“In Chicago in 1961 you didn’t take on the police department,” says Seymour Hersh in the Progressive (October), recalling his time at City News Bureau. “Two cops reported that a prisoner had tried to escape and they’d shot him….I wanted to interview these cops first and write a good story on them killing this idiotic prisoner who had tried to escape. Two beefy, white Irish cops came out of a car. And one of the buddies said to the other: ‘So you got yourself a nigger.’ ‘Yeah,’ the other said. ‘I told him he was free, and he started running down the alley, and I plugged him.’…Sure enough, the coroner’s report said bullets in the back. I never did the story. Everybody told me not to.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
If you build it, will they come? According to the 1998 “Metro Survey Report” done by the Metro Chicago Information Center, “57% of area residents prefer to live in a place where shops, restaurants, and train stations are all within walking distance of each other.”
“Approximately one-third of the plants you are likely to see in most woodlands, wetlands, and grasslands in Illinois are nonnative species,” writes biologist Richard Sparks in the Illinois Natural History Survey’s “Reports” (November/December). But be of good cheer. Zebra mussels and garlic mustard are displacing native species, but “not every species that is introduced to the U.S. survives and establishes self-maintaining populations.”
