Still talk all day–but get tenure. Ira Glass of This American Life tells the on-line magazine Feed (July 2, www.feedmag.com/re/re232_master.html). “When I was doing all those stories about public schools, it was something I thought about all the time. ‘Well, I don’t know. I’ll do this radio thing for a little while more, and if I get tired of it I’m going to go teach school.’”
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The hype: “As populations shift farther away from Chicago, people become more dependent on cars, and auto-driven air pollution worsens,” according to “Beyond Sprawl: A Guide to Land Use in the Chicago Region for Reporters and Policy Makers,” a recent report published by the Chicago-based nonprofit Sustain. The facts: “Over the 1970 to 1994 period, actual emissions from [cars, trucks, aircraft, railroads, and marine vessels] declined significantly in the cases of CO [carbon monoxide] and VOC [volatile organic compounds] and increased only slightly in the case of NOx [nitrogen oxides],” according to the “Transportation Statistics Annual Report 1996,” published by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The EPA’s “National Emissions Trends Database” shows the same trends for emissions in Cook County.
Good news you won’t hear from conservatives. “At the turn of the century approximately 20 percent of black adult males (ages 20 to 64) owned their homes, compared with 46 percent of white men, a gap of 26 percentage points,” write William Collins and Robert Margo in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (“Race and Home Ownership, 1900 to 1990,” August). “By 1990, the black home ownership rate had increased to 52 percent and the racial gap had fallen to 19.5 percentage points.” Most of that improvement occurred between 1960 and 1980.
