A college campus is a sleepy place in the summer, which makes summer a good time to go sightseeing. I’ve always enjoyed visiting the main campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana for that purpose. One sees things one seldom sees at home, such as people reading books in public. (And people say Angkor […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Dumb mistake about smartphone parking
Reader John Paul of Prairie Archives points out that my account of smart phone parking apps in “Parking smartly” (Sept. 14, 2017) was misleading. Downtown street parking spaces are metered in the first place to encourage turnover that makes short-term parking available to shoppers and errand-runners. Feeding meters to stay beyond marked limits is illegal […]
Posted inOpinion
Parking smartly
Attorneys in their sunset years dream of the day when they no longer have to start a day knotting a necktie, governors of when they can complain about bills without people expecting them to know what’s in them. A certain Springfield columnist of that age dreams of never again having to write about parking downtown. […]
Posted inOpinion
How others see us
In “New Beijings” (June 7, 2012) I mentioned in passing the astonishing popularity of the University of Illinois’s Urbana campus with students from mainland China. From the excellent long piece in a 2015 number of Inside Higher Education by Elizabeth Redden, “The University of China at Illinois,” I learned this: The university’s nickname in China, I’m told, […]
Posted inOpinion
A certain despair
It is late August as I write this, a time of year when gardens and gardeners alike begin to look a little, well, tired, for reasons I explored in the column, which appeared in our paper of Aug. 27, 1987. It has been artfully revised and edited for length. T. S. Eliot was no gardener, […]
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Drawing fire
A draft version of this piece was posted in error. The version that follows is the corrected one. – JKJr. At least no one demanded that insulting images be suppressed a la Charlie Hebdo. No blood at the publisher was shed, and no one issued a fatwa against the artist, even if ritual murder was […]
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Corn Kings on Kindle; The Urbanologist interview
Readers who prefer to do their reading of history on e-devices should know that my book from SIU Press, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves, is now available in a Kindle edition. Also, a nice thing happened the other day. Max Grinnell, a writer-teacher-consultant on city issues who writes The Urbanologist blog, ran across the book […]
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Woodn’t it be nice
It might seem perverse to be concerned about how to construct new buildings when the Republic is falling down around our ears, but the world moves on, even if millions of Americans refuse to move with it. Back in 2014 I looked at the possibilities in building buildings of wood—cheaper, greener, and quicker rather than […]
Posted inOpinion
Monumental folly
Not since Chancellorsville have so many rebel soldiers fallen in battle. Across the U.S., statues and other memorials to Confederate heroes from the Civil War are being driven from their pedestals, decried as symbols of a white supremacist creed that has come to be regarded as odious. The problem of whether and how to honor […]
Posted inOpinion
More on statues limitations
In a recent blog post about the recent agitations about Confederate statues, I cited disapprovingly the opinion of economist and gadlfly Tyler Cowen. Cowen offered a fuller explication of his position in a recent column for Bloomberg News. In it he says in part, “I wouldn’t mind having a statute of limitations for public statues […]
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Iconoclasm 101
About those Confederate statues, which I write about in my new column: Tyler Cowen, a critic of some influence these days, praised Baltimore’s mayor who decided to remove that city’s confederate statutes in the dead of night without warning. Wrote Cowen: his statue removal was done suddenly, without democratic input for the final decision to […]
Posted inOpinion
A rural future from the past?
I have been observing the population decline in Illinois’ rural parts for decades now. (See “Devoid of life” from July 14, 2011.) In the current issue of Illinois Issues magazine, Norman Walzer and Brian Harger, senior research scholar and research associate respectively at the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University provide their own perspective. It is not encouraging reading. […]
