The 312 - December 2012

01/03/13

Homicide, Social Efficacy, and Poverty in Chicago

From homicide and heat waves in Chicago to New York's recovery from Sandy Hook: the importance of "neighborhood effects" and "collective efficacy" on crime and other critical issues of public health.

Posted at 1:33 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (4)

01/02/13

Chicago Homicides in 2012: All Over But the Theorizing

The total comes to 506, an increase of 71 over 2011 and 2010. The conventional wisdom is looking towards weather and the disbanding of specialized gang units as the causes. Can Garry McCarthy keep up his long game on crime through 2013?

Posted at 6:55 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/02/13

Photos of the Shrinking Mississippi River

In a couple days, the Mississippi River may shut down shipping traffic in the next couple days, due to low water levels on the Illinois-Missouri border; in a couple weeks, the river could be lower at St. Louis than it's ever been.

Posted at 3:37 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/02/13

The Atom Bowl: The Strangest New Year's Bowl Game Ever

On a field covered in glass shards and surrounded by the ruins of Nagasaki, Bears great Bullet Bill Osmanski led the Nagasaki Bears over Notre Dame Heisman winner Angelo Bertelli on New Year's Day 1946.

Posted at 12:32 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/31/12

Von Freeman, New Year's Eve, 1983 and 2010

The legendary saxophonist, who died this year at the age of 88, captured in two different New Year's Eve performances, including one of the last he'd ever give: 2010, at the Green Mill.

Posted at 4:09 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/31/12

Chicago: On the Brink of Its Warmest Year Ever

There's a good chance Chicago will close out 2012 today with an average temperature of 54.5 degrees for the year, breaking the record set in 1921. Cities across the country are breaking that record, as is the U.S. as a whole.

Posted at 3:22 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/31/12

The 2012 Bears: A Bad Season Against Good Teams Gets Lovie Smith Fired

The Bears started strong with a weak schedule, then collapsed against a long string of good teams—again struggling with their offense, despite the addition of Brandon Marshall. Having tried replacing quarterbacks, coordinators, and wide receivers, Lovie was next.

Posted at 2:06 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/28/12

The Life of a Tamalera

Filmmaker Carlos Martinez interviews Marciala, a Logan Square tamale vendor, about why she came to America, the competitive business of selling tamales, and the spirit of giving.

Posted at 3:26 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/28/12

The Biggest Chicago News Stories of 2013

The homicide rate, the privatization of city services, and the coming political and legal fight over pension reform: a roundup of the stories that will be big in the coming year.

Posted at 2:56 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/28/12

Woman Misses a Chicago Christmas After Being Jailed For Swearing

A Michigan judge tosses an Indiana woman in the slammer for muttering frustrated nothings, after she was given the run-around by his courthouse on a traffic fine. It's not the first time he's come down hard on someone who didn't take kindly to his office.

Posted at 11:06 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/27/12

Southern Accents Are 'Nice,' Northern Accents Are 'Smart' and 'In Charge,' Even to Little Kids

A study of how kids in Illinois view Northern and Southern accents finds that stereotypes take hold early and harden with age. But it's not regional bias: kids from Tennessee feel the same way.

Posted at 3:44 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/27/12

The Year in Chicago Weather: Nothing Happened, Except for a Record Mold Count

There was some notable weather this year in Chicago, but it's notable for its lack of snow, rain, and cold. This year was all about heat and dryness, but it did stay humid enough for us to surpass the city's mold-count record in August.

Posted at 2:44 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/27/12

Does Having an Irish Name Help You Get Elected In Chicago?

It's a truism that being identifiably part of the Irish diaspora, at least on a ballot, is a huge advantage in Chicago's provincial, low-information electoral contests. But a look at judicial elections, among the lowest-information of all, indicates that the advantage is barely statistically significant.

Posted at 1:44 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/27/12

The Year We Actually Threw The Bums Out, Or At Least Some Of Them

Judicial appointments in Cook County are generally considered to be lifetime appointments; no judge has lost his or her job since 1990. But in 1990, we fired seven of them, almost as many as have been recalled in every other election combined. What happened?

