One of the quainter rituals of any campaign, along with “debates,” is the newspaper editorial endorsement. It proceeds from three dubious assumptions – one, that anyone reads editorials besides the editor’s mother, two, that voters are swayable by argument and three, that a newspaper’s institutional opinion, being better informed than most, is thus automatically wise. […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Waste not. Why not?
Yard and food waste account for 26 percent of the municipal solid waste stream in the U.S. Composting reduces trash and yields a soil amendment that can be used for gardening. PHOTO BY DON KELSEN/MCT As much as 40 percent of the food that Americans buys in the supermarket is tossed uneaten into the trash, […]
Posted inOpinion
Going for the fences
Woman of the Year, the 1942 movie starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn: Sportswriter Tracy invites the Hepburn character to her first baseball game, at Yankee Stadium. She arrives in the sixth inning or so; told that the score is 0-0, she says, “Good, I haven’t missed anything.” What is wonderful about the moment is […]
Posted inOpinion
Where is Illinois?
MAP COURTESY WWW.FREEWORLDMAPS.NET 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 believed make up that region. He figured they’d know, but 19 percent of the […]
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New York, New York
It is natural in this season to think of New York City, but this year I have been thinking of it in a happier light than the 9/11 anniversary casts on it. I had reason to read the interview that banker George W. Bunn, Jr. did before he died in 1973. The Bunn family in […]
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Dangerous propositions
Bruce Rauner, a Republican candidate for governor of Illinois. PHOTO BY TERRENCE ANTONIO JAMES/MCT It was sometime just after the new millennium, I think, that Illinois political leaders first started to resemble the first guy through the broken store window crying “Justice!” while looting a TV set. The thought occurred to me while reading about […]
Posted inOpinion
Wet dream
For years, “green space” in downtown Springfield meant a weedy parking lot. These days greenery of a handsomer sort abounds, in curbside flower beds, in planter boxes and urns, in hanging baskets and window boxes and sidewalk planting wells. By the most accommodating definition, green space is merely any public space that has green things […]
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What do you mean by that?
I was reading the other evening, which is what I do when I can’t read during the day. My choice this night was a detective novel written by Englishman Bruce Montgomery as Edmund Crispin. Montgomery’s stories are intended as entertainments, but that did not – or did not in 1948, when this one was published […]
Posted inOpinion
Merge, right?
There is no traffic situation so bad that drivers can’t make it worse, as I was reminded while driving on I-55 recently. Work on the Des Plaines River bridge required rerouting traffic onto one lane in each direction, resulting in the mother of all merge bottlenecks. Took 40 minutes to get through. It didn’t need […]
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Land of mope and worry
To borrow a phrase, all happy cities are alike; each unhappy city is unhappy in its own way. To learn a bit about what those unhappy ways are, three economists at Harvard and the University of British Columbia sifted through the responses by some 300,000 Americans to a national survey run by the Centers for […]
Posted inOpinion
Gwyneth knows
Matt O’Hara, Illinois Natural History Survey, holds a 15-pound silver carp that had jumped into the boat while O’Hara and his crew sampled the Illinois River’s fish populations. PHOTO BY RACHEL WELLS It is satisfying to contemplate that unbridled capitalism might in some cases be harnessed to rectify the damage done by unbridled capitalism. In […]
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Immigrants behaving badly
The house came ready-made but the yard didn’t. Thus it was that, in addition to the picket fence and the rose trellis, my parents decided to plant a tree in the front yard. They did this because houses are supposed to have trees in the front yard, but as I look back the gesture also […]
