By Whet Moser
Byron Pitts of 60 Minutes looks at the high number of false confessions in the city, and puts Anita Alvarez on the spot for her office's handling of two cases the program investigated. Read more
Whet Moser
By Whet Moser
Maps of casinos, bars, and brothels in the old Levee and Cheyenne Districts show just how dense the sin was in turn-of-the-century-Chicago. And where there's sin, there's good government in its path, trying to nudge the urban hellmouth on the road to righteousness. Read more
By Whet Moser
The Chicago area saw substantial domestic out-migration during the past decade—as did all but one major metro that's not in the South, Southwest, or West. The sole exception? Minneapolis. Read more
By Whet Moser
A new study by two former U. of C. sociologists attempts to find out how much a juvenile arrest affects the chances that a teen in Chicago will graduate from high school. Among comparable peers, a kid who gets arrested is less than half as likely to graduate. Read more
By Whet Moser
No, the renovation of City Hall will not cost more than twice what the building originally cost. The current one was expensive enough that the state had to raise its debt limit—in order to replace a terrible building that cost just as much and lasted less than 30 years until it blew up. Read more
By Whet Moser
A software company used data feeds from public-transit systems around the world to create visualizations of their systems—and all their routes—over a 24 hour period. Chicago, the great grid city, is a lot more comprehensible than its peers. Read more
By Whet Moser
From horse-drawn cars to compressed-air motors to battery powered streetcars to propane buses: what public transportation in Chicago looked like and how it got around, from 1857-1970. Read more
By Whet Moser
The Chicago neighborhood with the second-lowest per-capita income and the highest hardship score has a food insecurity rate over 50 percent. The city's wealthiest neighborhood still has one over ten percent. Read more
By Whet Moser
A new bill proposed by Elaine Nekritz and Daniel Biss takes many of the pension-reform ideas that have been floating around, and weds them with some new ones; it's already got a fair amount of backing. Is it legal? How well will it work? Read more
By Whet Moser
A mile of cycle track downtown might not seem like that much, but it's the first time in awhile bike-friendly cities like Portland and Seattle have envied a piece of Chicago infrastructure. You can thank the warm weather for it going in so quickly. Read more