Chicago Public Square is back. And for that, please thank supporters including Terry Sowka, Dawn Haney, Mark Nystuen, Sherry Kent, William Wheelhouse, Larry Dahlke, Werner Huget, Owen Youngman, Ed Nickow, John Iltis and Barbara Miller. You can join them in backing Square with a one-time tip (nice) or an ongoing pledge (nicer). And if you can’t chip in now, no guilt: You help Square grow simply by opening and reading each day. So let’s get to it:
School or not? Chalkbeat Chicago lists six things to watch as the city weighs whether to put students and teachers back in classrooms …
■ An associate dean at a public college warns against a rush back to campus: “Faculty, staff and graduate students have been asked to lay their bodies on the line … in service to revenue-generating enrollments.”
Fauci foray. The White House is attacking the man who’s been the face of its pandemic task force, Dr. Anthony Fauci …
■ … but, The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent explains, that move is boomeranging back on President Trump.
■ Hindering the nation’s COVID-19 response: Fax technology.
Testing high. Illinois reports a record number of COVID-19 tests administered in a single day.
■ But the wait for results is getting longer, rendering results increasingly unhelpful.
■ The Tribune asks Chicagoans: Why are you getting tested?
We’ve been here before. A University of Michigan medical historian says mask resistance was a thing in the 1918 pandemic.
■ Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: “What I tell myself … every single frickin’ carbon copy of the day before and the day after day: Hang in there. Hold on. Chin up. One foot in front of the other. Better days ahead. Or so I hope.”
■ Steinberg colleague David Roeder says employers are up a creek, “pondering if they need less space—because business is down or more staffers are working from home—or more of it because workers are worried about infection in close quarters.”
Blood on the streets. At least 64 people were shot—at least 11 fatally—over the weekend in Chicago.
■ Chicago’s civil rights protests were accompanied by a record number of complaints against police.
■ WBEZ: Chicago cops impounded a quarter-million vehicles over the last decade—most of them never associated with criminal charges and most of them in predominantly Black communities.
■ Trib columnist Eric Zorn: Time to capitalize “white,” too.
R.I.P., Red____s. After 87 years, Washington’s football team is dropping its offensive team name.
■ Credit the advertisers.
■ Your move, Chicago NHL team.
■ The New York Times: ESPN workers complain of racism behind the camera.
■ More than 1,000 government workers
‘A feasibility study to determine the presence or absence of human remains.’ Almost a hundred years after a racial massacre in Tulsa, the city plans to begin digging for what may be mass graves of the victims.
■ The descendants of a couple that fled to Chicago 100 years ago, after their sons were burned alive, joined at a memorial in the Texas town where it happened.
‘Scary.’ U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley of Chicago says Trump’s commutation of the sentence of his friend Roger Stone smacks of “the actions of an autocrat.”
■ Chicago radio host Erich Mancow Muller partied with Stone over the weekend.
■ Stone says he plans to campaign for Trump …
■ … who, according to the Post’s count, has now made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims since taking office.
Radio pioneer gone. Seth Mason, who launched two iconic Chicago radio stations—WXRT* and The Score—is dead of cancer at 71.
■ Mason to the Chicago Reader on the occasion of the stations’ 1995 sale to a conglomerate: “You’re given a license to serve the community and that’s what I think we did. … We built radio stations that became part of people’s lives.”
■ The self-proclaimed “Tuba-American” who oversaw the Reader’s fact-championing Straight Dope Message Board for decades is dead at 65.
Thanks to reader Mike Braden for spotting a redundancy above.
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* Where your Square proprietor worked for a decade, delivering his first newscast there on this date in 1979.