The English novelist Christopher Fowler ruminates to good effect in this blog post about George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Orwell could never have predicted Trump. The fall of real authority came with the willing participant of the people. Few authors would imagine that citizens would deliberately vote themselves out of better living standards and less freedom. […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Making do without
Some further thoughts that I couldn’t squeeze into this week’s column on higher education. It is amazing how many of the men and women now honored as great Illinoisans managed to become so without benefit of formal instruction. Lincoln apprenticed as a lawyer. Most lawyers did back then. Debate continues about how good a background […]
Posted inOpinion
Ben Sasse — who? — on higher ed
This week in my Dyspepsiana column I lament that, for all his talk about structural reforms in Illnoius’ system of public higher education, Bruce Rauner has no idea what needs to be to really change it for the better. Which is why I was intrigued by the recent conversation between Ben Sasse, the junior senator […]
Posted inOpinion
Real innovation
We can all agree that Illinois’ public higher education system is in a state of crisis – or rather crises. Bruce Rauner, living in his own private Illinois, believes that tax-supported colleges and universities cost too much, thanks to bloated bureaucracies, high pension payouts, union work rules and redundant course offerings. Then there is the […]
Posted inOpinion
Medicaid in emergency care?
Jordan Weissman of Slate sums up Republican senators’ proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act. Medicaid is America’s largest health insurance program by enrollment. It covers 62 million Americans—almost as many as Medicare and the entire individual market combined. It helps the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and—thanks to Obamacare’s expansion of it, which Republicans […]
Posted inOpinion
Race, class and representation
Come fall, it will be 30 years since the City of Springfield’s new aldermanized city council first convened. I voted for it, and I wrote about it. A new system of representation had been forced by a lawsuit alleging that voters’ choices were ineluctably driven by race. The occasion gave me a chance to take […]
Posted inOpinion
Seeing your name in print
A pleasant surprise today — a box full of copies of my new book, fresh from the printer. After some 40 years, the thrill of seeing one’s name in print has faded, but I confess that opening a box — I thought it was from Amazon — felt a bit like Christmas Eve when I […]
Posted inOpinion
More floppies in a shoebox
Having found itself unable to solve the state’s big problems, legislators the other day took up a small one – the agreement to spend $2.4 million over five years for space in a converted furniture store in which to store records of the Department of Human Services. I know nothing about that lease as a […]
Posted inNews
Lasting impressions
In this week’s column I say my two cents’ worth about the warehousing of State of Illinois documents, which is, pretty much, that storing such documents on acid-free paper in a controlled environment of a warehouse is probably the best solution, digitization being both more costly and less reliably durable than print. But there are storage […]
Posted inNews
“He will not settle”: Will Howarth on Thoreau
Wandering the web, I ran across something new by Will Howarth, in American Scholar. Howarth, as some of our readers will know, is a local-boy-made-good. A 1958 grad of SHS (of whose Hall of Fame he is a member), this son of Mayor Nelson Howarth has taught at Princeton since 1966. He is a former […]
Posted inOpinion
Missing links
If Mr. Rauner thinks that reforming Illinois’ workers’ comp is hard, wait until he tries to reform the state’s geology. It turns out that yet another reason Illinois Inc. is not economically competitive with neighbor states is that its landscape is too plain. We know that because golf course developer Mike Keiser said so to […]
Posted inOpinion
Golf, of course
Chicago Highlands’ 5th hole. Photo from Golf Advisor This week I wrote about golf, more specifically about golf courses in and around Illinois. Among them are Chicago Highlands in suburban Westchester and Chicago’s Harborside International. Also of interest is “Tee Time,” the two-page review of golf’s past in Springfield in Springfield Entertainment: A Pictorial History […]
