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October 2012

11/06/12 Swing State and Illinois Twitter Feeds to Follow on Election Day As national outlets map out their divinations for tonight's returns, it's worth taking a look at knowledgable people close to the scene, who often pick up on developing patterns before they're felt nationally. Posted at 3:05 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/31/12 School Achievement Gaps: High in Illinois, Higher Everywhere As Chicagoland struggles with education reform, it faces a stiff headwind from income-based educational-achievement gaps that have been growing since the 1970s. What happened? Wealthier parents may have learned a great deal from programs targeted at very poor children. Posted at 5:47 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/31/12 The Link Between Car Crashes and Street Crime In the city's pedestrian plan, authors found a correlation between high-crime areas and lots of pedestrian crashes. But where's the causation? Indian behavioral economists are dealing with their own, much more deadly traffic problems in Mumbai, and have a theory. Posted at 2:08 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/30/12 A Hand-Built Model of the CTA and Less Amazing Real-World Transit News A hand-built electric-train model of the CTA—with homemade model two-flats, laser-cut El railings, and vintage El cars—takes shape; the Peotone airport continues to plod along, even without Jesse Jr.; and will Chicago drivers be ok with BRT? Posted at 5:38 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/30/12 Probability, Global Warming, and Hurricane Sandy There's a lot about global warming we don't know, and the more specific we try to get, the more people disagree. City planners are betting on the effects in extremely concrete ways, such as on Cermak Road here in Chicago. Posted at 3:59 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/30/12 Chicago In 30,000 Photographs: A Film In tens of thousands of pictures taken over the period of four months, photographer Eric Hines captures the city's downtown from all sorts of surprising and beautiful angles. Posted at 9:51 AM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/29/12 Probability, Fantasy Baseball, and FiveThirtyEight The stat geek's FiveThirtyEight site is a must-read during campaign season. But interest can turn into addiction, and addiction into abuse. Consume his work in moderation, as part of a healthy information diet, and be wary of people who call it deadly or a miracle drug. Posted at 5:44 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/29/12 Hurricane Sandy: Five Ways of Looking at the Wind in Chicago Chicago is remarkably close to the giant Frankenstorm—Hurricane Sandy and a nor'easter—that's blowing Lake Michigan towards us. We could get massive waves on Lake Michigan and some high winds, while everything else stays pretty clear. Posted at 2:23 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/29/12 Why Chicago Is Spending Millions on the Gary Airport Years ago, Mayor Daley offered to shell out about a million and a half bucks a year to the Gary/Chicago International Airport to keep the state from taking control of O'Hare and Midway. Years later, the subsidy still exists. Posted at 12:30 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/26/12 Good Reads on Art and Architecture Jeanne Gang on the future of architecture (hint: it's smaller); Alexander Fruchter on the ironization of Chief Keef and Chicago's drill scene; and more Posted at 3:08 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
10/26/12 Chicago Aldermen Preview the Budget Fight to Come, or Maybe Not While the Chicago Police Department insists it doesn't need to expand the ranks as the new budget comes down the pike, the Chicago Fire Department wants to buttress its ranks against the greatest threat of all—old age. Posted at 2:18 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/25/12 Play CTA Conductor on 'Railfan,' and Other Train Marginalia There is a game that allows you to play a CTA conductor, fulfilling a dream I barely knew I had (though they chose the Brown Line, which is less than optimal). Plus: the history of Chicago's Belt Railway and a trip through the North Shore in the 1920s. Posted at 4:15 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/25/12 The State Budget Crisis Task Force's Subtle Suggestions for Fixing Illinois A highly-touted report on the state's awful financial situation rubs in the many errors the state's made over the past couple decades, but is circumspect about solutions. Read between the lines, though, and there ideas. Posted at 2:49 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/24/12 Report on Illinois's Budget Crisis: You Spend Too Much, You Don't Spend Enough A report on our state's finances from the bureaucratic dream team of Richard Ravitch and Paul Volker is a lengthy yet concise description of its many problems, but doesn't provide many ideas for addressing them. Posted at 6:00 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/24/12 Richard Mourdock's Comments on Rape and Abortion Push the Social-Economic Conservative Alliance to Its Limit Richard Mourdock