicken in the oven for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, then remove it from the oven and keep it warm until you serve it.

Look at this! It a little bite of chicken, sent from Heaven to fall off the bone during the cooking process so that when I lifted the lid off the pot, I would retrieve it with my fork and gobble it down without apology.

Serve the chicken with a big plate of warm, creamy mashed potatoes and sprinkle the whole lovely mess with sliced green onions.

But then do this. The sauce is just out of this world.

So basically, here’s what happens: you stick your fork anywhere remotely close to the chicken and pieces of gorgeous meat just fall all over the place. Ity’s so, delicious and tender. But then when you take a bite of your smashed potatoes, you get some of that whiskey-and-peach-laden flavor, too. Simply Divine. You’ll love this.

The Great Escape: Frederick Anderson Lifts the Veil on FASHION Spring 2026 C.L. BLACKBURN CONTRIBUTING WRITER This week’s Black Fashion Designer Spotlight is Frederick Anderson Brand: Frederick Anderson When Frederick Anderson stepped onto the runway this season, it wasn’t just a showcase of fabric; it was a masterclass in fashion as a form of liberation. An FIT alum with a pedigree that reads like a Who’s Who of music royalty, Anderson spent decades honing his couture craft under Douglas Hannant—dressing icons like Beyoncé and Janet Jackson—before launching his eponymous label in 2017.

Fresh off the momentum of his 2023 FGI Rising Star Award, Anderson’s trajectory is no longer just rising; it’s soaring.

From Shadows to Sunshine

Anderson has successfully curated an "escape for everyone." Whether you're manifesting a stay in an overwater bungalow in the Maldives or strolling through the Seychelles, these pieces are designed for the global nomad who refuses to sacrifice elegance for ease.

It is a rare feat to capture the zeitgeist while simultaneously offering a way out of it, but Anderson has done just that. This isn't just a collection; it’s an invitation to exhale.

In the lead-up to his Spring 2026 debut, the mood in the atelier was admittedly heavy. Reflecting on a turbulent socio-political landscape, Anderson initially felt the weight of the world. However, a creative pivot shifted his perspective from the somber to the sublime.

“This season, I broke into another level and started thinking about lifting us up and finding a joyous experience,” Anderson shared.

“With all the intensity around, I wanted us to take a second and find a happy place—not just in destination, but in our minds.” The result? A collection that serves as a passport to a mental paradise.

The Itinerary: Ibiza to St. Tropez The collection is a sartorial journey through the world’s most glamorous locales. Anderson’s aesthetic this season is where high art meets wearable luxury, defined by signature textures and a vibrant, "sherbet" palette.

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