O'Neill of Chicago
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brianoneill.bsky.social
O'Neill of Chicago
@brianoneill.bsky.social
1.1K followers 2.7K following 990 posts
Books, baseball, Great Lakes. Writes reviews all over, and at South Side Sox. Big fan of rivers and such. He/him
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brianoneill.bsky.social
Excited to have written about Patrick Wensink's "The Great Black Swamp" (@beltpublishing.bsky.social), a charming look at the unintended consequences reshaping the land, for Great Lakes Review.

greatlakesreview.org/the-price-of...
What can be even more unsettling to think about are turbulent changes happening in shallow time. That the land we know and are comfortable with, and think of as permanent, has undergone near-geologic upheavals in the span of a few paltry human generations. That our framework for “unchanging” — essentially, because something looks more or less the same as when we were kids — obscures revolutions underfoot. When we think about the rapidity of changes, and the potential for damage that humans have done, shallow time feels more of a drowning terror than deep time.
December 6, 2025 at 4:40 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
I wrote about a nonfiction book and collection of short stories to explore the Great Lakes, time, compression, erosion, and the way our lives are shaped by things we can't control for Great Lakes Review.

greatlakesreview.org/defining-for...
Time is the main character of these books, both in its vastness and in its minute agonies. Time can seem endless when we’re walking the edge of a cliff face, over rocks laid down hundreds of millions of years ago. Time can seem so short when we start to slip, and realize, suddenly and terribly, that we’re all out of it.
December 6, 2025 at 3:09 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Earlier, the thinnest layer of ice creeping across the lake.
A thin uneven skin of ice moves across a snowy lake
November 30, 2025 at 5:01 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
OK so Big Aurora isn't a total hoax, I guess.
A faint coloring of clouds over a dark lake.
November 13, 2025 at 3:20 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
It is incredible that we take it for granted that the President will abuse his power if people don't agree to satisfy his ego.
The source with knowledge of the stadium deal said that if Trump insists on the stadium bearing his name, "he has plenty of leverage" to make it happen, no matter which government body will ultimately decide. "He has cards to play. He can make it very difficult, through government environmental approvals and other things, to make sure everyone who wants this stadium to be built will join to put his name on it," the source said. "Trump has plenty of cards to play to get his way."
November 8, 2025 at 7:43 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
This feels bandwaggony but Aldo is very earnest and goofy so I am going to say Toronto
A dog at rest A dog in bounding play
October 24, 2025 at 2:04 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Enjoying this beautiful and mournful collection right now with a fire, wine, a storm over the lake, and a good dog.
The Ghost Sequences, by A.C. Wise, a gorgeous and mournful collection
October 19, 2025 at 5:12 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Haunted Ecologies, by @coreyfarrenkopf.bsky.social, is so incredibly good so far. I try to take comfort in the supernatural but it never lets you forget the horrors that are coming. I've also been moved to tears like three times in the first five stories.
Haunted Ecologies, by Corey Farrenkopf
October 11, 2025 at 11:50 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
I love when rain in the distance seems like melting clouds, which is kind of what it is.
Distant rain sweeping down from clouds
October 10, 2025 at 11:54 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
My keen sense of weather is intuiting that there is lightning to the north.
September 23, 2025 at 1:24 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
OK, but he's lying. You can say that.
NYTIMES headline reading "Trump Downplays Post Threatening Chicago, Saying He Wants to 'Clean Up' City".
September 8, 2025 at 3:01 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Imagine being this easily played and thinking you're not the mark.
Trump telling Hannity that Putin agrees with him the 2020 election was rigged, obviously very bluntly flattering the most easily-manipulated man in the world.
August 16, 2025 at 9:23 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
I get how reparations and prosecution are non-starters when you are meeting only with the aggressor on the aggressor's terms, but the abducted children should be a clear starter for any semi-neutral third party.

