The 312 - January 2013

02/07/13

Cubs Logo Contest Recalls Origins of White Sox “Winning Ugly” Uniform

The Cubs have announced a plan to come up with a new logo to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field in 2014...

Posted at 4:37 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/31/13

Six Ways of Looking at Wolf Point

Does it have too much parking? Too little? Is it too much like its neighbors... or too much like towers in Spain, Chile, Abu Dhabi, and China? Developing one of Chicago's most significant and most underused plots of land is, and will be, a fraught process.

Posted at 5:36 PM in The 312 News & Politics News & Politics: Featured story | Permalink | Comments (3)

01/31/13

The Cubs Are Hiring, and Their New Sabermetric Specialist Has Already Been Good For Chicago

A job doing research and development for the Cubs has opened up, working alongside new hire and sabermetrics expert Tom Tango—who explodes the Bartman myth with the Leverage Index.

Posted at 1:18 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/30/13

The Cubs' Insane Coaching Experiment, the White Sox' Home-Run Inflation, and the Dawn of Sabermetrics

The first use of computers to analyze baseball? It appears to have been a bizarre spasm of midcentury modernization by Phil Wrigley with his struggling Cubs. It didn't take. 20 years later, the White Sox—with future GM Dan Evans—put analysis to its highest use, creating lots and lots of home runs.

Posted at 6:57 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/30/13

Chicago Gets Its Guns Where It Used to Get Its Blues

Aside from the obvious sources—nearby counties and states that don't have Chicago's history of strict gun laws—a surprising number of guns come up north from the Delta into the city, a current dilemma overlaying the old tracks of history.

Posted at 1:54 PM in The 312 News & Politics News & Politics: Featured story | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/30/13

Illinois: The Fourth Most Regressive Taxes in America

The state's flat tax, its dependence on property taxes, and relatively high sales taxes (both state and local) combine for a tax structure that, compared to other states, hits the poor hard—and the middle class as well.

Posted at 11:21 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/28/13

The Geography of Chicago Home Loans

A map of owner-occupied home loans in Chicago for 2011 shows familiar patterns: high density on the north and northwest sides of the city, a desert of new home loans on the south and west sides.

Posted at 4:46 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/28/13

American Governments Start to Turn Against Public-Private Partnerships

New York City, scared off the plan by Chicago's experience, just decided to hold on to its parking meters. There's been a bit of a backlash against public-private partnerships in the past few months, as both governments and operators struggle with the financing of infrastructure in a down economy.

Posted at 1:15 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/25/13

Pond-Effect Snow, Nuke-Effect Snow, or Both?

The arctic air that just moved through the area produced substantial lake-effect snow off the Great Lakes. But both Pennsylvania and Illinois got odd, rare streaks of snow in the vicinity of nuclear power plants: perhaps nuclear-tower snow or nuclear-cooling-pond snow.

Posted at 3:26 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/25/13

Republicans Can Make Progress In Cities When They Stop Fearing Them

The GOP has been losing ground in America's cities, and the wounds are largely self-inflicted. If it can throw off its Agenda-21 fringe and its instinctual opposition to urbanist ideas that really shouldn't be ideological, it could make progress—especially in red-state cities that are the new urbanist frontier.

Posted at 1:43 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/24/13

Jay Cutler: Popular Among Liberals, But Polling Softly

Who's standing by Jay Cutler? Liberal Democrats. Republicans in Illinois are more skeptical of the Bears' quarterback, at least when they're not rooting for the Packers. NB: poll results are from the week the Bears beat the Vikings, not their late season collapse, which may have disturbed the electorate.

Posted at 4:02 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/24/13

Illinois Republicans At a Crossroads

In 2006, Illinois Republicans ran a social moderate against an unpopular governor, and lost. In 2010, they ran a social conservative against an even more unpopular governor, and lost. Now Bill Brady has moved to the center, conservatives are moving against their former standard-bearer, and the party has to decide again what sort of candidate should oppose Quinn (or a much, much more formidable foe).

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

01/24/13

The Sad Life of Peter II, and the Curious Disinterring of the King of Yugoslavia From Libertyville

He fled communist Yugoslavia by crawling down a drainpipe, married a Greek princess, and led a life of declining geopolitical intrigue that frequently brought him to Chicago. Buried in Libertyville, his body remained their for four decades, as his homeland reconciled itself to its monarchic past, aided by a popular American television show and the fall of communism.

