Knitting together the public and the private

     We leave the decoration of public space to others. The city, not us, puts up bus stops and rents out billboards on those bus stops. It plants trees and strings them with lights in the winter. In summer, building owners plant flowers and put out flags.
     We don't. We walk through, minding our business, occasionally glancing around. Picking up garbage on the street that you yourself did not drop is practically an unbalanced act. Planting a tree on the public way is probably a misdemeanor of some kind. 
     Occasionally an individual will embellish a public space -- those memorials you see on highways marking where people have died in road accidents, whitewashed crosses and teddy bears and displays of sad plastic flowers.  It shows just how reluctant we are under normal circumstances to project ourselves into the public sphere, that it requires a terrible tragedy to move someone to decorate the side of the road. 
     Most folks, that is. Artists, however, take a different relationship to common space. Enjoying the freedom that creativity brings, and a certain degree of expected boldness, they understand that they can, if they choose, contribute to the beauty of our urban landscape, though the rest of us don't always appreciate it when it takes the form of, oh for instance, graffiti.
      In 2012, Pete Dungey, a British artist, created what he called "pothole gardens" -- little plantings in what are normally eyesores and dangers. It was part of a project he named, delightfully, "Subvert the Familiar," an important role for art.    
     In that same spirit, I noticed and admired this pink and blue striped handle cover that somebody knitted for the Big Belly garbage compactor at the corner of Madison and Wacker Drive. It was not an accidental act. Somebody had to conceive it, create it, and affix it to one of the corporate garbage cans that represent the fire sale sell-off of Chicago's infrastructure. I admired that it was so subtle. It wasn't showy. It was just there.
     What's the handle's purpose? Hell if I know. To pad and protect the fingers of those throwing stuff away? To look pretty? To get people like me thinking? Something else? I hope there isn't some common, well-known, prosaic explanation. "Geez, Neil, those are the pink and blue knit handle cozies that Girl Scouts have been putting on garbage can handles for years. Where have you been?"
      I noticed the knit cover on Sunday, on my way into the Lyric to see "The Sound of Music," and instantly quizzed its PR staff, wondering if perhaps it was some Austrian decoration—the trashundrecepticalmittenfruppy—they had put out, in some unfathomable cross-promotion of the musical. No, not them, they said. 
     The subject didn't weigh on my mind. But I did think about it, trucking south on Wacker Tuesday, and was pleased to see it was still there, not a tatter shred, but quite intact. The power of yarn. One reasons we usually don't arbitrarily decorate public spaces is the assumption that our loutish fellow citizens would destroy whatever we do, for the sheer joy of destruction. But the handle remained, at least for two days, perhaps because few noticed it, perhaps because those that did got into the unexpected whimsy of the thing and let it be. I like to think that is a factor. 

Update:

     When I wrote the above, I measured the odds of hearing from the person who knit this, decided they were slight, so didn't bother appealing to the public for an explanation. What I didn't realize—duh—is that there are very few isolated expressions of individuality nowadays that can't be immediately slotted into a movement, a genre, a term. In this case, it is "yarn bombing," or ... ready? ... "guerrilla knitting," and there are far more elaborate examples to be found around Chicago, such as these at Logan Square. The practice has its own Wikipedia page, which trace the practice back to the 1990s, and shares some clever examples, such as wrapping a tank at a military museum in Germany. 
     I wouldn't mind hearing from a yarn bomber (nice to hear that term given a new meaning) about the appeal, though a very good guess immediately springs to mind. People who knit, who like the physical act of knitting, are faced with the challenge of what to do with the result of their passion. There are only so many loved ones who are willing to accept so many scarves, sweaters, afghans, etc. Thus yarn bombing seems to offer a perfect solution. Takes a lot of knitting to wrap a tree. Plus you get to be artistic and neighborly too.

Making sure the jets have clean fuel to gulp

    This might seem out-of-left-field. But there is a simple explanation: the Navy asked. Would I like to talk to a sailor from Chicago? Of course I would. And for you PR sorts, a reminder of the importance of timing. As I was finishing writing this Tuesday, I heard from the Navy Office of Community Outreach in Millington, Tennessee: would I, they wondered, like to talk to a sailor from Chicago? It never rains, it pours. This one aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. Normally I would love to, I wrote back, but I've got one, running tomorrow. Must be some kind of military charm offensive. Though there is an important lesson, when it comes to dealing with the media. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask. At the right time, of course. 

