More Theories of Brown and Blue Line Depression
Means of commute, compared, from slow zones to 5000-series cars. Plus: a modest request to go Mass Mohair on an old-school, art-deco Electroliner.
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A Chat with Jean-Claude Brizard, the Personal and Professional
Jean-Claude Brizard, 48, a big man at six feet five—“I’m too fat,” he tells me—was standing outside his office at Clark, just north of Adams, waiting for me as I arrived last Thursday for a sit-down interview. His musical accent reveals his Haiti origins, although he has been in the U.S. since 1976, when he … Read more
Q&A with Dmitry Samarov: Artist, Cabbie, Author, and Our Newest Writer-in-Residence
In advance of his first post for Off the Grid, we called up the Moscow-born School of the Art Institute grad for a getting-acquainted chat.
5 Reasons the Yuppies On the Brown Line Look So Depressed
Well, there are a lot of reasons: the Great Speedup, job insecurity, student-loan debt, cynicism about public institutions, and stalled incomes. But in our depression is our salvation.
Yet Another Resonant Graph About TIFs
A chart from the Civic Federation shows not just the impact tax increment finance districts have had on the city coffers, but how that impact has greatly increased in the past five years.
Bill Daley: A Better Banker than Chief of Staff?
It hasn’t been a great few days for President Obama’s Chief of Staff Bill Daley. He has been sliced, diced, dismissed, dissed in Politico, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, not to mention the Huffington Post and New York magazine. In all of these publications, Daley is portrayed as overly corporate, hierarchical, averse to the down-and-dirty of politics…
WVON's Matt McGill Dishes on his Oval Office Meeting with President Obama
Reading Politico last month, I came upon an item about a WVON host going to D.C. for the dedication of the Martin Luther King National Memorial. While there, he would interview the president in the Oval Office. I called the station and discovered that the lucky radio guy was Matt McGill, the morning drive host for the city’s only black-owned and -operated…
The Chicago School-Day Length Debate, and Other Models
The battle between the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools has culminated in a lawsuit over teacher hours and pay. Here’s a long look at the difficulties of getting good information, and a look at the Japanese and KIPP approaches to the school day and year.
Caterpillar CEO Steps into Structural Unemployment Debate
Doug Oberhelmen laments that his company can’t find qualified employees despite high unemployment. He’s not the only person to make the point, as the debate over “structural unemployment” continues.
The Radium Girls of Ottawa, Illinois
On Labor Day, the young women of Ottawa who died of radium poisoning from their work at Radium Dial were memorialized. Chillingly, they were the second Radium Girls: an identical case made an identical furor in New York ten years prior, but it took years for the science, and the law, to make it to Illinois.