Across 41 years and 70-some films, Juliette Binoche — the gold standard for cinematic expressivity, and for performances both imposing and delicately shaded — has figured out a few things.

One: “Do your own work. Because you cannot rely on directors.”

Two: Her favorite screen actor is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, and they once spent four hours over dinner discussing “oh, everything. Life.”

Three: She does not like to be told to hold back, even — perhaps especially — by filmmakers she admires. Binoche’s latest film, the visually droolworthy period picture “The Taste of Things,” was written and directed by the Vietnamese French writer-director Trân Anh Hùng, whose works include “The Scent of Green Papaya,” a similarly delectable number.

“A couple of times,” Binoche recalls, “he came to me after a take and said, ‘Juliette, can you be more … neutral this time?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, neutral?’” She speaks these words with just a hint of judgment, in a tone of what can only be described as withering neutrality.

In “The Taste of Things,” which was chosen as the French entry for the category of international feature film at the upcoming Academy Awards, Binoche, 59, plays the cook Eugénie, the longtime culinary and sometime romantic partner of a renowned chef. They have retired to the country together. The story, based on the 1920 novel translated into English as “The Passionate Epicure,” begins in 1885, with Eugénie in subtly declining health, and the chef Dodin mounting a new stealth campaign of marriage proposal. Dodin is played by Benoît Magimel.

The film marked the first time Binoche and Magimel worked together since “Children of the Century” in 1999. Their off-screen partnership of the time, which lasted several years, produced a daughter, Hana. “I think it’s so sad when people separating don’t see each other anymore,” Binoche says, over a large, grazing sort of lunch at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills (filet mignon, polenta, grilled broccolini, et al.) “They don’t express what they’re feeling. It’s terrible. It’s burying yourself before you die.”

The following is edited for clarity and length.

Q: You filmed “The Taste of Things” in the spring of 2022. Does it feel like a long time ago?

A: “You know, not really. With a film that was quite intense to make, time works differently. The experience is still printed in you. Still very vivid, what we went through, because you had to be so present in every moment. So it stays in you. It’s not just passing through; it’s digging in.

I’d seen most of Trân’s earlier films, including “Eternity,” and I thought in “Eternity” he retreated from emotion a little bit. With “The Taste of Things” I wanted to give him as much emotion as I felt was needed. A couple of times after a take he came to me and said, “Juliette, can you be more neutral?” And I said “what do you mean, neutral? I am a human being, I have to feel, I have to live! I cannot block myself to please you intellectually.” So. I think I was smart at that moment. (smiles) I asked Trân afterward why he asked me in that scene to be neutral. He said he was afraid there would be too much emotion. But after I said “no, I can’t do that,” we shot another take and he gave me a little pat and said, “You know what? That’s fine” (laughs).

Q: I rarely get a single emotion in any of your work on screen, whoever you’re playing.

A: I think that’s preferable, yes? It’s important to understand the root of everything, and somehow link it to the surface of what you’re doing and who you’re playing. That’s why comedies are so difficult. I hate comedies, usually, because so often it’s about overstatement, and it doesn’t work for me.

As human beings, we carry everything with us, all the time, and it’s all being revealed while you’re shooting. That is the magic of it. You cannot push or will it into being a certain way. It needs to come out before the camera in a way you didn’t expect.

Q: Can you remember the first time you saw a film as a child where a performer just basically changed your life forever?

A: Yes. I was six or seven, and I saw Charlie Chaplin’s short films. And then I happened to visit Charlie Chaplin in Switzerland with my sister, for real, when I was nine. My father was a friend of one of his daughters, Victoria.

Q: So if the first person you saw on screen was Buster Keaton instead, I wonder if years later you would’ve told your “Taste of Things” director, yes, fine, neutral is fine?

A: Who knows? (Laughs). We all have to be transparent as actors. To let things come out. That’s not neutral. It’s a sort of an abnegation. You give into something and let something happen so it comes out of you naturally.

Q: The kitchen in “The Taste of Things,” with the wood fire and the beautiful copper pots, it’s like a dream kitchen, designed to make 21st century audiences want to go to late 19th century provincial France immediately.

A: I know! I bought a farm a year and a half ago, two kilometers from my grandmother’s house, in Saint-Martin-de-Seignanx (near the Spanish border). I had some difficult memories there, my parents separating, sometimes a little rough. But it will be good for all of us, cousins and everyone, to gather there. It’s good to have a place for family. And my goal, when the farmhouse is finished, is a sort of “Taste of Things” kitchen.

Q: The first scene, or scenes, of meal preparation we see in the film — it lasts nearly 40 minutes, and it’s a swirl of activity, none of it ostentatious, from the picking of the vegetables at sunrise to the emptying-out of a fish for an omelet. By the way, what kind of fish did you stick your hands into in that scene?

A: Turbot. Also turbot in English, I think. Wait, I’ll tell you. (Checks French to English translation on phone). Flounder? You don’t say “turbot” in English?

Q: I’m afraid I’m not the one to ask! But “flounder” I know, which doesn’t sound nearly as good. What are you actually frying up in the pan in that scene?

A: The testicles! That was the first day, my first scene, we filmed. We had three fishes we could use if we needed to. I was nervous! I had never done that. But it was fine, we did it in the first take. The testicles were for the omelet. (Pause) I didn’t try it.

Q: Can we talk a bit about you working with Benoît in the film?

A: Yes, certainly. We had seen each other once in a while (years after they split up), because we have a daughter together. But we never had a real conversation about the past, things that happened. And then suddenly we were spending time, working together. I was very moved by this. And I think he was as well.

I think distance creates the need for expressing feelings. And so I used Trân’s words (in the “Taste of Things” screenplay) to express my feelings for Benoît. The medium became a sort of gift, a bridge toward him, and I was able to tell him everything: I love you no matter what happened, I care for you, life goes on, we have a wonderful child, I loved you then, and now I love you in a different way. And that’s the way it is.

For our daughter, it was like opening a door. She doesn’t remember us being together, so this was a sort of healing moment, seeing her parents expressing things between them.

Q: How would you characterize Benoît’s approach to acting in relation to your own?

A: He loves the freedom the earpiece gives him. Giving him the lines. He loves it. For the shorter scenes, he didn’t need it. For the monologues, he used it. I adapted to his needs and it didn’t bother me. We both like going on an adventure to see what happens in a retake. I feel like it’s a privilege to do another take of a scene. You have to be an open instrument. Not thinking too much. Just jumping into the unknown.

Q: Did it take time to find that freedom, when you were younger?

A: I had my mother as a theater teacher, who taught me. After that I went to my area drama conservatory, and then to a private school. And there, my teacher, she sort of shook me awake. She stopped me from wanting to act like I was trying to be a great actress every time I opened my mouth. When I was 18 I was trying to prove it, and she would say “Stop!” because it was too “acted.” So then I started feeling something else. Being, not acting. But when I started in films, right afterward, I saw right away that (Jean-Luc) Godard (who cast Binoche in the controversial 1985 film “Hail Mary”) didn’t give a (fig) about me. Or care about trying to help me. He was just trying to figure out what to do with the camera.

And I thought: OK, I’m learning something here. Never rely on directors!