defeated eternal GOP stalwart Richard Lugar with a hard Tea Party economic line, putting the Indiana seat at risk—with the reward of a conservative replacing a conciliator. As the most recent major candidate to draw nationwide attention for his comments on abortion, it's a test to see how far economic conservatives are willing to go for their social counterparts. Posted at 4:56 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/24/12 140 Characters. One Star. Me. How Twitter preys on needy bastards like me in front of 1,656 people Posted at 2:21 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/24/12 The Rise of Baseball Ticket Prices and a Modest Proposal to Save American Soccer Cubs' ticket prices have gone up 265 percent in two decades; the White Sox have had one of the largest price increases in the past few years, to the extent that they can't fill a stadium with a competitive team. Tax subsides are in part to blame, but there's a better way. Posted at 12:22 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (2)
	10/23/12 'Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Good-Looking Corpse': Coined by a Chicago Writer Willard Motley came up with one of the most famous lines in American literature for his popular debut novel—which was turned into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart—but has since faded into obscurity. Nelson Algren was a fan, but not of his writing. Posted at 1:32 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (2)
	10/23/12 Good News and Good Ideas for Cyclists A new study finds that the intuitive logic about protected bicycle lanes and bicycle tracks outweighs the received wisdom: the better defined the infrastructure, the safer it is. Plus: a look at Sao Paulo's bicycle schools. Posted at 11:58 AM in The 312 News & Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/22/12 People With Lots of Friends In High School Earn More Money And the reverse is true, and the disparity is even greater—socially isolated high school students make less over the course of their lives than their peers, according to studies based on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, the nation's oldest long-term study of adolescents. Could smaller classes help? Posted at 6:02 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/22/12 Illinois Taxes: The High, the Low, and the Unequal Illinois has a rep as a high tax state, and by some measures it's true—a high nominal corporate income tax rate to go along with high property and sales taxes. Our income tax is low, but it's not low for everyone. Posted at 3:40 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/22/12 Northwestern Economist: Don't Expect Any More Economic Growth In Your Lifetime Northwestern's Robert Gordon presents an intentionally provocative argument: the 19th and 20th centuries got us used to wonderful but unsustainable rates of economic growth, so don't get used to it. And even if we do get the next new thing, economic inequality is a drag. Posted at 12:33 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/19/12 How the AMA Scared Us Away From 'Socialized Medicine' and Prepared Us For Obamacare In the 1950s, the American Medical Association—with the help of the first political PR firm—launched a full-on assault against Harry Truman's national health care plan, connecting it (and all sorts of other subsidies) to the specter of socialism. But it backed an approach not unlike the ACA. Posted at 4:10 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/19/12 The Battle Over Bob Dold Democrats have tried to pin Paul Ryan and Joe Walsh on the redistricted Republican freshman, perhaps the most vulnerable Republican House member not named Joe Walsh. But New York's mayor is riding to the rescue with his boutique PAC. Posted at 12:38 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/19/12 Joe Walsh Thinks There's No Such Thing as a Medically Necessary Abortion. He's Not Alone. Chicagoland's notorious rep caused a stir by saying, in his WTTW debate with Tammy Duckworth, that modern science has made it so that there's no exception for the life of the mother in the case of abortion. It's... complicated. Here's an introduction. Posted at 11:13 AM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (2)
	10/18/12 Toni Preckwinkle Wants to Balance Cook County Budget on Things People Don't Like Other People Doing Under Cook County's proposed new 2013 budget, cigarette taxes would go up, and guns and bullets would each get taxed. It's how cities and localities everywhere are responding to the recession and the housing crisis. Posted at 3:20 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/18/12 Barack Obama, Red Lobster, and the Big Problem of Big Data The Obama campaign knows who you are and what you like—and they're trying to figure out what that means now, and in the future. They're way ahead of journalists, and the public, on how voting is done in America. Posted at 1:31 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/17/12 Subsidized Housing in Chicago Began With Frank Lloyd Wright As Chicago's notorious high-rise projects come down, the current trend in public housing looks more like how it began: smaller, more modest in scale