The shadow of 1968 continues to loom over Chicago, particularly with the twin summits coming later this year. Had the city been more flexible with protesters then, it might not have turned into a fiasco.
The new ward map versus the old; tracking where the snow plows are now… and where they’ve been; how maps saved a cartographer’s life; a lament for LineDrive; and more.
New TIFs proposed, including a venture-capital twist on the old fund; the making of an alderman; the head of The Woodlawn Organization; and much more.
Chicago gets sliced and diced again, especially the Second Ward, where Alderman Fioretti is a “remamp victim of Euclidean geometry as much as politics.”
In advance of this spring’s summits, the city moves to close holes in its regulation of public protest. The process hasn’t always been so fine-tuned, one legal scholar argues: the intensive regulation of assembly arose in the second half of the nation’s history.
The endless potential for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to monetize our underutilized public spaces
Is Mitt Romney “authentic”? Does it hurt him? Does it even matter? Perhaps the authenticity problem lies not with Mitt, but with his culture, and ours.
The U.S. homicide rate hit a 50-year low last year and violent crime hit a 40-year low in 2010, despite the terrible economy. Lead abatement may offer a substantial explanation—and a challenge to utilitarian theories of crime.
In the postwar years, the mass migration of Southerners to Chicago caused substantial cultural tensions in the city—and of great official concern were the Appalachians who settled in Uptown and their “primitive jungle tactics.”
I just finished reading Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, and I think I’ve figured out why Michelle Obama is so steamed, why she groused to The Early Show’s Gayle King that she is tired of being portrayed as “some kind of angry black woman.” The First Lady recognizes that her husband will probably run against Mitt Romney, and thus, she herself will be stuck “running” against the warm, blonde, seemingly flawless Ann Romney…