    Aviation fuel is not spring water. It doesn’t travel in small plastic bottles but through miles of often corroded pipelines, or it’s pumped into greasy truck or railcar tankers, or transferred to enormous, not-quite-clean ocean-going tankers. 

     When the fuel gets to its destination, for instance the USS Abraham Lincoln nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, you cannot simply pump it straight into the belly of a jet fighter about to take off. Not if you don’t want something bad to happen, like the water and sediment the fuel has picked up in its long journey fouling the jet’s engines while it thunders across the carrier deck.

     “Any bad fuel, and the plane will go directly in the water,” said Chief Petty Officer Cory Lee, a 1991 Taft High School graduate who has served his country in the U.S. Navy for the past 22 years and is aviation boatswain’s mate in charge of fuel aboard the Nimitz-class carrier. That means he’s responsible for making sure the fuel doesn’t clog airplane engines or cause any other of the other deadly problems that can occur if it isn’t handled with shipshape precision. 

     His job is “real simple,” Lee said.

Chief Petty Officer Cory Lee

     “We receive fuel out at sea, from a refueling ship,” he said over the phone. “We bring it onboard; we have approximately 187 tanks on the ship. We put the fuel in the tanks where we purify it, send it through a filter, just like at a brewery — the same concept as Budweiser. When we send it up to the flight deck they get clear, bright fuel.”  

While cleaning the fuel, it takes vigilance to make sure it doesn’t blow up. “We have to take a lot of safety precautions,” he said. 

     Lee, 40, grew up on the West Side and didn’t have money for college. But he had a role model: his cousin, Jacqueline Williams, serving in the Navy. “She was telling me all the places she visited,” Lee recalled. “That kind of brightened my curiosity. So I joined the Navy right after high school.” 

     And did he see the world?
     "Oh yes, yes I have," he said. "A very large part of it. Not everything, but I saw a lot."
     And his favorite parts?
     "I would say Spain," Lee said. "Spain and Italy. I like the scenery."
     He gets back to Chicago about once a year to visit his mother, Delores Lee, who still lives on the West Side, and she appreciates what the Navy did for her son.
     "It's helped him, helped him out a lot," she said. "It made a man out of him. I'm proud of him. I tell him all the time."
     The Abraham Lincoln is 25 years old, and saw action around the world, particularly during the Iraq War. It was on its flight deck that President George W. Bush landed for his famous "Mission Accomplished" visit. The ship went into port in March 2013 for three years of top-to-bottom overhaul, from the reactors to the hull, to carry it through the next 25 years. The 2,500-person crew is living ashore - Lee has a house in Newport News, Va. - though several hundred crew members redeploy to various Navy ships to keep their sea legs.
     Lee oversees rebuilding the fuel system.
     "Right now we're in a shipyard environment," he said. "Taking a lot of pumps, motors and valves out of the system, remanufacturing all the equipment."
     The overhaul will take until fall 2016 to complete. By then Lee plans to be close to retiring from the Navy.
     "I'm actually about to graduate with an MBA from St. Leo University," said Lee, who earned his undergraduate degree from Park University while in the Navy. "That takes a big portion of my off-duty time."
     What are his plans when he gets out?
     "I want to open up my own business, maybe financial management," he said.
     What, I wondered, has the Navy taught Lee that he'll bring to his civilian career?
     Lee replied by speaking about the dangers of walking around an active flight deck.
     "You can get sucked into an engine," he said. "If you're real tall and walk without bending, a helicopter can chop your head off. Everyone has to look out for each other. And there's a saying on the flight deck: 'Keep your head on a swivel.' "
     In other words: Take care of your co-workers and be aware of everything around you.
     Good advice for business, and for just about everything else in life.

Oh no, he's at it again!