“The Taste of Things” opens in Chicago Feb. 9.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

A police detective in London is asked by her boss to listen to a tape of an emergency call concerning an allegation of domestic violence. It’s more a formality than anything; the caller refused to give her name or any other identifying details. But she does let slip one bit of information that catches the detective’s attention: Her abusive boyfriend told her he killed his previous girlfriend years ago — and now another man is serving a prison sentence for the crime. Then she screams and the line goes dead.

That call will be the undoing of several cops in the Apple TV+ police procedural “Criminal Record.” Cush Jumbo stars as June Lenker, a detective who thinks the allegations are worth investigating, opposite Peter Capaldi as the older, more senior detective named Daniel Hegarty, who initially worked the case — and now uses every trick in the book to undermine June’s questions. Is it possible there was a wrongful conviction? “I don’t want to embarrass you,” Daniel says patronizingly, “but some caller out of the blue, doesn’t give a name, he said/she said — frankly at this point, it’s starting to sound like a prank.” Behind her back, he and his cronies dismiss her as an ambitious token hire with an ax to grind.

Most organizations, be they public or private, are designed to discourage people from asking too many questions that challenge the status quo — especially if it’s a Black woman doing the asking. Systems exist to be preserved, no matter how amoral or dysfunctional.

This is what June is up against. Some of the corruption is driven by pressure from higher-ups to quickly close a case. Some of it is driven by sour, exceedingly stubborn bigotry. Similar issues were at the forefront of Steve McQueen’s “Red, White and Blue,” one of the films in his 2020 “Small Axe” compilation, starring John Boyega as a cop who is quickly disabused of any ideas that change from within is possible. But most British cop shows present a more idealized version of events — of a diverse police force where racism isn’t much of a factor in the workplace. The long-running crime series “Vera” comes to mind, not only because Jumbo co-starred on it for a couple of seasons, but because “Criminal Record” creators Paul Rutman and Elaine Collins (who is married to Capaldi) are “Vera” alum as well. They’re taking a different approach here, which makes the show stand out.

U.S. audiences might better recognize Jumbo from “The Good Fight.” Capaldi is best known for “Doctor Who” and “The Thick of It,” and together they are a riveting pair. There’s not enough story here, or suspense frankly, to justify the eight-episode length — like so many other streaming shows, it would have worked better as a movie — but Jumbo and Capaldi’s performances are reason enough to watch. Her face is open, revealing her racing thoughts within. His face is closed off to better hide his secrets, but not his disdain.

June and Daniel are wary and distrustful of one another, forever on edge and trying to figure out how to undermine their opponent. She has righteousness on her side, but little institutional support. His colleagues give him the benefit of the doubt, while his cadre of equally dirty underlings do everything possible to muddy the waters of June’s investigation. But the pair have certain things in common, including personal lives that bleed into their work lives. Both are worried about their children — her preteen son is racially profiled by one of Daniel’s henchmen to better scare her off; meanwhile he has his hands full as the single father to a drug addicted daughter who sees through his steely bluster.

The resolution, when it finally comes, is unsatisfying. After eight episodes, the thinness of the show’s ambitions are revealed. That’s probably closer to real life than most of us would hope. Even when the outcome tips in favor of justice, the Daniels of the world remain firmly entrenched.

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‘CRIMINAL RECORD’

2 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Apple TV+

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©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

LaShawnDa Pittman’s book begins with a table of women’s names — 74, to be exact — listing their first name, age, marital or dating status, and the number of children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren they have.

The common denominators among the women are that they are Black grandmothers who are raising any number of their children’s offspring, creating what is known as skipped generation households, those consisting of only grandparents and grandchildren.

In her book “Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First Century Story of Love, Coercion and Survival,” Pittman, associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, plumbs the nuances of the role of contemporary Black grandmothers in today’s landscape.

The Northwestern University alumna collected data from nearly 100 women on Chicago’s South Side for four years through in-depth interviews with the women and ethnographic research via doctor’s visits, welfare offices, school and day care center appointments, and caseworker meetings.

In so doing, Pittman explored the myriad forces that help and hinder their caregiving, taking a deep dive into the relationship between elder and youth where the former is working to fulfill the functions of motherhood without the legal rights of the role.

Pittman, a sociologist, showcases the strategies Black grandmothers use to manage their caregiving role among state and federal systems to ensure the well-being of the next generation.

“This book shows the complexity of what these grandmothers are up against. It’s a lot,” Pittman said. “This long lineage of Black women dealing with a lot and the importance of us in giving voice to what that looks like and giving each other opportunities to share that information … it’s not small.”

Pittman points out research that found more grandparents are currently raising their grandchildren than at any time in American history. The number of U.S. children living in a grandparent’s household more than doubled from 3.2% in 1970 to 8.4% in 2019, with 26% of those children in skipped generation households.

Two- and three-generational living arrangements are more prevalent in communities of color, with Black families being more likely than any other group to raise grandchildren in skipped generation households.

The factors that contribute to this range from changes in social and child-welfare policies and practices to increases in divorce rates and single parenthood and declining birth rates and marriage rates, as well as teen pregnancy, mental and physical health issues, child abuse and neglect. Black children also are the most like­ly to live in a sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­ly.

Compound that with some Black-grandmother-household incomes being at or below federal poverty levels and it raises a lot of questions. “Why and how do Black women’s traditional grandmother roles morph into surrogate parenting? How do they manage the demands of caregiving, including their lack of legal rights, challenges to making ends meet and inability to prioritize their personal lives?” Pittman writes in the book.

“There’s a lot of systemic things that force it upon us. … Incarcerated Black men and women, that’s had a huge ripple effect — it decimated our communities and families,” Pittman said. “It used to be that a Black man could work in some kind of manufacturing job and send their children to college and buy a home. Now, the physical labor jobs are in the service sector, they pay less, they don’t come with benefits, it’s harder to make it. There’s more discrimination. All of those kinds of things matter. Can you afford to live? Forget moving into the middle class, can you even maintain working class and not slip into poverty?”

Over the course of more than 300 pages, Pitman pores over the economic survival strategies Black grandmothers employ during the struggle of kinship care. It’s a mix of “burden and blessing,” rewards and consequences that range from an opportunity to parent again and a sense of purpose, to caregiving restricting retirement freedoms and impairing physical and mental health.

Raised in a family where her grandparents provided assistance to her immediate family, Pittman became interested in Black women and resilience as a graduate student at Northwestern. It was there that Pittman produced a thesis on Black women and their psychological well-being, and another work on the social capital of children in poverty.

All of it revolved around Black grandmothers raising grandchildren. Pittman found her purpose in making sense of the grandmothers’ perspectives, which eventually led to the book.

“You can no longer have a conversation about grandparent caregiving without talking about how they create the structure to provide that care,” she said. “It is not the way that it used to be where Big Mama stepped in, got the baby, enrolled it in school and has this harmonious relationship with parents, where the parent is bettering themselves so they can get their baby back. While that does happen, in too many cases, it does not.

“When conflict happens, and grandparents have no legal rights to their grandchildren, there’s a different set of issues they have to deal with and no book was dealing with that,” Pittman said. “Do I go over the parent and get legal guardianship, prove that the parent is unfit? Do I want to do that to my own child? It’s a complicated set of issues. Caregiving in the 21st century is a story that needs to be told for what it looks like today. How they navigate their lack of legal rights relative to parents, the child welfare system and in some cases, the criminal justice system. How they navigate to get resources, all of that is a big policy story.”

