Second Thoughts

 Since David Atkins asked the right questions about the wisdom of the recent purchase of Time Warner Cable by Comcast, I won’t have to.  . . . the taxpayers funded much if not most of the actual wiring infrastructure that makes up the Internet for which these companies charge. Moreover, the Internet is an absolutely […]

 A reformer talks education:  “With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible  to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of […]

  In “A new Dawn at the statehouse?” I suggested that most of the statues and memorial that litter the statehouse grounds ought to be landfilled, they being either mediocre art or memorializing mediocre characters. Most, but not all. Among the state’s current collection of garden gnomes—and, because its location, probably one of the least […]

There is much to say about statues, and public art in general, and I am surprised, looking back over nearly 40 years of writing about things Illinoisan, that I have said so much of it. There is, for a start, my column in this paper from 2012, “Faith, hope and statuary.” More meaty in every […]

More on the lowly status of the drummer in the band, this time from Sting. In Broken Music: A Memoir, published by Dial Press in 2003, he recalled his days as a struggling up-and-coming bass player on the club circuit. The scene is a bar at which Gordon Sumner, the future Sting, sits with Gerry, […]

When we left Hemant Mehta, he was still trying to get someone in Morton Grove — anyone — to accept his money. the $3,000 in donations. As I noted in my column last week, Mehta had asked readers of his blog on atheism to help make good money lost to the Morton Grove park district […]

 On the subject of drummers: No singer/songwriter/producer has made more creative use of unconventional percussion over a 44-year career than Tom Waits — probably because (as he put it in a 1983 interview, “I’ve always been afraid of percussion for some reason. I was afraid of things sounding like a train wreck, like Buddy Rich […]

My recent column decrying the rise of the all-purpose preposition moved faithful reader John Garvey to share. “I’ve been noticing, especially on radio, that the word ‘an’ is nearing extinction. People will refer to ‘a excellent example’ and ‘a overhead beam’. . . Meaning doesn’t change, but the experience of listening does. I find the […]

My recent column complaining about the pension “reform” plan cobbled together by the General Assembly annoyed some readers. One reader asked whether, when I was young and did not get a toy I wanted for Christmas, did I forbid others from having it. No, but I might if I was being asked to pay for […]

One of the things to admire about Gillum Ferguson’s new book, Illinois in the War of 1812, which I wrote about recently, is his depiction of the native peoples caught up in that conflict. He portrays leaders such as Main Poc as complex individuals with  contradictory ambitions and ambivalent loyalties of the sort so often […]

Bob Vaughn, who runs the Sangamon Auditorium at UIS, tells me that the upcoming performance by the San Francisco Jazz Collective will be dedicated to Springfield drum great Barrett Deems, whom I mentioned in my recent column about drummers. The date of the 7 p.m. performance, Sunday March 30, 2014, falls about a month after […]

 Last year, noting that not a single high-level executive had been successfully prosecuted in connection with collapse of the national economy in 2008, I asked why more real crooks don’t go to jail. Jed S. Rakoff takes up that topic in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books in which he asks […]