Posted at 1:39 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (7)

01/23/13

What It's Like to Play an Actual NBA Player

Bulls bench favorite Brian Scalabrine, retired back to Boston to give broadcasting a try, invites some regular guys to a pickup basketball challenge—and shows them how much better a human victory cigar is than the average mortal.

Posted at 4:13 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/22/13

San Francisco: A Flex Plan for Pensions, Flexible With Labor

How mayors Ed Lee of San Francisco and Angel Taveras of Providence, Rhode Island instituted pension reform in their cities with the agreement of unions, and voter support.

Posted at 5:26 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/22/13

The Costs and Savings of School Closures

The math of school closings is weird: the upfront costs are high, and the savings unpredictable, as districts decide on up-front demolition or long-term maintenance costs. Meanwhile, our underutilized schools have counter-intuitively overcrowded classrooms.

Posted at 2:36 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/21/13

Barack Obama's Progressive Inaugural Speech and the Timing of Justice

The President sets Stonewall alongside Selma and the Seneca Falls Convention in a plea for equality in sexual orientation: "for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well."

Posted at 3:48 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/21/13

How Long Does It Take To Defrost a Building? About Four Days

The Fulton Market Cold Storage building, which rose in 1923 in the heart of the beef distribution and racketeering district, had to be thawed out before it can become a mixed-use development.

Posted at 1:26 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/18/13

Chicago's Year Without Snow

In defense of the Chicago winter and the Hawk Wind: it's a hard kind of awe, but it's the only awe we have in one of the least naturally wondrous great cities on earth.

Posted at 7:05 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/18/13

Poverty and Wealth In Illinois: Upstate, Downstate

As you might guess, the collar counties are the state's richest, though the very richest may surprise you. The poverty downstate is intense in places, along the lines of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods.

Posted at 4:34 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/17/13

Happy Birthday, Al Capone

In a wonderful historical coincidence, January 17th marks the birth of Chicago's most famous gangster and the public policy that made him, the day that the 18th Amendment became law.

Posted at 12:36 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/16/13

Smoke Monsters: Chicago 1913, Beijing 2013

A century ago, Chicago's air was (probably) a lot worse than Beijing's is today. Chicago was pretty proactive in terms of air quality, beginning as early as 1881, and advanced ahead of its peers—but things were still bad in the 1970s, when the real push for clean air swept the country.

Posted at 4:22 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (2)

01/16/13

Obama Administration Announces Its Gun Control Policy, 'Now Is the Time'

The White House's plan includes a lot that will be familiar: an assault weapons ban, limiting clips to 10 rounds, and research into the effects of violent video games and movies. And a lot that's new, including a large mental-health component.

Posted at 1:05 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/15/13

The Science, Politics, and Criminal Justice of Pedophilia

Research into pedophilia is starting to peel back the layers of why some people are attracted to children. In the meantime, the criminal justice system continues to struggle with how to protect children from a pathology we don't understand.

Posted at 5:46 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/15/13

Rahm Emanuel Talks Comprehensive, National Gun Control... or 'Criminal Access'

While he's pushing gun control at the local level, the mayor is encouraging Congress to pass legislation, a couple days before the President is expected to announce a plan... and Emanuel's strategy looks a lot like the one he engineered in 1994.

Posted at 1:53 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/15/13

City to Add Another $33 Million to Its Police-Settlement Bill

It's a massive amount of money compared to other cities, but sadly typical when it comes to Chicago's recent history of legal settlements, which are far out of proportion to major American cities. And it's not just the CPD.

Posted at 11:10 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/14/13

RIP Aaron Swartz

The young Highland Park native was an Internet prodigy, beginning with his work on developing RSS when he was only 14 years old. Driven by an idealistic commitment to open data, Swartz connected an extraordinary number of people together, both on and offline, and changing how we look at the Web from a technological and moral perspective.

Posted at 6:45 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/14/13

Want to Start One of the Best Bars in Chicago? Build Along a Diagonal Street

Location, location, location: if our guide to the city's best bars is any indication, one thing many of them share, whether dive or cocktail lounge or neighborhood haunt, is a location on or near one of the city's diagonal corridors.

Posted at 4:39 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/14/13

Does Segregation Make a City More Vulnerable to Crime?