     A circle is the collection of all points on a 2-dimensional plane that are  equidistant from a center point. We are all familiar with circles: an LP record is a circle. A hula hoop is a circle. A wedding ring is a circle.
    Many organizations use a circle as their logo. Target, for one, or Pepsi. Imperial Japan used to symbolize itself with a red circle.   
     The circle is one of many shapes. Other shapes include squares, hexagons and crosses. 
     Like circles, crosses are also popular symbols—Christian denominations use crosses to represent their faith. 
     But not all symbolic crosses represent religious groups. Railroad warning signs use a St. Andrew's cross. The American Red Cross uses a Swiss cross. Imperial Germany used a Maltese cross and, when the Nazis assumed power, they seized a Hindu symbol,  the swastika, which is a St. Andrew's cross with each arm turned at a right angle.  
      Oh wait.... I'm in trouble again, aren't I? No, not because I compared LP records to a hula hoops.  But I just ... oh gosh ... compared the Christian cross to the Nazi swastika. I said ... in essence ... that all Christians are Nazis.
     If you're a nitwit, that is.
     Happily, I don't write for nitwits, despite the obvious profit in it. I couldn't do it with a straight face;  my sincerity would trip me up. 
     But I also don't control who reads this. Thus, for days now, in the weird Punch & Judy Show that passes for political discourse in the United States, a paragraph very much like what I wrote above, from this column that ran in the Sun-Times April 18, has been bouncing around the lower rings of the Tea Party media hell, as they try to get traction out of something that was inoffensive to regular folk.
    I was writing about a lady named Hermene Hartman, the publisher of a weekly black newspaper, an obscure throw-away, who nevertheless was given $51,000 by Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner to host a few parties. Then she sang his praises in print, never mentioning the cash she pocketed. My colleague Mike Sneed wrote a column deliciously revealing this stunning ethical lapse. The subject was irresistible, unfortunately.
     I didn't want to merely pile on, so I tried to give a little context. Hartman certainly didn't invent the practice. The powerful have always been buying support in the black community. Rauner isn't the first. I talked about black aldermen who spoke out against Martin Luther King. 
     At this point, for the column not to explode in my face like a loaded cigar, it was crucial to show that I wasn't just picking on black people, wasn't singling them out unfairly for special criticism. So I wrote this: 

Let me be clear: As a general rule, individuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit. It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round up their own people in the hopes they’d be the last to go. The Republican Party will deny global warming until the ocean laps at Pittsburgh simply because doing something about it crosses the immediate profit of the coal burners and oil companies and carbon spouters who write the checks. No tobacco company has any trouble finding people who, at a hefty salary, stare into the camera and say no, all that lung cancer stuff is just fiction.

     I included Jews intentionally, to show that I wasn't saying anything about African-Americans that I wouldn't say about my own team. There are bad apples in every basket. That isn't something that can be argued, in my view. It's just true.  
     But sometimes, trying to dodge the bicycle messenger, you step in front of a truck.
     To me, the most significant thing was not what it said about Hartman, who hardly matters, but what it said about Rauner, tossing fistfuls of money at a nonentity. If he wastes his own money like that, I wondered at the end of the column, what's he going to do when he gets his hands on yours?
      Reaction was muted, at first. Hartman of course called me to complain that I am a racist. (If I'm a racist, then why tell me? What do you expect me, the big bad racist, to do? Agree with you?) A few Jewish readers took exception to my mentioning the fact of Jewish collaboration. Typical was this, from "L Weber":

Isn't there enough antisemitism in the news already do you have to add more?...
I'm glad I was brought up open minded and not a sheep
Maybe you enjoy stirring the pot of hate that already exists, I don't

      The old, "Let's try to look good for people who are going to hate us anyway," argument. I couldn't resist writing L Weber back: 

Do you really think anti-Semites are weighing the facts before them, and then coming to their conclusions? That if we put a pretty Jewish face forward, that somehow we will win them over? That is just so sad. 

     That was Monday of last week. By Tuesday it was past. A pleasant phone call from Rev. James Meeks, who I also mentioned in the column. He didn't talk about the sympathizer analogy, but rather wanted to be clear that he bought his own plane ticket when he visited Rauner at his Montana ranch. We talked for quite a while and said goodbye on friendly terms.
      What I didn't realize is that the Quinn campaign had tweeted my Rauner story. That is really what touched this off, not anything I wrote, but the Quinn team injecting it into the political distortion machine (thanks guys) and then, realizing it had promoted something with a bit of bite, trying to pull it back.  (Ham-handed. Don't try to claw back tweets. Drives folk crazy). The right wing media—Fox News, WLS, etc.—which already IS crazy, picked up, not on the fact that Bruce Rauner paid $51,000 for the friendship of a laughable nobody whose primary skill is a bottomless ability to be insignificant. No, what upset them was, well, let a Fox Nation writer describe it: 

Chicago Sun-Times readers were stunned last week to find that writer Neil Steinberg has penned a column comparing black supporters of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis against their brethren.

