This Book Is Not for You Explores Daniel Isenberg’s Personal Story

The Chicago Journal Staff on August 8, 2026

By: Arlene Harris

For much of his career, Daniel Isenberg has been known for helping people work through uncertainty.

A former Harvard and Columbia professor, entrepreneur, investor, venture capitalist, and internationally recognized authority on entrepreneurship, Isenberg has been a pioneer in helping people overcome obstacles, build businesses, and manage complex economic and social change. His professional world has often revolved around identifying complex problems, challenging assumptions, and creating paths to prosperity when there is no beaten path forward.

His latest book examines a challenge unlike any he had encountered before.

This Book Is Not for You: My Loss, My Grief, My Healing is an intensely personal memoir chronicling the death of his 52-year-old wife, Carla, following a four-year battle with a rare, untreatable cancer. It is not a guide to grief, nor does it promise healing through a series of steps or lessons. Instead, it offers something far less common: a deeply and painfully honest and soul-searching account of one man’s attempt to understand a life forever changed by profound loss.

The contrast is striking.

A man whose professional life centered on solving wicked problems suddenly found himself facing an experience that offered no solution.

No strategy could reverse what had happened, no set of data could make sense of it, and no professional expertise was capable of providing a roadmap through what came next. Grief did not behave like the challenges Isenberg had spent much of his career studying. It was personal, unpredictable, and resistant to easy answers.

What followed wasn’t a professional project.

It was survival.

After Carla’s death, Isenberg began recording dreams, diary entries, private reflections, and even imagined conversations aloud with his late wife. At first, he had no intention of writing a book. He simply wrote because writing became one of the few ways he could begin to process the maelstrom of emotions that defied easy description.

Over time, those fragments began to form something larger. The act of documenting his experience created a record not only of loss, but of the ways heightened memories, love, anger, confusion, and even moments of unexpected joy can coexist after someone central to a person’s life is gone.

Only later did Isenberg realize those pages might speak to others who had experienced loss, or who wanted to better understand someone who had.

That deeply personal beginning also explains the memoir’s unusual title.

This Book Is Not for You wasn’t chosen to provoke curiosity or serve as a marketing slogan. According to Isenberg, the writing was originally meant for himself, a private effort to understand an experience that had completely reshaped his world. The irony, he says, is that many readers have since found the book deeply meaningful in their own lives.

Perhaps the memoir’s most distinctive quality is what it refuses to do.

Rather than offering advice or presenting grief as a journey with clearly defined stages, Isenberg, through his own bewildering journey, came to believe that every person’s grief is unique. Instead of prescribing how others should heal, he painstakingly shares the deep and often puzzling experiences of his own story and allows readers to draw their own conclusions.

That revealing and reflective approach also acknowledges something often lost in conversations about grief: there may be no universal timeline for moving forward. The relationship between loss and healing can shift from day to day, and the person experiencing it may discover that moving forward does not necessarily mean leaving the person they lost behind.

That philosophy extends to the way Isenberg tells his story.

He has described his approach as one of “radical candor,” believing that genuine storytelling requires complete openness rather than carefully edited memories. Looking back, he has said that telling the story honestly, including his own flaws, became an important part of living through it, and that storytelling can be as transformative for the person telling it as it is for those listening.

Isenberg’s candor also allows contradictions to remain contradictions. Grief can include sadness and gratitude, isolation and connection, despair and humor. Rather than trying to organize those experiences into a neat narrative about recovery, Isenberg allows them to exist alongside one another.

The experience has changed him fundamentally.

Reflecting on the years since Carla’s death, Isenberg says he has become more tolerant and more empathetic. Perhaps most surprising, he writes that grief and joy eventually became intertwined, no longer opposite emotions, but experiences capable of existing in an amalgam of feeling in ways he never could have imagined before his loss.

That perspective also distinguishes Isenberg’s approach to writing about grief.

The memoir doesn’t ask readers to see grief through the lens of psychology, philosophy, or self-help. It simply invites them to witness one person’s lived experience with honesty, vulnerability, and remarkable restraint.

For some readers, that may be precisely where the book’s value lies. It does not attempt to explain what grief should look like. Instead, it documents from the inside out what a grief experience was for one person, and leaves room for readers to recognize, question, or simply witness that experience on their own terms.

Many books about loss promise answers. Daniel Isenberg offers something quieter: the recognition that some of life’s most significant experiences cannot be solved, only lived.

This Book Is Not for You: My Loss, My Grief, My Healing by Daniel Isenberg is available in print and digital editions. Further background on the memoir and its author can be found on Daniel Isenberg’s official book site.

Attorney Derek E. Miller on Leadership, Public Service, and the Responsibility of Legal Advocacy

The Chicago Journal Staff on August 4, 2026

By Jay KT

Picture a young boy walking alongside his father, down the cobblestone streets of Corktown in Detroit, handing out wooden rulers that state, “MADE IN THE USA,” while shaking hands with countless men and women lining those streets. It was the popular Labor Day Parade and this type of experience was common in the early life of Derek Miller, whose father was a State Senator. His dad often would stop to talk with strangers at local restaurants or in a convenience store, because these folks were constituents that wanted to say hello or one struggling with a problem. His Father listened. He promises to help. And then he did.

Those memories never left Derek. It became, in many ways, the blueprint for everything that followed. Today, Derek E. Miller Attorney and founder of D. Miller Law P.C. is a Michigan attorney with more than a decade of prosecutorial experience, a record of legislative achievement, and a private practice built to serve two of the most vulnerable populations in the legal system: people facing criminal charges and individuals seeking Social Security Disability benefits.

His path from the campaign trail to the courtroom to the State Legislature and back again is not a straight line. But it is a coherent one, shaped by a single sentiment: that the law exists to solve problems for real people, and that attorneys bear a responsibility to show up and do that work every day, whether anyone is watching or not.

Growing Up in a House of Public Service

Derek Miller did not stumble into law. He was drawn toward it from a specific, formative direction.