Posted at 12:00 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/24/12

How Charles Dickens's Screw-Up Chicago Brother Turned the Second City Against Boz

When Charles Dickens toured America for the last time, he gave Chicago the cold shoulder, as well as his widowed Chicago sister-and-law. The local press attacked him as a Scrooge and a hypocrite, but the real story was a sad and complex one closer to Bleak House than A Christmas Carol.

Posted at 1:25 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/24/12

A Fire in West Englewood, Charges Filed on Christmas Eve

A hot plate used for warmth in an unheated West Englewood apartment that lacked smoke detectors is believed to have caused the deaths of two young, unattended children on early Saturday morning.

Posted at 1:19 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/21/12

Christmas Infographics, Circa 1908

Giant teddy bears, giant dolls, and other ways of expressing seventeen million dollars worth of Christmas goodies in terrifyingly nightmarish fashion.

Posted at 5:15 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/21/12

The Fiscal Cliff: A Legacy of Dennis Hastert's House

John Boehner's Plan B to avert the fiscal cliff got nixed by his own party raising the question of what, if anything, he could get the members he leads to agree to. He could also try to swing some Democrats his way—but that would violate the edict established by his predecessor, Dennis Hastert, which Boehner has made, at his peril, even stronger.

Posted at 2:38 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/20/12

The Obama Campaign: Hard Data, Soft Sell

How the Obama campaign used massive brain and processing power to guide them towards simple, subtly sophisticated strategies for pitching the candidate and his wife to donors (and potential employees).

Posted at 4:32 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/20/12

Trauma Care and Death as the Ultimate Data Point

Are fewer people being killed in America because there's less violence, or because we're better at saving the wounded? It's really, really hard to say, because we're much better at measuring death than life.

Posted at 3:14 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/19/12

Can We Reason With Evil?

In the wake of unimaginable tragedy, we often think that it's beyond explanation. But what if we could use reason not just to explain it, but to attack its underlying causes? Research into psychopathy at the University of Wisconsin—the result of unprecedented access to the state's incarcerated population—is giving us insight into the psychopathic mind, and early but promising strategies to deal with it, and perhaps heal it.

Posted at 6:28 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/19/12

Illinois: A Long History of Underfunded Pensions

The state has long had trouble deciding to pay its share of employee pension costs. In the 1990s, representatives of the pension system filed a complaint about it, and were told: the constitution guarantees that the state has to pay the pensions. It doesn't guarantee that it has to fund them.

Posted at 11:58 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/18/12

Mike Royko on Gun Control

In the wake of the Winnetka school shootings, people from all over pushed legendary columnist Mike Royko to continue his decades-long crusade for gun control, but at that point even the tough writer was worn out by the NRA.

Posted at 3:06 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (4)

12/14/12

What We Don't Know

On a day when no one knows what to say, starting with what we don't know about guns, rights, and violence.

Posted at 4:52 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (2)

12/14/12

'I Don't Want To Be Angry'

Jeff Ruby reflects on the Newtown shooting and asks how we can make it stop, without repeating the same painful, angry things that haven't yet made it stop.

Posted at 3:23 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/13/12

What Bob Dylan's Voice Looks Like

A spectrographic analysis of Bob Dylan's voice from his early years, through the 1970s, and through his late career suggests he's finally found the scratchy, bluesy voice he heard from the musicians he's always loved.

Posted at 11:55 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (2)

12/12/12

Leave Jay Cutler and His Frumpy Face Alone

The Bears quarterback is building a legacy of total ambivalence towards his legacy, as argued by a PR pro in ChicagoSide. It's probably costing him a good chunk of money, now and in the future. But it's worth considering it from his perspective: maybe that's a worthwhile price to pay for actual, uncalculated privacy.

Posted at 6:13 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/12/12

Chicago Fed President's 'Evans Rule' Completes Its Odyssey, As the Fed Gets Dovish

Charles Evans has been waging a "low profile" war on the Fed's opaque language, its mushy monetary guidance, and its conservative approach to inflation during a period of high unemployment. Today, the Fed embraced much of what he's been arguing for as its current policy.

Posted at 3:16 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/12/12

Jack Schaap Gives the Creepiest Sermon You'll Ever See, and Maybe the Second-Creepiest

A year before the ex-pastor of Hammond's First Baptist Church committed the Mann Act violation he recently pled guilty to, he appeared briefly in an ABC investigation of Independent Baptist churches... and hung hellfire on the network for questioning the idea that women aren't the reason man is fallen.

