Second Thoughts

The invaluable Diane Coyle at The Enlightened Economist recently brought to our attention The Diminishing Returns of the Information Age by Mark Roeder, an essay gathered in a collection about the future of the world economy titled What’s Next? and edited by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale.   In it, Roeder notes that at a time when there […]

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo fetched a bit of tape from the memory hole. Holding copies of FBI emails about torture that the ACLU obtained through FOIA requests last fall, Sen. Dick Durbin said,  If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done […]

Janet Daley is the venerable commentator and critic for Britain’s The Telegraph. Recently she took up the larger issues raised by the recent report of this country’s secret post-9/11 torture program as discussed by CIA director John Brennan. “So yes, in the aftermath of 9/11, America had a national nervous breakdown. As Mr Brennan implied, […]

 Governor-elect Bruce Rauner was in Springfield on Dec, 2, where he told the press that the State of Illinois budget deficit “is far worse than has been discussed.” No, it’s not. It’s exactly as bad as has been discussed for months, by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, by the Civic Federation, by Senate […]

 In my September column, “Where’s Illinois?,” I hazarded the guess that the mental maps that Americans make of the places they know resemble the actual map as much as the State of Illinois budget described in campaign speeches resembles an auditor’s report.  The people who run Buzzfeed’s London office asked their staff  to try and […]

The Executive Mansion is falling apart — the mechanical systems need to be replaced, the roof leaks and the flooring is even less well-supported than recent State of Illinois budgets.  Govenor-elect Bruce Rauner says that he will donate money, and encourage others to donate money, to fix up Springfield’s This Old House. Does anyone else […]

 The Executive Mansion is falling apart — the mechanical systems need to be replaced, the roof leaks and the flooring is even less well-supported than recent State of Illinois budgets.  Not to worry — Governor-elect Bruce Rauner says that he will donate money, and encourage others to donate money, to fix up Springfield’s This Old House. Does […]

I only recently noticed that a reader had chided me in the comments for listing all the places I’d lived in my piece about food scrap recycling. (Waste not. Why not?) I wasn’t t place-dropping, I swear. I just wanted to make clear that I had experience as an average citizen using municipal food waste […]

 In my upcoming column on state driver licensing requirements, I note that because driverless cars will demand even less of our brains and our bodies than manual driving does, we are likely to progress as a society but regress as a species.  Today, I learn that the same general topic was taken up recently by […]

 Each year about this time, when the first snow threatens, local police urge caution upon drivers who apparently have forgotten everything they ever learned about how to drive on snow-slicked pavements last winter and all the winters before it. Part of the fun of living on Chicago’s North Shore was provided by SUV drivers whose […]

Danielle Kurtzleben at Vox alerted me to this: Pollsters for Ipsos-MORI recently asked 1,001 Americans, “Out of every 100 people of working age, how many do you think are unemployed and looking for work?”  Their average response was 32, or 32 percent. The actual unemplouyment rate in the U.S. in August, when the poll was conducted, […]

 Bruce Rauner not only must learn how to be a governor – every new governor does – but how to be a politician. He made a good start in the campaign. He promised things he cannot deliver and pandered to voters by telling them what they want to hear like any hack politician of the […]