Cold weather flames scorch University of Illinois chancellor

     With temperatures predicted to be as low as 15 below zero Monday, many schools canceled classes. The University of Illinois did not. 

     “Classes and operations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will proceed as scheduled Monday, Jan. 27,” Chancellor Phyllis Wise wrote in an email to students, faculty and staff. “Please use caution as you travel in and around campus during what is forecast to be an extremely cold and windy day and night.” 

     A simple communication. But on the Internet, with its easy anonymity and its tendency toward snark, if not outright cruelty, simple things can get complicated quickly. 

     Student complaints immediately began popping up on Twitter. “I’m still not going to class tomorrow,” wrote someone tweeting as “Mr. Wilso.” By 10 p.m., a few students started to vent their ire on Wise who, like all administrators, is not universally popular.

     “Yo Phyllis,” Ryan McGuire wrote. “if people die, that’s on you.” Critical comments were aggregated under the hashtag “#F---Phyllis” — no dashes in the actual tag of course. Wise is both a woman and of Asian descent, and those qualities were remarked upon, sometimes in the same tweet.

     “Asians and women aren’t responsible for their actions,” said one tweet. Another compared her to Kim Jong Un, a third to Hitler.

     Some students started pushing back.

     “Aside from the fact that #F---Phyllis is racist & sexist, I’m sad that more of you don’t have critical thinking skills & a survival instinct,” wrote Mikki Kendall.

     At 2:49 a.m. Monday, the hugely popular social media aggregator BuzzFeed posted a detailed account, setting the whole tawdry Twitter moment in amber, under the headline "After Being Denied A Snow Day, University of Illinois Students Respond With Racism and Sexism."
     It noted that a parody account for Wise "racked up over 1,000 followers in a few minutes" and 7,000 students signed an online petition demanding class be canceled.
     If it weren't for the BuzzFeed article, the Twitter paroxysm over this might not have reached the level of an incident, never mind news. But it did. Wise reacted in an essay posted Thursday on the Inside Higher Ed website. She wrote that making unpopular decisions is part of her job, and while only about a dozen students made comments that were "vulgar, crude and in some instances racist and sexist," the attacks disturbed her not on a personal level, not because they reflect upon the university, but for what they say about the online world.
     "What was most disturbing was witnessing social media drive a discussion quickly into the abyss of hateful comments and even threats of violence," she wrote. "I shudder to think what might happen if that type of vitriol had been directed at a vulnerable member of our student body."
     The Internet is a vast social experiment that has become increasingly pervasive for 20 years. The question is: Will it coarsen society or will society master it, or will the two coexist, as they do now, in uneasy alliance?
     Maybe the problem is that we still pay attention to this stuff. Society was pretty coarse before the Internet. People scrawled slurs and obscenities inside bathroom stalls. It just wasn't considered news.
     The fact is that almost any online comment board can veer into poison and hate. If a 7-year-old is run over by a bus and killed, the comments section afterward will inevitably include, if not be dominated by, people jeering at the child, making catty remarks, crude jokes or dragging in irrelevant topics.
     One can assume these same people would not make those statements directly to the grieving boy's parents, might not even think through the process enough to realize that, of course, they'll read this garbage and be further hurt. Or maybe posters are confident that their anonymity will protect them from repercussions, or just don't care. The solution could be to have people identified on the Web, but that would create a whole new set of problems. You wouldn't want to undercut the next Arab Spring to keep people from posting mean remarks online.
     Wise was in New York on Thursday being honored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The university - though it has a code of student conduct that contains the words "respect for the dignity of others" and claims "It is the policy of the University not to engage in discrimination or harassment against any person because of race, color, religion, sex" - considers the offensive tweets free speech and plans no disciplinary action. Most of the university's 43,000 students went to class Monday. No weather-related injuries were reported.

