Feature

PHOTO BY USER GRIDGE VIS WIKIPEDIA.ORG The state government center in Chicago is showing its age but should be revitalized instead of sold to developers, argues a respected architecture and urban planning observer. The James R. Thompson Center, just after noon on a weekday, is the liveliest of the government buildings clustered in the North […]

PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE Seven years ago, the city of Springfield faced a fiscal crisis so serious that then Mayor Tim Davlin formed a blue-ribbon committee to define the problem and recommend solutions. The housing bubble had burst and the stock market had crashed. Springfield and other governments were laying off employees and instituting furloughs […]

ILLUSTRATION BY DON BUTTON, WWW.DESIGNBUTTON.COM World leaders from more than 190 countries will convene in Paris during the first two weeks of December for the long-awaited United Nations Climate Change Conference. Will the governments of the world finally pass a binding global treaty aimed at reducing the most dangerous impacts of global warming? Or will […]

Richard Craig says he chooses to be homeless, but he has a plan to get back on his feet. PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE If you didn’t know better, you might think Richard Craig is a powerful businessman. An athletic, handsome man of 46, he’s dressed sharply from head to toe: black wingtip dress shoes, black […]

In 1976, when Carl Jensen, a professor at California’s Sonoma State University, started looking into news media self-censorship, nobody had ever dreamed of the Internet. Most computers were still big mainframes with whirling tape reels; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had just figured out how to make a personal computer, but sales were in the […]

Greg Schroeder demonstrates the art of skinning beaver. PHOTO BY BRUCE RUSHTON With the speedometer at 85 and fingers crossed, I fly toward the Macon County Fairgrounds in Decatur. I have gotten a late start, and so am risking a speeding ticket to see something that I might never have the chance to witness again: […]

The smoldering ruins at Tenth and Madison Streets in the aftermath of the 1908 race riot, very near where the modern-day archaeological investigations took place. When Floyd Mansberger and Christopher Stratton at Fever River Research began their archaeological investigation of 10th Street between Madison and Mason streets in Springfield, they knew the probability was high […]

For nearly three decades, the sprawling Mitsubishi Motors North America plant in Normal was an enormous economic engine, providing jobs and other commercial opportunities to its hometown and downstate Illinois. Now, as the Tokyo-based automaker cuts more than 1,250 good-paying area jobs and prepares to permanently end vehicle production by December, that mammoth plant is […]

Tastes change with the advent of fall. Absent the blast furnace of summer, we become more finicky, less willing to shotgun can after can from 18-packs that dip below 10 bucks when the temperature shoots past 90 degrees and humidity strains our ability to do anything except, well, drink beer. In July, we care only […]

This article is the product of a collaboration between Illinois Times and the Better Government Association. The BGA is an independent, nonpartisan and nonprofit government watchdog that specializes in investigative reporting with media partners througho Illinois’ devastated finances and well-known government dysfunction is claiming another victim – the legally mandated launch of a promising prison […]