(from @drfarls.bsky.social)

nationalsecurityjournal.org/the-trump-pu...
-Ukraine also has a wide range of demands, from the repatriation of Ukrainian children to the payment of reparations to the prosecution of the Russian political leadership and the perpetrators of heavily documented war crimes. For better or worse, none of these issues will be considered in Alaska.
August 14, 2025 at 6:49 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
I wrote a review of William Sites's "Sun Ra's Chicago: Afro-Futurism and the City" (@uchicagopress.bsky.social) for Great Lakes Review, reflecting on how we talk about the region, and how the Midwest can be much weirder and more diverse than we think.

greatlakesreview.org/alternative-...
When you recognize that the cities shape the region, and that the lakes shape the cities, you see the region as much more diverse and wild and unpredictable. You understand that regions are made up of millions of people intersecting in strange ways, influencing each other unpredictably. You hear the sounds of the Great Lakes in a different way. The Cleveland proto-punk scene is Great Lakes music. Motown is the sound of the Great Lakes. And even the strangest sounds of them all, that of Sun Ra and His Arkestra, the impossible-to-define primeval-cosmic oddball-transcendent jazz, is in many ways a product of Chicago, and the lake over which it looms.
August 1, 2025 at 3:14 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Eliminating jobs and sacrificing any and all privacy is a small price to pay for no longer having to undergo the effort of taking out your wallet or your phone.
Once in the system, your selfie is linked to your ticket and credit card — a feature called “Game Face ID.” The idea is that you never have to take your phone or wallet out of your pocket. Facial recognition cameras will allow you to walk right into the stadium without scanning a ticket, and since concession stands don’t have cashiers, cameras will record what you take and charge you accordingly.
July 17, 2025 at 7:39 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country

Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country

Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country
Trump tweeting "Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA."
July 12, 2025 at 6:29 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Obi Wan saying "Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time."
July 12, 2025 at 1:14 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Along with wonderful tributes from @brettballantini.bsky.social
@soxmom72.bsky.social, @dontizzlejones.bsky.social and @liddlektina.bsky.social, I've got a bit about the life and memories of Bobby Jenks.

www.southsidesox.com/2025/7/6/244...
It’s not fair. Baseball has a finite life; so does actual life. We know this, as sure as being born. Baseball is shorter for closers: Bright and explosive and on a razor’s edge, always on the brink of disaster. Life shouldn’t be. Bobby got a raw deal out of the devil’s bargain that is life. How bright he burned in our memories doesn’t make up for it. It doesn’t satisfy the loss for his family, or the stretch of time he could have had to be happy. It doesn’t change the years that now will never exist, the moments that are already gone. Nothing can change what death decides to take.
July 6, 2025 at 5:31 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
I don't know what I expected
Box reading "dead opposum"
June 13, 2025 at 9:38 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
The amount of people we're going to have to deal with whose entire lives have revolved around Trump is staggering. It'd be hard enough if they were just ding-dongs down the block, but they are in real important positions!
On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”
June 4, 2025 at 11:03 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Really excited to have had a chance to write about ON THE GREENWICH LINE (Shady Lewis, tr Katharine Halls) for @necessaryfiction.com. A strange sad wonderful book, and more brually relevant with each dehumanizing day.

#booksky
Hollowness, hopelessness, a grim balancing of the books: Lewis demonstrates what a decade of Tory (and often Labour) austerity politics has created. While his London doesn’t have post-war griminess, its grey and grungy meanness isn’t that far off. But the migrants have the added sorrow of having been tossed into this uncaring London by the brutal politics of their own countries. Through these machinations and calculations, they have become invisible, irrelevant, non-people. The Greenwich Line of the title refers to the spot in London through which the Prime Meridian runs, where the eastern and western hemispheres meet. Of course, that geographical divide has nothing to do with the cultural ideas of “east” and “west,” bizarrely dictated by the same tattered empire. The Middle East and Far East are not actually east of anything except a tiny landmass that was briefly a world power, but names have stuck, and the regions, central to global history, have had their identities transformed by someone else’s geography. As with nations, so with people. Even as “east” and “west” mingle in a world of refugees and migrants, ideas and attitudes harden, subject to the pinched imaginations and literal-minded visions of Border Agency officers. Who you are doesn’t matter as much as who those with power think you should be.
June 2, 2025 at 2:56 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
I don't know, didn't Antifa HQ mobilize pretty strongly in support of the Pro Act? I thought it was one of the key planks of their official platform!
"pass the pro act" spraypainted on a convenient-to-clean part of Mace's house
May 29, 2025 at 6:18 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
"But they are not the fresh faces who can give the Democratic Party a sleek new look."
Fresh face Ben Stein leading Dems to a new era of relevance
May 28, 2025 at 12:28 AM
brianoneill.bsky.social
Roger Ebert agreed.
I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
May 10, 2025 at 7:36 PM
brianoneill.bsky.social
At the game, apparently! He's the guy on the phone.
The pope at the World Series
May 9, 2025 at 8:23 PM