Get used to it. The Associated Press says America’s in for a hot and/or smoky summer: “The stuck weather pattern made abnormally hot and dry conditions for Canada to burn at off-the-chart record levels. Then it created a setup where the only relief comes when low-pressure systems roll through, which means areas on one side get smoky air from the north and the other gets sweltering air from the south.”
■ Not so fast: Yesterday’s prediction of Chicago-area relief from the smoke proved … premature.
■ Rain may clean the air a bit …
■ … but community activists are hoping this onslaught will raise awareness of what residents of Chicago’s most polluted neighborhoods endure every day.
■ Block Club Chicago readers have been sharing photos of Chicago enshrouded.
■ What’s in the smoke? The Sun-Times explains: “A toxic brew of microscopic contaminants” from 19.5 million acres of burning wilderness—“the equivalent of more than half of Illinois.”
■ Neil Steinberg: “The air hurts.”
■ And it’s not gonna be helped by all those fireworks people are buying in Indiana …
■ … or NASCAR’s thing.
■ Your Local Epidemiologist: Those particularly at risk include athletes.
Race-based admissions’ end. Ruling in the case of programs at the nation’s oldest private and public colleges—Harvard and the University of North Carolina—the U.S. Supreme Court says institutions of higher education must stop considering race in deciding which students to enroll.
■ Breaking along ideological lines, justices ruled 6-3 that the schools discriminated against white and Asian American applicants.
■ Read the 237-page decision and dissents—one of which, by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s first Black female member, declares the ruling “truly a tragedy for us all.”
■ Update, 10:59 a.m.: The Illinois Board of Higher Education is defiant: “Our work toward an equitable higher education system will continue unabated.”
■ Gov. Pritzker, too: “Here in the Land of Lincoln and Obama, we will continue to uplift our students of color.”
■ Chicago’s in line for its first-ever female U.S. attorney.
Help wanted. Chicago Board of Education President Miguel del Valle is leaving.
■ More Chicago schools named after people with racist histories are getting new names.
Cops off the hook. The government agency charged with investigating Chicago cop misconduct is set to just close hundreds of unresolved cases just to clear its massive backlog.
■ The Sun-Times says a list of candidates to lead the Chicago Police Department has been narrowed to these six.
■ Shots fired on the Stevenson Expressway this morning shut inbound lanes for almost half an hour.
France, not Chicago. Two nights of urban violence sparked by the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old has prompted the French government to deploy 40,000 officers.
■ The chief organizer of next month’s year’s scandal-scarred Paris Olympic Games pledges “the safest place in the world.”
‘There was no … significant threat to Putin’s rule.’ Rejecting the Biden administration’s line on the challenge to Russia’s president, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh concludes “the Russian ‘revolt’ that wasn’t strengthens Putin’s hand.”
■ The AP recaps what happened “through the words of four presidents and a mutinous warlord.”
‘Presumed human remains.’ A formal analysis in the U.S. was set for material recovered from the doomed underwater expeditionary vehicle Titan.
■ Debris from the ship itself, too.
‘Hell, yeah!’ First Aid Kit healthcare journalist Dan Weissmann cheers on patients resisting medical providers asking them to pay in advance.
■ He cites rules in particular for government-funded insurance plans, requiring that any call for upfront payment “must be made as a request and without undue pressure.”
‘It’s awful.’ Newcity critic Ray Pride: “It feels mean to even write a review” of the new Indiana Jones movie.
■ The Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper calls it “the sequel of doom.”
How’s this edition look? We’re tuning up the Chicago Public Square format for legibility this week. Better or worse? Let us know what you think by replying to any email edition or emailing design@chicagopublicsquare.com.
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■ Thanks to Eric Zorn for introducing Square to his readers …
■ … in his Picayune Sentinel, to which you should subscribe.
■ Mike Weiland made this edition better.