Second Thoughts

This week I take up the governor’s choices in clothes, but I can find no fault with his grooming. I haven’t always been able to say that about Illinois’s senior politicians. In a 1990 column titled Eggheads, I examined – not a bit more closely than I had to – the topic of the comb-over […]

 Usually when the subject is Illinois governors and someone brings up cuffs, you know what they mean. But this week I’m talking about attire, not arrests. We’ve had chief executives who preferred casual clothes – Jim Edgar comes to mind – but Bruce Rauner prefers what I call casualty clothes, because he looks likes a […]

 In “Unplugged” I wondered why Illinois’ internet service is so backward. I probably should have specified Downstate Illinois. These days Comcast customers in suburbs can get service with downloads speeds reliably in 125-135 Mbps range for under seventy bucks. Last month Comcast announced its plans to offer 1-gigabit-per-second Internet service to Chicago residential and business customers […]

A faithful reader was kind enough to share her own recollections of Adrian Belew in Springfield. She writes: Back in 1982 or so, I was at my parent’s house visiting. I grew up on South State. My mom was a precinct committee woman (wrong party, but I kept my mouth shut MOST of the time). She said that […]

 This week in the print edition of IT we reran an old Prejudices column of mine about the brief sojourn of rock guitarist Adrian Belew in mid-Illinois. That version of the column had to be edited for length; here’s the original, uncut, as it appeared on June 17, 1982. OCTOBER 15, 1979: I encounter the […]

 In 2014, in “Where is Illinois?” I stuck my big nose into the issue of regional identity.  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 […]

 In “Back on the roads again,” I noted that Mr Rauner’s proposed budget  would cut funding for public transit in the Chicago area (in spite of increased demand). I asked, is it wise to continue to spend so much of Illinois’ transportation money where its people ain’t? For Illinois to work, Chicago must work. And for Chicago […]

U.S. Rep. John Shimkus (R.-Paranoia) is a sponsor of  the SAFE Act, recently passed in the House by representatives fretting that members of ISIS might gain entry into the U.S. disguised as refugees. Shimkus was quoted about that in a recent Illinois Issues article about the refugee situation. (There is no reason to call it a “problem.”) […]

 In “With 772 you get eggroll,” we re-ran excerpts from a 1981 column that examined the immigration issue as it appeared in the Springfield of that day. I promised to post the original, much longer essay, so here it is, as it appeared in our paper of Sept. 3, 1981.   Which come first? The […]

 At the Downtown Springfield Inc. annual awards dinner in January at the Wyndham City Centre, the Springfield Mayre Jim Langfelder talked about the most recent developments in the Bluffstone LLC proposal to build student housing downtown, which I wrote about it in “Doing development right.” The city council, you might remember, chose not to grant […]

 Reader Jay Kitterman CHA, director of the Culinary Institute at Lincoln Land Community College, writes to remind me that the death of Indian restaurants in Springfield in 1981 I described in a recent column has, happily, been remedied. “We now have two Indian Restaurants in Springfield.  One is Taste of India.  One of our students, Amandeep Kaur, is […]

Last week I remarked on a pretty good new book about corn and the Midwest from the U of I Press. (See “Where corn is god.”) I didn’t know it then, but when I became a magazine journalist my Springfield address doomed me to writing about corn. My first cover story for a national magazine […]