By Nicholas S. Kass

November 12^th,2026

John Kass is a writer.  A great, legendary Chicago journalist, yes.  A rare political analyst, of course.  But he is first and foremost a writer.  Which is to say, he is an artist.  And artists can reveal truth to us in a manner that far transcends other ways of knowing.

You can always count on John to tell it straight. Always. Stares the truth right in the eye, never flinching, whether he’s writing about politics or the health challenges he’s faced in recent years.  You don’t find that around so much these days, with what was once called “mainstream” journalism having fully reverted to its default mode as a nest of pay-for-play toads, deep state mouthpieces, status-seekers, little climbers and sycophants.

Some of John’s readers have been following him for over 40 years, most recently at Johnkassnews.com since its inception five years ago.  Before that, he was a reporter, political writer, and then many years the top columnist  (on page 2) at “the paper,” his term for the once-great, fallen news organization where he worked for decades.  And even before that, he was at the “Daily Calumet,” where he started his pro career, and where he began to break news with investigative reporting on corruption at City Hall.

My brother Peter and I have been following John longer than anyone—since we started to walk—and have watched him develop his talent long before he began to share it publicly.

He has always poured his heart and soul into whatever he does.  And so he is an extraordinarily hard worker.  Always has been.  John brings everything he has to his chosen medium, and we’re all the better for it. It looks effortless, but I know how much work goes into it.

Peter and I remember countless afternoons and evenings when, as a kid, John would come home from football practice and go straight up into his room and start writing for hours, without breaks—short stories, oberservations about life, some of which you see reflected in his work today.  He has always understood that talent alone isn’t enough, and that discipline and hard work are essential to getting the most out of whatever gift God gives you.

He wrote four columns a week at the paper. Consider that for a minute.  Being a columnist is not just sitting in the office thinking great thoughts.  It means he was working seven days a week, out on the streets, digging, finding out what was going on, spending years developing sources, then writing furiously under deadline pressure to get the job done to his own high standards.   His family breathed a sigh of relief when, having started John Kass News in his mid-60s, he cut his output to three columns a week.

He has always considered writing and truth-telling a vocation, approached with absolute commitment and seriousness, with his readers in mind. I remember a long piece he wrote early on in his career at the paper about the battle between two prominent Chicago politicians to replace Harold Washington, fighting over who had the best claim to his legacy, which they interpreted in the way best suited their own power interests.  It revealed a deep understanding of his subjects, and of the who-gets-what-and-how of big city politics—which, it might surprise you to find out, is not all that different from Washington politics in its elemental mendacity.

That piece stuck with me, not only because it was well written and deeply insightful, but because it clearly demonstrated that you could earn the respect of, and even access to, the players by being fair and by knowing what you were talking about, not by sucking up to them and telling them what they might have wanted to hear.  In my mind, it became a template, an example of how the job should be done.  He’s written countless pieces since then, any one of which should be a model for anyone interested in the news business, from both the reporting and opinion sides of the trade.  If you’re a young person interested in pursuing journalism as a career, or even if you’re not, John’s stuff is all out there, each with its own lessons on how to do the job.

But it is his columns about life that I appreciate most, and where you can really see his gift on display.  Whether its writing about his garden,  Zeus the Wonder Dog, his love letter to his amazing wife, Betty, his family, reading books as a kid, growing up in the family business in Gage Park, his health, his encounter as a merchant seaman with rats on a cargo ship as a metaphor of political and journalistic corruption, or the Orthodox prayer that is his annual Christmas column, he brings you in so completely you can share his experience with all of your senses.

One of my favorites is a recent one, called “Riding a Good Horse in the Snow (Part 2).” If you haven’t read it already, do yourself a big favor and click the link to read it now.  You can pick any line or graph in the column as an example of what I’m talking about here, but here’s one:

“Right now, I remember the weight of the chestnut quarter horse standing next to me in the barn and brushing him, and the plumes of his breath in the cold stillness and the scent of it.

The brush in my hands, the weight of the apples and carrots in the pockets of my field jacket, all of it.”

Read that line as it comes to you, naurally, as you read the piece from the beginning, the whole story building to that moment.  It illustrates what makes John such a unique writer.  Its not just his penetrating political insights, his deep understanding of the political environment of Chicago or Illinois or other things he writes about, or of his mastery of the hard rhetorical punch, the ability to drive home viscerally to the reader the ruthlessness of politics.  To me, it is that in addition to all of these remarkable attributes, John is a master of evocative prose, of the ability to set a scene, capture it, to paint a picture.   And ultimately, to make you understand, to reveal reality to you through the environment he creates, and to help you relate his experience to your own life.

The best writer in America, in fact.

I’m going to miss JohnKassNews.com.  I know Chicago will miss it, too. It was an institution, a haven for a stable of fine local writers from all walks of life that John curated over the years, a place where contributors were expected to write what they thought and believed—which is the central point of John’s no-nonsense approach.  It was also that rarest thing in Chicago journalism; a place you could go to read and grapple with honest opinion on the issues of the day.  I was deeply honored to have had the opportunity to be an occasional contributor.

The silver lining is that John isn’t really going away.  He will continue to write, and speak, though at a more leisurely pace, as he spends more time with his family.

So, thanks for everything, brother.  You taught me more than I can say, or ever explain.   But I think you know.

See you soon.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicholas S. Kass is John’s brother.