“My father was in politics when I was growing up,” Miller recalled. “He was a State Senator in the Michigan Legislature. I loved the idea that everyone in our community would reach out to him for help with whatever problem they were having and he would try to find a solution for them. I wanted to be that person.”

His father carried one professional regret openly. He had never earned his law degree. That admission planted a seed. Miller grew up watching his father walk into any room, from a judge’s chambers to a greasy spoon diner, and treat every person with the same warmth and genuine regard. “He would always say, ‘Derek, everyone loves a compliment,'” Miller reflected. “He would get up and hug the hostess, or tell the cook, ‘That was the best soup I’ve ever had.’ He made people feel special. He made them have pride in who they were and what they were doing.”

Both of his parents passed away in 2020. The loss deepened rather than diminished his drive. “Now I work so hard in honor of them and their memory,” he said. That motivation is not abstract for Miller. It shows up in how he prepares a case, how he greets a new client, and how he thinks about the kind of lawyer, and father, he wants to be.

From Prosecutor to Legislator: A Decade of Building Credibility From the Inside

Before Derek Miller ever hung a shingle for a private practice, he spent more than ten years as a prosecutor. That experience gave him something most defense attorneys simply don’t have: an inside view of how charging decisions get made and where cases fall apart.

“As a Prosecutor I met with detectives and decided how cases would be charged and tried,” Miller explained. “I always knew what aspects of the cases would be hardest to prove to a jury. Now as a defense lawyer, I know the conversations those prosecutors are having behind closed doors. I know where the holes are. Now it’s my job to shine a light on those weaknesses and open the eyes of the jury to true justice.”

His prosecutorial work led directly to one of his most significant accomplishments. After prosecuting and convicting a woman named Rachel Edwards. She had given a child her mental health medication to keep him confined indoors. Miller watched a judge issue a sentence that did not include jail time. Edwards went on to abuse another child, a boy named Wyatt, nearly killing him. The boy’s mother, Erica Hammel, and the previous victim’s mother, Cristyne Kadlitz, wanted a public registry to track individuals with a history of child abuse.

Miller, by then serving in the State Legislature, wrote the legislation himself. The bill, named Wyatt’s Law in honor of the boy who nearly lost his life, was eventually passed into law. It stands as a direct example of how his experience in the courtroom translated into policy that protected Michigan children long after any single case closed. “It was a Team effort. Erica and Cristyne would not take noanswer. And my colleagues in the House of Representatives, including initial co-sponsors, Rep.Rep. Vanessa Guerra. Finally, now Senator Kevin Hertel was the one that carried the baton and fought to get Wyatt’s Law passed.” Miller, a big sports fan, always believes more gets done with a Team mindset.

His time overseeing 60 Assistant Prosecutors as Chief of Operations also gave him a management perspective rare among trial attorneys. He understands how large legal offices function, where institutional pressure builds, and how leadership either elevates or diminishes the work of an entire team.

Building D. Miller Law: Defense and Disability Under One Roof

After his years in prosecution,Miller was offered an interesting opportunity during Covid to work in the freight logistics industry for Coyote Logistics , the third-largest freight broker in North America. Miller had a lot of friends from Michigan State, the Nation’s #1 logistics school, in the logistics profession. However, after over 3 years in the freight world, shipping cross border freight from Canada, throughout the US and over the Mexico border,Miller found himself missing the courtroom. The corporate world offered pace and competition, but it didn’t offer the chance to help people navigate legal crises.

So he came back. He founded D. Miller Law P.C., where the D stands for both Disability and Defense. The practice focuses on two distinct but complementary areas of law, experience and legal advocacy.

Criminal defense representation for individuals facing charges, including those wrongfully accused
Social Security Disability advocacy for clients who have been denied benefits
Client-centered counsel rooted in listening first and fighting second

The choice to combine these two practice areas was deliberate. Many of the clients Miller sees face poverty and addiction, often at the same time. It’s easy to see a person caught shoplifting clothing and just see them as a petty thief. I know, because I often did when I was a Prosecutor. But often times, those people are stealing clothing for their children. These people are not, in Miller’s view, simply criminal defendants. They are people in crisis who need someone in their corner. His approach is to hear what clients are most worried about and then work to deliver on those specific concerns.

“I show up, I’m honest with them, and fight for their particular issue,” he said, “whether that’s clearing their name after being wrongfully accused or trying to get them social security benefits after being denied by the social security administration.”

What Ethical Leadership Actually Looks Like Day to Day

Ask Miller what ethical leadership means and he doesn’t reach for a textbook definition. He reaches back to high school football.

“I always remember my high school football coach preaching that character is built when nobody’s watching,” he said. “So often, clients are relying on us to work for them and be doing right by them even when they’re not with us. And that is what being ethical is.”

This philosophy runs through every aspect of how he operates as a Michigan attorney. Trust, in his view, is not announced. It’s accumulated. Every client interaction, every court appearance, every returned phone call adds or subtracts from a reputation that takes years to build and seconds to damage.

His principles for decision-making in difficult moments also trace back to his upbringing and his faith. “How I was raised, my faith in God and the example Jesus provided us have so much to do with how I try to live and face adversity,” he explained. “When things get tough you need to trust in the process. Success will come through hard work and doing things the right way, not taking shortcuts.”

He is equally direct about what separates strong attorneys from adequate ones. It comes down to willingness to be uncomfortable.

“People that aren’t afraid of a challenge,” he said. “Many people in this profession want to do what they’re comfortable with. That’s safe. And that’s fine. But, in order to grow professionally we have to be willing to be uncomfortable and to take on things we haven’t quite done before. I have always found that I learn the most when I need to reach out for help and challenge myself.”

Advice for Young Attorneys and the Legacy Derek Miller Is Building

Miller’s advice for attorneys early in their careers is grounded and specific.

Seek out workplaces where real experience is available, not just supervised observation
Ask to sit in client meetings and go to court, even when it is not required
Show eagerness to learn, because supervisors notice it and clients benefit from it
Treat every person with respect, regardless of what they are accused of doing

Those aren’t abstract principles to Miller. They’re habits he developed over years of public service leadership, prosecution, and private practice.