      Fabrication. No Sun-Times readers beyond Hartman were actually stunned, and she was pretty dazed to begin with.  When people are reaching to be outraged, they tend to blur—in this case, blacks who take cash to support Rauner morphed into "black Republicans." Readers of this sort of thing made their own, further abbreviations, until I was being accused of calling blacks people Nazis.      
     I heard from mouth-breathing morons from Florida and Texas, none of whom had read the original column, but who were spouting outrage on cue—it's what they do, apparently— and wanted me to know just what they thought of somebody capable of, well, offending them in some manner.
      The paper, I was pleased to see, stood behind me, re-tweeting the original column while it racked up clicks like a geiger counter at Chernobyl.  Meanwhile, I controlled my breaths and practiced calm. I have been working at nurturing a true indifference to the public howl, and this incident felt like a satisfying step in the right direction. Almost a breakthrough. 
     I even took a little pleasure in watching the carnival of buncombe, to borrow H.L. Mencken's delicious phrase. My favorite example was an opinion piece on an Illinois Republican web site by a trustee in Will County's Wheatland Township and—miribile dictu—an actual black Illinois Republican, who started off decrying the "insult" of my column, admitted that it was an improvement over the standard description of black Republicans as "Uncle Toms" and then, toward the end, served up this:

     The Democrats owe their cronies and the unions their campaign promises first; the Black folks can get what’s left over –a few more weeks of unemployment, food stamps, and no jobs.
    The Jews in Nazi-controlled Germany had to wait in line to get their scraps, too.

    Someone comparing black Republicans to Jews in Nazi-controlled Germany! I considered demanding that she apologize, but decided the irony would be lost.
    Are you bored yet? I sure am. I don't know how people spend their lives puffing up false outrage. I guess it's the political version of slasher films—create a bad guy and then enjoy visiting on him the cruelty that supposedly so offended you, because he "deserves" it. I actually heard from a self-described member of the John Birch Society—on Twitter, I sometimes check, to see what kind of person is writing this poison—who called me a racist, among other things. You have to marvel at that. It almost made the whole experience worthwhile. 
     Of course Rauner tried to make hay with the non-issue. He has no background in politics, and doesn't know what he's doing, or what's important and what isn't. If he runs the state half as incompetently as he's running his campaign, we might all be in for trouble. I am, for the record, sorry I wrote it, though not because it offended the complainers, who live in a state of permanent offense anyway, lurching from one supposed provocation to another. Frankly, I wouldn't be sorry if what I wrote consigned them to the fiery pit for an eternity. But rather, I'm sorry because who wouldn't be sorry for accidentally setting off these assholes and then having to spend time gazing in horror through latticed fingers at their cramped little world? 
    Anyway, to sum up, a list of examples is not a "comparison." If I say that many things come in groups of a dozen—eggs, months, Angry Men—I am not drawing a moral equivalence between 12 eggs and 12 Angry Men. Nor between pizza and hula hoops, beyond their roundness. Nor between Christians and Nazis—so go find something else to get worked up about. Enough. I don't like writing about trivial subjects, and this is a truly trivial subject. But it's a Tuesday, and it was either this or the cool knit pink and blue cozy that I noticed somebody put on a garbage receptacle handle on Madison Street. We'll save that for later in the week. 
     In the meantime, Bruce, now I've grouped together, not only blacks who get paid to support you and Jewish collaborators with the Nazis, but record albums and Target logos, and the Christian cross with the swastika. That ought to keep your campaign busy until the summer.




 


     
    

Divvy Diary: The Running of the Bikes

     “Wabash and Grand has only one dock open,” says Rich Ewalt, checking his phone.

