I cover green technology for Forbes, edit Contrary Magazine, and teach journalism and other varieties of non-fiction writing as a lecturer at the University of Chicago. I’ve been a newspaper reporter, a columnist for New Times, an essayist on writers and writing for Newcity and PEN International Magazine. I was born on the South Side of Chicago and live there now, but two of my nine lives were spent in Arizona and California—a third on the meander. This site aggregates feeds from the regular places I publish, and I’ve collected a few clips here that have stood out over the years like, for example, my first pro clip. I’ll add m ore as I publish new ones
or as I pluck vintage ones from the webby vaults of history.
I joined True/ Slant, the news network pioneered by Lewis Dvorkin and company, in April 2009, a couple of months before its beta launch.
I covered environmental news and pol itics for them until Forbes purchased the s
ite and closed it down in August 2010.
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from PEN International Magazine, Spring/Summer 2009
On a frozen morning this November past, I was tacking through alleys on the South Side of Chicago, angling toward a friend’s apartment for breakfast, when I locked eyes with a man who was digging through a garbage bin, a shopping cart waiting beside him.
Nelson Algren wrote that you never truly love Chicago until you love its alleys, “where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home.” Among those anxious eyes are the hungry eyes of Chicago’s gleaners, who salvage a narrow living from our neighbors’ discarded excesses.
This man had little to show for his morning’s work: a few aluminum cans, random angles of iron and coils of wire. But in t he shopping cart
he had something that once was mine, and I recognized it at once. It was a skateboard I had piloted on one perfect afternoon three and a half years prior, and upon which I
had made a most rewarding acquaintance. It was on that skateboard that I got to know Jean Grenier and his cat, Mouloud.
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Newcity cover art by Tony Fitzpatrick
By Jeff McMahon
Reprinted from Newcity magazine • Saturday, March 28, 2009
This is the story of the broken heart of a man, the rusty heart of a city, and how they got all tangled up as one. Like a lot of us, he learned hope and heartbreak first from a baseball team, then from bruising bouts with love, then from the city in which he lived, but unlike a lot of us, he never learned to play along, never stopped seeing the way things are contrasted against the way things ought to be, never stopped championing the nobodies nobody knows—for there, he wrote, beats Chicago’s heart. He followed his own beat straight to the place where pride will lead you every time—to poverty and exile—while describing Chicago as no one had since Carl Sandburg and as no one has again. And save for the devotion of a peculiar few, the City of Big Shoulders shrugged him off. [click to continue…]
By Jeff McMahon
Reprinted from PEN International magazine • Friday, November 28, 2008
Less than three years after the U.S. Cavalry massacred the Sioux at Wounded Knee, Chicagoans could safely observe Sioux en campm
ents at the World’s Columbian Exposition, and the science of ethnography was born. So goes the story, and so it will go with socialists.
As soon as the last socialist dies – which might happen soon in Cuba – we will study them as curiosities, celebrate them as nostalgic objects, observe them through some modern version of a Columbian Exposition exhibit. It has already begun with Che Guevara: four years ago Gael García Bernal portrayed Che’s formative years in The Motorycle Diaries, and soon we will be able to safely observe the revolutionary Che, played by Benicio Del Toro, in a 268-minute biopic by Steven Soderbergh. We can watch while wearing our Original Che Berets, on sale right now at the Che Store for only $24.99 – $5.00 off the regular price. I will celebrate Che as much as the next subject of capital, but when I think of socialism I will not think of Che. I will think of Lozandro Polanco. [click to continue…]
By Jeff McMahon
Reprinted from Forecast Earth • August 6, 2008
It sounds like science fiction: a previously unknown insect with an appetite for electrical circuitry appears at a Houston-area chemical plant and marches toward the Johnson Space Center, defying human attempts to stop it with conventional weapons.
“I think we ought to be in panic mode,” said Tom Rasberry, the Pearland-Texas exterminator who was the first to battle the unidentified species that has informally taken his name: the crazy rasberry ant. “I’m not one of these people who panic about anything, but this is something that I really do think we should panic about it.”
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By Jeff McMahon
Reprinted from Newcity magazine • Wednesday, January 29, 2003
It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home. — From Nelson Algren’s “Chicago: City on the Make”
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Links to 20th Century commentaries still breathing on ancient, lingering websites: [click to continue…]
orb weaver
O What a Tangled Web We Observe
When First We Practice to Conserve
Reprinted from New Times • Dec. 3, 1998
Maurice captures the spiders in our neighborhood. He accepted this responsibility as an act of charity, but it has since dragged him through the fires of public scorn, sucked him into the bowels of philosophy and thrust him toward uncomfortable conclusions about our species. [click to continue…]
By Jeffrey A.
McMahon
Special for the Arizona Republic
Oct. 11, 1985 • first pro clip
Staff members at the University of Arizona’s Radiation Control Center routinely discard in dumpsters up to 30,000 vials a month that once contained radioactive substances, and may still contain small amounts…
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• Golden Quill Award for best commentary in an English-language weekly newspaper, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, 2000
• Golden Quill Award for best commentary in an English-language weekly newspaper, International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, 1999
• First Place, National Society of Newspaper Columnists Competition, 1996
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