Second Thoughts

 Some further observation on, and from, Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters from the University of Illinois Press, which I review this week in “Old letters.” The book’s editors, Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz, offer the letters as lessons in American social, political, and cultural history, as essays […]

In 2002 I moved to the Chicago area and became a White Sox fan; they won the World Series in 2005. In 2010 I moved to the Bay Area and started following the Giants; they won baseball’s top prize that year and again in 2012 and 2014. I moved back to the Chicago area in […]

The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute down Carbondale way continues to bravely explore the treacherous pathways of public opinion in Illinois. Among the 1,000 Illinois registered voters surveyed in a recent poll, 57 percent said they have at least a somewhat favorable view of labor unions. Those same people said they favored anti-union right-to-work or […]

In this week’s Dyspepsiana, I take up the question of election-rigging. Which got me to thinking . . . . The principle—that those subject to the state’s laws ought to be able to shape those laws through the vote—applies even more compellingly to citizens under 18. Among other sins the over-18s commit against the next […]

 I graduated from Springfield High School in 1966. My classmates organized a 50th reunion for the same weekend that the Springfield High School building  turned 100. District 186 staged a  ceremony Friday evening to mark the centennial of Springfield High School. (There are other events planned; let’s hope they do better than this; the featured […]

In “Refined, delicate and urban,” I talked about the Centennial Building on the statehouse grounds, which was built to honor the first centenary of the founding of the State of Illinois. I, argued, not very persuasively, for its restoration to honor the second centenary in 2018. Curious readers might want to also consult this entry about […]

There’s a sucker born every minute, they say, which might explain why state legislatures and city councils count so many of them among their members. As I noted here and here, spending the public’s good money to entice large corporations to do business in one’s home state or city is folly. From a recent report […]

In next week’s installment of Dyspepsiana, I argue that a nice way to mark the State of Illinois’ 200th anniversary in 2018 would be to restore the memorial it built to celebrate the commonwealth’s first one hundred years — the Centennial Building, a.k.a. the Howlett Building, on Second Street.  Objections will be raised because of the cost. […]

 In “Get right or get out” I recalled episodes from Illinois’ recent past in which fearful Illinoisans confronted the Other. I mentioned an incident in Litchfield involving Jehovah’s Witnesses. Here are the details. After World War II, paranoid fantasies of subversion and revolution focused on new sets of exotic newcomers. Because they put loyalty to […]

I’m not sure that everyone loves a parade but I do–as a subject. I wrote two columns about the parade that kicks off the Illinois State Fair each year.  This one appeared in our paper of August 20, 1987.   “I gotta tell the guys in New York about this,” I said to myself. New Yorkers […]

 The more things change, the more they stay the same. Thirty-six years ago, Springfield’s mayor was Mike Houston, and the Illinois State Fair was, well, what the fair has always been. I wrote about it in this column of my Prejudices series, which appeared in the IT of August 22, 1980. It varies slightly from […]

Appropriate for the Olympics season is this very interesting piece from Scientific American, “Magic Blood and Carbon-Fiber Legs at the Brave New Olympics,” in which Daid Epstein addresses some of the same questions I considered in “Cheating is the American way” way back in 2012.  Epstein’s answers? He doesn’t have any, any more than I did. In […]