Belew and his band, the Adrian Belew Power Trio, are currently on a 12-nation, 22-city tour of Europe. PHOTO COURTESY HTTP://ADRIANBELEW.NET On January 25, 2016, the State Journal-Register published an article in which rock guitarist and former Springfield resident Adrian Belew reminisced about his career. Ordinarily, one would expect to see the words “Springfield” and […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Citizenship test
ILLUSTRATION BY Julie Notarianni/TNS Who gets to be an American? I don’t mean who gets to live here. I mean, who gets to be an American citizen? This large question weighs heavily on the smaller minds on our political right. I recall that Alan Keyes argued – if that’s the accurate term for an assertion […]
Posted inOpinion
Midwest revisited
In 2014, in “Where is Illinois?” I stuck my big nose into the issue of regional identity. You would think that the one inarguable fact about Illinois is that it is a Midwestern place. Walt Hickey, a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, commissioned a web poll of self-identified Midwesterners that asked them which states they […]
Posted inOpinion
All aboard
In “Back on the roads again,” I noted that Mr Rauner’s proposed budget would cut funding for public transit in the Chicago area (in spite of increased demand). I asked, is it wise to continue to spend so much of Illinois’ transportation money where its people ain’t? For Illinois to work, Chicago must work. And for Chicago […]
Posted inOpinion
Words matter
U.S. Rep. John Shimkus (R.-Paranoia) is a sponsor of the SAFE Act, recently passed in the House by representatives fretting that members of ISIS might gain entry into the U.S. disguised as refugees. Shimkus was quoted about that in a recent Illinois Issues article about the refugee situation. (There is no reason to call it a “problem.”) […]
Posted inOpinion
“With 772 you get eggroll,” the writer’s cut
In “With 772 you get eggroll,” we re-ran excerpts from a 1981 column that examined the immigration issue as it appeared in the Springfield of that day. I promised to post the original, much longer essay, so here it is, as it appeared in our paper of Sept. 3, 1981. Which come first? The […]
Posted inOpinion
The new model museum
Illinois State Museum Bruce Rauner the other day took action that, he explained in a press release, would “develop a sustainable fiscal model for the continued operation of the Illinois State Museum.” I’m a little behind on my reading – Highway Thru Hell reruns – so I thought we had a fiscal model that had […]
Posted inOpinion
Bruce Rauner, progressive
PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE Daydreaming the other day, I ran through my head some scenes from my imagined movie remake, Mr. Potter Goes to Springfield, in which Capra’s naïve do-gooder Jefferson Smith is replaced by Henry F. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. However, our own Mr. Potter, Bruce Rauner, also brings to mind real […]
Posted inOpinion
Bluffstone builds
At the Downtown Springfield Inc. annual awards dinner in January at the Wyndham City Centre, the Springfield Mayre Jim Langfelder talked about the most recent developments in the Bluffstone LLC proposal to build student housing downtown, which I wrote about it in “Doing development right.” The city council, you might remember, chose not to grant […]
Posted inOpinion
I call this progress
Reader Jay Kitterman CHA, director of the Culinary Institute at Lincoln Land Community College, writes to remind me that the death of Indian restaurants in Springfield in 1981 I described in a recent column has, happily, been remedied. “We now have two Indian Restaurants in Springfield. One is Taste of India. One of our students, Amandeep Kaur, is […]
Posted inOpinion
With 772 you get eggroll
As part of Illinois Times’ 40th anniversary observances, we will revisit in light of more recent events columns from James Krohe Jr.’s Prejudices series that ran from 1977 to 1994. Minor errors have been corrected and the pieces edited for length. The original, much longer essay can be read in its entirety on Krohe’s blog, […]
Posted inOpinion
Farmer Jim
Last week I remarked on a pretty good new book about corn and the Midwest from the U of I Press. (See “Where corn is god.”) I didn’t know it then, but when I became a magazine journalist my Springfield address doomed me to writing about corn. My first cover story for a national magazine […]