A model of crime contagion suggests that heavy segregation by income—and segregating the rich from the poor with a middle-class buffer—is worse for city crime levels than a mix of neighborhoods.

Posted at 2:07 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/14/13

Could Rahm Emanuel's Push For Gun Control Work? Perhaps at the Margins

Despite the city and state's court defeats over gun control, the mayor is making an explicit push to tighten the city's laws, and is likely to target assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Posted at 12:10 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/11/13

National Climate Assessment Predicts Less Frost, More Hot Days and Heat Waves for Future Chicago

A new report from the United States Global Change research program looks at the U.S. and climate change over the rest of the century, projecting hotter hot days, wetter winters, more 100-degree days, and deadly heat waves along the lines of 1995.

Posted at 6:38 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/11/13

Long Reads on Chicago's Transition From a 'Managerial State' to an 'Entrepreneurial State'

The city continues to embrace public-private partnerships, as the mayor fills out the infrastructure trust and Midway-privatization boards. It's an old story—and expect more, especially if tax-free muni bonds disappear.

Posted at 1:22 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/11/13

Good News in Chicago Data

The Sun-Times picks up the well-regarded crime-tracking site Homicide Watch, plans on expanding it to Chicago; a look at city-owned vacant property (there's a lot of it), and more

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

01/10/13

The Alternate-Universe Chicago In Which Our Craziest Unbuilt Buildings Exist

Some of Chicago's great unbuilt buildings are as remarkable as the ones that make up its skyline. What would happen if Harry Weese's Lake Michigan Islands, the Sears Tower on its side, and a Tribune Tower in the shape of a giant classical column shared downtown?

Posted at 5:54 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/10/13

The Geography of Chicago's Second Languages

Looking at ESL speakers, the far north and northwest sides of Chicago have a great deal of linguistic diversity, with Belmont Cragin having a high number of non-native speakers, and West Ridge a breadth of languages. The far south side, on the other hand, is notable for its lack of non-English speakers.

Posted at 2:53 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (2)

01/09/13

Five Ways of Looking at the Flu Season

This year's flu season is unusually intense, and literally off the charts—well, Google's Flu Indicator chart at least, which tracks what people are searching for and uses it to predict the severity of the flu season. Hopefully it will remain not very deadly, however.

Posted at 5:06 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/09/13

Illinois's Pension Mess: The Battle of What Might Be Constitutional

Illinois has the most restrictive pension laws in the nation, so almost anything the legislature does to try to cut benefits is almost certain to be challenged in the courts. Getting each other to agree on what's fiscally sensible and politically survivable is hard enough; agreeing on what's legally sound is no easier.

Posted at 10:12 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/08/13

Concern From Domestic Violence Advocates Causes Pushback on Courtroom Cell Phone Ban

The cell phone ban in Cook County courthouses, scheduled to go into effect next week, is meant to protect witnesses and others in court—but could it put victims of domestic violence at risk?

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

01/08/13

DUIs, Fatal Crashes, and Regional Drinking Culture

Chicago's a pretty safe city to drive in, but it's got a drinking problem: a high percentage of fatal crashes involve intoxication. It's a problem in the North and the West, while far fewer fatal, intoxicated crashes occur in the South.

Posted at 1:09 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/08/13

Big Money In Illinois's Thicket of Local Governments

A Trib investigation finds that localities are able to use alternate-revenue bonds to take on debt without voter input, with virtually no oversight by the state. It's hard for the state to keep up, what with 7,000 governments to oversee.

Posted at 10:26 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/07/13

Megabus, the Recovery of American Downtowns, and the Resurgence of the Bus Industry

Less than a decade ago, intercity bus service looked like an industry in terminal decline. Since 2006, it's started to recover, with discount carriers adding over a thousand daily operations. Megabus pushed the dying giants to innovate—but the improvement of big-city downtowns has also taken the stigma out of bus travel.

Posted at 3:58 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/07/13

Lead, Violence, and Society

One reason frequently given for the substantial drop in America's violent crime rate is lead abatement—a couple decades after it was removed from paint and gas, crime started downwards. But it's still out there, in houses and the soil of big cities, and the more we know about it, the lower the acceptable limits of lead get.

