Chicago, City of the Warm Shoulders

The beauty of desiring the regular. The sun rises over Lake Michigan in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images) Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. I can’t tell you the first time I heard that old Carl Sandburg poem about Chicago. But I remember finding it alien: Chicago, in all the time I lived there, from 1999 to 2018, was never the “hog butcher for the world” or “tool maker, stacker of wheat.” To some extent it was still the “nation’s freight handler,” but I realized that only on select occasions when we, denizens of the South Side, would cross the 60s to go downtown. Valerie is Ideas Editor at The Dispatch, based in New York City. Prior to joining the company in 2025, she worked at The New York Times and NewsGuard Technologies, and she is currently a Novak Fellow through The Fund for American Studies. When Valerie isn’t commissioning and editing the next big essay for The Dispatch, she is probably people-watching in a funky cafe or scheming up her next oddly-themed party. More Where I'm From