Second Thoughts

 In my 2012 column “Faith, hope and statuary,” I panned recent attempts to commemorate through public statuary sacrifice by public protectors like firefighters and cops. Such works leave a bad taste to the extent they reinforce the fetishization of the warrior in all his guises; by calling anyone who puts on a uniform a ”hero,” […]

 I’ve been thinking a bit more about food waste, and the several ways it might be reduced, or at least redeemed. While it’s too wet to burn, food waste can be digested by our little friends the anaerobic bacteria to produce methane. (This happens in landfills, but the conversion under those conditions is inefficient and recovering […]

 Further thoughts about the Daily Herald’s forlorn search for a gubernatorial candidate who can “change Illinois history.” The paper believes it found one in Bruce Rauner. As I noted in last week’s column, Bruce Rauner cannot change Illinois history. Bruce Rauner cannot change even Springfield. He can, however, do as he promises and, shake up […]

 In “Where’s Illinois?” I pondered the ways in which the Midwest is a state of mind – and that when it comes to geography, Americans’ minds are often in a state of confusion. Yale history professor and cartographer Bill Rankin looked at how 100  businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies define the Midwest for their purposes […]

The social impacts of the cyber revolution are beyond the brief of a columnist specializing in weedy parking lots and aldermanic antics. But, like the current Republican gubernatorial candidate, I have opinions about many things beyond my field of endeavor. One is that computer systems, more specifically our reliance on them, is making us stupid. […]

 In “Flyover Country” Is an Insult to Midwesterners Like Me. So Is “Heartland” Sentimentality,” journalist Matthew Wolfson offers a sober and perceptive assessment of the popular sentimental image of the region that “a broad swath of Americans — not least Midwesterners — have constructed together.” He writes   The first time I registered the term […]

My column next week will be about New York City, and the allure it has always had for the ambitious and the hopeful. Writing it, I was reminded of a something said in an interview by performance artist Laurie Anderson. She, like me, grew up in the Illinois of the 1950s and ‘60s. (Anderson was raised […]

 The State Journal-Register on Sunday published a useful report by reporter Jamie Monk about the efforts by the Springfield Metro Sanitary District to cope with flooding from “rain events” that seem to be ever more frequent and severe. Many millions are being spent, but most of that money will go, as it must, to merely […]

 The Y block in downtown Springfield lies along the now-buried course of the Town Branch of Spring Creek. That has implications for the redevelopment of that block, as I noted in Wet Dream.  In our paper of Dec. 24-Jan. 6, 1977, I published a feature article in which the old Town Branch was described and […]

 In “What do you mean by that?” I ventured the opinion that “big words”  words are not, like jewelry, mere adornments to the educated, but essential tools that equip us to communicate more clearly with ourselves.  New Yorker writer John McPhee took up another side of the topic in that magazine’s April 29, 2013 issue. He relies on […]

 In next week’s column, “What do you mean by that?” I ask the perennial question: Big words – what are they good for? One man who has some very good answers to that question is writer James S. Murphy, who offers them in “The case for SAT words,” published on-line on Dec. 11, 2013 at […]