     He sits behind the wheel, parked on Orleans, west of the Merchandise Mart, where he has just picked up seven identical bikes, running as he rolls each heavy three-speed up a metal ramp and into the back of a large Mercedes van, the van painted the same shade of robin’s egg blue as the bikes.

     It’s 10:37 a.m. Ewalt is working at one of the newest jobs in Chicago: He is a Divvy Bike rebalancer.

     The city’s 16,414 Divvy members, who each pay $75 a year for the right to ride any of the program’s 3,000 shared bikes whenever they like it, for a half hour at a time, can’t take a bike from a station if there are no bikes there to be taken. Nor can those riding a Divvy drop it off at a station if every dock is filled.

     Hence the need for “rebalancing” — shuttling bikes to and fro, from full to empty Divvy stations, all day long.

     “These things gotta move,” Ewalt says, pulling into traffic. “They’re filling up fast.”

     Though not as fast now, at midmorning, as earlier, during rush hour, when a station can be stripped of bikes or overwhelmed with them in matter of minutes. The customers howl when that happens.

     “If you’re going to work, you don’t want a full station; that’s not helping. That’s going to take time out your day,” Ewalt says. “We gotta fly in the morning and try to get every station.”
     Without rebalancing, docks at places like Ogilvie Station would always be empty in the mornings and full in the afternoons.
     "Some stations self-balance, and others require our involvement," Divvy GM Elliot Greenberger says. "We use a combination of real-time data and intuition to keep the system balanced. But we're also working with some data scientists to develop more predictive modeling that can help us better anticipate full or empty stations."
     Each Divvy bike contains a chip that talks to the docks, which let the office in West Town know how many bikes are at any given station at any given time. Having worked for Divvy since Day 1 — previously he was a security guard at a sporting goods store — Ewalt usually knows what to do.
     "Weekdays, you definitely have a feel that this station is going to be filled by this time, this station is going to be empty at this time," he says. "You get the same back and forth. I can pretty much handle rebalancing without them calling me. They pretty much let me do my thing. But if a station's been at zero for a bit they'll definitely let us know."
     There are five rebalancing vans out Friday: Divvy has seven; two are idle for repairs. While Ewalt carries rags and solvent to go after graffiti - a growing problem - repairs are left to repair techs. Divvy also has roving bicyclists checking and filling tires.
     At Wabash and Grand, another four bikes go into the van, which holds about 24. Ewalt also runs past every bike and gives its seat a tug to make sure the bike is locked in. Though customers are on the hook for the $1,200 bike from the moment it is pulled out of its dock, a surprising number of customers returning their bikes, Ewalt says, roll their bikes into the rack, but not with sufficient force to have the system lock. Thus, not only could the returned bike be taken by anybody passing by, but the customer is still paying and time is rolling.
     That said, no customer has yet been slapped with a $1,200 fee, nor has Divvy lost many bikes — fewer than 30. When bikes go missing, customers often bird-dog them.
     "Divvy people are out there," Ewalt says. "If they see a Divvy bike in an area it shouldn't be, with no station near it, they'll call in.
     "Lots of times we'll find a homeless person using it as their bike. We'll ask politely, saying, 'We know there are no stations around here, do you mind if we ask your name, because you're riding one of our bikes'? Ten out of 10 times they'll just hand the bikes over. We haven't had a problem.''
     The amazing thing about Ewalt is that he runs, flying out of the van, racing to the racks, grabbing bikes, sometimes two at a time. He was hired after a Divvy manager noticed him hustling boxes at the sporting goods store. Showing off for the media? No way.
     "It's a great workout for me," says Ewalt, 32, who lives in Jefferson Park with his wife and young daughter. He does mixed martial arts. "I love working out. I train at night."
     He also loves the company for which he works.
     "I can't wait to see what it's going to bring."