Posted at 2:03 PM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

	02/07/13 Cubs Logo Contest Recalls Origins of White Sox “Winning Ugly” Uniform The Cubs have announced a plan to come up with a new logo to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field in 2014... Posted at 4:37 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/31/13 Six Ways of Looking at Wolf Point Does it have too much parking? Too little? Is it too much like its neighbors... or too much like towers in Spain, Chile, Abu Dhabi, and China? Developing one of Chicago's most significant and most underused plots of land is, and will be, a fraught process. Posted at 5:36 PM in The 312 News & Politics News & Politics: Featured story \| Permalink \| Comments (3)
	01/31/13 The Cubs Are Hiring, and Their New Sabermetric Specialist Has Already Been Good For Chicago A job doing research and development for the Cubs has opened up, working alongside new hire and sabermetrics expert Tom Tango—who explodes the Bartman myth with the Leverage Index. Posted at 1:18 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/30/13 The Cubs' Insane Coaching Experiment, the White Sox' Home-Run Inflation, and the Dawn of Sabermetrics The first use of computers to analyze baseball? It appears to have been a bizarre spasm of midcentury modernization by Phil Wrigley with his struggling Cubs. It didn't take. 20 years later, the White Sox—with future GM Dan Evans—put analysis to its highest use, creating lots and lots of home runs. Posted at 6:57 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/30/13 Chicago Gets Its Guns Where It Used to Get Its Blues Aside from the obvious sources—nearby counties and states that don't have Chicago's history of strict gun laws—a surprising number of guns come up north from the Delta into the city, a current dilemma overlaying the old tracks of history. Posted at 1:54 PM in The 312 News & Politics News & Politics: Featured story \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/30/13 Illinois: The Fourth Most Regressive Taxes in America The state's flat tax, its dependence on property taxes, and relatively high sales taxes (both state and local) combine for a tax structure that, compared to other states, hits the poor hard—and the middle class as well. Posted at 11:21 AM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/28/13 The Geography of Chicago Home Loans A map of owner-occupied home loans in Chicago for 2011 shows familiar patterns: high density on the north and northwest sides of the city, a desert of new home loans on the south and west sides. Posted at 4:46 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/28/13 American Governments Start to Turn Against Public-Private Partnerships New York City, scared off the plan by Chicago's experience, just decided to hold on to its parking meters. There's been a bit of a backlash against public-private partnerships in the past few months, as both governments and operators struggle with the financing of infrastructure in a down economy. Posted at 1:15 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/25/13 Pond-Effect Snow, Nuke-Effect Snow, or Both? The arctic air that just moved through the area produced substantial lake-effect snow off the Great Lakes. But both Pennsylvania and Illinois got odd, rare streaks of snow in the vicinity of nuclear power plants: perhaps nuclear-tower snow or nuclear-cooling-pond snow. Posted at 3:26 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/25/13 Republicans Can Make Progress In Cities When They Stop Fearing Them The GOP has been losing ground in America's cities, and the wounds are largely self-inflicted. If it can throw off its Agenda-21 fringe and its instinctual opposition to urbanist ideas that really shouldn't be ideological, it could make progress—especially in red-state cities that are the new urbanist frontier. Posted at 1:43 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/24/13 Jay Cutler: Popular Among Liberals, But Polling Softly Who's standing by Jay Cutler? Liberal Democrats. Republicans in Illinois are more skeptical of the Bears' quarterback, at least when they're not rooting for the Packers. NB: poll results are from the week the Bears beat the Vikings, not their late season collapse, which may have disturbed the electorate. Posted at 4:02 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (1)
	01/24/13 Illinois Republicans At a Crossroads In 2006, Illinois Republicans ran a social moderate against an unpopular governor, and lost. In 2010, they ran a social conservative against an even more unpopular governor, and lost. Now Bill Brady has moved to the center, conservatives are moving against their former standard-bearer, and the party has to decide again what sort of candidate should oppose Quinn (or a much, much more formidable foe). Posted at 3:16 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (3)
	01/24/13 The Sad Life of Peter II, and the Curious Disinterring of the King of Yugoslavia From Libertyville He fled communist Yugoslavia by crawling down a drainpipe, married a Greek princess, and led a life of declining geopolitical intrigue that frequently brought him to Chicago. Buried in Libertyville, his body remained their for four decades, as his homeland reconciled itself to its monarchic past, aided by a popular American television show and the fall of communism. Posted at 1:39 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (7)
