■ … and plans to shut another 142 stores by the end of the year …
■ … which spells trouble for store landlords and thousands of employees …
■ … but which could be good news for competitors like Best Buy and J.C. Penney …
■ … unless they have stores at the same malls.
Well, Chicago has this going for it. A survey of insurance industry workers—asking where in the U.S. they’d live to avoid future natural disasters—puts Chicago right up there.
■ The weekend’s freeze ended Chicago’s shortest growing season in 14 years.
■ Smithsonian: “If geography is destiny, Chicago’s history offers the hope that fate is still partly in our hands.”
■ Vox launches a new feature, “Future Perfect,” with a guide to finding the charities where your money will save the most lives.
Not so open. ProPublica Illinois reports the Illinois office that’s supposed to enforce open government laws is backlogged and frequently ignored.
■ Email filed as part of a court dispute creates a fresh headache for gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker, who’s campaigning as a friend of organized labor: He used nonunion workers to renovate his Gold Coast mansion.
■ Chicago Public Square’s voter guide is here for your enlightenment.
■ The Trib’s Mary Wisniewski: After the election, Illinois could finally get a bill “to fund badly needed fixes to the state’s roads, bridges and public transit systems.”
‘I’m President, and you’re not.’ CNN runs down 11 noteworthy moments in President Trump’s 60 Minutes sitdown, aired last night.
■ A CNN analyst says Trump’s embrace of—and a hands-off American policy toward—Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman set the stage for the disappearance and possible murder of a Washington Post contributor.
‘Saturday Night Live writers … could not improve on his material.’ The Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet—who was there—reflects on Kanye West’s … um, memorable … White House appearance with President Trump.
■ Compare: Full video of the actual Trump-West meeting and the SNL satire.
■ Now that U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a DNA test supporting her assertion that she’s of Native American heritage, will Trump make good on a pledge to pay $1 million to the charity of her choice? Because here’s her choice.
■ A Facebook executive said something that sounded almost exactly like a satiric character on HBO’s Silicon Valley.
■ The Atlantic: Facebook’s Instagram subsidiary has a massive harassment problem.
■ Chicago Reporter: Women in prison around the country are punished more harshly than men.
Announcements.
■ Correction. Reader Mark Petersen was the first of several readers to note a bad link in Friday’s Square for Open House Chicago—photos of which Block Club Chicago has shared here.
■ Thanks … to Chris Koenig for a continuing flow of great Square link suggestions; and to Mike Braden for some early proofreading help.
■ If you’re reading this by email, you’ll note some characters in recent editions have been garbled, like this: —. It’s a MailChimp problem the company says it’s working to address.