Ad Categories: City Life

How Morton, Illinois, the world canned pumpkin capital, subsidizes a tiny town in Mexico; the rich life and quick death of mince pie as America’s pie; why Black Friday doesn’t tell us anything about the Christmas economy; and more

If the temperature hits 64 degrees today it will pass 1915, tie 1914, and come with in a few degrees of 1966’s all-time warm Chicago Thanksgiving. After you give thanks for that, though, things will go back to normal.

A young Australian’s film tour of mid-1930s Chicago, from the observation platform of the Wrigley Building to the Steel Mills on the Calumet River and back.

The governor’s hokey pension snake drew more attention to pension reform than it’s gotten in months, but Squeezy’s site is kind of a dud. There’s nothing wrong with a little juvenilia, but the adults need something to play with as well.

50-plus years of data on marriage, divorce, and annulment in Illinois shows that people are getting married way less frequently than they used to… but they’re also getting divorced less often, perhaps because they’re getting married later, and older.

By almost every measure, the nation’s growing income-inequality gap has hit Illinois harder than almost every state. It’s hit the poorest 20 percent of residents the hardest, whose incomes didn’t grow at all from the late 1970s to the mid-2000s.

Pat Quinn’s adorable serpentine representation of the state’s most critical fiscal issue has been lamented as half-assed and juvenile… but Squeezy’s a lot catchier than actuarial analysis, and more relevant to the problem than the recent constitutional amendment.