Fletcher Farrar

I love the New York Times. I quote it so often my kids think I don’t know anything I didn’t read there. So naturally I was drawn to the long piece in May’s Vanity Fair on NYT publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and how he is steering the country’s flagship newspaper through the recession and […]

A plain white pitcher, a bowl, a broken plate and a whiskey bottle from the mid-to-late 1830s are among the finds from Floyd Mansberger’s digs on the block where the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library now stands. Those dead relics come to life when the archaeologist pieces together that they were owned by Springfield’s pioneer newspaper […]

When U. S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu met with the FutureGen Alliance on Monday to discuss whether to proceed with a large-scale coal gasification demonstration plant near Mattoon, he faced enormous questions. Can the companies involved take two relatively untested technologies and combine them in a way that will produce “clean” energy from coal? If […]

When I first heard about the new Crime Stoppers drug dumpster, I found it amusing. A trash dumpster, welded shut, painted orange, is stenciled with, “A suspected drug house is in this area,” and “Report suspicious activity 788-8427.” There’s a spaceship-like blue bubble-dome on top, caged in metal mesh, that tries to make criminals think […]

As America looks around for someone to blame for the current economic mess, bankers are the easiest target in sight. “No one wants to hug a banker,” reads a recent Newsweek headline, and no wonder. Bankers made the loans that went bad, causing the house of cards to tumble. Then they accepted government bailout money […]

It is a sad and sickening sound, that of another good reputation gurgling down the drain. Only a few weeks ago, Roland Burris was remembered as a trailblazer in Illinois politics, who had served ably in two statewide offices. Now he will forever be regarded as, at best, a fool, at worst a criminal liar. […]

Georgina Blair died last week at 92. When I visited in her home on the family farm in Virden a few years ago, she showed me this picture of her and her father with one of his prize mules, the Grand Champion at the 1939 Illinois State Fair. Over the years Georgina and I had […]

People are so ready to be relieved of the Bush presidency, and to end the Iraq war, that Barack Obama could have said anything, or nothing, in his inaugural address and it would still be called eloquent and elegant. The guy knows how to use the language, a skill the more welcome following eight years […]

At this business meeting of homeless people, some of the speeches are long and rambling, but that’s no different from many of the church and professional meetings I sit through regularly. What is different from many meetings I attend is that the business is important and the focus is clear. Advocacy for the homeless by […]

The national economic crisis brings a sense of foreboding to a small city like Springfield. Sometimes the nation’s worst weather bypasses here; the coasts get the hurricanes, fires and blizzards, while we sit cozy, contending only with the aftereffects of others’ storms. So far here we’ve largely escaped the housing bust because we never had […]