Looking back

Updates and addenda to recent columns

Satchel Paige wisely advised us, “Don’t look back: Something may be gaining on you.” He’s right.I addressed the time and energy costs of daily commuting to jobs in Springfield

Unscientific methods

Why aren’t kids learning science?

As news goes, it wasn’t very new. The company that administers the ACT college prep tests announced recently that fewer than a quarter of Illinois’ 2011 graduating high school class met th

Stuck in Carlinville with the Springfield blues again

“Commuter.”A lot of Downstaters hear that word and think of a driver trapped during an afternoon rush in August on Chicago’s westbound Ike, which – and I know what I’m ta

Modern minstrels

The heirs to Vachel Lindsay’s performance poetry

Poets, we are reliably told, once were creatures of the street and the court, not the study, and poetry was sung, or at least recited. That past lives again every year when Springfield area schoolkids

Going against the flow

Need Springfield gag on stormwater?

My advice is, don’t ever invite the executive director of the Springfield Metro Sanitary District and a carp to the same party. Springfield, you see, is one of dozens of Illinois cities and town

Architectural dreams

There are famous buildings, and buildings by famous architects

Springfield’s Trivial Pursuit is not a party game that is much played these days, except by candidates for state representative seats. Several different versions were released over the years in

Anti-urban urban renewal

Horace Mann’s HQ looks better at 39 than its neighborhood

The downtown headquarters building of the Horace Mann Educators Corp. is getting its first major fix-up since it opened in 1972. Whatever its merits as a work of design, the building certainly was wel

It’s not the heat, it’s the corn

Are row crops making summers unbearable?

Here it is July again, and the General Assembly still hasn’t done anything about summer. Summers in the Midwest have never been pleasant, unless you own stock in a water park, but lately they ha

Devoid of life

Rural Illinois continues to bleed people

Illinois has long been content to be a C-minus kind of state. That’s about the grade the 2010 census gave the state for its performance during the Oughts, when the number of people living in Ill

Mr. Bureaucracy

Why aren’t there more songs about government?

The life of an opinion-monger is filled with idle moments that more diligent commentators spend in study and reflection. I prefer to wonder rather than ponder. And one of the things I wonder about is,