Introduction

I am a citizen of the globe.

But I grew up in South Shore, Chicago.

Not in the version that flickers beneath cable news chyrons or hardens inside campaign slogans. Not the cartoon of pathology. Not the curated nightmare. I mean the ordinary place. Row houses leaning into one another. Two- and three-floor walkups breathing decades of human residue. Corner stores glowing late into the night. Bus stops where people shelter from the hawk and from the sun, depending on the season. A neighborhood shaped less by spectacle than by routine.

Life lived mostly between headlines.