Getting there from there

Might an informal “street” network help heal South MacArthur?

South MacArthur Boulevard is a lot like a heart attack patient. It might recover its former vigor, but it will never thrive in the ways it did before it got sick. It will be able to survive at all onl

Has another public project gone off the rails?

The Springfield Rail Improvements Project gets stuck on a siding

We’ve all seen it dozens of times in movies. A railroad train is barreling down the tracks. There might be enough time – just – to bring the lumbering machine to a halt before it cra

The short arm of the law

At last, we can all feel safe when we take our credit cards out in public again. In September, a federal judge in San Francisco fined a Taiwanese company $500 million and sentenced its former presiden

Missing the bus

The SMTD and the American bias against experts

In late August the Springfield Mass Transit District Board chose as its new executive director a retired Corrections Department internal affairs investigator. The new hire’s qualifications to ru

Invisible walls

Why good newspapers need good publishers

I was a newspaper publisher at the age of 24. My aptitude for the job can be judged by the fact that the column you are reading appears in a newspaper that is not published by me. I published two news

Cheating is the American way

What Lance Armstrong teaches us about ourselves

There is no shame in quitting a race you know you can’t win. Lance Armstrong’s shame is the many races he perhaps should have quit rather than win. It was apparently to prevent unsavory fa

Endangered repose

Dogs love to talk. Pity they have nothing to say.

Ever notice that there is only two letters’ difference between dog and blog? The dog and blogger are kin to the extent that too many of each are noisily eager to share their ignorance with every

It’s Springfield’s fault

Does geographic isolation explain why Statehouse politics are corrupt?

A few weeks ago the nation was briefly distracted from the work of buying, stealing and subverting this year’s elections by the release of a report from researchers at the Kennedy School of Gove

Just what the doctor ordered

Spending too much on health care that does too little

When it comes to their health – and eventually, everything does – Americans’ motto is, “Too much is never enough.” That phrase ought to be printed on every test report, e

Bus-age wonders

Is the bus the future of short-haul intercity travel?

While I was coming of age in central Illinois in the 1960s, the motor vehicle that figured daily in my life was not a car – I didn’t have one – but the bus. I rode buses to school, I