JeQuana Na-Tae Thompson and DeAnna McLeary of  True Star Foundation

From a small, independent venture that had a mission to become an upgrade of Teen Beat and Ebony Jr., JeQuana Na-Tae Thompson and DeAnna McLeary have filled a generation-long void in Generation Y journalism: Magazines for teens by teens. Now they’re taking it to radio with True Star Radio and giving teens the opportunity to learn the broadcast business first hand. Guess having their own OWN is next.

True Star Foundation
yourtruestar.com

Best of Chicago 2011

Ryan Chiaverini

As cute as a button or hot enough to unbutton? Ryan Chiaverini undoubtedly goes both ways for grandmas and Gammas who have filled up the chairs at the Windy City LIVE! studios since its birth earlier this year in an effort to fill the programming gap once held by Oprah. The heads at ABC were wise to move Chiaverini from the radio-face world of sports anchoring to fresh-faced morning chatter with co-anchor Val Warner. They discuss everything from local news to Chiaverini’s recent knee surgery (we think he wasn’t short of applicants for a bedside nurse).

Windy City LIVE!
weekdays at 9am, ABC7 Chicago
windycitylive.com

 Audience choice:
Mark Suppelsa, WGN9

Best of Chicago 2011

Lauren Jiggetts

Even though she’s married, NBC Chicago reporter Laura Jiggetts is so attractive her father needs to wear the D.A.D.D.: Dad’s Against Daughters Dating (shoot the first one and the word will spread) t-shirt on air CSN’s “Chicago Huddle.” Not bad for a cum laude Harvard grad.

NBC News Today
4:30am-7am, NBC5

Audience choice:
Anna Davlantes
Fox WFLD32

Best of Chicago 2011

Photo: Kristine Sherred

Giant snowmen, forts and dibs

In the days after the mighty Blizzard of 2011, aka Snowmageddon, Chicagoans finally felt safe enough to survey the damage and to try and resuscitate their buried cars. This led to wide-girthed snowmen/women hovering on street corners, forts piled high from shoveled snow and the time-honored annual tradition of dibs, which was much worse this year than in recent winters. An entire Chicago Dibs Tumblr account dedicated itself to images of a Virgin Mary statue, plants, bikes, an ironing board and every kind of junk imaginable used to aggressively save parking spots. In times of disaster, Chicagoans can really be creative.

CTA Holiday Train
A gale wind blows freezing rain into your face as you fight your way down a crowded December street, the gloomy overcast skies giving way to an afternoon nightfall. It’s been an especially bad day: your significant other seems significantly more interested in others lately, your boss seems wont to emulate Ebenezer Scrooge, circa chapter one, and your mother’s not happy with you—your mother’s never happy with you. You shuffle onto the El platform, eyes down amongst the Uggs and Naughty Monkeys. Just. Let. This. Day. Be. Over. Then, you hear it first, the joyful din of your fellow travelers, the sound of the…sleigh bells? Then you see, a wondrous, unexpected sight: your train is decorated on all sides by thousands and thousands of lights. Red bows, garlands, candy canes and wait—there’s Santa, being pulled into the station on his own flatbed car. What were you so unhappy about anyway? Hello Bedford Falls! Merry Christmas!

transitchicago.com/travel_information/holidaytrain.aspx

Audience choice:
Christkindlmarket Chicago in Daley Plaza
118 North Clark
(312)494-2175
christkindlmarket.com

Best of Chicago 2010

International Museum of Surgical Science
We are fragile, mysterious, ridiculous instruments. We keep finding absurd ways to die. We look to the experts to keep thriving, and the experts keep experimenting—go ahead and giggle at Hippocrates’ board and ladder, but don’t think the current state of orthodontics won’t look silly in fifty years. He pokes two fingers through the hole in her jean leg. She whispers something primitive and unethical, and pushes him against a case of fake eyeballs. We swap ecosystems upon ecosystems. We kill the squeamish superstition within. We make fools of ourselves with no precise, objective definition for pain or pleasure.

1524 North Lake Shore
(312)6420-6502
imss.org

Best of Chicago 2010

Contemplation Point at Foster Beach
It’s that ring of rectangular rocks on the beach at the end of Bryn Mawr. Find a spot as close to the middle as you can and go for it. Necking here is like committing PDA for the spirits of horny North Side sweethearts past. And at least one of you gets a sweet view of the lake.

5200 North Lake Shore
(312)742-5121
chicagoparkdistrict.com/resources/beaches

Best of Chicago 2010

isthereacubsgametoday.com
It’s every Red Line commuter’s most fearsome question and this site gives you the pain or the relief with no frills. Because you don’t need to read a dull band interview or discover more reasons to hate the Toddler. You just want to know how long it’s going to take to get from this cubicle back to Jarvis.

isthereacubsgametoday.com

Best of Chicago 2010

Party like it’s 1973
With Jacobson and Kurtis together again, everyone from young to old gets to know what it feels like to have the first flurries of early-onset Alzheimer’s. (It would be especially great if The U’s ME-TV programmed Bob Newhart reruns right after.) Even if you don’t know what RJ Grunts was, you’ll be in the 1970s salad bar kind of mood, as the grinning one and the grumpy one offer Perspectives from decades past with their off-key Sunshine Boys routine. Could a comparison of a local pol to Nixon be far off?

Audience choice:
Who?
Others that were mentioned a few times, amused us or seemed especially weird: “It’s the best thing on CBS since ‘Sweating Bullets.’”; “They’re still younger than all their viewers.”

Best of Chicago 2010

Cynthia P. Caster
On December 1, the day after the deadline for mayoral petitions, twenty candidates were listed, with eleven contested. But once the cock crew, one earnest first-time pol, Cynthia P. Caster of the Hard Party, didn’t get enough signatures. “I sense smallness,” as Ms. Plaster Caster, nee Albritton, has been known to observe. While unlikely to pull off a Lisa Murkowski and make an Alaska-sized victory with her write-in run, she’s still ready to go the length. “Yes, I am disappointed not to be on the ballot,” the “recovering groupie” writes on her ChicagoForCynthia.com blog. “But the time for change is now, imperative we go from soft to hard when it comes to our great city.” While her candidacy sounded satirical from the get-go, her suggestions are both un-P.C. and working-class. At the very least, her site’s more twenty-first century than most of her rivals, plugged into Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, blogging, word cloud—a veritable engorgement of social media.

ChicagoForCynthia.com

Audience choice:
Lisa Madigan

Best of Chicago 2010