2021-01-04 The Vaccine Rollout Debacle
What’s Going On with the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout? Short answer: Chaos and confusion. Long(er) answer: In early October, HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced that 100 million doses of the first approved...
View Article2021-01-06: Feeding Children in a Time of Pandemic
Many Schools Have Closed, but the Need to Feed Children Endures When the U.S.’s largest cities began imposing the first lock-downs in March 2020, one of the concerns which resulted in delays in school...
View Article2021-01-08 What Happened? What’s Next?
Is This, or Isn’t This, America? It has now been two days since a mob of several thousand people breached the weak security perimeter around the U.S. Capitol building and stormed the Rotunda, the...
View Article2021-01-13 Learning Anew
On Learning New Things New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot provides a review of Tom Vanderbilt’s just-released Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning (Knopf, January 2021),...
View Article2021-01-13 Illinois Set to Do It Again
Illinois Politics: The Gift That Won’t Stop Giving Despite having lived outside the U.S. for four decades, it will always be home for me. A few years ago, during a period when I was returning to my...
View Article2021-01-18 Our Wounded Land
America the Wounded Definition: Negative externality (also called “external cost” or “external diseconomy”) is an economic activity that imposes a negative effect on an unrelated third party. This...
View Article2021-01-19 Charter Schools: A Public Good?
One More Tragedy of the Commons: Charter Schools Education writer Rachel Cohen spoke with Pete Davis recently, and the podcast transcript is available here. Cohen provides a good short summary of the...
View Article2021-01-20 Inauguration Day
Joseph Biden, 46th President Today’s the Day: Joseph Biden is scheduled to be sworn in as the U.S.’ 46th President at noon Eastern Time; events surrounding the inauguration, which will have only a...
View Article2021-01-22 The COVID-19 Plan
But will it Work? Reflecting on the “last mile” The Big-Picture Plan The Biden Administration’s COVID-19 “war plan” is official. Here are the bare bones of what it contains: 1 million doses a day for...
View Article2021-01-26 Evictions: The Coming Crisis
Let’s Talk Evictions Last Friday, the new Administration announced a number of measures which will help millions during the pandemic. These include the following: …increasing nutrition assistance,...
View Article2021-01-28 K-12 Re-openings
To Open or Not to Open? The new Administration has explicitly stated that it’s imperative we re-open schools (K-12) as soon as possible. And magically, articles and studies begin shooting up through...
View Article2021-01-28 A Real Deal on Climate Change
“We Know What to Do, We’ve Just Got to Do It” On his first day in office, President Biden signed an Executive Order ensuring that the U.S. would rejoin the Paris climate accord, whose next meeting,...
View Article2021-01-29 The Pandemic and Housing
American Cities and the Pandemic COVID-19 has served to bring into high relief longstanding issues involving public health, education, housing, and racial equity. Today we’ll discuss the housing...
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2021-02-06: CPS vs. CTU
Who Do You Trust? For those who follow education and Illinois politics, the past couple weeks have been dominated by the story of Chicago Public Schools and Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s decision to force...
View Article2021-02-09: Rest in Power
One Person Can Make a Difference: Karen Lewis (1953-2021) The great Chicago labor leader Karen Lewis has passed away. Many – most – readers won’t recognize her name, but may recall seeing the vast...
View Article2021-02-10 Dreams of Zillow
Home Aspirations The most recent episode of “Saturday Night Live” (6/2/21) featured a skit on what, for want of a better word, I can only call “Zillow addiction.” Now the New Yorker has joined in the...
View Article2021-02-17 Texas, oh Texas
Energy Provision, Climate Change, and Structural Inequity “For years, energy experts argued that the way Texas runs its electricity system invited a systematic failure. In the mid-1990s, the state...
View Article2021-02-20 He Had a Plan
The Slow Wheels of Justice The story: The Washington Post yesterday featured a “Lifestyle” (really, “Lifestyle”?) story about the release from prison of Joe Ligon, who was the U.S.’s longest-serving...
View Article2021-02-25 Oh, Peoria
Peoria Disappoints Once Again It having proved not possible to send a long-form email attachment* to the progressive mayoral candidate in our hometown of Peoria, Illinois, who came in fourth out of...
View Article2021-03-01 Social Lenses: “Room 2806” (Part I)
Les affaires interdits For those not familiar with this blog, when it was originally planned in early 2017 (we’re approaching our fourth anniversary of going live, but were already doing dry runs by...
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