What they did. Politico’s Shia Kapos recaps changes Illinois lawmakers jammed into their weekend session …
■ … including a tax tweak aimed at improving Chicago’s ability to land a casino …
■ … mixed drinks to go …
■ … and a dramatic expansion of Illinois’ mail-in voting push.
■ NPR: “Almost every place where Americans usually register to vote has been out of reach since March and … the consequences of that decline could reshape the electorate.”
‘No more, and not from us.’ The lawmaker ejected from the General Assembly last week for not wearing a mask led a Grant Park rally of simple folk demanding the reopening of Illinois.
■ Tribune columnist Ron Grossman: “I might carry a picket sign, too, if my share of the American Dream had been shot down by a governor ordering my cash register closed when I have mortgage payments to make.”
■ An ethics and business law professor: “After this pandemic is over, health care workers should still be greeted with nightly applause, grocery store workers should still be treated as heroes and delivery drivers should still be surprised with gifts. It would be nice if they were paid accordingly too.”
■ Wired: COVID-19 makes the case for more meatpacking robots.
What Democrats dread. After the depths of the coronavirus shutdown, a Harvard prof and Obama administration veteran predicts “the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country”—even though, as one Democratic strategist explains, “in absolute terms, the economy will look historically terrible.”
■ Under new pandemic rules, the New York Stock Exchange reopened today for the first time in two months.
■ Trump’s economic adviser is in the hot seat for saying that “our human capital stock is ready to get back to work.”
‘We’re past flattening.’ The fight against COVID-19 is looking up at Cook County Jail.
■ Chicago’s Memorial Day weekend was its deadliest in four years.
Graduating … to the front lines. In many cases out of necessity to help pay family bills, Chicago-area high school kids are picking up jobs as essential workers.
■ A Trib investigation finds senior citizens in Chicago’s subsidized housing have been shut out of the pandemic information loop.
■ WBEZ: Some Chicago renters are waging the coronavirus battle without water.
■ The Conversation: The real estate industry’s racial discrimination set communities up for greater danger.
■ Chicago’s 57-year-old Wellington-Oakdale Old Glory Marching Society parade inverted its slogan for a Memorial Day in the pandemic: “Everybody watches, nobody marches.”
How to hang. Block Club Chicago shares experts’ guidance on ways to gather safely with 10 or fewer people.
■ Prioritizing safety and science over a rush to reopen, Chicago’s tourism industry aims to position the city as an intelligent destination visitors can trust.
■ The co-founder of a Hong Kong restaurant chain talks to The Atlantic about the state of restaurant dining after a lockdown there: “Incredibly ugly, but we have no choice.”
Uh-oh. Temperatures in the Arctic Circle have been soaring.
■ New research indicates the rate of climate change in the ocean’s depths could increase by a factor of seven by the second half of the century.
Man bites dog. The Sun-Times, historically the Chicago paper more likely to be struggling, has hired a reporter away from the Tribune.
■ One Trib columnist took a swipe at another on Facebook (further down in Robert Feder’s column).
■ Police say a man who grabbed a WGN-TV reporter during a live shot has confessed.
‘I do not need a studio audience to tell me when to laugh.’ TV critic Robert Lloyd: “If you’re not paying attention to late-night TV right now, you should.”
■ A DePaul University grad stars in an Amazon Prime series that he calls a good quarantine watch from the creator of The Office and Parks and Recreation.
■ Variety says Steve Carell and Steppenwolf Theatre mainstay John Malkovitch’s new Netflix series, Space Force, “is really just OK.”
the National Immigrant Justice Center.