A study in roasted root vegetables

      Beauty is found in unexpected places. It can strike you while leaning over a pan in the kitchen, such as this arrangement of roasted root vegetables — carrots, onions, garlic, parsnips, plus an eggplant — that my wife was preparing the other day. The color, first: the gentle earth tones, punctuating by the dramatic orange of the carrots. The exclamatory flourishes of the gently purple onion strips. The pale green sprigs of rosemary.  The juxtaposition too — the varying sizes of the circles, the uniform distribution of the types and colors—she had shaken them up in a bag with olive oil—which actually holds something of a key because, in my opinion, something beautiful carries a secret message, a meaning, locked in its physical attraction, hidden there, waiting to be figured out. In this case it is in the uniform distribution of the vegetables. Notice that they are not piled in the pan, but lain — none overlap, except for a few of those exuberant onions. Which means, when you pause to consider it, that somebody — my wife — did not cut and carelessly dump those discs of vegetables into a pan, willy nilly, but carefully set each slice in, just so, to be roasted with the maximum efficiency and effect, so no vegetable would shield another, leaving it undercooked. So an element is the care about ordinary things, about small details, which is itself beautiful and that the vegetables wordlessly reflect. And finally a kind of innocence. Just as a model, heavily made up and posing for a magazine fashion photo tends not to have the kind of unforgettable loveliness that someone caught off guard at the exact perfect moment can, so there was an unconsciousness to this study in root vegetables, an innocent joy. When I said, "Wait here for a second, let me get my camera," my wife, who had just created this tableau, had no idea what on God's earth I'd be photographing. She stood with puzzled patience as a I snapped a few shots, then told her she could put the pan back in the oven — another minute, not quite roasted to perfection. Only when I showed her the picture did she say, "Ohhh."
     Of course, like most men, I underestimate the work and deliberation that women put into creating something beautiful. When I ran my accidental arrangement theory by my wife, she replied, "I always cook according to color..." Not so accidental after all. 

Divvy Diary: "The air felt almost solid"

     A balaclava cuts your peripheral vision, which is just as well, because that helps with the and-away-we-go swan dive of trust you must execute to make a left turn in rush-hour traffic on a Divvy bike from Lake Street onto Wacker Drive. A quick leftward jerk of the head, more symbolic ritual than actual glance to see if you’re about to be creamed by a truck. 

     Tuesday morning, 9 a.m., five degrees below zero. I had considered staying home. But our mighty nation was not forged by men staying home, padding around in their slippers and keeping track of the temperature on The Weather Channel. So even though, stepping out the door, the air felt almost solid — something jellied, frozen — I took a big searing lungful and headed toward the train station. 

     Being outside for more than a minute was like doing the breaststroke in liquid nitrogen. At first. But you get used to anything. 

     The Metra gods were smiling, and we got downtown only 20 minutes late (going home, it would be 40 minutes late). Finding out whether Divvy was up and running seemed a doable cold-weather task. Three weeks ago, when it was minus 15, they shut the system down — to protect Divvy workers, they said. But it was 10 degrees warmer now and besides, there is a certain boy-who-cried-wolf quality to official reaction to extreme weather conditions the second time around. The first is expected. The next seems unnecessary, an awkward blend of timidity and luxury. Chicago Public Schools leaders were denounced for closing too tardily earlier in the month and risking children’s lives, then damned again this week for closing at all, with aldermen idly speculating that the schools should be kept open as a day care center for kids whose parents have to work. Bad idea. If you’re going to do that, you might as well keep the schools open and teach the kids who show up. Remember, on an average day, 9 percent of CPS kids don’t come to school whatever the weather. It would be nice to think that parents concerned their kids might freeze on the way to school due to the extraordinary weather would keep them home while the rest could go. But if CPS could rely on that level of parental oversight and discernment, then half its problems would be solved.

     The first bike port outside Ogilvy Station stayed red, and I thought the system was down. What kind of weaklings and cowards are running this thing? But the next: green. While I rolled my bike out, a second heavily bundled idiot, to my surprise, took one too.

