Anonymous's blog There’s a breeze of fresh air blowing through some of the Midwest’s most hard-hit old industrial towns. A new generation of leaders is taking over, bringing new thinking and new initiatives to cities that have had little but decline ...
Anonymous's blog China is sitting on $3.4 trillion (that’s trillion, with a T) in foreign exchange reserves, three times the stash of Japan, the only other global trillionaire. In the meantime, the U.S. economy badly needs more investment to put the ...
Anonymous's blog The American Gothic House still stands on the edge of the tiny town of Eldon, Iowa, just where it was in 1930 when the artist Grant Wood made it the backdrop to his famous painting, American Gothic. When the Dibble family built the ...
Anonymous's blog The old industrial heartland, that aching arc between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, is a landscape of desolation unmatched in American history outside the Dust Bowl and the post-Civil War South. But if the Dust Bowl produced Jo ...
Anonymous's blog Recent travels have taken me to two places that would seem to have almost nothing in common – southeastern Iowa and England. Southeastern Iowa is centered on Ottumwa, an old manufacturing and mining town that is struggling to make it ...
Anonymous's blog If you live in Chicago, you’re probably familiar by now with the duststorm unleashed by Rachel Shteir, an expatriate New Yorker and heretofore obscure professor at the city’s DePaul University, who wrote a review of three Chicago-rel ...
Anonymous's blog For any city aspiring to play in the global league, infrastructure is where it’s at. Such cities are out to court both the people and the businesses who can afford to live anywhere. These global citizens go to cities that not only ha ...
Anonymous's blog A Detroit business man with immensely deep pockets and an equally deep love for his town, has taken it upon himself to rebuild the blighted heart of that tragic city. Dan Gilbert is putting his money where his heart is, but his proje ...
Anonymous's blog This week’s posting calls attention to two good stories from NPR on manufacturing in America, where it’s going and how this affects the Midwest. Both focus on Electrolux, the global corporation based in Sweden which has had an outsid ...
Anonymous's blog Spring is late coming to the Midwest this year, but democracy is blooming in Illinois. Most of the state is to hold township elections on April 9 to elect some of the most redundant and least useful public officials in American polit ...
