In 1857 Abraham Lincoln was a has-been ex-congressman. Illinois had zero miles of railroad. Fewer than 30,000 people lived in Chicago….And Robert Kennicott founded the Chicago Academy of Sciences, now celebrating its 140th birthday and its status as the city’s oldest museum, according to a recent press release.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“In a racially just world, black athletes should not be expected to hold to a higher standard of behavior than whites,” writes Northwestern political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. in the Progressive (July). “Sure, it would be good and useful for Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to exert pressure on Nike to clean up its dreadful labor practices. But the implication that they have some special obligation to do so because of their status as black–or in Woods’s case, even Asian American–athletic icons is wrong. Woods and Jordan have the right to be apolitical no less than Larry Bird, Pete Sampras, Wayne Gretzky, or Brady Anderson. Frank Thomas has the right to have grown up playing baseball without paying much attention to the sport’s history, even the history of its desegregation, from which originates his opportunity to become wealthy playing it.”
Things that owners of little bitty cars don’t want to know, from James Flammang in the Chicago-based “Tirekicking Today” (June): “Each 100-pound decrease in passenger-car weight boosts the fatal crash rate by 1.1 percent, and the injury crash rate by 1.6 percent.”
Of course you knew it wasn’t Wal-Mart. Patrick McCormick in the Chicago-based U.S. Catholic (July): “To paraphrase Jesus in Matthew 19:24, if you want to know how tough it is for a rich person to get into heaven, try negotiating a revolving door at Nordstrom’s with two overloaded shopping carts.”
