James Krohe Jr.

Way back in 2014, when the sun still shone on America, I did a column titled New York, New York in which  I ventured an opinion or two about why New York City draws to it the best and the brightest young people, or at least the most energetic and ambitious, from around the country, including Springfield. […]

Here is a short shelf of books that explore in some way the history of mid-Illinois, as I promised in “Understanding our brave new world through the old one.” All are still in print or, if not, still fairly easy to track down in good used shops such as Springfield’s Prairie Archives.  Among the anthologies aimed […]

 “Sears revolutionized American retail not once but twice, and made a lot of Americans immeasurably better off,” Megan McArdle writes in Bloomberg. “But Sears built a great business for an America that no longer exists.” Sears, Roebuck was a good Illinois company that was lifted into greatness by a Springfield native and which reshaped life […]

Public Policy Polling has been peeking under the low brow of the American public again, and found that a great many Trump supporters live in a different United States than do their countrymen.  The survey found that 67% of Trump voters believe the unemployment rate went up during Barack Obama presidency, when in fact it […]

An update on the issue I raised here and here: The U.S. presidential vote is still being counted. As of December 6, Hillary Clinton leads by 2.6 million votes, which is 2 percent of the total. Donald Trump’s share is 46.2 percent. Kevin Drum notes, “Aside from the obviously corrupt election of 1876, no winning candidate in […]

Readers who share my dismay at the ways that the structure of our national political system frustrates the will of the majority have a sympathetic ear in blogger Jason Kottke, who offers links to useful video lessons in how the system works, or rather doesn’t work.  As Kottke says, Fairness and justice should not be […]

Among the original items in Mr. Rauner’s Turnaround Agenda (he counts 44, I get a little more than a dozen) are several sensible reforms that the saner Democrats ought to at least be talking about.  Alas, according to today’s news accounts, the governor he has settled on the two dumbest as his conditions for approval […]

Alert readers will know that two mid-Illinois writers, translator and poet Robert S. Fitzgerald and Lincoln novelists and editor William Maxwell, have been much talked about in these pages over the years. I essayed a piece about Fitzgerald’s boyhood in the capital (“All is not well forever”) in 2009 and in 2012 the late Rich […]