and scope, like Wright's plans for Francisco Terrace and the Waller Apartments, the latter of which still stand on Walnut Street. Posted at 3:23 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/16/12 Prentice Hospital's Bad Vibrations and Northwestern's Bad Architectural Vibes Northwestern's architectural record around the hotly debated Prentice Hospital is cause for concern when it comes to the future of the site, but when discussing the future use of architecture, engineering can't be ignored. Posted at 6:19 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/16/12 Turn-of-the-Century Chicago in Color An old, elaborate printing process called Photocrom allowed people around the world to see Chicago rise from the prairie, from Michigan Avenue to Potter Palmer's house, as the 20th century was just beginning. Posted at 2:06 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (4)
	10/16/12 Shel Silverstein on WTTW: America's Favorite Uncle, America's Favorite Dirty Uncle Archival video from the golden era of WTTW's Soundstage captures the author, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, and Wrigley hot dog vendor in the two sides of his persona, and their appeal to two very different age groups. Posted at 11:58 AM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/15/12 Why Congestion Pricing Works, and Why People Don't Like It CMAP is pushing for variable congestion pricing for express lanes on Chicago interstates. Turning your commute into arbitrage is rarely popular, but it has to be at least a bit unpopular to work—otherwise, it's hard to keep people off the roads. Posted at 3:34 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/15/12 Inside the Head of Jesse Jackson Jr. Two profiles of the embattled representative, one from the beginning of his political career and one from what could be the end, bookend his ambitions and evolution, and show how what's kept Junior as a local politician could also save his job. Posted at 12:11 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/12/12 Prentice Hospital and the Difficult-to-Acquired Taste of Brutalism An all-star roster of architects wants the city to preserve Prentice, one of the city's surprisingly few Brutalist structures. They make an excellent case that it's of substantial historical, cultural, and engineering value... but even granting that, is it still worth it? Posted at 4:49 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/12/12 Barbara Byrd-Bennett Replaces Jean-Claude Brizard as Head of Chicago Public Schools After 17 tumultuous months running CPS, the current head announced his surprising—or not—departure yesterday. His replacement, a veteran of the Cleveland, Detroit, and New York public schools, has experience in the political tensions of a Midwestern big-city school district. Posted at 1:47 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/11/12 Boston Looks to the Future on School Segregation and Quality After years of complex, expensive, controversial school busing to combat segregation, Boston looks to consolidate into neighborhood schools, and turns to the public for ideas. Posted at 6:26 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/11/12 Social Media as City Life 101 As Chicago Ideas Week asks Twitter for solutions to the city's gun-violence problem, the daily social-media life of the city continues with the smaller dramas of urbanity, such as what to do with injured baby squirrels. Posted at 12:59 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (2)
	10/11/12 How Roger Ebert Discovered John Prine In 1970, Ebert was a young critic at the Sun-Times, when he came across a young singer-songwriter-mailman playing future standards at the Fifth Peg, in "out of the way" Lincoln Park. Posted at 11:26 AM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/10/12 The President's Speech: Daniel Day-Lewis Fixes Lincoln's Accent The notoriously rigorous actor surprised people with his reedy-voiced Great Emancipator, but it's actually a lot closer to what Abraham Lincoln plausibly sounded like than the profoundly silly screen Lincolns of legend. Posted at 3:31 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (2)
	10/10/12 Chicago's Big Pension Wall In his budget address, the Mayor said that in less than four years, 22 percent of the city's budget will be consumed by pension costs. Why? That's when a state-imposed schedule, which would get the city's pensions 90 percent funded in 25 years, begins. Posted at 1:05 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/10/12 Big Red Numbers Day: The Mayor's Chicago Budget Address The mayor sets out on his 2013 budget this morning, and expectations are that revenues will come from TIF surpluses and an improving economy, but no new taxes or fees; you can watch it live. Posted at 9:58 AM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/09/12 Chicago's Alleys and Its Growing, Hidden Green Infrastructure The city's plan to cool its temperatures in the age of global warming is going up above, below, and around you, including within the city's alleys—which, with 1,900 miles worth, are the most of any city in the country. Posted at 4:53 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/09/12 Today in Violence Prevention: The Chicago Violence Tax and Inner-City Farming Toni Preckwinkle floats a tax on guns and ammunition, not the first that's been proposed in Illinois, and an NRA lobbyist harshes it; and Alex Kotlowitz takes a look at the Growing Home urban garden. Posted at 2:57 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (2)
