Suspended. A white history teacher who hung a Black doll by its neck from a projector screen cord in front of his classroom and then argued about it with a Black colleague is out at Chicago’s celebrated Whitney Young Magnet High School.
■ Among students who packed the school theater yesterday for an assembly on the incident: One who said, “I was really disgusted because our school is supposed to be very inclusive.” (2009 photo: Eric Allix Rogers on Flickr.)
■ It’s Michelle Obama’s alma mater.
■ A George Mason University education professor warns that school listings ranking only achievement status—and not achievement growth—“are essentially nudging families toward the whitest and most affluent schools.”
Will you or won’t you? Do you or don’t you? Your Local Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina tackles your questions about the pros and cons of getting that fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine—including when to get it and which brand to get.
■ Chicago cases are on the rise, but the city’s health commissioner says the city’s in “good control.”
■ The Conversation: “Brains are bad at big numbers, making it impossible to grasp what a million COVID-19 deaths really means.”
■ The Associated Press: The end of the pandemic stands to trigger regression for “a cumbersome U.S. health care system made more generous, flexible and up-to-date technologically through a raft of temporary emergency measures” … that are about to expire.
■ First Aid Kit offers tips for avoiding giant emergency room bills.
‘If Milwaukee can pull off a convention in the middle of a pandemic, Chicago should be able to manage the same or better.’ Columnist Neil Steinberg welcomes news that Chicago is under consideration to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
■ Looking back to Chicago’s hosting of the NATO meeting in 2012, Steinberg suggests the city tamped down on protests too much—as you might infer from this radio report back then.
■ From 1996: An audio retrospective on the last DNC held here.
■ A federal judge has tossed a lawsuit aimed at blocking construction of the Obama Presidential Center on South Side parkland.
‘The whiff of fuckery.’ Ex-Tribune columnist Eric Zorn (middle of today’s post) goes about “setting the record straight” on what went down between his then-colleague John Kass and the emerging Chicago Tribune Guild in 2018.
■ Chicago media watchdog Robert Feder calls it (middle of his post) “a masterpiece that could only have been written by an insider.”
■ Columbia Journalism Review surveys the broadening movement for media workers’ rights—“born of the poor financial conditions of the industry and accelerated by the pandemic and fight against racism in newsrooms.”
■ The Reader bids adieu to The Onion’s Chicago-based pop-culture spinoff, A.V. Club, ordered to relocate to Los Angeles.
‘Everyone … was embarrassed.’ A CBS News employee talks to The Washington Post about internal turmoil over the hiring of Trump enabler Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor.
■ The Post has audio of CBS News’ co-president justifying the move to staff this way: “We know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms.”
■ CNN’s Oliver Darcy details a “right-wing media machine” war on Disney now that it’s come down off the fence to oppose Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Hunter hunt. A federal probe into the tax affairs of President Biden’s son Hunter is reportedly heating up.
■ A Post investigation of Hunter’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company finds no evidence the president knew about or benefited personally from those deals, but nevertheless illustrates “the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.”
■ Key to the Post’s work: A copy of a laptop hard drive that purportedly once belonged to Hunter.
Park your pennies. Want to visit the Indiana Dunes National Park? Beginning today, it’ll cost you.
■ The Reader’s Ben Joravsky says Chicago’s hopes that a casino will help cover the city’s pension obligations is “the second-dumbest idea of this century.”
Wanna save $5 on a Chicago Public Square T-shirt? Make a continuing pledge to support Square at any of these levels and get a code good for a discount on one of those snazzy new tees.
■ Reader Michael Rosenbaum made this edition better.