	01/23/13 What It's Like to Play an Actual NBA Player Bulls bench favorite Brian Scalabrine, retired back to Boston to give broadcasting a try, invites some regular guys to a pickup basketball challenge—and shows them how much better a human victory cigar is than the average mortal. Posted at 4:13 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/22/13 San Francisco: A Flex Plan for Pensions, Flexible With Labor How mayors Ed Lee of San Francisco and Angel Taveras of Providence, Rhode Island instituted pension reform in their cities with the agreement of unions, and voter support. Posted at 5:26 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/22/13 The Costs and Savings of School Closures The math of school closings is weird: the upfront costs are high, and the savings unpredictable, as districts decide on up-front demolition or long-term maintenance costs. Meanwhile, our underutilized schools have counter-intuitively overcrowded classrooms. Posted at 2:36 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/21/13 Barack Obama's Progressive Inaugural Speech and the Timing of Justice The President sets Stonewall alongside Selma and the Seneca Falls Convention in a plea for equality in sexual orientation: "for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well." Posted at 3:48 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/21/13 How Long Does It Take To Defrost a Building? About Four Days The Fulton Market Cold Storage building, which rose in 1923 in the heart of the beef distribution and racketeering district, had to be thawed out before it can become a mixed-use development. Posted at 1:26 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/18/13 Chicago's Year Without Snow In defense of the Chicago winter and the Hawk Wind: it's a hard kind of awe, but it's the only awe we have in one of the least naturally wondrous great cities on earth. Posted at 7:05 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/18/13 Poverty and Wealth In Illinois: Upstate, Downstate As you might guess, the collar counties are the state's richest, though the very richest may surprise you. The poverty downstate is intense in places, along the lines of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Posted at 4:34 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/17/13 Happy Birthday, Al Capone In a wonderful historical coincidence, January 17th marks the birth of Chicago's most famous gangster and the public policy that made him, the day that the 18th Amendment became law. Posted at 12:36 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/16/13 Smoke Monsters: Chicago 1913, Beijing 2013 A century ago, Chicago's air was (probably) a lot worse than Beijing's is today. Chicago was pretty proactive in terms of air quality, beginning as early as 1881, and advanced ahead of its peers—but things were still bad in the 1970s, when the real push for clean air swept the country. Posted at 4:22 PM in The 312 \| Permalink \| Comments (2)
	01/16/13 Obama Administration Announces Its Gun Control Policy, 'Now Is the Time' The White House's plan includes a lot that will be familiar: an assault weapons ban, limiting clips to 10 rounds, and research into the effects of violent video games and movies. And a lot that's new, including a large mental-health component. Posted at 1:05 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/15/13 The Science, Politics, and Criminal Justice of Pedophilia Research into pedophilia is starting to peel back the layers of why some people are attracted to children. In the meantime, the criminal justice system continues to struggle with how to protect children from a pathology we don't understand. Posted at 5:46 PM in The 312 \| Permalink \| Comments (1)
	01/15/13 Rahm Emanuel Talks Comprehensive, National Gun Control... or 'Criminal Access' While he's pushing gun control at the local level, the mayor is encouraging Congress to pass legislation, a couple days before the President is expected to announce a plan... and Emanuel's strategy looks a lot like the one he engineered in 1994. Posted at 1:53 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (1)
	01/15/13 City to Add Another $33 Million to Its Police-Settlement Bill It's a massive amount of money compared to other cities, but sadly typical when it comes to Chicago's recent history of legal settlements, which are far out of proportion to major American cities. And it's not just the CPD. Posted at 11:10 AM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/14/13 RIP Aaron Swartz The young Highland Park native was an Internet prodigy, beginning with his work on developing RSS when he was only 14 years old. Driven by an idealistic commitment to open data, Swartz connected an extraordinary number of people together, both on and offline, and changing how we look at the Web from a technological and moral perspective. Posted at 6:45 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/14/13 Want to Start One of the Best Bars in Chicago? Build Along a Diagonal Street Location, location, location: if our guide to the city's best bars is any indication, one thing many of them share, whether dive or cocktail lounge or neighborhood haunt, is a location on or near one of the city's diagonal corridors. Posted at 4:39 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (1)