Pittman has spoken to policymakers around the nation to say: “Here are the resources that we say are available to these families, very few, and yet there are still all these barriers that they’re experiencing.”

She hopes her book highlights the travails Black grandmothers face. It’s a written charge for those in positions of power to think about the training of front-line workers who interact with these families.

Pittman said the people who work with skip generation families have a sense of “what did they do to contribute to this happening?”

But she says you shouldn’t assume you know their story. Dealing with the explicit and implicit bias and misinformation in the training of agency representatives will go a long way, she said.

Pittman said too often during her interviews with grandmothers, she found they felt alone in their caregiver role. To help fix that, Pittman is building out her website so Black grandmothers can share resources, knowledge and their stories with one another. She also hopes her book is a shoutout to the Black community.

“It’s raising awareness and providing a sense of solidarity. … It is so important for us to understand what we are asking of our mothers, grandmothers and aunts,” Pittman said. “Understand that these are the kinds of sacrifices, complexities that our mothers and aunties have to deal with. And grandfathers too. Most skip generation households are headed by both grandparents. But Black grandmothers have the distinction of being more likely than all other grandparents of doing this without a parent or a partner.”

Pittman said reaching out to the Black grandmothers in our communities would go a long way. She said Black matriarchs want to sustain their families and communities, but they also need to take care of their own health, and need respite and support.

“If you know there are people in your family who are doing this, see what they need. Don’t assume that they got it,” she said. “I hear people say stuff like, ‘They do it out of love.’ Why should we not make sure that children have what they need in this country regardless of who their caregivers are? We do it for foster parents.”

She looked at how in pop culture, Black grandmothers tend to be romanticized within the Black community and pathologized outside of it. And she wondered: “Where do you go to get a sense of who these women really are?”

That’s why Pittman is focused on making Real Black Grandmothers, the first digital archive created specifically with their reality in mind. Pittman said society has to continue to make changes that will support skipped generation households because putting together two vulnerable populations and asking them to figure it out themselves is asking too much.

“The complexity of what they’re dealing with, the brilliance of ‘we will find a way,’ the brilliance with which they navigated, the strategies they came up with to keep their grandchildren in their care safe and still try to get what they needed, blew me away,” Pittman said. “Yes, they did that in a miraculous and amazing way and it’s still not enough. We need to make it so it’s not so hard.”

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

A singular affront, in ways more conventionally wrenching movie treatments of the Holocaust such as “Schindler’s List” never were, “The Zone of Interest” withholds as much as it reveals, reorienting the audience’s perspective on the 20th century’s defining atrocity.

It is not for everyone, needless to say. Nothing is. But writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s 105-minute treatment of the 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same title is really not for everyone. The filmmaker, whose previous feature was “Under the Skin” a decade ago, has managed one of the most radical page-to-screen adaptations in recent memory. He has done so by tossing out Amis’ fictional “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”-style epistolary of sexual seduction, which I found compelling, pulpy — and morally offensive. Despite its awards and international praise, the movie may strike some as offensive, too, though for utterly different reasons.

This is an achievement destined for serious debate, in other words.

Factualizing Amis’s fabricated characters, which teetered on the edge of caricature, Glazer’s film uses real names of real people and his own imagining of their daily lives, just over the wall from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

In the commandant’s house and garden, SS officer Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller of “Anatomy of a Fall”) and their five children go about their business. Scenes are placed before us, dispassionately, often without any camera movement but they’re never visually predictable. A birthday party. A boisterous gathering around the tiny swimming pool. A gentle walk among Hedwig’s prized flowers, with Hedwig cradling her newborn infant.

Others come and go: Jewish prisoners working as housecleaners, gardeners, laborers, eyes cast downward. In one scene, Hedwig gossips with friends, or — alone in her bedroom — tries on a stylish mink stole, stolen from a prisoners. At another point, from the perspective of the family’s yard, we hear, faintly, and then see in long shot a freight train carrying the latest load of prisoners to the camp.

In one striking passage, Hedwig’s mother comes for an extended visit. She admires what her daughter has done with the place, making it so welcoming and well-appointed. (At another point, the Höss children read through a guest book, where one visitor thanks the family for their “National Socialist hospitality.”) Then, a disruption. Hedwig’s mother has had a sleepless night. She leaves suddenly, unannounced. We, the audience, realize what the family does not want to believe — that the sounds from across the wall, inhuman wails, industrial moans, have proven too much for her. Everyone in this family, and this serenely hideous corner of the Final Solution, knows exactly what is going on every minute.

“The Zone of Interest” takes enormous chances without enormous dramatic machinery. Its startling contrast of mundane, strategically dispassionate tones and imagery is upended by a sound and musical-score design that cries out from a sort of mass subconscious of suffering. Mica Levi, one of the best composers working in film today, did the music, deployed in brief, arresting bursts; sound designer Johnnie Burn, working from 600 pages of Auschwitz research documents, created the brilliant aural landscape.

The actors are denied most of the customary dramatic assists of cinema performance; the acting feels like behavior, not acting, and you can count the close-ups on two hands. With calm detachment, director Glazer and cinematographer Lukasz Zal favor middle- and long-shot compositions, giving the viewer literal distance while enforcing our experiencing of taking it all in. Even so, we get precisely what we need from Friedel and Hüller; with exactly the right brio, Hedwig proudly tells her mother that “Rudi calls me the Queen of Auschwitz.”

Zal used up to 10 cameras, often hidden from the actors, positioned around the house and grounds, so that the performers could improvise lines and physical behavior with ease. Glazer probably did himself no favors by describing this approach as “Big Brother in the Nazi house.” The aesthetic result of all these design and directorial decisions, though, is anything but glib (though some dialogue, such as a riverside talk between Rudolf and Hedwig, underlines the characters’ vicious delusions too neatly). We watch these human beings do what they do, as if all is for the best in this worst of all possible worlds. And if a family swim, photographed from a distance, happens to be interrupted by bones floating downstream from the camp, in this world — our world — these things happen.

In his autobiography, written after the Nuremberg trials while he awaited his 1947 execution in the camp he managed, Höss rationalized that he was merely “a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich.” An American military psychologist at the time wrote that the Auschwitz commandant was “intellectually normal, but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.”

In Glazer’s film, the barbarity is everywhere, every second, behind a devastating guise of normalcy. It needs no demonizing flourishes. This may be the first film dealing in any way with the Holocaust that dares to strip away the movies’ reliance on dramatizing subhuman or inhuman evil in ways audiences are used to receiving — and, dangerously, dismissing as ancient history, long ago and far away. At the climax we see the career-climbing Höss, having been called to his next post, away from the home he has grown to love, peering into a dark hallway. He sees a strange vision, a foreshadowing he cannot fathom. It is beyond words.

I won’t soon forget it. Or much of anything about “The Zone of Interest.”

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‘THE ZONE OF INTEREST’

4 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking)

Running time: 1:45

How to watch: Now in theaters

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©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Every great city deserves an easily identifiable sandwich of its own. Whether it’s the Philadelphia cheesesteak or the New Orleans po’boy, a gut-busting sandwich is a matter of civic pride.

