Anonymous's blog More than any region, the Midwest lavishes seven-figure pay packages on the presidents of its big public universities. At the same time, too many of these universities are trimming full-time faculty while their students run up some o ...
Anonymous's blog Inequality, a growing social and political issue in the United States, has become particularly acute in the industrial Middle West. This makes sense, considering the transformation of the industrial economy that once supported millio ...
Anonymous's blog It’s no news that the American news business is in flux and in trouble. The powerful newspapers and giant networks that dominated journalism in the last half of the 20 th century have fragmented into shards of new media, blogs, socia ...
Anonymous's blog Once upon a recent time, most of what we read appeared in our local newspapers, or maybe the Time magazine we bought at the corner drugstore. Now the web delivers a daily blizzard of articles, op-eds, blogs, think pieces, and other j ...
Anonymous's blog My wife arrived at our apartment building at the same time as a young man delivering groceries from a local supermarket. She held the door for him. He thanked her and smiled sourly, almost apologizing for his state in life. “Not much ...
Anonymous's blog There’s a theory, held by some American pundits, that Vladimir Putin’s menacing of Ukraine is all our fault. Here’s the argument: In the 1990s, Moscow had just lost the Cold War. The Soviet Union had broken up. The Warsaw Pact was de ...
Anonymous's blog The drive to reorganize the Midwest into economically sensible regions moves ahead slowly, but it does move. I was reminded of this recently when I spent time with people working to make it happen in northwestern Illinois, a beautifu ...
Anonymous's blog There’s more than tax breaks to attracting a business to a state. Such as whether that business may have gay employees—even executives—who don’t want to live in a state that treats them as third-class citizens. That didn’t used to be ...
Anonymous's blog We’ve been here before, we and the Russians. We’ve stood eyeball to eyeball, playing double-dare in international politics, mostly in Eastern Europe, plotting just how far we can push the other guy before he pushes back. Back then we ...
Anonymous's blog Forty years ago this month, Studs Terkel published his epic oral history, Working: People Talk About What They Do all Day and How they Feel About What They Do. Today, the book reads like dispatches from a lost world. Chicagoans knew ...
