Profile: George Kasp: 40 Years Behind the Wheel (for Chicago Dispatcher)

   

   Every night in the summer of 1973, 18-year-old George Kasp would leave his job in a cup factory with a high-pitched ringing in his ears. 

   “I said, ‘this noise is affecting me,’” said Kasp. “‘There’s no way I’m working in a factory.’” After noticing a newspaper ad seeking cab drivers 18 years and older, Kasp drove to a Yellow Cab garage, was fingerprinted at the police station, and received his temporary chauffeur’s license--all in the same day.

Essay: The Self in Philosophy and Religion

To explore the nature of the self, it is crucial to define what we refer to when we speak of the self. In philosopher David Lund’s chapter on the self in Making Sense of It All, he explains that the self is not one’s name, qualities, body, or brain. Rather, the self is what a human being refers to when they use the word “I”; the self, then, according to Lund, is the subject of consciousness and experience—or nothing at all.

Community Profile: Radio Arte

If Pilsen’s youth are eggs waiting to hatch, Radio Arte is their incubator. According to Dulce Mora, executive producer of radio programs First Voice and Primera Voz, the station is a hub where students come first to be on the air, and end up leaving with a range of new skills and a wealth of new ideas.

Analysis: Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff

Every full-grown cliché began as an embryo of sincerity. Through repetition and misuse, the sacred truth is lost in a sea of banality. It takes a critic of extraordinary insight to part these seas of irrelevance and extract the microscopic morsel of meaning tucked away inside. Anders, the book critic and main character in Tobais Wolff’s short story Bullet in the Brain, is not such a critic—at least not any longer.

Restaurant Profile: Cafe Jumping Bean

The corner of 18^th, Blue Island and Loomis is to Pilsen what the “six corners” are to Wicker Park—its heart. Just west of the intersection, across from Pilsen Vintage and Thrift, lies Café Jumping Bean.

The small café carries a big reputation. Residents of Pilsen are sure to see a familiar face or two among the crowd, and a crowd it is: the roughly two dozen seats in Jumping Bean are almost always occupied, so don’t be surprised if you have to wait a few.

Website Review: The New Shelton Wet/Dry

YouTube claims that one hour of video is uploaded to their website every second. Apple's fiscal reports show that they sell about 262 iPhones every hour—a figure greater than the world's birth rate. According to Wired, the NSA is building an internet surveillance center capable of storing over one yottabyte of information, which equals about 500 quintillion pages of text.

As the world's internet-using population increases, so does the amount of information on the web. This effect is creating an unimaginable wealth of data and content, inevitably producing a staggering amount of clutter to sort through. Fortunately, a number of sites exist solely for the purpose of providing pertinent, interesting, and relevant information and content. A stunning example is a blog called the New Shelton Wet/Dry.

Album Review: RAJA -- Red (2011)

MegaUpload is gone, FileTram is out the window, and Mediafire isn't far behind. File-hosting websites are now a thing of the recent past, and in their place have spawned a legion of artist-run music sharing sites. Every day, thousands of tracks are uploaded to Bandcamp and SoundCloud not by fans but by musicians themselves. 

From the state of New York, a hip-hop beatmaker by the name of RAJA has signed on to both websites, releasing dozens of tracks to fans at no price. Ironically, RAJA's three-part mixtape series titled The October Series, released on Bandcamp for free, sounds almost entirely analog. 

Part 1, simply titled Red, is a 33-track Frankenstein masterpiece, a hodgepodge assortment of drum kits, synthesizers, samples, samples, and more samples.