By David Rutter

When I was 15 and thought myself a smart young man of letters, I read The Sun Also Rises. I knew then I would read everything that Ernest Hemingway wrote because you could not be serious and avoid him.
It was 1961. The summer when he died.
But then I decided I could avoid him.
No, I decided I had to put him aside. It was bittersweet, though likely the first adult decision of my life.
Those times and decisions came back to me this week during the six-hour PBS biographical special Hemingway.
If watching those 360 minutes does not illuminate both the hope and terrible fear of imitating Hemingway, nothing will.

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Posted on April 8, 2021

By Lorena German/The Hechinger Report

If we want to fight white supremacy, a good place to start is by interrogating how it seeps into canonical texts like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Whiteness, meaning the institution that upholds white culture and affirms white ways of being as superior over other ways, seeks to sustain and protect itself. That’s how it survives.
Identifying its tactics is a necessary skill for understanding it. Understanding it is necessary if you seek to destroy it, as I, a Dominican woman and educator, do. I do not seek to destroy white people. I do seek to destroy white supremacy as the ideology and structure that has oppressed, killed and destroyed the rest of us since its inception.

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Posted on March 31, 2021

By SIU Press

“Twice a year, spring and fall, numerous species of reptiles and amphibians migrate between the LaRue-Pine Hills‘ towering limestone bluffs and the Big Muddy River’s swampy floodplain in southern Illinois. Snakes, especially great numbers of Cottonmouths, give the road that separates these distinct environments its name.
“Although it is one of the best places in the world to observe snakes throughout the year, spring and fall are the optimal times to see a greater number and variety. Among the many activities that snakes can be observed doing are sunning themselves on rocks, lying in grasses, sheltering under or near fallen tree limbs, or crossing the road. In this engaging guide, author Joshua J. Vossler details what to expect and how to make the most of a visit to what is known around the world as Snake Road.

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Posted on March 16, 2021

By UIC

Following recent years of turbulent developments in politics, economics and social media around the world, one might assume these events inspire University of Illinois Chicago researcher Zizi Papacharissi to have an ominous view about what the future holds.
That would be an incorrect assumption.
It was during the Obama administration when she began to consider whether democracy is not the idealized final stop on the world’s civic journey, but rather a springboard to superior government practices.
“What if there is something better out there, and technology can help us uncover a long-hidden path to it? We change and so does our technology, but we cling to past iterations of democracy like a dream we desperately try to remember after we wake up. Life is not static. Neither is democracy,” said Papacharissi, UIC professor and head of communication and professor of political science.

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Posted on March 11, 2021

By Jacob L. Nelson/The Conversation

News organizations are trying to do a better job connecting with their audiences, in hopes of overcoming the profession’s credibility problems and ensuring its long-term survival.
To do this, a growing number of newsrooms have for years embraced what’s called “audience engagement,” a loosely defined term that typically refers to efforts to increase the communication between journalists and the people they hope to reach.
These efforts take many forms, and vary from online – for example, the use of social media to interact with readers about a story after it’s been published – to offline, for example, meetings between journalists and community members to discuss a story currently being produced.
At its best, engagement shows audiences that journalists are real people, with the training and skills necessary to provide accurate information that is trustworthy. It also offers people an opportunity to contribute their ideas about how their communities should be covered, allowing news consumers a larger role in shaping their own stories.
This outcome is especially important for communities of color, who have long been been ignored or misrepresented by newsrooms that have historically comprised mostly white, middle-class editors and reporters.
But not all efforts have produced the intended results.

