‘Selling fear and outrage.’ An early Facebook investor turned company critic reacts to an AP report that the company froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed its platform.
■ The Washington Post: “Five points for anger, one for a ‘like.’”
■ Popular Information runs down five things to know about the Facebook revelations—the first of which is that “Facebook gives right-wing politicians and publications special treatment.”
■ Steven Levy in Wired: Facebook failed the people who tried to improve it.
■ Tech journalist Charlie Warzel, who’s written critically about the company for a decade: “The ‘fixes’ that could come from this momentum are going to be extremely treacherous.”
■ CNN’s Brian Stelter: The parade of “Facebook Papers” revelations will last weeks.
■ Protocol has an updating list of all the stories arising from whistleblower Frances Haugen’s document dump.
‘Next time someone says … Not all cops are bad, you can respond to them: No, just their favorite ones.’ Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver took aim at John Catanzara, the president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, over his resistance to vaccine mandates.
■ Catanzara on Monday threatened City Council members who don’t oppose Mayor Lightfoot’s vaccine order: “We are coming for every one of your damn seats” …
■ The conflict sends Patch columnist Mark Konkol back to the days of Mayor Harold Washington: Catanzara has indicted Ald. Ed Burke on his side, “advocating to slap legislative checks and balances on a Chicago mayor. It feels like 1983 all over.”
■ Block Club Chicago: Federal agents seized an illegal machine gun from scandal-scarred Ald. Jim Gardiner’s ward superintendent in August—yet the superintendent’s still on the job.
‘Kid-sized doses.’ Gov. Pritzker says the state has half a million COVID-19 vaccinations for children ages 5 to 11 ready to go once the feds give final approval.
■ Chalkbeat: Few Chicago parents are signing children up for school-based COVID tests.
Springfield ‘fireworks.’ Politico’s Shia Kapos sees trouble for Pritzker’s move to tweak the “moral convictions” law that skeptics have been using to resist vaccinations.
■ Today’s the deadline for state employees at nursing homes and prisons to get their first vaccine dose—or risk losing their jobs.
■ Pandemic numbers have been falling in every U.S. region.
‘Metra, we have an idea.’ A Tribune editorial asks why the heck it should take a decade to open a new train station in the exploding Fulton Market district.
■ Eleven years after initial funding for a Metra station in Edgewater, groundbreaking’s set for next week.
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‘Shock the world.’ Trib columnist Rex Huppke calls on Rockford airport officials to do the right thing and not destroy one of Illinois’ few frozen-in-time prairies.
■ The suburb of Dixmoor has its water back—with a boil order—but, WTTW News explains, almost any Chicago-area community could face a similar crisis.
Bears forfeit? Head coach Matt Nagy’s contraction of COVID-19—he’s vaccinated—brings the team within passing distance of enough cases to force a forfeit of Sunday’s game.
■ Nagy: “It’s a reminder … to be extremely cautious.”
‘It was 58 goddamn years ago.’ Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce on the Biden administration’s latest delay for release of the John F. Kennedy assassination files: “The ‘intelligence community’ is still covering up what it covered up in 1963.”
■ Two Kennedy nephews call the delay “an outrage.”