Back in March of 2009, Barnes & Noble signed a new five-year lease on its store in the strip mall at Wabash and Veterans where it has been doing business since it opened in 1993. The decision was ]]> Road crews, I see, will be spending the summer making the intersection of Dirksen Parkway and Clear Lake Avenue safe for the out of sorts. It’s been years since I’ve driven through it on a]]> There is no shame in quitting a race you know you can’t win. Lance Armstrong’s shame is the many races he perhaps should have quit rather than win. It was apparently to prevent unsavory fa]]> I will not be able to take Western religions seriously until they explain the sand burr. The plant’s very existence suggests that the universe is a creation of malevolent design. Even devout Chr]]> Usually, making a Top 10 list is cause for congratulation, but not when it’s Landmarks Illinois’ annual list of most endangered historic sites. In March, the preservationist group named to]]> On Oct. 12, on what would have been the subject’s 100th birthday, a marker was unveiled at Second and Jackson streets, noting the once-presence nearby of the boyhood home of Robert S. Fitzgerald]]> The foundations of Springfield institutions will crack and sway. Structures long thought impregnable will topple; a long-familiar landscape with be altered beyond recognition. No, it is not the convic]]> San Francisco, city and club, are famously tolerant of people who don’t play by the book, but Major League Baseball tolerates it only among its umpires. The game’s poobahs have ruled that ]]> In the early 1850s, the brand new Alton & Sangamon Railroad needed a north-south track corridor through the capital city. The City of Springfield also needed a railroad, so the city council grante]]> Everybody read about it – a high-tech hunter got video evidence that confirmed the presence in a Morgan County woods of an adult cougar, only the fourth known to have been sighted in Illinois si]]> Springfield has seen two Lincoln movies recently – Saving Lincoln, which retells the White House years from the perspective of his close friend and bodyguard and which the Abraham Lincoln Associ]]> Steve Jobs is dead, and the world talked about little else for a week. By now we have arrived at the transitional moment that was neatly described by columnist Rick Polito in the Pacific Sun – t]]> You wouldn’t think it was possible for a soldier to shoot himself in the back while marching toward the front line, but Congressman Mark “Don’t Get Fooled Again” Kirk has manag]]> In late August the Springfield Mass Transit District Board chose as its new executive director a retired Corrections Department internal affairs investigator. The new hire’s qualifications to ru]]> Few of our readers know the words and music to “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” a mawkish ballad that was a hit in the 1830s. Instead they are singing the blues about the destruction of Griffin]]> South MacArthur Boulevard is a lot like a heart attack patient. It might recover its former vigor, but it will never thrive in the ways it did before it got sick. It will be able to survive at all onl]]> Finally. The Springfield High girls beat Glenwood at soccer the other night, after nearly a decade during which Chatham girls played Mike Madigan to the conference’s legislative rank and file. T]]> Now we know. The reason that Rod Blagojevich disdained the governor’s mansion in Springfield was to save his kids from, well, the mansion. “Growing up in a big governor’s mansion, surrounded by staff is not normal,” Blagojevich writes in The Governor.]]> Last fall, the University of Illinois trustees approved the most recent UIS campus development master plan. The document maps the preferred locations of hoped-for new student housing and office and cl]]> While I was coming of age in central Illinois in the 1960s, the motor vehicle that figured daily in my life was not a car – I didn’t have one – but the bus. I rode buses to school, I]]>