	10/09/12 School Testing and the Burden of Childhood Lead Exposure Studies of Massachusetts and Milwaukee schoolkids suggest that one straightforward way to improve school performance, even on standardized tests alone, is to reduce lead exposure. Posted at 11:44 AM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/08/12 Why They Ran: Three Stories from the 2012 Chicago Marathon A 72-year-old on his 35th marathon, a novice wheelchair racer, and a young man with an epiphany Posted at 1:41 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/05/12 The Southern Great Migration to Chicago, Black and White In This Affluent Society captures the Great Migration to Chicago with archival footage and interviews, including former residents of "Hillbilly Heaven," better known as Uptown. Posted at 6:22 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/05/12 Bicyclist Killed Downtown Avoiding a Dooring One of the things that makes experienced cyclists most nervous is the ever-present threat of getting hit when a car door is opened into a bike lane. Some bike advocates are against any bike lanes that run to the left of parked cars. Posted at 1:35 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/04/12 This Week in Urbanism: Pawn Shops and Helmetless Riders Sudhir Venkatesh on guns, kids, and crime; Mick Dumke on the politics and economics of pawn shops in Chicago; a map of city food truck parking; and more Posted at 5:45 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/04/12 Rahm Emanuel, Trade-Union Racism, and the Burden of History In response to a South Side labor protest, the mayor off-handedly mentioned the history of racial segregation in the "building trades." It's a long and ugly one, and even though private-sector unions have worked for years to undo the damage, we're still living with it. Posted at 3:45 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/03/12 Chicago Gang Factions: Breaking the Gang-Violence Equation? The locations of gang violence can be predictable, so much that UCLA scientists have modeled it with decades-old territorial models. But what happens when the gangs, and their territory, break down? Posted at 6:16 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/03/12 Testing, Graduation, and the Numbers Behind Charter Schools in Chicago Far from the heated rhetoric of the charters-versus-public schools debate, a 2009 paper looking at a decade of charter schools in Chicago suggests that they don't necessarily improve test scores all that much, but that charter high schools are good at sending kids to college, in ways traditional schools might learn from. Posted at 4:36 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (4)
	10/03/12 The Cubs: Going Out With 100-Plus Losses, and a Whimper For the final game of a 100-loss season, against the worst team in baseball, the Cubs send out the scrubs... and a couple prospects whose 2012 struggles leave hard questions for 2013. Posted at 2:15 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/02/12 Mitt Romney: Before the Debate, a House Divided Where's the pragmatic, capable, problem-solving Romney who was governor of Massachusetts, and whom many associates have vouched for? And can he re-emerge tomorrow night? Posted at 5:32 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/02/12 Downtown Chicago Grows, and Grows Younger, as the Rest of the City Ages and Shrinks Chicago's downtown—defined as everything within two miles of City Hall—grew faster than that of any other big city in the country over the past decade, and much of it grew younger, too. Outside that, it's a different story. Posted at 3:19 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)
	10/02/12 St. Louis's Wondrous City Museum The Gateway City is home to one of the nation's most spectacular, singular museums: a childlike maze of metal, water, and stone, the vision of a sculptor and contractor who finally got to combine his two gifts. Posted at 12:45 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/01/12 Alfonso Soriano: A Smarter, More Experienced Approach? A year after one of his worst seasons as a pro, one of the last remaining Cubs veterans has turned in a bounce-back season, driving in a ton of runs and anchoring a young team. What's behind Soriano's improvement? Posted at 5:08 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (0)
	10/01/12 Garry McCarthy's New Chicago Crime Strategy: Social Networks, 'Hot People' The CPD's top cop came out of Newark and New York as a disciple of William Bratton and the broken-windows theory of criminology. In Chicago, McCarthy has embraced two more approaches to combat the city's very different problems: social networks and legitimacy, under the influence of two Chicago-trained sociologists. Posted at 3:59 PM in The 312 | Permalink | Comments (1)

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