features
How a street newspaper creates jobs for Chicagoans
Selling magazines becomes a lifeline for Chicagoans navigating the intersecting barriers of incarceration, addiction, and housing instability. For decades, Keith Hardiman heard the same answer when he tried to move his life forward: “You don’t qualify.” After recovering from substance use disorder and returning home from prison, Hardiman discovered that social and legal barriers prevented…
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Chicago Palestinian Film Festival Marks 25th Anniversary With Largest Program Yet
The milestone year highlights films that challenge dominant narratives and expand how Palestinian stories are told. There were no empty seats at last Saturday’s premiere of the 2026 Chicago Palestinian Film Festival, hosted by the Gene Siskel Film Center. The sold-out crowd welcomed the festival’s 25th year with the first screening in a 50 film…
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Local News Day: Looking Back at 150 Years of Chicago Photography
In honor of Local News Day, TCR is turning its lens toward the city’s past and present, exploring Chicago’s complex and often fraught history through photography. From entrenched segregation to powerful movements for advocacy, leadership, and justice, this project reflects on the forces that have shaped the city, and the people who continue to redefine it. As…
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Employment and labor
IDOC’s controversial health care provider is out. Will people in IDOC finally receive the care they need?
After decades of protest from activists, change is coming to the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) health care system. A June 23rd memo announced that the IDOC is abandoning contract negotiations with Wexford Health Sources, who had won a ten year, $4 billion dollar contract renewal at the end of 2023. Now as IDOC initiates…
Economic Development
Six years in, has Illinois’ cannabis equity law delivered?
Illinois legalized cannabis with equity at its core in 2020. Six years later, the results are mixed. After nearly 90 years of prohibition, Illinois became the first state to legalize the sale of cannabis through a state legislature in 2019. Touted by the governor’s office as the “most equity-centric” cannabis law in the nation, the…