‘You have no idea the type of chaos that's occurring.’ A Chicago Public Schools third-grade teacher is one of several across the country who describe for Esquire just how badly the pandemic has crippled the nation’s educational system.
■ The Conversation: “Elementary school teachers in our study report … up to nine different academic levels in a single classroom.”
■ Beginning next week, Chicago schools shorten their COVID-19 quarantine period from 10 days to five.
■ The Onion’s take on the College Board’s plan to abandon pencil-based college admissions testing: “‘It’s Over! It’s All Over!’ Screams Ticonderoga CEO, Dousing Office In Gasoline After Announcement SAT Going Digital.”
The best masks? After testing ’em for two years, a Colorado State University mechanical engineering professor makes his recommendation.
■ Politico: “The COVID lull is coming.”
Pepsi denigration. Popular Information’s report that PepsiCo has been funneling cash to Republicans who backed Texas’ abortion ban has triggered calls for a boycott. (Photo: Qirille.)
‘Cold-blooded … execution.’ A Cook County judge has sentenced a former Northwestern University microbiology professor to 53 years in prison for the 2017 “butchering” of his boyfriend.
■ Recalling “a time in my life when I had messed up worse than you,” Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg counsels actor Jussie Smollett, convicted of staging a racist attack against himself: “Come clean … if you are to have any hope of a life beyond this shameful episode.”
■ Mars Wrigley is closing its 94-year-old West Side facility, once hailed in the Tribune as America’s most beautiful candy factory.
Spotify on the spot. Rock legend Neil Young wants his music off Spotify if the company doesn’t dump vaccine misinformation monger Joe Rogan’s crap-rich podcast.
■ Journalist Jill Filipovic: Spotify should classify Rogan’s show “as fiction or fantasy” or “require that their best-paid and most-popular podcast hosts not pose a direct threat to public health.”
■ Here’s where to register a complaint with Spotify.
■ Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Sorry about the Anne Frank thing.
‘It will be an amazing story.’ But Politico’s senior media writer, Jack Shafer, has reservations about the imminent merger of WBEZ and the Sun-Times: “Public radio … makes my skin itch.”
■ 1619 Project architect Nikole Hannah-Jones, who trolled Union League Club critics last week by reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical comments as her own—before revealing his authorship to the crowd’s shock: “I can probably never do it again.”
Time’s running out. Cast a vote or four for Square, won’t you?