     “Nice day for it,” I said, always the conversationalist, and he grunted something through his face mask and yanked the bike. 

     I eased the blue bomber onto Canal and began pedaling north. Traffic backed up turning right onto Lake, and I threaded my way forward. Riding a Divvy in subzero weather is like whitewater rafting or exploring a cave — something that sounds a lot more daring than it actually is. The trip took five minutes versus 15. I never felt cold because my full attention was focused on not being crushed by a cab. The streets are dry.

     Since last I wrote about Divvy, the Montreal-based supplier of the bikes and assorted docks and systems, the Societe de Velo en Libre-Service, called “Bixi” for short (a mash of “bike” and “taxi”), filed for bankruptcy, claiming $46 million in debt, in part because two disgruntled customers, Chicago and New York, withheld $5 million due to problems with the software. The middleman between the city and Bixi, Alta Bike Share of Portland, Ore., insists the mother ship’s financial woes won’t affect the bikes. Perhaps, but it already has affected the perception of the system, from cheery civic embellishment to potential parking-meter-scale disaster. Or maybe it’s just me being cranky; I like the bikes and would hate to see the system fall apart. 

     While I was on the topic, I checked with the city to see if we’re any closer to having a sponsor for Divvy. New York got $42 million from Citibank to brand its bike system. Chicago got nothing. The city says it’s more complicated than that.

     “We got $25 million in federal grant money that paid for the initial build-out of the system,” said Peter Scales, Chicago Department of Transportation spokesman. “Because we had those grants, we didn’t need a sponsor at the outset to fund the equipment purchases and were able to establish a brand that was uniquely Chicago.”

     I guess. Though I don’t see why the city couldn’t have gotten both the federal cash and a lucrative sponsor. With all our money woes, are we not monetizing whatever we can? The new bike share system should have been a no-brainer. Scales said the city is still looking for a sponsor, which strikes me as sort of late. But better late than never. 

The NATO 3 farce

    When the NATO protests were going on in Chicago, in May, 2012, I thought they were, for the most part, pointless street theater by young people looking to inject a little drama into their lives by splashing around in ours. They weren't particularly worked up about NATO per se, not about Western nations banding together in a defensive organization—that's what NATO supposedly is—so much as complaining generally about living in a 21st century Western capitalist society. The protest seemed an unfocused Mardi Gras, the prom for the Occupy Chicago movement, then still camped at at LaSalle and Jackson, demanding, well, something. Attention. Thus the protests splintered off into all sorts of tangental issues, like the people who lay down in the street off Michigan Avenue and covered themselves with chocolate syrup to decry, if I recall correctly, some kind of coal tar pollution somewhere in Canada.
     As with Richard J. Daley in 1968, the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanual, made the situation worse through his heavy-handedness, trying to push through City Council all sorts of new regulations that would hamstring protesters and saddle them with huge fines. They seemed a match set, the big talking protesters hot for attention, and the cautious mayor, afraid of grungy kids getting their messy fingerprints all over his shiny World Class City.
      So the marchers marched, the cops watched, the world yawned and the meetings transpired more or less without major incident.
      Just when the whole thing is beginning to recede into memory, comes the official prosecution of the "NATO 3," a trio of Floridian mopes arrested after boasting to undercover Chicago policemen about shooting arrows and slingshots, for making molotov cocktails under the cops' close supervision.
     As my colleague Mark Brown has crisply pointed out in a series of columns, even fanned by vigorous police cheerleading, the weak mopery of the defendants hardly approaches the level of crime, never mind terrorism. 
     But just as Occupy Chicago served a purpose, almost despite itself: to hold a mirror to the inequities in our society, and draw attention to aspects we comfortable lumpenproletariat choose to ignore, so these supposed terrorist cases have value, too. They give pause to the thinking citizen, highlighting a continuing danger to our freedoms: overzealous policing. Notice the ponds where the government is  always fishing for terrorists -- in protest groups, in mosques, in coffee shops (laughably targeting the granola and patchouli oil anachronism of the Heartland Cafe, as Mark also chronicles). You have to wonder, if the feds started infiltrating church groups and paramilitary organizations, how easy would it be to goad a few soft-minded fools to tip-toe up to illegal acts and then be arrested. My bet: pretty easy.
      None of these people on trial are Lex Luthor, none did any harm, despite their big talk, and while a sentient government would have slapped them on the wrist and turned them loose long ago, we do not have that government, and thus they face decades in prison. Frankly, the prosecution is a good thing, because it reminds us that those protests, despite their ludicrous street-theater aspects, did have a point, lurking under all the hyperventilating hyperbole. Power corrupts. The Chicago cops are trying to rationalize all the effort they put into skulking around hotbeds of 1960s activism by bagging this trio. Is there anybody following this case who is sincerely hoping these guys are taken off the street? Anybody who thinks three prison spaces should be used for them, and not for more dangerous actual criminals? Last time I looked, bad intentions were not a crime. If they were, we'd all be in prison at one point or another.