He is also thinking about legacy in a deeply personal way. D. Miller Law is growing. But alongside the practice, he is raising three daughters, and the two goals are not separate in his mind. “My hopes are to be as good a role model to them as my mom and dad were to me,” he said. “If I do that, maybe they’ll want to work with their dad one day. That would be special and a legacy I’d be proud of.”

The boy in the back seat of his father’s car grew into a man who has spent his career doing what his father always hoped he would: showing up for people when they need help most, and doing the work even when no one is watching.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction. And, by all means, you can call D. Miller Law P.C. at 855-Let-D-Help and ask for Derek.

Nir Peled’s Beyond 100% Framework, How to Rebuild Life After Crisis

The Chicago Journal Staff on July 26, 2026

By: Mark Wallace

Nir Peled had built his identity around cognitive speed. He could assess pressure, make decisions quickly, and communicate with force and clarity. That ability had served him as an officer in an elite IDF unit and later as a Fortune 500 technology executive. Then, at 49, a stroke took the very qualities he had always relied on. He could not move. He could not speak. The man who had spent a career solving complex problems was suddenly living inside the hardest system failure imaginable: his own body and brain.

Peled had already survived more than most people can imagine. There had been a bombing in Sinai, anaphylaxis that ended his military career, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a violent kidnapping and robbery in the Amazon, fast-spreading cancer, and a serious motorcycle accident. But the stroke was different. “The stroke was different because it took the thing I had always relied on, my cognitive speed, my ability to think and communicate fast, and made that the very thing I had to rebuild,” he says. “For someone whose identity was built on intellectual horsepower, that was the deepest test.”

That test became the heart of his book, Beyond 100%: Rebuilding Life After It Breaks. The book did not begin as a public project. It began as evidence that he was still here. “The book started as my recovery journal,” Peled says. “I used video to record myself learning to speak again. I called it ‘captain’s log.’ Later, when I learned how to type, first with one finger, then two, then a real keyboard, then both hands, it was my recovery journal.”

In those entries, Peled tracked far more than rehabilitation exercises. He wrote about the hidden losses that come after a stroke: the loss of identity, the loss of assumed competence, the instability of progress, and the emotional cost of being seen as both survivor and patient. Recovery was not a straight line. It was physical, mental, relational, and spiritual, even for someone who does not define spirituality through religion.

“The Spirit pillar is about meaning-making, purpose, and connection,” he says of the framework he eventually built. “It is grounded in those things regardless of belief.” In practice, that means recovery requires more than movement drills and cognitive exercises. A person needs a reason to continue through fatigue, embarrassment, grief, and the slow rebuilding of trust in the body.

The turning point came early, when Peled was lying on the floor of his office, unable to move. “I felt the world closing in,” he says. “I was not afraid. I was calm, and deeply sad, like a kid being told to leave the park.” In the hospital, his defenses fell. “I cried. My whole body cried, all defenses down, completely surrendered. In that moment, I felt more alive than I had ever felt.” What looked like collapse became the first opening.

Peled does not use surrender to mean giving up. In Beyond 100%, surrender means the end of wasting energy on denying reality. Once he stopped fighting the fact of what had happened, he could begin building inside it. “That surrender was not weakness,” he says. “It was the beginning of everything.”

From there, Peled applied a systems mindset to recovery. He created a structure around Body, Mind, and Spirit; seven recovery rules; four stages of rebuilding; and a recovery blueprint that maps how capabilities return. First comes manifestation, when a possibility appears. Then comes a sign of life, the first evidence that something is returning. Practice follows, and finally, complex integration, when the skill can be used in real life.

The approach was practical because Peled needed it to be. “I am a practical man,” he says. “I like motivation and inspiring stories, but I need something tangible. Something I can use tomorrow morning.” His book, he adds, is designed to give readers tools for recovery, not just inspiration.

Today, Peled teaches yoga and meditation to stroke and brain injury survivors. The work carries unusual authority because he does not stand outside the experience. He has been the person who could not speak, could not move, and could not rely on the mind that once moved faster than everyone else’s. He also knows that progress may look too small to count until it compounds.

His message to survivors is not a promise that they will return to who they were. It is a more durable promise: a way forward. “There is always a path forward,” he says. “Not back. Forward. And it starts with one very small step tomorrow morning.” For someone beginning again after the brain breaks, that one small step may be the first sign that life is not over. It is being rebuilt.

Beyond 100%: Rebuilding Life After It Breaks is now available on Amazon,

Tom Arnold Testified Before the U.S. Senate on Cybersecurity. Now He’s Trying to Reach Kids Who Haven’t Started High School Yet.

The Chicago Journal Staff on July 25, 2026

By: Christopher Graves

The gap between what cybersecurity experts know and what the general public understands has long been wide. Tom Arnold has spent his career operating at the expert end of that gap, co-founding a company that became part of a global security firm, leading breach investigations involving thousands of servers, and testifying before Congress on cybersecurity legislation.

He decided to help close the gap with a book for ten-year-olds. And he means that seriously.

Why Teaching Changed His Approach

Tom took on a part-time teaching position at a university partly for a reason that might surprise people: to constantly update and enhance his own knowledge of cyber threats. The field moves fast. Staying embedded in an academic environment that is tracking emerging threats, new tools, and evolving attack vectors can help keep his professional edge sharp in ways that purely operational work does not always allow.

But teaching also showed him something about communication that his career in investigation had not fully revealed. The way you explain something to a graduate student in a cybersecurity program is completely different from the way you explain it to a teenager who has not yet decided whether technology is interesting. And the way you explain it to that teenager is completely different from the way you explain it to their parent who does not know what digital forensics means.

The Digital Detective is his attempt to reach those last two groups simultaneously, the young person and the adult who needs to have a better conversation with them.

