By SIU Press

Southern Illinois Salukis Football, the first book to focus solely on the program and its history at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, details the organization’s greatest moments, from its origins around the beginning of the 20th century through the extraordinary leadership of head coaches William McAndrew, Rey Dempsey and Jerry Kill, to the present-day team and its coach, local hero Nick Hill.
Dan Verdun draws on more than 100 interviews with coaches, players, sports historians and sports reporters, as well as newspaper and magazine archives and other sources, to give readers an in-depth look at Saluki players, coaches and teams from all eras.

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Posted on August 30, 2017

By Natasha Tusikov/The Conversation

The torch-lit march by armed white supremacists in Charlottesville continues to generate debate about how hate groups should be regulated. Amid growing public pressure following the march, internet companies rushed to remove from their platforms websites espousing violent hate speech.
GoDaddy terminated its domain services to the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, as did Google. Cloudflare, a company that protects websites from online attacks, also banned the hate website from its platform. Russia ordered the site barred from being hosted in the country.
My research and my book, Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet demonstrate that many internet companies already remove content and ban users “voluntarily” – that is, in the absence of legislation or any judicial processes. Major intermediaries including Google, PayPal, GoDaddy, Twitter and Facebook voluntarily police their platforms for child sexual abuse content, extremism and the illicit trade in counterfeit goods.
Many people understandably applaud these efforts to stamp out hate speech and other objectionable content. However, internet companies’ efforts as de facto regulators of speech raises serious questions: How should online content be regulated? By whom?

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Posted on August 23, 2017

By Jennifer La Zotte/The Conversation

National Thrift Shop Day exists alongside other quirky holidays like National Play Your Ukulele Day and National Rice Krispies Treat Day. Though intended as a lighthearted celebration of an acceptable commercial habit, the process of making thrift stores hip involved unusual advocates.
As I describe in my recent book From Goodwill to Grunge, thrift stores emerged in the late 19th-century when Christian-run organizations adopted new models of philanthropy (and helped rehab the image of secondhand stores by dubbing their junk shops “thrift stores”).
Today, there are more than 25,000 resale stores in America. Celebrities often boast of their secondhand scores, while musicians have praised used goods in songs like Fanny Brice’s 1923 hit “Second-Hand Rose” and Macklemore and Ryan’s 2013 chart-topper “Thrift Shop.”
Yet over the past 100 years, visual artists probably deserve the most credit for thrift shopping’s place in the cultural milieu.

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Posted on August 18, 2017

By The Spertus Institute For Jewish Learning And Leadership

For the 7th year in a row, Chicago will mark Jewish Book Month with One Book | One Community, in which a single title is selected for discussions and activities across greater Chicago.
This year’s selection is Windy City Blues by Chicago author Renée Rosen (White Collar Girl and What the Lady Wants). Set in 1950s Chicago, it follows the musical and social revolution through the eyes of a young Jewish woman working at the legendary Chess Records.

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Posted on August 14, 2017

By Kristin Seefeldt/The Conversation

After “Rose” lost her low-wage job in a Southeast Michigan nursing home, the single mother of four sought Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits.
People who are eligible for this federal, time-limited welfare program for very low-income families must be working or looking for work, a feature the Trump administration and other politicians want to spread to Medicaid and other similar programs that support low-income Americans.
Rose obtained the benefits but lost them after finding that the program was doing little to help her get a job and interfering with her parenting. This fairly common experience suggests that these restrictions can prolong and worsen spells of poverty. Like many experts on American poverty relief, I don’t see why that punitive strategy makes sense.

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Posted on August 3, 2017