Envy no man

     Envy no man, because you don't know where he has been, or where he is going.
     It was last June, not a year ago, that I stood in the Hyde Park living room of Amer Ahmad and watched him and his family pray.
      I was writing what was on its surface a simple article: I wanted to look at Chicago Muslims, not through the context of controversy, but through the five prayers that a devout Muslim says every day. The story would start in one place—Fajr, the first prayer, at 4:30 a.m. at the Muslim Education Center in Morton Grove—then jump around the city, meeting Muslims at various prayer times. In the process it would look at Islam in Chicago, and say something about the normality of a faith that still seems strange to many Americans.
     I had been to prayers in public mosques, suburban and downtown. I wanted to get inside someone's home. I happened to be talking to the mayor's press secretary, complaining, as I usually do, about their unhelpfulness. "How about a Muslim city worker?" I asked. They must know of one—hook me up with someone.
    They served up Ahmad, the city comptroller. We had a pleasant conversation over the telephone—an open, intelligent man—and a short time later, one evening after work, I visited his luxurious Hyde Park home: newly rehabbed, tasteful, huge. I met his lovely wife, Samar, and their three adorable young children. Looking around, I felt a pang of envy: THIS guy obviously had life figured out. Cultured. Traveled. He had been to Mecca. A rising star. Obviously money somewhere. HE got to live in this swell house in the heart of Hyde Park, across from the Kenwood Academy. While I'M exiled to my decaying ruin of a suburban farm house, hoarding pennies. 
     I don't want to overstate the case. I didn't gnash my teeth and shake my fist at the sky. More like a sigh, standing on the sidewalk after. Some guys have life figured out...
     Within a month he was at the center of scandal, and had quit his $165,000 a year job. Of course I thought of my visit to his house. Perhaps a connection to write about. And I did have the observation that seemed, perhaps, worth sharing. The question arose last summer: did City Hall know this guy was under suspicion? It seemed clear that the mayor's office probably didn't know he was dirty or they wouldn't be dangling him under the nose of the media. But that seemed pretty thin gruel, and, frankly, I didn't want to draw attention to his being Muslim, because that is irrelevant. There are crooks of every faith, in Islam as in all others, but there are people who would try to make hay with this specific situation, and why toss them fodder?
    Ahmad pleaded guilty to money laundering and receiving kickbacks in Ohio. He is facing 15 years in prison.  That seemed to unhinge him. Since he surrendered his passport, he tried — his wife alleges — to get her to get him a fake passport, and is now on the run, with a warrant out for his arrest. His wife, pictured above, said he has become violent and abusive and has taken out an order of protection because she's worried he'll kidnap their children and flee to Pakistan, where he has family.
     I don't envy him any more.  I hope he turns himself in, finds a way to salvage his life. He seemed a smart man, the hour I spoke with him, explaining how he permitted his daughters to lead the prayers, contrary to strict tradition, but in keeping with the new tradition he was pushing toward. Family was important to Ahmad. I liked him. 
     The house did seem perhaps too nice for a city employee. I wondered about that. But I figured people have money somewhere, from their families. And besides, he was a money guy. Money guys do well. In his case, I guess the house was paid for with the graft money from Ohio. Which meant that I was gazing appreciatively at the tangible manifestation of the ill-gotten gains that would soon destroy his life, and didn't even know it.  
     Stealing was a bad choice, running worse. We all reap the fruit of the choices we make. I hope Ahmad chooses to stop running, report to the authorities, serve his time, and begin the slow crawl back to whatever new life awaits him. Hard work, but it is still possible. Life is a long time, or can be. Me, I'm going to try to remind myself, next time I cast a covetous eye on someone else's glittering lot, that all is not what it appears, and better to put that energy into paddling my own canoe and being content with what I do have, which is plenty and should be enough. Many ills flow from discontent. Better to envy no man. Because you never know where he has been. Or where he is going.

     Update: As of 2021, Amer Ahmad is serving a 15-year prison sentence at Terminal Island, a federal prison in Southern California.
     

Saturday fun: where IS this?

     Now this rock is something frightfully important, obviously. And as much as I'd like to tell you all about this very important object -- you can tell it's important because of the velvet ropes -- I don't want to give the game away.  Last week, I really thought I had you with the abandoned South Works. So mum, really. Except to say ... it's not located in some obscure place, but in a well-known place. You'd know the exterior on sight. You might just not know that this revered piece of stone is there, hiding.
     Since my stock of posters is dwindling — if you want one, buy one, because once they're gone, they're gone — I'll offer the winner a copy of my 2008 (!) memoir, Drunkard. It's a grim story, as I like to tell people, but it ends well. It must be on my mind because so many of my new readers in American's beautiful Southern states have been bringing up various aspects of the book over the past few days, as a result of a burst of momentary notoriety on various right wingnut websites that I've never heard of before and will never hear of again, if I'm lucky. It's a long story and not worth recounting. Good luck, post your guesses below. 