A Career Path Worth Considering

Tom’s advice for young readers interested in cybersecurity as a career is grounded and practical. Stimulate interest in technology through healthy curiosity. Explore and learn without crossing into actions that are against the law or harmful to others. Understand that the field has multiple disciplines, some of which may seem non-technical on the surface, but all of them ultimately require a strong foundation in how technology actually works.

The field is, in his assessment, likely to grow in importance. As technology becomes more inseparable from everyday life, the people who understand how to secure it, investigate it, and defend against its misuse may become more important across many sectors of society.

The Inseparability Problem

Tom uses a single word to describe where technology and everyday life are heading over the next decade: inseparable.

It is already true in many ways. Refrigerators, televisions, phones, cars. The intersection between daily life and connected technology is not approaching. It is already here. Security and personal privacy necessarily expand with that intersection. Any device that can make life more convenient can also collect data about the person using it.

He raises the more uncomfortable version of that reality directly. In a totalitarian environment, the same data that makes life convenient can become surveillance infrastructure. The raw information generated by connected devices, messages, voice calls, photos, and even how full a refrigerator is could be transformed into something entirely different in the wrong hands.

It is not a hypothetical he raises lightly. It is part of the context in which he believes cybersecurity education should be understood.

If there’s a curious, tech-minded young person in your life who hasn’t yet discovered what a career in cybersecurity could look like, The Digital Detective: First Intervention by Tom Arnold is available now on Amazon. It might just point them in a direction that changes everything.

How Chicago Taught a University of Illinois Graduate to Balance Research, Risk, and Ambition

The Chicago Journal Staff on July 15, 2026

For Yogesh Rethinapandian, Chicago was not just where he earned a graduate degree. It became the city that taught him how to build.

A 22-year-old arriving in Chicago for the first time does not fully understand the city at once.

At first, it is the noise. The trains cutting through neighborhoods. The wind moving between glass towers. The lake appearing suddenly at the end of a long street. The rush of students, workers, founders, researchers, and immigrants all trying to make something of themselves in a city that does not slow down for anyone.

For many graduate students, Chicago is a place to study, earn a degree, and move on. For Yogesh Rethinapandian, it became something deeper. It became the place where ambition stopped being an idea and became a daily discipline.

Rethinapandian came to the University of Illinois Chicago with the goal of building a serious technical foundation in computer engineering. Like many students who arrive with big plans, he carried more than one dream. He wanted to grow as a researcher. He wanted to publish meaningful work. He wanted to contribute to advanced semiconductor systems and secure computing. But he also felt the pull of entrepreneurship, the urge to solve real problems outside the classroom.

Chicago forced him to confront both sides at once.

Graduate school required patience. Research required depth. Startup life required speed. The city required endurance.

During his time at UIC, Rethinapandian developed scholarly work in semiconductor systems, hardware security, and advanced computing. His research has explored chiplet security and die-to-die communication in AI accelerators, a field becoming increasingly important as modern computing systems move toward modular chip architectures. In simple terms, his work looks at how sensitive data moves inside advanced chips and how future AI hardware can be made more secure at the hardware layer itself.

At the same time, he was also beginning to build beyond the lab.

Rethinapandian later co-founded Kamuit, an angel-backed transportation technology startup focused on structured shared mobility. The company grew from an observation familiar to many students and immigrants: traveling between university towns, airports, and major cities can be expensive, fragmented, and unreliable, even when other people are already driving the same routes.

The idea was simple, but the execution was not. Kamuit set out to bring structure to long-distance shared rides through verified users, scheduled routes, and community-based coordination. What began as a problem he personally understood started turning into a company that drew early investor and advisor interest.

To Rethinapandian, the connection between semiconductor research and mobility technology is not as strange as it may seem. Both are about trust. In one case, trust between chiplets inside an AI accelerator. In the other, trust between people moving across cities. Both require systems that can coordinate safely, reliably, and at scale.

Chicago helped him see that pattern.

“Whenever I felt like I was falling behind or missing out, I would take a run from Harrison toward the lake,” Rethinapandian said. “You see the trains moving, students walking, people working late, the skyline on one side and the lake on the other. Chicago has a way of reminding you that everyone is carrying something, but everyone is still moving.”

That movement became part of his own rhythm.

There were days when research deadlines felt heavier than expected. There were nights when startup decisions carried more uncertainty than confidence. There were moments when the fear of missing out became real: fear of choosing the wrong path, fear of moving too slowly, fear of trying to be both a scholar and a founder when the world often asks people to pick one identity.

But Chicago did not teach him to choose only one side of himself. It taught him to build bridges between them.

“Chicago feels like two sides of the river,” he said. “On one side, there is the pressure to prove yourself. On the other, there is the reminder to breathe and keep going. The bridges are what matter. You have to build your own bridges between fear and ambition, between research and execution, between who you are and who you are trying to become.”

That lesson became central to how he approached his work.

His semiconductor research gave him a way to think deeply about invisible infrastructure: the internal systems that make modern AI computing possible. His startup work gave him a way to think about visible infrastructure: roads, cities, airports, university towns, and the people moving between them. In both cases, he was drawn to problems that many people experience but few systems are designed to handle well.

For Rethinapandian, UIC was more than a university on a résumé. It was where he learned to operate under pressure, to connect academic rigor with practical execution, and to understand that ambition is not built in one clean direction. It is built through competing demands, late nights, difficult choices, and the willingness to keep going when the outcome is not guaranteed.

That experience reflects a broader shift among young STEM graduates. Many are no longer treating research and entrepreneurship as separate tracks. They are publishing, presenting, building, testing, and applying technical ideas to public problems. They are learning that scholarly work can shape industry thinking, while startup work can expose new research questions.

Rethinapandian’s path sits within that shift.

His work in semiconductor security points toward the future of AI hardware, where trust may need to be designed into the physical architecture of computing. His work with Kamuit points toward another kind of trust system, one focused on people, routes, and shared transportation.

Both paths are still being built. But Chicago gave him the environment to begin carrying both.

