Did Barack Obama actually say that "if you have a business, you didn't build that business"? It seems to depend on your ideology and/or how you diagram sentences. Either way, it's not a very interesting question. Read more
From 2005 to 2009, Chicago's percentage of fatal pedestrian crashes involving hit-and-runs was twice that of the national average. This year the percentage is very high. Stopping crashes is one thing; how do you stop behavior after a crash? Read more
Why don't Chicago drivers stop at crosswalks? The previously confusing law was only changed in 2010, and habits are hard to break. New crosswalk signs, however, make it completely explicit. Read more
The murder of a 62-year-old immigrant in West Rogers Park is the latest victim attributed to a "game" of random street violence—one that's also cropped up in St. Louis and London. Read more
The jobless recovery the country is going through is tightly coupled with the decline of the middle class and the polarization of American incomes. But a Chicago Fed paper suggests that there's demand for middle class workers, and a gap not well explained by a "skills mismatch." Read more
The frequency of the old cliche "Chicago-style politics" spiked after Barack Obama's rise to the White House—and it's getting hauled off the shelf again by the Romney campaign. Read more
After two fundraisers in Austin today and two more next week in the Bay Area, Obama will come home for his birthday—to host another fundraiser. He's doubled George W. Bush's total in a similar period, but Mitt Romney is creeping up on his heels. Read more
Benh Zeitlin's odd, dreamy debut feature has been embraced as a post-Katrina allegory of life in the Delta, but like good folklore, it expands beyond that into the struggles of the dispossesed to stay in places the state would have us improve. Read more
A new NBER study finds that blacks and Latinos in four U.S. cities pay, on average, more than other homebuyers no matter what or where they're buying. The highest premium is paid by African-Americans in Cook County. Read more
In 1934, Orson Welles had departed Chicagoland and was on the verge of his New York theater breakthrough. But that year he married Wheaton native Virginia Nicholson—and the two shot a film, Welles's first, at his beloved alma mater in Woodstock. Read more