When most people think of Chicago’s sandwich of choice, the first answer is usually the Italian beef sandwich. (Unless you are one of those people who thinks a hot dog is a sandwich.) After all, you can find one in most neighborhoods, and locals love to argue relentlessly about where to find the best. The popularity of the sandwich has only grown recently thanks to “The Bear,” an FX show that follows a fine dining chef who has to return to his family’s Italian beef stand.

But looking through the Tribune’s archives, it’s a bit shocking to find that the Italian beef hasn’t been the obvious sandwich choice for that long. Unlike barbecue, which shows up in the archives all the way back in the 1850s, the Italian beef doesn’t even make an appearance until the 1950s.

Chicagoans were eating sandwiches with beef long before then, though. It’s just that they were either roast beef sandwiches or, more likely, corned beef sandwiches.

As critic Louisa Chu explained well back in 2019, “Chicago is a corned beef town, unlike New York, Los Angeles or Montreal, where they prefer pastrami.” While true today, Chicagoans were apparently even more obsessed with corned beef in the early 20th century.

That was when John P. Harding, also known as “Corned Beef John,” had 12 restaurants downtown serving the dish, including Harding Grill (131 N. Clark St.) and Harding’s Colonial Room (21 S. Wabash Ave.). According to an article from Sept. 22, 1922, Harding “started the craze for the ‘make ’em before your eyes’ corned beef sandwich.” An article from Aug. 15, 1926, went even further, claiming his “chief bid for fame, however, is in having made the corned beef sandwich what it is today.”

The Tribune loved to throw superlatives at Harding. He transformed the Star Theater at 68 W. Madison into a restaurant in 1918, and when he planned to open another downtown restaurant, the paper felt the need to write this: “Mr. Harding four years ago answered in the affirmative the momentous question: ‘Is the corned beef sandwich mightier than the movies.’”

Corned beef also made Harding a very rich man. On Dec. 4, 1928, the Tribune referred to Harding as a “millionaire restaurant owner,” while noting how he wielded a knife “dexterously” when he “carved corned beef for fifty guests at a dinner given last night in honor of Harry Hackney of Atlantic City, president of the National Restaurant Association.”

So when did the Italian beef overtake corned beef? The 1920s is when many of the Italian beef origin stories pop up, with both Pasquale Scala and Tony Ferreri mentioned as possibly inventing the dish. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any mentions in the Tribune archive during that time period.

In fact, the first clear mention of the Italian beef that I was able to find wasn’t until June 28, 1953. It wasn’t exactly a grand introduction. The very short post, titled “Old Peoples Home Aids Plan Benefit Picnic,” explains how “the ladies auxiliary and men’s league of Villa Scalabrini will hold their second annual picnic at noon next Sunday at the villa in Northlake … Italian beef and sausage sandwiches and spumoni will be served [to] guests.” That’s it.

According to “The Chicago Food Encyclopedia,” the origins of the Italian beef probably weren’t from either Scala or Ferreri, but instead “lie in Italian American home cooking.” In particular, the book points to “so-called ‘peanut weddings’” in the 1920s where the dish was often served because it was affordable and could easily feed a crowd.

As noted above, nothing was mentioned during the time, but on May 11, 1979, the Chicago Italian American Organization did an advertisement for a “‘40s Italian Wedding” fundraiser where you could experience “an authentic 1940s Italian ‘peanut wedding.’” The first food mentioned is the beef sandwich.

The Italian beef pops up occasionally in the 1950s and 1960s, though most often in restaurant ads, like the one on Nov. 14, 1954, for the “grand opening of delivery service” for Barsanti’s Grill at 3404 Lincoln Ave., which specialized in “pizza, spaghetti, ravioli, Italian beef sandwiches, bar-b-q ribs, southern fried chicken and french fried shrimp.” On July 28, 1963, The New Parkette at 105th and Western printed its menu, which shows that an Italian beef sandwich cost 60 cents.

On May 26, 1962, we get what may be the first recipe for the Italian beef from Mary Meade. (As I found out recently, the name was a pseudonym for a number of different women writers.) There’s a lot of tomato paste, which isn’t as common today, but the recipe looks pretty close. Plus it has the first mention of dipping bread in the beef juices: “In the true Italian fashion, the sliced Italian or French bread should be dipped into the stock before being layered with the thin slices of beef.”

But it was not until the 1970s that the Italian beef truly took off with Tribune reporters. On May 17, 1975, in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, Charles Leroux visited a number of drive-ins around the city, including Mr. Beef: “They have a wonderfully spicy sausage sandwich [75 cents] and a killer Italian beef sandwich [$1.05]. A photographer friend says he can’t face the drive home without a Mr. Beef beef dripping into his lap.”

Even cats started appreciating the sandwich. In one of the stranger stories I’ve ever come across in the archives, author Mary Daniels wrote on Oct. 6, 1976, about Nick Fischer’s cat that weighed 23 pounds and once “stole an 11-pound turkey.” Then Fischer explained that when he gets a beef sandwich, “I have to get him one, too. Without peppers.”

By Jan. 8, 1979, the Italian beef was apparently so ubiquitous that Phyllis Magida could write this: “Rare is the Chicagoan who doesn’t know to dip pierogi in sour cream, or how to hold a taco, or to demand hot pepper with Italian beef.”

The Italian beef really took off in the 1980s. In a Sept. 26, 1980, article about where to spot celebrities in the city, Barbara Molotsky wrote that Neil Diamond apparently really liked the Italian beef at Al’s. The sandwich became a fixture for numerous businesses at Taste of Chicago, which launched for the first time in 1980. Even fine dining chefs started discussing the sandwich. In an article from Oct. 15, 1982, Gail Bernstein asked chefs where they enjoyed eating after closing time, and multiple chefs mentioned grabbing an Italian beef. On Nov. 3, 1983, JeanMarie Brownson even offered a recipe for “cheesy Italian beef sandwiches,” proving that cheese was a common topping for the sandwich in the 1980s.

By Sept. 15, 1989, Manuel Galvan felt confident enough to declare that the Italian beef was “Chicago’s sandwich.” That said, the article is more interesting for mentioning that Jay Leno, who at that time didn’t have his own show, brought “a bagful of beefs to ‘Late Night with David Letterman’” when it was taping in Chicago four months before. “As he and the host traded laughs, Leno ate a couple of Italian beefs and frequently told the Chicago audience the sandwiches came from Mr. Beef.”

This is around the time when Chicago transplants started writing in to complain about how they can’t get a good Italian beef anywhere else. On Aug. 16, 1990, Edward Agustin from Norcross, Georgia, wrote a “plea for help from a displaced Chicagoan” about how much he missed the “wet mess of sandwich.” On July 25, 2001, Jerry Goodman from Florida said he’d love a recipe for the sandwich because he really missed those “morsels.”

Finally, on Oct. 12, 2005, there was no doubt about the status of the Italian beef sandwich in Chicago. That’s when the sandwich was included in Bill Daley’s article about “10 Chicago icons.” There the Italian beef shared space with other recognized Chicago food classics like deep-dish pizza and the Chicago hot dog.

Nick Kindelsperger is a former Tribune food critic.