	01/14/13 Does Segregation Make a City More Vulnerable to Crime? A model of crime contagion suggests that heavy segregation by income—and segregating the rich from the poor with a middle-class buffer—is worse for city crime levels than a mix of neighborhoods. Posted at 2:07 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/14/13 Could Rahm Emanuel's Push For Gun Control Work? Perhaps at the Margins Despite the city and state's court defeats over gun control, the mayor is making an explicit push to tighten the city's laws, and is likely to target assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Posted at 12:10 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/11/13 National Climate Assessment Predicts Less Frost, More Hot Days and Heat Waves for Future Chicago A new report from the United States Global Change research program looks at the U.S. and climate change over the rest of the century, projecting hotter hot days, wetter winters, more 100-degree days, and deadly heat waves along the lines of 1995. Posted at 6:38 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/11/13 Long Reads on Chicago's Transition From a 'Managerial State' to an 'Entrepreneurial State' The city continues to embrace public-private partnerships, as the mayor fills out the infrastructure trust and Midway-privatization boards. It's an old story—and expect more, especially if tax-free muni bonds disappear. Posted at 1:22 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/11/13 Good News in Chicago Data The Sun-Times picks up the well-regarded crime-tracking site Homicide Watch, plans on expanding it to Chicago; a look at city-owned vacant property (there's a lot of it), and more Posted at 12:12 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/10/13 The Alternate-Universe Chicago In Which Our Craziest Unbuilt Buildings Exist Some of Chicago's great unbuilt buildings are as remarkable as the ones that make up its skyline. What would happen if Harry Weese's Lake Michigan Islands, the Sears Tower on its side, and a Tribune Tower in the shape of a giant classical column shared downtown? Posted at 5:54 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/10/13 The Geography of Chicago's Second Languages Looking at ESL speakers, the far north and northwest sides of Chicago have a great deal of linguistic diversity, with Belmont Cragin having a high number of non-native speakers, and West Ridge a breadth of languages. The far south side, on the other hand, is notable for its lack of non-English speakers. Posted at 2:53 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (2)
	01/09/13 Five Ways of Looking at the Flu Season This year's flu season is unusually intense, and literally off the charts—well, Google's Flu Indicator chart at least, which tracks what people are searching for and uses it to predict the severity of the flu season. Hopefully it will remain not very deadly, however. Posted at 5:06 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/09/13 Illinois's Pension Mess: The Battle of What Might Be Constitutional Illinois has the most restrictive pension laws in the nation, so almost anything the legislature does to try to cut benefits is almost certain to be challenged in the courts. Getting each other to agree on what's fiscally sensible and politically survivable is hard enough; agreeing on what's legally sound is no easier. Posted at 10:12 AM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (1)
	01/08/13 Concern From Domestic Violence Advocates Causes Pushback on Courtroom Cell Phone Ban The cell phone ban in Cook County courthouses, scheduled to go into effect next week, is meant to protect witnesses and others in court—but could it put victims of domestic violence at risk? Posted at 4:09 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/08/13 DUIs, Fatal Crashes, and Regional Drinking Culture Chicago's a pretty safe city to drive in, but it's got a drinking problem: a high percentage of fatal crashes involve intoxication. It's a problem in the North and the West, while far fewer fatal, intoxicated crashes occur in the South. Posted at 1:09 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/08/13 Big Money In Illinois's Thicket of Local Governments A Trib investigation finds that localities are able to use alternate-revenue bonds to take on debt without voter input, with virtually no oversight by the state. It's hard for the state to keep up, what with 7,000 governments to oversee. Posted at 10:26 AM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (0)
	01/07/13 Megabus, the Recovery of American Downtowns, and the Resurgence of the Bus Industry Less than a decade ago, intercity bus service looked like an industry in terminal decline. Since 2006, it's started to recover, with discount carriers adding over a thousand daily operations. Megabus pushed the dying giants to innovate—but the improvement of big-city downtowns has also taken the stigma out of bus travel. Posted at 3:58 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (1)
	01/07/13 Lead, Violence, and Society One reason frequently given for the substantial drop in America's violent crime rate is lead abatement—a couple decades after it was removed from paint and gas, crime started downwards. But it's still out there, in houses and the soil of big cities, and the more we know about it, the lower the acceptable limits of lead get. Posted at 2:03 PM in The 312 News & Politics \| Permalink \| Comments (1)

January 2013

02/07/13

01/31/13

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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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