America likes to solve its problems after they’ve already occurred, if you ask Mark Rodgers.

“How do you put a plaque on prevention?” he asks.

Efforts to combat the problem of sex trafficking must take a strenuous look at why men purchase sex in the first place, he said, not just catch them at it.

The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation is taking a close look at the complexities of this market and how demand can be curbed from the ground up.

“Why have you not been making dresses?”

That was the incredulous question a friend asked Kahindo Mateene.

Three of her friends were standing in the middle of Mateene’s Edgewater apartment, looking at and trying on an assortment of clothes designed by Mateene.

“I’m wearing Kahindo,” Silvia Kariuki said, coining the designer’s first name as the label for the orange and green halter dress she had been reluctant to take off.

Aleksandar Hemon moved from Sarajevo to Chicago in 1992, wrote his first story in English in 1995, and won a MacArthur “genius grant" in 2004. Not bad, right?

Last week Hemon released the fruit of his “genius grant," The Lazarus Project, a novel that jumps between the murder of a Jew in early 20^th century Chicago and a Bosnian immigrant in modern-day Chicago investigating the victim. Hemon’s 2002 novel Nowhere Man and 2000 debut collection of stories, The Question of Bruno, also feature Chicago heavily. His style is a mix of careful description and epic narrative, channeling the desires and dreams of immigrants in America; he lives in Edgewater, one of the most diverse and immigrant friendly neighborhoods in the city.