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Posted on March 4, 2021

By John Schwartz/Undark

Elizabeth Kolbert lives her stories. In the course of reporting her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, she got hit by a leaping carp near Ottawa, Illinois (“It felt like someone had slammed me in the shin with a Wiffle-ball bat”) and visited tiny endangered pupfish at Devils Hole, a small pool in a cave near Pahrump, Nevada. She got her socks wet walking across a mockup of the Lower Mississippi in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and watched corals reefs spawn at an ocean simulator in Australia.
With her lively, vivid writing, Kolbert is one of the nation’s most high-profile science writers. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2014 book The Sixth Extinction made the disappearance of species understandable and urgent. She writes for the New Yorker, where portions of Under a White Sky first appeared. But even if some of it was familiar to me – both as a reader of the New Yorker and as a science writer who covers some of the same topics myself – I wanted to read it through, to see these pieces come together into an overarching argument.
In each of these trips, she tells of disaster – of invasive species and endangered ones, of coral bleaching, of the rapid land loss in south Louisiana. Disasters caused by us. The thought at the center of this wonderful book is that not only do we humans do a lot of damage to the planet, some of the worst damage we do occurs when we’re trying to fix things. As she puts it, this is a book “about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”

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Posted on February 27, 2021

By Katharine Trendacosta and Cara Gagliano/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

In all the madness that made up the last month of 2020, a number of copyright bills and proposals popped up – and some even became law before most people had any chance to review them. So now that the dust has settled a little and we have a better idea what the landscape is going to look like, it is time to answer a few frequently asked questions.
What Happened?
In December 2020, Congress was rushing to pass a massive spending bill and coronavirus relief package. This was “must-pass” legislation, in the sense that if it didn’t pass there would be no money to do things like fund the government. Passing the package was further complicated by a couple of threats from President Trump to veto the bill unless certain things were in it.
In all this, two copyright bills were added to the spending package, despite them not having any place there – not least because there hadn’t been robust hearings where the issues with them could be pointed out. One of the bills didn’t even have text available to the public until the very last second. And they are now law.

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Posted on February 6, 2021

By Ed Hammer

When I first saw that former Gov. George Ryan had written a book about his efforts to put a halt to the death penalty In Illinois, I became concerned. What bothered me was that Ryan might attempt to use the book to reverse the stigma he earned from a 35-year political career replete with corruption.
On April 17, 2006, a jury found Ryan guilty on 22 counts of corruption (later reduced by a judge to 20) linked to his time as Illinois Secretary of State. I became aware of his corruption as early as 1993 while being assigned as a special agent/investigator for the Secretary of State’s Office. My partner Russell Sonneveld and I investigated several cases Involving multiple subjects obtaining commercial driver’s licenses in exchange for bribes – and that bribe money ending up in the Citizens for Ryan campaign fund.
Those cases were being prematurely closed without prosecutorial review by SOS inspector general Dean Bauer, our supervisor and Ryan’s close friend. Then, on Election Day in 1994, six children were killed in a fiery crash on I-94 south of Milwaukee by a truck driver who obtained one of those licenses for bribes. When Bauer also closed our investigation on that tragic case, we knew the obstruction had to be stopped. We arranged to meet with an investigator with United States Department of Justice. Nine years later, on December 17, 2003, after completing two terms as Secretary of State and one term as governor, Ryan was indicted. The charges included obstruction of justice.

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Posted on January 19, 2021

By Lisa Feldman Barrett/Undark

This excerpt is adapted from 7 1/2 Lessons About The Brain.
Most of your life takes place in a made-up world. You live in a country whose name and whose borders were made up by people. You allow particular humans to be leaders of that country, such as a president or a member of Congress, by following procedures invented by people long dead, such as elections, and you give them powers that were also made up by people. You acquire food and other goods with something called “money,” which is represented by pieces of paper and metal and even by electromagnetic waves flowing through the air, and which is also completely made up. You actively and willingly participate in this made-up world every day. It is real to you. It’s as real as your own name, which, by the way, was also made up by people.
We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our collective human brains. Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada, or that an expanse of water has certain fishing rights, or that a specific arc of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is called January. These things are real to us anyway. Socially real.

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Posted on January 5, 2021

Brought To You By The Skeptical Inquirer

Seth MacFarlane, Eric Idle and the most important day on Earth in the last 100 million years explain how our lives are ruled by chance.

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Posted on December 8, 2020