Chicago the best spot for Obama library

     

David Axelrod already has quite an assemblage of Obama memorabilia here.

     We in the inky newspaper trade are famous for disdaining our brethren in public relations. Though, having dipped my toe in that world, I know there are lessons for us there: Be direct. Be honest. Address the elephant in the room.

     And as someone who often tasks himself with the trick of making something that is interesting to me also interesting to the average reader, I use a PR technique: When you’ve got a dull story to tell, marry it to something interesting. Think of it as the Spoonful of Sugar Trick. The best example of this is when Dramamine, the motion-sickness pill, created a roller coaster team and sent it across the country, knowing that news organizations that would shrug off a mere nausea medication jostle to set up their cameras at dawn to catch a group of attractive young folk pitting themselves against the local theme park’s coasters.

     Thus when I found myself trying to tell what is perhaps the most tedious story ever committed to a book — the death of the men’s hat industry, in Hatless Jack, I thought to tell it to through a subject that people actually did care about: John F. Kennedy who, despite popular impression, was actually the last American president inaugurated in a silk top hat.

     The book involved a lot of research, from the Library of Congress to the British Library in London. I flew to Boston to spend a few days beavering in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and so, as somebody who has actually used a presidential library, I ought to put my two cents in regarding Barack Obama’s future library.

     Lynn Sweet wrote Friday about the mayor’s efforts to bring the library here, and how the library is “the University of Chicago’s to lose given its very close ties to the Obama family and its long list of wealthy potential donors in the Obama orbit.”

     Those factors are significant. But I want to toss another reason into the hopper, based on experience: Chicago must get it because Chicago is the best location.
     God bless Hawaii. I'm sure it's very nice, particularly this time of year. Obama was born there, we can all agree (actually we can't, and there's a book in that, one that will be researched here at the Obama library).
     But Hawaii is nothing if not off the beaten path. When I went to the Kennedy library, I dug in my pocket, bought a ticket, booked myself into a hotel. Had it been in Hawaii, I guarantee you, I wouldn't have bothered. Chicago is in the center of the country.
     Sweet also mentioned Columbia University in New York. Obama can't put his library there because, having been on campus in August, I can report: There's no room. Columbia is shoehorned in as it is. You couldn't add a coffee shop. Were there a spot to build it, the cost would be extraordinary. Chicago has lots of affordable land around Hyde Park to create a worthy edifice for Obama.
     Those of you used to yanking information off the Internet might wonder: Who cares where the library is? Won't everything in it just be online? Answer: No. Just as the mass of hieroglyphics in the basement of the Oriental Institute have never been translated, so much, maybe most material in a presidential library will be unscanned, papers and documents and notes and letters.
     There was a moment of research glory in the Kennedy library I'll never forget. My hat book begins with a man standing up and waving a clipping during a 1962 stockholder meeting for the Hat Corporation of America. I found the scene in a 1962 Wall Street Journal story. I knew a few details, no more.
     In Boston, I was going through envelopes containing letters of complaint to Kennedy, randomly searching for stuff about hats. And here was a letter to his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, demanding to know why the president was posing for fashion spreads. In the letter, a folded up rectangle of newspaper that I immediately realized was the exact same clipping being waved on the first page of my book. Right there. I could look at it, study it, use it. I gasped, overjoyed.
     People come to cities for many reasons. Millennium Park and the big stainless steel bean come to mind. Rahm Emanuel is right to grab that library. Not only is it good for the city, good for the U. of C. neighborhood, but it'll be good for the researchers who must use it. Fifty years from now, some young man writing Doorjamb-Gnawingly Insane: Those Who Hated Barack Obama will paw through boxes of handbills and letters and hand-carved hate effigies that are brought to him. Unless the stuff really is all scanned online, and then I suppose you can put the library on Mars and it wouldn't matter. But we still want it here, the only logical spot to honor our logical president.