“Chicago showed me that you do not have to wait until everything is perfect to start,” he said. “You can be tired, uncertain, and still take the next step. That is what the city taught me.”

For a young graduate student who arrived with a fresh mind and more ambition than certainty, Chicago became more than a backdrop. It became a training ground.

The skyline, the lakefront runs, the bridges, the classrooms, the research papers, and the long nights all became part of the same story.

Not a story about avoiding fear.

A story about learning how to move with it.

Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, HSPP, the Psychologist Who Turns Crisis Into Action

The Chicago Journal Staff on July 3, 2026

There is a phone call that Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, has never been able to forget. A young girl was being treated, calling late one night from a payphone in Chicago, asking to be picked up. Dr. Gopal told her to go home to her foster parents, assuming it was a teenage dispute. She never heard from the girl again. That silence changed everything.

That moment redirected the career of one of the most decorated clinical psychologists working in human rights today. Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, went from treating foster children in a clinical setting to building an internationally recognized coalition against human trafficking, founding a therapeutic shelter in Indiana, and eventually becoming the first Asian American President of the Psychology Coalition at the United Nations. The path was shaped by grief, urgency, and an unshakable sense of responsibility.

Roots That Ran Deep: Growing Up in a Family Built on Service

Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, grew up in a military family where moving between cities was a way of life. Each new school brought a different culture, a different social ecosystem, and a new set of unspoken rules. Rather than struggling with the instability, she developed a sharp ability to observe, listen, and adapt. Those skills, she has said, made a career in psychology feel like a natural fit.

Altruism ran through her family for generations. Her most formative example was her mother, an Army officer’s wife who returned to college at 35 while raising three young children, then went back again at 50 to become a naturopath. Her mother built a thriving business around organic products, expanded it across an entire state with no formal marketing background, and hired women escaping domestic violence, offering them dignified work and fair wages. For Dr. Gopal, that example set a standard: professional achievement means nothing if it isn’t connected to something larger.

She began her doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and completed her doctorate in clinical psychology at Alliant University in San Diego. From the start, her focus was on the populations that systems most often fail: children in foster care, survivors of abuse, and individuals carrying trauma that no one had ever named or treated.

Naming What Others Hadn’t: The Science Behind the Practice

One of the most significant contributions of Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, to the clinical field is a term she coined herself: “Displacement Trauma.” The concept describes the complex psychological damage caused by repeated disruptions to childhood attachment bonds, a pattern common in children who cycle through foster placements, institutional care, or unstable family environments.

The term gave clinicians, case managers, and courts a framework for understanding behaviors that had previously been misread as defiance or pathology. It also gave parents and caregivers language to describe what they were witnessing in the children they cared for.

Her books have extended that work into practical tools. She is the author of The Supportive Foster Parent, Foster Parenting Step-by-Step, and the grief and loss workbook In My Heart. Her most recent book, Strong Roots, Safe Wings, published on Amazon, focuses on helping parents recognize and interrupt generational trauma patterns before they pass to the next child. She is also co-editor of the Springer publication Sex Trafficking: Feminist and Transnational Perspectives, which places the crisis in both a psychological and global policy context.

From Clinic to Coalition: Building SAFECHR and the Work That Followed

In 2014, Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, founded the SAFECHR Coalition for Human Rights with a specific goal: to confront human trafficking through psychology, not just law enforcement. That distinction mattered. Most anti-trafficking frameworks at the time centered on prosecution. SAFECHR centered on the survivor.

Under her leadership, SAFECHR developed an internationally accredited, psychologically grounded training program in human trafficking for advocates, clinicians, and law enforcement professionals. She has since trained a wide range of institutions and individuals, including:

• FBI agents

• Police officers, sheriffs, and firefighters

• Judges, attorneys, and case managers

• Foster and adoptive parents

• Government agencies and nonprofit organizations

She has also developed a training manual for clinicians in Mongolia and victim-identification tools for use in Ukraine and Myanmar, working directly with survivors of rape and war. The reach of that work is hard to overstate. Dr. Gopal has moved the conversation about trafficking from awareness into an operational, clinically grounded response.

Since 2020, SAFECHR has operated a therapeutic shelter in Indiana specifically for women who have been trafficked. The shelter is currently scaling to 10 beds with a target of 40-bed operations. Dr. Gopal is building a restorative therapy healing center in India, paired with a commitment to adopt 16 villages in remote areas where girls face the highest risk of being recruited into trafficking networks.

Conference Rooms and Courtrooms: The Scope of Her Leadership

Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, has chaired the Global SAFECHR Conferences since the first one in Chicago in 2014. Subsequent conferences ran in Washington, D.C., and Virginia in 2016, and Chicago again in 2018 and 2019. The next SAFECHR Conference is planned for India in 2027 at safechrindia.com.

Her institutional leadership runs equally wide. She served as President of the Society of Clinical Psychology, Division 12 of the American Psychological Association, in 2022. She chaired the Illinois Psychological Association’s Working Committee on Hate and Harassment. She serves on two Indiana Lake County boards: the Child Protection Team and the Child Fatality Team. In January 2025, she began her tenure on the APA Council of Representatives for Division 56, which covers trauma psychology.

She also serves as President of Mid-America Psychological and Counseling Services, PC, overseeing operations across six mental health clinics in Indiana and Illinois.

The awards she has received reflect the breadth of that work:

• Indiana Lake County Award for Excellence, 2004

• Indiana Attorney General’s Voices for Victims Award, 2015

• US Congressional Award for Top 20 Global Women

• APA Presidential Citation Award for Human Rights and Global Leadership and Promoting Health Equity, 2023

• Indiana Commission for Women Torchbearer Award, 2024

The United Nations and a New Chapter of Global Leadership

In August 2024, Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, became President of the Psychology Coalition at the United Nations. She has since been re-elected to a second two-year term, a signal of the confidence the coalition places in her vision for psychology’s role in international human rights work.