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Introduced in Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 detective novel “The Maltese Falcon,” the character of Sam Spade became an indelible template for the hard-boiled gumshoe. Humphrey Bogart would bring him to life with a dryly unflappable performance in the 1941 film noir based on the book, and now Clive Owen ably dons the fedora in AMC’s “Monsieur Spade,” which catches up with the character decades later in the early 1960s, when he’s more or less retired to the small village of Bozouls in southern France.

What an unexpected turn of events.

It’s a case that first brings him to town. In 1955, he is hired to deliver a little girl named Teresa to her father after her mother’s death — only the guy was nowhere to be found. This is annoying rather than worrying for the private eye (no one is more emotionally detached than Spade) so he sticks Teresa in an orphanage run by nuns. As this unfolds, he catches the eye of a wealthy local widow who he subsequently falls for and marries. (Wait, I thought he was detached!) She dies of an illness a few years later, leaving him to mourn luxuriously on the estate she left to him.

All of this is prologue to a mass murder of the nuns, which throws into disarray Spade’s placid existence of quiet days skinny dipping and trading good-natured barbs with his live-in housekeeper.

Who killed the nuns — and why? Spade is begrudgingly drawn into the drama and Teresa, now a teenager, comes to stay with him until he can sort things out. When the girl comes of age, she’ll be the beneficiary of a vast inheritance and he’s worried about her safety. Could the money be the reason behind the nuns’ deaths?

No one in the village seems particularly appalled by this crime or its effect on the orphaned children. No one seems concerned about the emotional welfare of any child in the story, for that matter. Perhaps their sympathies are spent, having lived through the horrors of World War II and then, later, the revolution that would win Algeria its independence from France in 1962. The ghosts of both wars hang over the place like a dark cloud, despite the sunny skies, pastoral vineyards and quaint villages.

That’s the setting. Gorgeous, but full of secrets. Classic noir motifs of moral ambiguity and inner conflicts are threaded throughout. No one is content, but forever glancing over their shoulder. David Ungaro’s cinematography is dazzling, capturing Spade’s life in the country and the cozy Old World look of the town. Bozouls has a unique topography, built around an enormous gorge — The Hole, as everyone refers to it — with buildings seemingly teetering on the edges. Talk about your metaphor. This is the one time I wish a production had used drone shots to really make clear how vivid the village’s gorge appears from overhead.

The show comes from seasoned talents. Created by Scott Frank (of “The Queen’s Gambit,” and whose other screenwriting credits include everything from “Get Shorty” to “Minority Report”) and Tom Fontana (known for “Oz” and “Homicide: Life on the Street”), the six-episode limited series is so classy and made with such style, you don’t notice its flaws at first. Most of that comes down to Owen’s performance as the gimlet-eyed Spade. He doesn’t have the right gait — he moves through the world with too much spring in his step — but his face is wonderfully inscrutable. Spade’s inner monologue is meant to be elusive, but he’s a calculating figure and Owen conveys his watchful cynicism with the kind of low-key zest that holds your interest, even when the narrative doesn’t.

A number of red herrings and people with compromised motives enter the picture. Is the precocious Teresa (Cara Bossom) the real target? Perhaps not. There are various soldiers around, both ex and current, who can’t seem to move on from whatever violence they were primed for. There’s the woman who co-owns the local nightclub with Spade; she’s unhappily married to an Algerian who is suffering PTSD from the war. The Algerians in town were never made to feel welcome, and that subtext runs through everything. There’s also a young British painter who moves next door with his mother; they’re too chipper and too friendly to not be up to something. These are surface-level characters, which is also true of everyone populating the show’s original source material. But that can wear thin when stretched out over a multi-episode season.

Round and round they go, and the show’s plotting becomes Byzantine and strained. But the dialogue makes up for it. There’s a terrific monologue in the first episode when Spade explains his reluctance to get involved. He is a man who has seen it all, and had his fill: “People come to you with their problems and you end up inheriting those problems,” he says with studied dispassion. “But you’re good at fixing them, so the problems keep coming. Along with the money. In a very short while, the problems go from small to deadly — turns out, you’re good at those too. Maybe too good. One day you wake up, you look in the mirror and you see someone you don’t much like. No big deal. Just don’t look in the mirror anymore.” It’s the moment that solidifies him as Spade.

There’s also the occasional wry and deadpan line. “Cigarettes are bad for you,” Spade’s doctor says as he lights a pipe.

Here’s what Hammett once said about his invention: Spade is a “dream man,” the kind “most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and in their cockier moments thought they approached.”

How do you translate that fantasy on screen without devolving into a cliche of masculinity that leaves no room for vulnerability or any visible emotion other than anger? Somehow, Owen finds a way to play him as exceedingly human.

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‘MONSIEUR SPADE’

3 stars (out of 4)

How to watch: 9 p.m. ET Sundays on AMC (streaming on AMC+)

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©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The British musician and filmmaker Jeymes Samuel wanted to make a biblical epic like “Ben-Hur,” with a side order of biblical-adjacent “Spartacus,” but his way. The result is the satiric/earnest/rollicking/mellow amalgam called “The Book of Clarence,” starring LaKeith Stanfield as a dope-dealing striver in 33 A.D. Jerusalem.

The trailer looks like an action comedy, and it isn’t that, really, thought it contains both action (chariot street racing, gladiator bone-crunching) and comedy. Does it work? I’d say no, and sort of, and in the end, almost. The extreme tonal change-ups careen from full-on crucifixion violence to sight gags such as the light bulb appearing over Clarence’s head when he’s struck by his latest inspiration.

Broke and threatened with death by the local loan shark, Clarence hustles through his meager life as “a seller of ungodly herbs” with his friend Elijah (RJ Cyler). He takes care of his mother (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who has been more or less forsaken by Clarence’s identical twin brother Thomas (also played by Stanfield, though without much differentiation).

Thomas has grand things on his agenda: He’s one of Jesus’ 12 apostles, on a date with biblical destiny. Clarence puts his bid in to join the circle, and ultimately lands on the idea of becoming a copycat Chosen One himself, performing fake miracles and gathering acolytes for prestige and profit.

It’s a ripe satiric premise, but “The Book of Clarence” wants more. Filming in Matera, Italy, where Mel Gibson shot (and stabbed, and whipped) “The Passion of the Christ,” Samuel feeds his throwaway verbal jokes and anachronisms into a narrative played, disarmingly, for a spiritual story of one underestimated nobody’s path toward becoming a somebody.

Anna Diop, so good in the supernatural thriller “Nanny,” plays Lavinia, the local gangster’s sister; the tentative but palpable connection she has with Clarence is the movie’s grounding element. Once Clarence’s popularity draws the interest of Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy), the movie’s tangle of intentions gets knotted up in some frustrating ways. Is the movie best served by the full-on Gibson-esque gore in the culminating scenes? Does it work to follow nail-pounding and anguished screams with wisecracks from those dying on the cross?

The cast includes Omar Sy as the noble, unkillable gladiator slave Barabbas, freed by Clarence in his first conspicuous act of valor; David Oyelowo as a testy, waterboarding John the Baptist; and the reliably splendid Alfre Woodard as the Mother Mary, who in one comic highlight discusses the whole virgin birth business with a puzzled Clarence. Teyana Taylor, coming off her excellent work in “One Thousand and One,” doesn’t get nearly enough to do as a fierce Mary Magdalene.

