No news here for stay-at-home mothers. “Be sure you want to do it, because it is hard on you mentally,” stay-at-home dad David Smith advises men who might follow his example, in the Loop-based newsletter Moments (March). “My experience is that housewives don’t treat me as an equal and men don’t take me seriously.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
News flash–Kennedy resurfacing called off as foundations decline to renew grants. Stephanie A.Y. Smith profiles Thomas Tresser of People’s Housing in Chicago Enterprise (March/April): “Tresser contends that the Chicago City Council should set a strong cultural policy and that the city can no longer cut its own support for the arts [only 43 cents per capita, compared to San Francisco’s $10.44]. ‘Why should the Department of Cultural Affairs write for grants from private foundations? Why doesn’t Public Works [apply for grants] when they need to fix roads?’ says Tresser. Culture is as necessary to the city’s economy as its infrastructure, he says.”
Free-market bleeding heart. “Root causes are much out of fashion nowadays as explanations of criminal behavior,” writes Northwestern University law professor Daniel Polsby in Atlantic (March), “but fashionable or not, they are fundamental. The root cause of crime is that for certain people, predation is a rational occupational choice. Conventional crime-control measures, which by stiffening punishment or raising the probability of arrest aim to make crime pay less, cannot consistently affect the behavior of people who believe that their alternatives to crime will pay virtually nothing. Young men who did not learn basic literacy and numeracy skills before dropping out of their wretched public schools may not have been worth hiring at the minimum wage set by George Bush, let alone at the higher, indexed minimum wage that has recently been under discussion by the Clinton Administration.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
