‘Contact tracing shit show.’ A Chicago Public Schools parent wrote to Chicago Public Square last night, complaining about the schools’ contact tracing protocol: “We got an email today … saying a person who was in close contact with my children on 9/14 tested positive on 9/15. It took 4.5 days to let us know. … One would think there would be a quicker response following positive cases.”
■ Mayor Lightfoot concurs, telling WTTW: “I’m disappointed. … There should have been a much more robust plan.”
■ Drugstores are taking heat for refusing to grant COVID tests to bicyclists at drive-through windows.
[Update: Benet has reversed itself.] ‘Just come out and say it.’ Trib columnist Rex Huppke wonders why Benet Academy, a Catholic school in Lisle, isn’t being more forthright about its reasons for rescinding a lacrosse coaching job offer to a woman—an alumna, to boot—after she submitted her wife’s name as an emergency contact.
■ More than 2,000 students, parents, alumni and friends have signed a protest petition.
■ Loyola University students say the administration isn’t taking reports of sexual assault seriously.
Yeah, but. Reflecting on Mayor Lightfoot’s “big, bold, audacious” budget proposal, Politico’s Shia Kapos asks: “What happens when the $1.9 billion in federal COVID relief funding isn’t around?”
■ The mayor’s considering tossing more perks to the Bears to keep them playing at Soldier Field.
■ A Sun-Times editorial praises the plan’s “modicum of relief for Chicago’s poorest families.”
■ Gov. Pritzker’s committing $327 million to help the state’s poorest—regardless of immigration status—pay for rent, utilities and food.
■ Columnist Charles Selle: With Metra ridership down nearly a quarter, it’s a bad look for the CEO to take a big pay raise.
‘An extreme case.’ A Chicago police detective comments on a Tribune investigation that found a 9mm Glock stolen from a Wisconsin gun shop has been linked to at least 27 shootings here.
■ Police were investigating two separate shootings in the West Loop overnight. (Cartoon: Keith J. Taylor.)
‘If Republicans are going to say nobody can tell you to get a shot they shouldn’t tell women what to do with their bodies either.’ An ex-lawyer in Chicago is suing a doctor who became the first Texas abortion provider to reveal he’d violated that state’s draconian anti-abortion law.
■ The Chicagoan, Felipe Gomez, says he’s doing it to establish that “the Act is illegal as written.”
(Re-)Open(ed) House Chicago. After a pandemic-crimped version last year, the Chicago Architecture Center is bringing back free in-person, indoor tours of some of the area’s most fascinating buildings …
■ … and the roster of sites is growing.
■ Fire destroyed a 156-year-old suburban church that appeared in the 2002 movie Road to Perdition.
Dogged reporting. Food writer Louisa Chu has solved the mystery of Chicago’s oldest hot dog stand.*
■ With insect farming for food on the rise, an entomology professor weighs the ethics of bug-eating: “The well-being of trillions of creatures is at stake.”
‘The greatest cascade of crises in our lifetime.’ That’s what the UN’s secretary-general told its first pandemic-era gathering the world faces now.
■ The Onion: “Relieved Ecologists Announce Rising Sea Levels Were Due To Clump Of Hair Clogging Drain At Bottom of Ocean.”
New life for old iPhones. Apple’s Version 15 operating systems for phones, pads, watches and TV streamers are out …
■ … but, as with any new release, you might wanna wait a bit …
■ … and, even then, make sure to back stuff up first.
■ A Wall Street Journal review—in the form of a music video that is very funny—concludes that new iPhones’ “cinematic mode” is not ready for Hollywood.
■ Thanks to reader Elizabeth Denius, first to note a misspelling of Philippines in yesterday’s Square.
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* Meyersons cited in Chu’s story are no relation—that we know of.