It’s a platform that connects directly to the on-the-ground work she has been doing for decades. The tools she created for Ukraine and Myanmar, the training curricula deployed across multiple countries, the survivor-centered shelter model she is scaling in Indiana, all of it positions Dr. Gopal as someone who treats global policy as a complement to direct service, not a replacement for it.

She has described success not in titles or accolades, but in a feeling: a peaceful, calming sense of personal fulfillment and meaning. Watching women and children move from victimhood to survival to purpose-driven lives is, in her own words, the most powerful driver behind her determination to build that 40-bed shelter and to keep going.

What Her Patients Taught Her

For all the institutions she has built and the policies she has shaped, Dr. Kalyani Gopal, PhD, is quick to credit her patients as her most important teachers. Decades of clinical work, listening carefully and helping people rewire the stories they carry, have given her a ground-level understanding of what trauma actually costs and what healing actually requires.

That respect for the people she serves shows up everywhere in her work. It shows up in the language she chooses, in the shelter model she built, in the way she talks about defining success. It is also visible in the way she has raised her own children: one now a Director of Digital Neuropsychology and Brain Health at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Professor in Psychology at Harvard, the other a Harvard Law School graduate working in private equity in California.

Dr. Gopal’s story is not a straight line from graduate school to recognition. It is a series of commitments, each one following from the last, built on the belief that every person can overcome past trauma with the right help, and that the right help is something she can spend a lifetime building.

Andres Kuusk Broke Records Set by the Man Who Built Google DeepMind. Here’s What He Thinks They Have in Common.

The Chicago Journal Staff on June 19, 2026

By: Andrew Carter

Most people pick a lane and stay in it. Andres Kuusk has spent his entire life doing the opposite, and it turns out that’s exactly the point.

He’s a seven-time World Pentamind Champion, which means he didn’t just master one game. He had to perform at the highest level across multiple strategic disciplines simultaneously. Before him, the benchmark he eventually surpassed was held by Demis Hassabis, the chess prodigy turned neuroscientist turned founder of DeepMind, now one of the most consequential figures in the history of artificial intelligence.

What Andres finds interesting about that isn’t the record. It’s what the record reveals. Both of them built their success on the same underlying ability: understanding complex systems, moving fluidly across very different domains, and asking the same questions no matter what game they happened to be playing.

That insight eventually became the foundation of Unlocking the Success Puzzle.

Stop Trusting Your Gut. Start Understanding It.

One of the more provocative arguments in the book is that instincts, the thing most successful cultures tell people to follow unconditionally, are often the hidden source of their worst decisions.

Andres isn’t anti-instinct. He’s precise about what instincts actually are. They’re pattern-recognition systems built from previous experience. Sometimes those patterns are accurate and useful. Sometimes they’re outdated, incomplete, or shaped by environments that no longer exist.

The human brain evolved primarily for survival, not for optimal decision-making in modern life. Discomfort gets registered as danger even when it isn’t. Uncertainty feels threatening even when it’s actually an open door. A person preparing to launch a business, make a career pivot, or have a difficult conversation is running survival software in a situation that doesn’t require it.

The skill Andres wants readers to develop is the ability to pause and ask one question: is this instinct pointing toward genuine danger, or just toward discomfort? That distinction, he says, changes a surprising number of life decisions. Not by silencing instinct but by learning to read it more accurately.

The Card Game Nobody Wins by Wishing for Better Cards

One of the most useful reframes in the book is deceptively simple. Every person starts with a different hand. Some hands are stronger. Some are genuinely difficult. That’s real, and Andres doesn’t pretend otherwise.

But the question that actually matters isn’t whether the hand is fair. It’s whether you’re making the best decisions available from your current position.

Strong card players don’t waste energy wishing they’d been dealt something different. They focus entirely on extracting maximum value from what they actually have. And critically, they know how to recognize when the odds have shifted enough in their favor to move forward aggressively rather than waiting for perfect conditions that may never arrive.

That framing redirects attention away from things a person can’t control and toward the decisions they can make right now. It sounds straightforward. Most people still spend enormous amounts of energy negotiating with reality rather than working with it. The hand matters, Andres says. But how you play it matters far more.

The Same Rules Work for Organizations Too

Andres has spent years advising financial institutions and credit bureaus on strategy and risk management, and one of the things that experience reinforced is that organizations suffer from the same cognitive distortions as individuals.

Companies become overconfident after stretches of success. They get attached to assumptions that nobody thinks to challenge. They optimize for short-term optics instead of decision quality. They avoid information that makes the current strategy uncomfortable to defend.

Organizations have psychology. That’s easy to forget when you’re inside one.

The ten rules in the book scale from individual decision-making to team and organizational thinking with less adjustment than you’d expect. Thinking in sequences is as critical for strategic planning as it is for personal choices. Questioning assumptions is as valuable in a boardroom as it is in someone’s career. Curiosity is as much a competitive advantage for a company as it is for a person. The principles don’t shrink when they meet scale. They expand.

What Versatility Actually Teaches You About Leadership

The Pentamind Championship is built on a philosophy that cuts against most conventional thinking about expertise. It doesn’t reward the deepest specialist. It rewards the strongest all-round performer across multiple disciplines. To win it, you have to learn new systems quickly, recognize patterns in unfamiliar environments, and make sound decisions under pressure in situations where your previous experience doesn’t fully apply.

Andres spent years building exactly that muscle. And what he found when he moved into senior leadership and strategic advisory work was that the ability to transfer knowledge across domains turned out to be one of the most valuable things a leader can have.

Specialization creates real value. He’s not arguing against it. But at the level where the hardest decisions get made, leaders are constantly solving problems they’ve never encountered before. The ones who adapt fastest aren’t always the ones who know the most. They’re the ones who know how to learn quickly and how to apply thinking from one domain to the unexpected demands of another.

That’s what the Pentamind taught him. And it’s what he’s trying to pass on through the book.

The most important lessons, he keeps coming back to this, aren’t domain-specific. They’re transferable. Whether the game is played on a board, in a business, or in a life, the underlying questions stay remarkably similar.

