Fletcher Farrar

Illinois Times readers are willing to patiently read to understand difficult issues. This week’s cover story by IT senior staff writer Dean Olsen is another opportunity to grapple with those who daily grapple with the complex issues of homelessness. Over the years, Springfield has had considerable success with the “housing first” approach to homelessness, backed […]

It was a perfect weather night in the park, with tons of children climbing playground equipment, getting soapy in the foam machine, competing in the cake walk. Neighbors old and new celebrated National Night Out with hot dogs and pulled pork sandwiches. Display tables touted the Northside Children’s Community Library, Enos Park Neighborhood Gardens, Third […]

It was a step toward world peace when China visited Springfield July 25. The occasion was China’s gratitude for Minnie Vautrin of the tiny town of Secor, north of Bloomington, who was a teacher in Nanjing, China, when the Japanese captured the city in 1937 and massacred thousands. In her school, Vautrin sheltered many women […]

For my high school newspaper, I wrote a column titled “What in the World?” in which I earnestly parroted what I’d read about global affairs in The New Republic. Later in my career, though still young, I became an editorial writer, from which post I regularly weighed in on how Nixon and Kissinger ought to […]

National media report that some conservatives are blending, not only religion and politics, but also are including exercise and diet in the mix. “Less Prozac, more protein,” was a theme at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by conservative group Turning Point USA, reports the New York Times. The message was that women who lift […]

We who tend to get cynical about politics need to pay close attention to the fight in Washington, and the fight after that. There are heroic political efforts going on to defeat the Republican spending bill, with its Medicaid cuts, clean energy cuts and, for the wealthy, tax cuts. “We’ve got to keep fighting,” Sen. […]

This week Illinois Times welcomes our summer intern, Maggie Dougherty, of Charlottesville, Virginia. A master’s degree student with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Maggie is particularly interested in investigative journalism and local news reporting. Earlier this year she was a reporting fellow with Capitol News Illinois in Springfield. Her undergraduate degree, from The College […]

Suddenly the antiwar president is threatening to take the U.S. into war with Iran. He may have thought threats would be enough to get Iran to give in to his demand for “unconditional surrender,” but it only brought a return threat from Iran to inflict “irreparable damage” if the U.S. intervenes. President Trump thought blocking […]

In the Broadway production Good Night, and Good Luck, it was after Edward R. Murrow used his 1950s TV program to show clips of U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy making a fool of himself in his own words that Murrow got in trouble with news executives at CBS for practicing “advocacy” journalism. As one of […]

Not even I could have given the Senate committee a good definition of habeas corpus that day, and I had two years of Latin in high school. So it’s a little unfair to ask the cabinet secretary, who was hired just to blindly carry out the president’s wishes, to answer such a difficult question. She […]

So far nobody is calling President Trump antisemitic because he did not make a stop in Israel on his current Middle East tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates. “This is good for Israel, having a relationship with these countries,” Trump said, not untrue. Nor was Trump called antisemitic for circumventing Israel to […]