The advantage of pursuing an education in a bookshop rather than a school is that at the bookshop young readers can pick out books that teachers and parents think aren’t good for you. I had bought several books by the historian Richard Hofstadter, then the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Reading […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Making Springfield a better place
“‘Intellectual oasis’ might be asking the venerable place to shoulder more weight than it could plausibly bear, but homage is overdue.” I was trading anecdotes about Shadid’s when Michael Skube said that. He is the Eastsider who went from a cub reporter covering prep games for the old Illinois State Journal to book critic for […]
Posted inOpinion
Noise about noise
Were a boom car to drive past city hall while Springfield’s city council was in session, the din would make it impossible to hear what the aldermen were saying. This is the sole public advantage of allowing the super-amped hip-hop-mobile to roam the capital’s streets at will, but anyone who has been following the debate […]
Posted inOpinion
Yielding to nonsense
A General Assembly unable to pass the laws that are needed must pass something, and so busies itself passing laws that are not. One of these is Illinois House Bill 43, which in round figures demands that drivers must stop to allow a pedestrian to cross a street via any crosswalk. As I write it […]
Posted inOpinion
Making room for the Huangs
In 2002, the government of the People’s Republic of China banned a book of oral history interviews with the sorts of people that the West does not hear about, and that the Chinese authorities do not wish it to. The compiler was one Liao Yiwu, a dissident writer who had been marginalized himself by the […]
Posted inOpinion
The Presidential museum turns five
Abe World opened five years ago this month, on April 19. Drawing on all the dark arts of electronic hucksterism, the new museum was to transform Springfield into a Mecca for patriots who would make their hajj by the millions in their Caravans and Odysseys. Has it? Has it returned a decent profit on the […]
Posted inOpinion
Cloudy thinking from the Sunshine State
Illinois was demographically if not geographically a Southern state in its early years, and has long suffered from innovations in the civil realm imported from the land of molasses and mosquitoes. These include Black Codes and courthouse politics, but we would have had to add to that list if a proposed school reform bill in […]
Posted inOpinion
Reuniting learning and labor
Facing nearly half a billion dollars of unpaid bills from the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois says it will probably have to raise tuition nearly 20 percent over the next four years. Taking a page from the General Assembly accounting textbook, the university will pay its immediate bills by borrowing against tuition and […]
Posted inOpinion
Protecting the protector
One is always saddened to see an old friend left helpless in the hands of fate, even if that friend fills half a city block. As did so many of my generation, I spent dozens of happy hours at the Illinois State Armory at Second and Monroe during my youth. The building was constructed in […]
Posted inOpinion
Safe passage
In March a busy Springfield learned that the Dana-Thomas Foundation, the private nonprofit guardian of the state-owned and Wright-designed Dana-Thomas House at Fourth and Lawrence, had bought a two-story house a couple of doors west of the Amtrak tracks at 227 E. Lawrence Avenue and torn it down. The house died so that tourists might […]
Posted inOpinion
Is this any way to run an election?
The only suspense come election time in places such as Russia and Belarus and almost any of the Central Asian republics is not who wins but by how much. Government leaders bully, they bribe, they ban opponents from the ballot to produce vote margins for the winners so flagrantly false that they would embarrass the […]
Posted inOpinion
How to say ‘What do we owe?’ in Mandarin
If enough middle and high school students sign up for it, the Springfield and Ball-Chatham public school districts may offer instruction in Mandarin Chinese, the simplified official Chinese dialect used in the People’s Republic of China. Like so many trends, this one is so late making it to the Springfield area that one wonders whether […]