As for Stanfield, he’s a watchful, uniquely charismatic actor in nearly any context, though this context proves especially challenging. His determinedly low-key line readings have a way of flattening out the movie’s energy. On the other hand, would a more classically trained “Bible epic technique” performer have made “The Book of Clarence” more persuasive, or just more harrumphy? Who’s to say? I’m all over the place on a movie that’s all over the place.

Samuel’s first feature, the 2021 Western “The Harder They Fall,” was all over the place, too, more successfully. That one, like this one, had the benefit of Samuel’s terrific soundtrack. Samuel — whose musical stage name is the Bullitts — consistently bails out his latest movie with a dozen or two songs in a supple half-dozen complementary styles, here featuring a song featuring Jay-Z, elsewhere leaning into Old Hollywood orchestral sweep or solo harp. The more this filmmaker can learn about matching his musical taste and invention with cinematic tonal range and control worthy of those sounds, the harder we’ll fall for whatever he does next.

———

‘THE BOOK OF CLARENCE’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong violence, drug use, strong language, some suggestive material and smoking)

Running time: 2:16

How to watch: In theaters Friday

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©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Most weekends at the Randolph Street Market in Chicago, Helena Kim can be found with her head inside the lining of a vintage Coach purse. After finding and restoring more than 30, she knows a good piece of leather by touch.

Kim, 31, has built a following on TikTok for her step-by-step videos restoring vintage leather pieces from Coach. Bringing old, worn bags back to life takes a careful hand. For West Loop resident Kim, who goes by her nickname Yoonie online, caring for vintage leather has helped her feel in touch with herself and her family.

“I started to personify these bags, and kind of like take care of them,” Kim said. “I keep getting very emotionally attached to these bags as I’m working on them.”

Kim went viral on TikTok in June 2023 with a video restoring a Coach Bleecker bag from the 1990s. Now, she has over 188,000 followers and 6 million likes on the app. Her most popular video, featuring a Coach coin purse found at Goodwill in December, has 1.6 million likes and 12.6 million views.

Kim learned how to take care of leather by watching her parents, Korean immigrants who bought a shoe repair and tailor shop after arriving in Chicago in 1998.

Money was tight at first, Kim said, and her family life revolved around the shop. As her parents mended clothes and shoes, she made tiny purses or glued buttons onto leather panels. Whenever Kim forgot her house key, she would return to the store and help her dad clean and condition leather shoes.

Decades later, the sights, sounds and smells of the family store rush back to Kim when she sits down with a new vintage purse.

“That just really stayed with me,” Kim said. “Stacks of leather shoes behind me that needed repairing, and leather glue stuck onto the table. My mom’s in the corner hemming pants, and I’m just tinkering with little things around the shop. … I think it’s become like a comfort place for me.”

Still, Kim didn’t rediscover leather until her late 20s. An avid fabric artist, she expected to take more after her mother, who attended fashion school and was a seamstress in Korea.

Then in 2020, Kim fell in love with a bag for the first time — a mahogany Coach Bleecker bag in sorry shape.

“I wanted to clean that bag up, and I actually knew a lot,” Kim said. “I remembered my dad gluing leather pieces back together, using clamps to make sure they stayed, washing leather and polishing it and using the horsehair brush.”

These days, Kim’s main focus is the Ergo purse, a curvy shoulder bag. The oldest bag in Kim’s collection is from 1977, and her current favorite is a red Ergo. Some come with names attached — Andrea, Casey.

Once Kim takes a bag home, she tries to identify it through a reverse image search or by flipping through old catalogs.

Then she straps on a headlamp and sets up a small tripod.

Kim cleans each bag with saddle soap and molds it back into shape, sometimes by stuffing it with paper or foam. She uses a horsehair brush to scrub out stains. This can involve dyeing parts of a darker bag with leather paint, or dunking the whole bag in a cleaning solution.

“Sometimes I find a bag that’s just in really rough condition,” Kim said. “I know it won’t sell and that makes me want to get it even more, to go home and rehab it and show it the care and respect that it deserves.”

The last step is a thorough massage with leather conditioner, sometimes paired with various oils. Her favorite products include Leather CPR and Lexol leather conditioner.

Restoring a bag takes Kim as little as two hours. The most damaged bags can take a month to troubleshoot. If she’s really stumped, Kim calls her dad, or makes a trip to the dry cleaning shop her parents now own in Northbrook.

“The last three years, I’ve probably called my dad more times than I had in all of my 20s,” Kim said. “It’s been really healing for our relationship.”

Severely damaged purses can need time to rest in between treatments, Kim said. She’s drawn to leather because it’s strong and durable, but it genuinely responds to care.

“I think that’s so fascinating that leather can heal on its own sometimes,” Kim said. “Because it is skin. If you give it oils and moisturizing and the proper care, it just can come back to life.”

Whether she’s filming for TikTok or not, Kim prefers to work on her bags in silence. Every soothing rasp, click and brush stroke is captured on camera, overlaid with a scripted voice-over.

As Kim talks through each step on camera, she quips about her daily life and the treasures left behind in some bags. Each of her TikToks takes about two hours to edit, she said.

By day, Kim is a creative director at Rit Dye, where her work includes planning and producing videos. Editing on the job made it easier to find her rhythm with leather content, she said.

Along with the Randolph Street Market, Kim often sources bags on eBay. She also visits her local Goodwill about once a week. New Ergo bags go for $250 to $350 on the Coach website. Vintage bags can go for $400.

Kim focuses on vintage Coach bags because of the quality of leather for the price point, she said. Plus, something about Coach reminds her of the 1990s mall scene buzzing around her parents’ shop.

“It was just something that I have always attributed to being a cool girl,” Kim said.

She’s also adept at spotting fakes, sometimes through typos on bag labels or serial numbers.

The marketing team at Coach has responded casually but positively to her TikTok account, Kim said, with occasional compliments on her videos.

As Kim doesn’t plan to resell any of her bags, overconsumption is often on her mind. She doesn’t buy bags she knows she can’t fix, or pieces she already owns. She won’t spend more than $30 on a thrift trip, or $150 on an eBay auction. She also makes a point of wearing her bags in her everyday life.

Kim hopes her videos make people think twice before throwing away a damaged leather piece. Some of her followers have restored family heirlooms from the 1970s and 1980s by studying her videos, she said.

Sometimes, Kim thinks about the likelihood that with enough care, her bags will outlive her.

“There’s a lot of people who have personal stories about their first Coach bag, or their mom’s bag, or inheriting their grandmother’s coin purse,” Kim said. “That just makes me feel like they’re healing while I’m also healing, and that this is all circular.”

iarougheti@chicagotribune.com

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

CHICAGO — Ten years ago, Beth Beyer’s youngest child walked out to Lake Michigan on a mild winter day and cried.

The Lincoln Park resident thought her son would be excited about spending time outdoors, but the seventh grader was distraught thinking about what the unseasonably warm weather meant for the world and its climate.

“I was like, ‘Wow, you’re taking this in a way that I had no idea,’” Beyer remembers saying.