Location guessed! Very impressive — and I'm pleased it took until noon, which meant that it was challenging but not impossible. If you want the answer where this is, click here and you can read about it. Thanks to all. I'll try to find another mildly-tough one next week. 

Racism ended in U.S.! Colleges to judge only by merit

   Two college hunts. Back to back without pause. Even before our high school senior was parading around in a new T-shirt for his future alma mater, we had already begun to aid our junior’s search. Down to Urbana. Up to Milwaukee.

     I suppose some, perhaps many, parents are absentee in this process. Many parents are absentee, period. But we nudged them this far, can’t stop now. So yes, 16 campus visits and counting; 16 speeches of welcome from 16 perky administrators or student hosts. And 16 versions of the following:

     “We are looking for a dynamic, diverse student body. Tell us who you really are, your unique skills and excellence. Because some years, we need a trumpet player in the band, so we wave a few trumpet players in.”

     Last month at Marquette, a student greeter said something like, “We have students from 49 out of 50 states ...” then added, “so if you know somebody from North Dakota, tell ’em to apply.” Everyone laughed. At least I thought it was Marquette; maybe it was U of I; these things blend.

     Either way, is that fair? Should anyone who can complete a form in North Dakota trump some hard-working kid from Illinois or Missouri just to fill a hole in Marquette’s promotional graphic? Of course not. But that is how the strange, random, mysterious, unfair, unscientific, skewed, debated and complex college admissions process works.

     A system that just got stranger, more random, etc. Tuesday, as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Michigan constitutional amendment that says public colleges there can't consider race or sex when admitting students. Trumpet-playing yes, football ability, definitely.  Volunteering, yes. Scores on tests designed to reward certain kinds of smarts? Absolutely. Race and gender? No.
     Because we've all moved past that racial business and are a colorblind nation where all are free to make their own life choices, unfettered by any prejudice or lingering disadvantage. We all start from the same clean slate - it's just some chose to live in an upscale suburb like Northbrook and go to excellent Glenbrook North and study like mad and get a great education, while others prefer to be poor and live in Englewood and see their kids get shot at every weekend.
     Kidding.
     The scary thing, for me, was not so much the Supreme Court quashing affirmative action, which wasn't the ruling. What the majority ruled was worse. They said college race preference is for states to decide, individually, the same states where bigotry smolders through the decades, waiting for the smallest waft of acceptability to burst into flame. If you don't believe that, reacquaint yourself with the choking off of minority voting rights, disguised as preventing nonexistent voter fraud, that the usual suspect states—Florida, Texas, etc.—have recently adopted, because they thought they could get away with it and they were right. Nobody seems to care.
     Now those same states can make it harder for minorities and women to leverage themselves into college, the engine that feeds the middle class. These laws have real results: When California schools became race blind in 1996, the next class of incoming black freshmen fell by 57 percent.
     But that's OK because admissions are based on merit, right? Wrong, as anyone who is going through the process knows, since "merit" belongs in quotation marks. "Merit." It is a social construct, a definition, a game. What is "merit"? The best test scores? On whose test? No college takes the top test takers or top class rank. They want a mixed student body and have reason to strive for balance, especially racial balance. First, diversity reflects who we are and increasingly will be as a country; second, it extends a scarce resource—a diploma—to more groups seeking it; third, and most importantly, it creates a better learning environment for all.
     This is complicated, and I hate trying to wrap it up in fewer than 800 words. For 50 years, the Supreme Court took the lead in transforming colleges, which, left to their own devices, tended to be lily-white enclaves where upper-class kids went to polish the skills they'd need running the world. Being inclusive meant they let in a few Jews. After World War II that changed. Slowly.
     But centuries of oppression were not undone in a few years; it's foolish to pretend otherwise. Access to college is part of the long correction, and colleges will skirt the law, focusing on geography and economics, to achieve the balance they seek. What will be scary is what states cook up next, with the high court's blessing, in their endless effort to return to their beloved past.