Second Thoughts

On my recent visit to the main campus of the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champaign, the presence of Chinese, Korean and Indian students was marked. The university’s recruiting of the Asian student raises questions that after 150 years have never been resolved, and seldom even engaged. Which public is served by a great public university?  […]

Allow me to return briefly to the topic of metered street parking that I took up in September in “Parking smartly.” A lot of people say to me, “We should have free parking, like Decatur.” A significant fraction of local opinion (usually from small towns) don’t think anyone should have to pay for parking, and resent […]

 I am among those many Americans who believe that this country needs more immigrants, not less. (See this column and this column and this column.) I recommend to you therefore a stimulating essay on immigration policies being discussed in Washington as they pertain to Illinois, written by Sara McElmurry, assistant director of immigration at the […]

The wheels of our nation’s book review machinery turn very slowly, and only now has the first proper review of my new book, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves, been published. It was worth the wait.  My old friend and colleague, Harold Henderson, whom older readers of this paper will remember from his days at IT. […]

 Reader John Paul of Prairie Archives points out that my account of smart phone parking apps in “Parking smartly” (Sept. 14, 2017)  was misleading. Downtown street parking spaces are metered in the first place to encourage turnover that makes short-term parking available to shoppers and errand-runners. Feeding meters to stay beyond marked limits  is illegal […]

 In “New Beijings” (June 7, 2012) I mentioned in passing the astonishing popularity of the University of Illinois’s Urbana campus with students from mainland China. From the excellent long piece in a 2015 number of Inside Higher Education by Elizabeth Redden, “The University of China at Illinois,” I learned this:  The university’s nickname in China, I’m told, […]

 Readers who prefer to do their reading of history on e-devices should know that my book from SIU Press, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves, is now available in a Kindle edition. Also, a nice thing happened the other day. Max Grinnell, a writer-teacher-consultant on city issues who writes The Urbanologist blog, ran across the book […]

 It might seem perverse to be concerned about how to construct new buildings when the Republic is falling down around our ears, but the world moves on, even if millions of Americans refuse to move with it. Back in 2014 I looked at the possibilities in building buildings of wood—cheaper, greener, and quicker rather than […]

 In a recent blog post about the recent agitations about Confederate statues, I cited disapprovingly the opinion of economist and gadlfly Tyler Cowen. Cowen offered a fuller explication of his position in a recent column for Bloomberg News. In it he says in part, “I wouldn’t mind having a statute of limitations for public statues […]

 About those Confederate statues, which I write about in my new column: Tyler Cowen, a critic of some influence these days, praised Baltimore’s mayor who decided to remove that city’s confederate statutes in the dead of night without warning. Wrote Cowen: his statue removal was done suddenly, without democratic input for the final decision to […]

I have been observing the population decline in Illinois’ rural parts for decades now. (See “Devoid of life” from July 14, 2011.) In the current issue of Illinois Issues magazine, Norman Walzer and Brian Harger, senior research scholar and research associate respectively at the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University provide their own perspective. It is not encouraging reading. […]

Kevin Drum today lists the CEOs who have quit Trump’s manufacturing council in disgust over his thinly-disguised support for the Charlotteville neo-Nazis. Ten have left so far; still on the council is the pride of Peoria, Caterpillar’s Doug Oberhelman. “If there’s a single name left on this list by the end of the day,” adds […]