Since, Beyer’s advocacy and nonprofit work has allowed her to keep her “ear to the ground” and share what she learns from other environmentalists with her two sons to ease their eco-conscious minds. She is the executive director of The Technology Alliance, which makes new technologies available to local underserved communities, and also works with the Chicago Wilderness Alliance.

“We need to figure out how we channel this anxiety,” she said. “How do we create hope?”

Beyer recounted this during a Climate Café, one of a few gatherings that Chicago psychotherapist and clinical social worker Libby Bachhuber has helped organize for those struggling with the emotional burdens of climate change: from anxiety to grief, from guilt to shame.

Many mental health professionals agree the most effective way to deal with the difficult feelings brought up by the enormity of the climate crisis might just be to slow down, pay attention to those feelings — as uncomfortable as they may be — and talk through them with other people.

“Unless we can process our internal responses to climate change, we are not going to be able to respond appropriately to it,” Bachhuber said.

After joining the regional team for the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, Bachhuber trained last year on how to hold small group sessions. She is planning three cafes in the next three months.

She organized the recent Climate Café at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum alongside Haven Denson, coordinator for the museum’s Chicago Conservation Corps program, which trains community leaders in grassroots organizing and climate action. Denson said many young people like her Gen Z peers are mentally checked out when it comes to climate issues.

“Everybody that I talk to is mostly ready to give up. All we hear is doom and gloom,” Denson said. “We may as well just give up, it’s already too late.”

And the numbers back this up. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2021 found that almost half of Americans surveyed between the ages of 16 and 25 were very worried or extremely worried about climate change and thought humanity was doomed because of it.

“That is why I think this is so important, having these spaces where we can not only talk about solutions, but also just talk about (how) we are in this together, we’re not isolated, it’s OK to feel this way,” Denson said. “To acknowledge these feelings and emotions, to actually process them so that we can then move on and find those solutions.”

Ecological anxiety and grief

Some may dismiss eco-anxiety, or fear of environmental catastrophe associated with climate change, as one more term in a long list of “therapy speak” — buzzwords related to psychotherapy and mental health that are often used excessively and incorrectly.

But just in the last decade, the number of Americans “alarmed” by climate change has doubled to more than one-third of the population, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

“People tend to come in and they are worrying a lot,” said Marilee Feldman, founder and clinical director of the Life Counseling Institute in Willowbrook and Park Ridge. She is also the Illinois regional coordinator for the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which trains psychotherapists to address climate issues and concerns.

Feldman said clients often ask themselves: “Where should I live? What is the future? What will it be like for my children?”

Another feeling particular to the climate crisis is ecological grief; a great sadness about the loss of nature and species, about a lack of safety and about unfulfilled potential. These and other overwhelming feelings can be exacerbated by a sense of isolation, according to Feldman. “So, that just adds fuel to the fire,” she said.

A growing number of climate-aware psychotherapists are hoping to help their patients move past denial and into climate resilience. By accepting reality, people can sort through complex feelings and grow able to tolerate them. Anxiety, grief and despair, anger and rage can all be transformed — by talking with other activists, joining a support group, meeting a climate-aware therapist — into productive action.

“I think there’s hope here, in terms of really becoming more adaptive, dealing with all those thoughts, feelings, body sensations,” Feldman said, “to where you take that anxiety, you take that grief and all of that upset, these emotions that are very powerful, and you channel (them) into … your love for this world and making things better and figuring out what’s important to you.”

Guilt and shame

According to The Lancet study, about 42% of young people surveyed in the United States felt guilt and over 44% felt shame in relation to climate change. An associate professor of environmental ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, Sarah Fredericks said deep shame can cause people to hide or retreat and become paralyzed, unable to act.

Guilt and shame in the context of climate change first piqued the ethicist’s curiosity when she lived in Texas a decade or so ago. She owned an old home that she wanted to renovate in an ecologically conscious manner, so she began perusing blogs and websites about eco-friendly design.

But Fredericks also found many people online who were plagued by guilt, in response to doing something wrong, and shame, or having negative feelings about one’s whole self. For instance, someone felt bad about driving a minivan around town, someone else was embarrassed to admit they used air conditioning regularly, and yet another person would always forget to bring reusable bags to the grocery store.

“It was interesting to me, because people kept using this language that I would think of as very religiously coded language,” Fredericks said. “They would say things like ‘I’m an eco-sinner,’ or ‘I’m a bad person.’ They were judging themselves. And I thought, as a religious studies scholar: Is that what’s going on here? Are these people affiliated with particular religious traditions? Are they not? Where’s this language coming from?”

At the time, however, there was basically no existing academic literature documenting this phenomenon; her peers and colleagues told Fredericks it made no sense for people to feel that way as individuals since climate change is a systemic problem.

But the more she read and studied discussion boards, websites and books to learn what people were doing about these feelings, Fredericks realized there seemed to be something affirming and validating when people helped others put their guilt and shame into perspective; mistakes were recognized as such and not as an indictment on a person’s morality.

“As individuals we exist in communities, and wouldn’t be able to exist without our communities,” Fredericks said. “But a lot of the environmental guilt and shame relate to our community. … There are structures in our community — financial, infrastructural, physical, social — that shape who we are. So we need community responses. And we need community support, the kind of cheerleading or moral support that friends and community and families can offer us.”

Sitting with differences

Participants at the recent Climate Café at the nature museum were asked to bring a natural object that illustrates their connection to climate issues.

Carolyn Vazquez brought her 10-year-old daughter, Bella.

“Well, she’s natural!” she remembers saying with a chuckle. “She’s my object because she’s the future. … What am I leaving her?”

For Vazquez, looking out for the environment is a personal and professional endeavor. The Auburn Gresham resident is a community activist and the CEO of hemp manufacturing company Think ReHemption which advocates for sustainable, organic and climate-smart agricultural practices.

After the conclusion of their Climate Café and still sitting in a circle, Vazquez and Beyer organically and almost inevitably waded into a conversation about race. Both women, similar in age but with distinct backgrounds, share a passion for the environment and hope to get their communities involved in these issues.

Vazquez pointed out that most of her neighbors in Auburn Gresham have basic needs like access to food and concerns like gun violence, matters so urgent they can divert attention from environmental problems.

“There are young, African American youth and parents, families who are concerned about it, but you don’t see them,” Vazquez said. “You don’t hear about them. Nor do they feel empowered enough to get a bunch of people who really don’t want to hear that language, who are worried about different stuff.”

And because suburban and North Side communities don’t see as much violence, she said, their residents might have more time, energy and resources to direct toward climate advocacy. “The playing ground will never be equal,” Vazquez added.

But Beyer herself feels challenged by the fact many people in her Lincoln Park neighborhood don’t feel connected to one another. “Some of us don’t even know what’s going on,” she said. “There’s no forum for it.”

“I think these are tough conversations sometimes, and people come from different places. So (with) this small group,” she gestured to the Climate Café participants and facilitators, “I think we’re going real far. … It just helps to get insight.”

Bachhuber sat to the side, quietly listening. She finally spoke after a lull in conversation.

“It’s challenging, all over in different spaces but including in environmental spaces, to sit with the reality of these differences, how deep they run, and how psychologically they affect us,” she said. “There’s a universality to (climate change), but there’s also a specificity to it, of how different communities are affected. (This conversation) is kind of cool because to me, this is some of the work that needs to happen. … I don’t think this solves with us just being separate and not figuring out how to sit with the discomfort of differences.”

Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, noted that some people may think or suggest climate anxiety is an experience limited to white, middle-class people who are concerned about losing summer homes or getting insurance on their coastal properties. But that’s not true, she argued.

“The people who are most worried about climate change are people of color, predominantly women of color,” she said. “The people who are most active around these issues are people of color. The people who are most advocating for policy change are people of color. So to suggest that climate anxiety is just a feeling of the wealthy elite is not correct.”

As an activist, Vazquez said she often finds herself “mentally tired and drained” from trying and failing to get people in her neighborhood, which has historically suffered from disinvestment, to pay attention to environmental issues.

“I feel like these moments help you connect in a safe space where you feel like you can really talk to people,” she said.

From individualism to community

When Ren Dean, the owner of Skunk Cabbage Books, was drawing up a business plan for the Avondale bookstore, one of their main goals was to create a place where folks could talk about their collective futures in the context of climate change. So Dean began a book club for nature-focused writing.

“I personally was really feeling like I needed a space, a physical space, to talk to other people and figure out how to find each other and how to support each other,” Dean told the Tribune. “How do we engage with this in a way that isn’t so paralyzing, that feels like there’s something we can do and (there’s) ways we can support each other?”

Dean said the group had been reading a lot of good writing about grappling with the immensity of climate anxiety and how community could offer a starting place to begin processing these difficult feelings. But they were also itching to find a space to talk about their mental and emotional experiences instead of just reading about them.

“There’s reading that and recognizing that that’s the answer,” Dean said, “and then there’s the next step of: How do I do that? It felt really big and hard for me, personally.”

Which is why Dean jumped at an opportunity a few months ago, when Bachhuber reached out with the idea of holding a Climate Café at the bookstore. “It was a really kind of perfect thing for us to host,” Dean said.

“We have a very individualistic culture that puts people in a really difficult position as they start to process climate change and learn about it in isolation,” Bachhuber explained. “And our culture of individualism is part of the problem, it’s part of what got us into this situation in the first place.”

Talking through their shared feelings and emotions on climate change can help folks untangle themselves from individualistic approaches to the climate crisis, which can oftentimes feel futile and discouraging.

“We were raised that way,” Vazquez said. “How do we say, ‘Hey, there’s enough pie for all of us,’ to solve this problem?”

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©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

CHICAGO — Mohamed Tageldin has worked at the intersection of artificial intelligence and pathology, the study and diagnosis of diseases, for six years.

Tageldin, a resident physician at Northwestern University’s McGaw Medical Center, is part of a team of researchers that has developed an artificial intelligence model to more precisely predict long-term outcomes for breast cancer patients.

At a time when some industries are shying away from and questioning the use of AI in daily work, those in the medical field are leaning into the support the technology can provide to doctors.

“There’s almost too much excitement,” Tageldin said of attitudes toward AI in the medical field.

The team hopes the new model, designed specifically for breast cancer, will aid patients with more personalized recommendations and agency in their choice of treatment plans. It may also spare patients unnecessary chemotherapy treatments, according to a report published in late November.

Researchers found that with current prognosis methods used by pathologists, some patients are placed into higher-risk categories when, in reality, the patients could undergo shorter and less intense treatment plans.

“For those people we recategorize, we could reduce the duration or intensity of their chemotherapy, and hopefully, achieve the same clinical outcome with less side effects,” said study co-author Lee Cooper.

Cooper, an associate professor of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said the algorithm assesses patients differently from human pathologists and previous models by studying both cancerous and noncancerous cells — such as immune cells — in a prognosis.

Noncancerous cells can attack and inhibit cancer growth and provide shape around a tumor, which can lead to better long-term outcomes for a patient. But noncancerous cells are hard to analyze with the human eye, making it difficult for doctors to predict if a patient needs an aggressive form of treatment like chemotherapy.

The AI model is not meant to replace the role of pathologists in providing the best care to patients, Cooper stressed. Rather, it is to help pathologists — who are tasked with grading how cancer cells appear and predicting how they’ll grow — feel more confident about the grade they send to the oncologist, who then determines a treatment plan with the patient.

Lauren Teras, senior scientific director of epidemiology research at the American Cancer Society, said the algorithm is promising for breast cancer patients because the current treatment options are brutal, with often strenuous side effects that affect day-to-day life. She said doctors should avoid using harsh treatments when possible.

“We need to have tools to help doctors identify which women are at the highest risk of dying from their cancers and need more aggressive treatments,” Teras said. “But also, we need to identify women who do not need these treatments.”

There are more cancer survivors in the United States than ever, Teras said, partly due to advancements in treatment plans.

As of Jan. 1, 2022, there were more than 18 million cancer survivors nationally, according to the most recent ACS Cancer Treatment & Survivorship report. Women with a history of invasive breast cancer made up the largest subgroup, with more than 4 million survivors recorded.

The Cancer Society says 1 in 8 women in the United States will receive a breast cancer diagnosis in their lifetime.

When Cooper began the research, the original AI model would study an image given to it and produce a prediction. That output did not provide any reasoning behind the prediction, which was a simple number, or grade. The updated model gives more information to doctors, including the steps the AI took to determine its prognosis, which addresses a main concern of AI for pathologists.

With the new model, doctors would acquire tissue from the patient during a surgery or biopsy. They would then use the tissue to produce a digital image slide for the AI model to view, identify the different cells and, ultimately, examine the cells’ relationship to one another.

Researchers used sample tissue from 3,177 breast cancer patients through a partnership with the ACS Cancer Prevention Studies program, where people sign up to donate their cancer tissue before they are diagnosed with the disease. When they donate, a high-resolution digital image is taken of their removed tissue and saved in the data set.

Markups and images of breast cancer tissue were studied by a team of around 40 doctors, residents and researchers around the world to train the algorithm on how to analyze the cells, Tageldin said.

Tageldin said he was grateful for the thousands of volunteers, as the model would not have been possible without the people who donated their body tissue and time to train the algorithm.

Using the ACS data means the algorithm is exposed to a more diverse set of patient tissues in its training stages since the ACS collects data from a variety of medical clinics, including community centers in low-income and rural areas. Most other public data originates in academic medical institutions and can have a select set of patient profiles, Cooper said.

“By building a model on this (ACS) data, we’re better able to capture the true spectrum of disease in the United States,” Cooper said.

With comprehensive and diverse training, the AI could also largely benefit patients in lower-income areas where the model could aid doctors who are not specialized pathologists in providing grades and treatment care options.

“If you can make a slide and you have a microscope with a camera and an internet connection, we could probably find a way to deliver these assessments anywhere in the world, really,” he said.

The use of digital images in medical practice has increased in recent years, with Northwestern Medicine transitioning to digital imaging over the next three years.

Next, researchers will need to evaluate the model using data from clinical trials, tackle operational challenges and ensure predictions are generated on time for pathologists. Cooper said if the model is approved for clinical use, he could see the same template applied to other cancers as well.

Teras said the ACS is “cautiously optimistic” about AI in the cancer research field, adding that the organization is taking steps forward with models but “not moving too quickly.” However, she emphasized that doctors will not be replaced by AI innovation.

“Patients will always need doctors, but this tool can help doctors help patients,” she said.

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