Why do some decisions consistently outperform others? How do small advantages accumulate over time? What hidden assumptions are shaping the outcome?

Ask those questions well, and almost everything else gets easier.

If the way Andres thinks about decisions, distortions, and what actually separates high performers from everyone else resonates with you, his book Unlocking the Success Puzzle: Ten Practical Rules to Achieve Your Goals is available on Amazon. It lays out ten rules within a single framework for understanding why capable people win or fall short.

How Charles Sims Is Helping Heal Old Racial Wounds

The Chicago Journal Staff on June 16, 2026

By: Lennard James

In a time when division often dominates headlines and historical wounds continue to shape conversations across America, Charles Sims is offering a different message, one rooted in truth, accountability, healing, and hope. His story is not one many would expect, yet it may be one of the most important examples of reconciliation in modern America.

Charles Sims is the great-great-great-grandson of James Z. George, the former Mississippi senator widely known as one of the principal architects of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, legislation that became a foundation for Jim Crow laws throughout the South. Those laws institutionalized racial segregation and voter suppression for generations of African Americans, leaving behind a painful legacy that still impacts communities today.

Yet rather than ignore that history, Sims has chosen to confront it openly.

A Friendship Built Across Painful History

His recent appearance alongside Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., cousin of Emmett Till, became a powerful symbol of what healing can look like when individuals are willing to face the truth of the past with humility and compassion. The two men, whose family histories stand on opposite sides of one of America’s darkest racial chapters, came together not in anger, but in unity.

Rev. Parker, who witnessed the kidnapping of Emmett Till in 1955, has spent decades preserving the story of his cousin whose brutal murder helped ignite the Civil Rights Movement. Sims, understanding the painful role his family history played in America’s racial divide, made the courageous decision to stand publicly beside Parker in a gesture of reconciliation and healing.

Their meeting was more than symbolic. It was deeply human.

For Sims, acknowledging history is not about carrying guilt for actions committed generations ago. Instead, it is about accepting responsibility to help build a better future. In doing so, he is showing others that confronting uncomfortable truths does not weaken people, it strengthens communities.

“Love is stronger than pain,” Sims said during his appearance at Argo Temple Church of God in Christ in Summit, Illinois. Those words resonated deeply because they reflected more than a slogan. They reflected intentional action.

Choosing Bridge-Building Over Blame

At a time when conversations around race often become polarized, Sims is choosing bridge-building over blame. His willingness to engage in honest dialogue demonstrates that healing cannot happen through silence, denial, or division. It requires courage, empathy, and a willingness to listen.

The friendship between Sims and Rev. Parker also sends an important message to younger generations. It proves that history does not have to imprison the future. While the scars of racism and injustice are real, reconciliation remains possible when people choose humanity over hatred.

Their public appearance together inspired many because it represented something rare in modern society, accountability without hostility and healing without forgetting history. Sims has not attempted to erase or defend the painful actions connected to his family lineage. Instead, he has acknowledged them while actively working toward unity and understanding.

That approach matters.

Why Personal Reconciliation Matters

Across the country, communities continue to wrestle with questions surrounding race, inequality, and historical injustice. While policies and legislation remain important, personal relationships often become the true starting point for lasting change. Sims understands that reconciliation begins one conversation, one gesture, and one relationship at a time.

By standing beside the family of Emmett Till, Charles Sims demonstrated that reconciliation is not a weakness, it is leadership.

His efforts also highlight a broader truth. Healing America’s racial wounds will require people from every background to participate honestly and compassionately. The burden cannot rest solely on those who suffered injustice. It also requires descendants of those connected to systems of oppression to engage in the process of restoration.

Charles Sims is helping model what that can look like.

In many ways, his story is ultimately about redemption not of history itself, because history cannot be undone but of the future. Through humility, dialogue, and intentional acts of unity, Sims is showing that even the deepest pain does not have to define the generations that follow.

As America continues working through difficult conversations about race and justice, the friendship between Charles Sims and Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. remains a reminder that love, truth, and reconciliation are stronger than pain.

And perhaps that is exactly the kind of leadership the world needs right now.

Steve Kidd Explains Why Bestseller Status Isn’t the Real Win

The Chicago Journal Staff on February 25, 2026

By: Marcus Delgado

For many authors, hitting bestseller status feels like the peak of the mountain. The screenshots get shared. Messages roll in. There is a brief moment where it seems like the book has finally made it.

Then something unexpected happens. The attention slows. Sales taper off. Invitations never arrive. The book quietly slips into the background.

Steve Kidd has seen this pattern thousands of times, and he says the problem is not the book. It is the belief that the work was finished.

After helping more than five thousand authors reach bestseller status, Steve noticed a hard truth that the publishing industry rarely talks about. Bestseller was never the goal. It was simply the starting signal.

“The industry trained authors to chase the badge,” Steve explains. “Celebrate for a weekend and then disappear. I watched too many powerful voices feel more invisible after publishing than they did before.”

That realization became the foundation for his book Only the Beginning, a guide designed not just to help authors launch, but to help them build lasting visibility, authority, and opportunity long after the charts stop moving.

The Credential Problem Most Authors Ignore

One of the most common mistakes Steve sees is treating a bestseller title as if it carries momentum on its own. In reality, it functions like any other credential. It matters only if it changes where you show up and how you engage.

Steve uses a simple analogy to make the point clear. If someone graduates from medical school but never steps into a hospital, they will not become a respected surgeon. Not because they lack skill, but because they never enter the environments that require it.

Authors do the same thing. They earn the credential and then return to their old patterns. They stop talking about the book. They stop appearing. They assume the market will eventually notice.

Visibility does not work that way.

“The market rewards repetition, clarity, and proof,” Steve says. “When authors stop showing up, the book does not fail. It just goes quiet because no one is carrying the signal anymore.”

How the 90-Day Visibility System Was Born

Steve did not build his visibility framework from theory. He built it out of necessity.

After writing more than forty books of his own, he realized he was guilty of the same behavior he saw in others. He was helping clients launch books while his own titles sat untouched. Not because he did not care, but because life was full. Business was demanding. Time was limited.