Posted at 11:36 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (16)

12/11/12

A Look at Chicago, Through Its Trash

Death of the newspaper aside, Chicagoans still throw out a lot of newsprint every year—particularly in high-income wards, where it comes in just behind food scraps in percentage of our trash.

Posted at 6:18 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/11/12

America as 'Kludgeocracy'

It's not just Illinois that has a problem with lots of confusing, overlapping, expensive governmental structures; the federal government has built a lot of kludges to get across roadblocks and competing ideologies.

Posted at 11:03 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/10/12

Lack of Snow Another Sign of Chicago's Long, Hot, Dry Year

If no snow accumulates in Chicago today, it will set a record for the longest stretch in city history without any snow. The Midwest's dry, drought-ridden year might be good for getting outside, but it's crippling Mississippi barge traffic.

Posted at 4:52 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/10/12

The Best Survey Question Ever

"People picture life after death in many different ways. We'd like to know how you think of life after death. Here is a card with sets of contrasting images. On a scale of 1-7, where would you place your image of life after death. d. 1. A pale, shadowy form of life, hardly life at all. 2. A life of complete fulfillment, spiritual and physical." Survey says....

Posted at 2:47 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (3)

12/10/12

Chicago: 'The False Confession Capital of the United States'

Byron Pitts of 60 Minutes looks at the high number of false confessions in the city, and puts Anita Alvarez on the spot for her office's handling of two cases the program investigated.

Posted at 11:22 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/05/12

The Geography of Hunger in Chicago

The Chicago neighborhood with the second-lowest per-capita income and the highest hardship score has a food insecurity rate over 50 percent. The city's wealthiest neighborhood still has one over ten percent.

Posted at 6:07 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (2)

12/05/12

Illinois Gets a New, Bipartisan Pension Plan; Here's How It Works

A new bill proposed by Elaine Nekritz and Daniel Biss takes many of the pension-reform ideas that have been floating around, and weds them with some new ones; it's already got a fair amount of backing. Is it legal? How well will it work?

Posted at 3:01 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/05/12

Chicago Leaps to the Fore in Bike Infrastructure With Protected Downtown Lane

A mile of cycle track downtown might not seem like that much, but it's the first time in awhile bike-friendly cities like Portland and Seattle have envied a piece of Chicago infrastructure. You can thank the warm weather for it going in so quickly.

Posted at 11:45 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

12/04/12

America's Civic Finance Problem Goes Back Before the Great Recession

Cities across the country have felt the pinch because of the Great Recession—but also the one before that. Well before the economy tanked, salaries and wages stagnated, causing declines in sales and income taxes in advance of the economy's collapse.

Posted at 2:56 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/04/12

Grant Achatz on the Future of Dining at the Chicago Humanities Festival

The Next and Alinea chef discusses his schedule (it starts late, but runs really late) and the future of cutting-edge dining (he doesn't think you'll like it) and other upcoming possibilities.

Posted at 2:32 PM in The 312 Dining | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/03/12

Who Goes to Jail in Cook County and Why

The number one reason people go to jail in Cook County? If you guessed drug possession, you're right. But violent crimes actually make up a bigger proportion than drug charges, and the number one violent crime—and the second-most likely charge for people who go to jail in Cook County—is domestic battery.

Posted at 3:09 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 2012

01/03/13

01/02/13

01/02/13

01/02/13

12/31/12

12/31/12

12/31/12

12/28/12

12/28/12

12/28/12

12/27/12

12/27/12

12/27/12

12/27/12

12/24/12

12/24/12

12/21/12

12/21/12

12/20/12

12/20/12

12/19/12

12/19/12

12/18/12

12/14/12

12/14/12

12/13/12

12/12/12

12/12/12

12/12/12

12/11/12

12/11/12

12/10/12

12/10/12

12/10/12

12/05/12

12/05/12

12/05/12

12/04/12

12/04/12

12/03/12

About The 312

What the editorial staff at Chicago magazine is reading, watching, clicking on, listening to, talking about, and doing—shared here and open for discussion.

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