That reality shaped the 90-day visibility system.

“I needed something that worked in real life,” Steve says. “Not something that required me to become a full-time marketer.”

The system was designed for authors who are also entrepreneurs, executives, speakers, and leaders. People whose lives do not pause for promotion. Ninety days became the ideal container. Long enough to build recognition and trust. Short enough to be realistic.

It became the bridge between a one-day achievement and a long-term platform.

The Moment Everything Clicked

Like everything he teaches, Steve tested the system on himself first. He applied it to books that had already hit number one internationally and then faded into silence.

When the system was put in place, those same titles climbed back to the top ten and number one positions, sometimes years after their original release.

That was the moment the insight became undeniable.

“Most books do not fail,” Steve says. “They go silent. And silence is not the same as finished.”

He compares it to finding embers in a fire pit the next morning. The structure is still there. The fuel remains. All it needs is air and attention.

Visibility does not expire. It just has to be reignited.

Why Algorithms Cannot Replace Human Trust

Many authors rely heavily on ads and algorithms, hoping technology will do the work for them. Steve does not dismiss those tools, but he is clear about their limits.

Algorithms cannot create trust. Ads cannot build a relationship on their own. People buy from people they recognize, resonate with, and trust.

That is where human visibility comes in.

Human visibility puts relationship before tactics. It focuses on voice, story, expertise, and lived credibility. A book plays a powerful role here because it gives readers time. Time to understand who you are and why your message matters.

Ads can amplify trust, but they cannot replace it. The market moves when humans connect, not when systems run quietly in the background.

Why One-Time Marketing Never Works

Another misconception Steve dismantles is the belief that marketing is something you do once and then forget.

Many authors hope for a single promotion, a single podcast, or a single ad that will carry their book forever. That moment does not exist.

Visibility behaves like a relationship. It stays alive through presence and relevance. When authors disappear, the book does not die. It simply stops being seen.

“Books do not die,” Steve says. “They stop being carried into the conversation.”

Marketing is not about doing more. It is about doing the right things consistently enough that the market recognizes you as someone worth paying attention to.

The Three Pillars That Keep Books Alive

At the core of Steve’s system are three pillars.

Clarity ensures the market understands who the author is, what they solve, and why the message matters. Without clarity, visibility has nothing to attach to.

Consistency keeps the signal alive. SEO, categories, rankings, reviews, and promotion tell platforms that the book is active.

Connection is where visibility turns into opportunity. Readers engage. Media notices. Invitations follow.

When all three run together for ninety days, the market remembers. And remembered books keep selling.

For Steve, the message is simple. Launch day is not the victory lap. It is the starting line.

And what happens next is where careers are built.

Chicago’s Own Adriana Pushchak Takes the National Crown at Ms. USA Universe Petite 2025

The Chicago Journal Staff on April 15, 2025

By: Alva Ree

In a moment that captured the hearts of Chicagoans and dazzled a national audience, Adriana Pushchak, representing the Windy City, has been crowned Ms USA Universe Petite 2025. The glamorous finale, held in Las Vegas, brought together dozens of remarkable women from across the country, but it was Adriana’s grace, strength, and story that set her apart and earned her the high honor in her category.

The Ms USA Universe Petite pageant is no ordinary competition. Celebrating women 5’6” and under, the pageant highlights inner strength, ambition, and beauty that transcends traditional standards. This year’s event featured an intensive program filled with workshops, interviews, runway showcases, and public speaking challenges — all of which Adriana navigated with extraordinary confidence and elegance.

When her name was announced as the national winner, Adriana stood on stage in awe, tears of joy in her eyes. “This crown isn’t just mine,” she said in her first emotional speech after the win. “It belongs to every woman who has ever felt underestimated, who’s ever been told she was ‘too small’ to dream big. I want to remind them that size has nothing to do with strength. This moment proves that with resilience, kindness, and self-belief, you can make the impossible possible.”

Adriana Pushchak is more than just a beauty queen — she is an internationally recognized expert of permanent makeup and an esteemed judge at global competition. Her work in the field of aesthetics has shown excellence and precision, making her an in-demand professional in her industry.

Born in the picturesque town of Drohobych in Ukraine’s Lviv region, Adriana grew up in a modest family — her father was a truck driver, and her mother worked in a local health resort. Despite humble beginnings, Adriana always held ambitious dreams close to her heart. As a child, she spent ten years practicing ballroom dancing, a discipline that instilled in her both grace and relentless determination. She originally aspired to study performing arts in Kyiv, but her father envisioned a more conventional future for her, encouraging her to pursue a career in law enforcement.

Following her family’s guidance, Adriana enrolled at the Lviv University of Internal Affairs, where she earned a degree in Psychology. But her creative spirit and passion for beauty eventually guided her toward the world of aesthetics, where she discovered her true calling.

Since relocating to the United States, Adriana has become a beloved figure in Chicago’s professional and cultural circles. Her work empowers women to feel confident in their skin, while her story inspires others to never give up on their dreams — even when the path is unconventional.

Chicago’s Own Adriana Pushchak Takes the National Crown at Ms. USA Universe Petite 2025

Photo Courtesy: Ms. Univers World International / Adriana Pushchak

Winning Ms USA Universe Petite is not just a personal victory for Adriana — it’s a symbolic triumph for the city of Chicago and for immigrant women across the country. It represents the power of hard work, the importance of authenticity, and the beauty of diversity. In a world that often imposes rigid standards of beauty and success, Adriana Pushchak is redefining what it means to be a modern queen.

As she continues her reign, Adriana plans to use her platform to advocate for self-love, support mental health initiatives, and mentor other women in the beauty industry. “If I can inspire even one young girl to believe in herself, then every step of this journey will have been worth it,” she shared.

Chicago is proud of its hometown star. From Drohobych to Las Vegas, Adriana Pushchak has shown that even the smallest voices can make the loudest impact — and that queens come in every size.

Published by Joseph T.