To survive it at all is a triumph of the heart

Extra clothing I wore to go out into the cold last week:

Keen hiking boots
SmartWool socks
Under Armour long underwear 
Fleece lined spandex long underwear top
Snowpants
Eddie Bauer Ridgeline Parka
REI Fleece
Scarf
Polo undergloves
Ski gloves
Spandex skullcap
Polarctic hood
Ear muffs

Extra clothing my 16-year-old son wore:






                                                                    *


     The realization hit me as he blew past with a "Bye pop!" I was on the curb, dressed for the South Pole, walking the dog, in her own little blonde fur coat. My boy was being picked up by our neighbors, carpooling. He had a backpack slung rakishly over his shoulder. But no gloves. No hat. No boots. A grey t-shirt under a Patagonia spandex long-sleeved top. Jeans. White sneakers. 
     "Have a good day at school," I called after him.
     My wife would have ordered him to wear a coat, pointlessly, even as he was driven away. But I gave that battle up long ago. Suffer the consequences of your actions. Be cold then.
     He obviously feels it is a small price to pay for whatever psychic warmth he gets from being underdressed.
     Maybe the joy of not being like me. That must be part of it. 
     Yes, there is a practical difference in what we are dressing for. The day is the same. But I have to walk, not just the dog, but later the 12 minutes across the Loop, from Union Station to the Sun-Times. When the wind chill is 20 below, that can be a very long 12 minutes. He only has to stumble the few feet from the house to the curb, the car to the school. My trip is like the ordeal in a Jack London story; his, a frigid flash, like a helmetless Dr. David Bowman blasting through the emergency airlock in "2001: A Space Odyssey." He isn't outside for 15 seconds.
      But there is also a deeper philosophical difference. I think he would walk the mile to school like that. In fact, he has, not quite in this weather, but nearly. And at Glenbrook North, all the boys dress like him. I see them, standing outside the school, hands thrust in jeans, hunched over, waiting for their rides. They would die before they would put on a puffy parka like mine. 
     Why? Trying to be tough. To be cool. Defying the cold, challenging it.
     To be young, which means challenging life, where you can. Making yourself cold is a perfect example—a test without true consequences. They don't really freeze. It only feels that way.
     Me, I don't want to be cold anymore. Been there, done that. Trying to be cool is like making faces at a tree. There's nobody to impress. And I see the true cold awaiting me, the eternal cold that awaits us all. No need to rush to meet it early. The people I see downtown gloveless, hatless, benumbed, are careless. "It's never too cold in Chicago," I rebuke them, when they complain on the elevator. "You're just underdressed."
     That said,. teens have a different code. I can admire the resolve that my boy shows -- I don't argue with him, I've spent too many years doing that. He's 16, he can dress as he pleases. 
     Standing at the curb, bundled thickly, watching the car drive off, holding the leash to a ridiculous little dog, I thought — my apologies — of a few lines from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus:

                                Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened
                                like winter, which even now is passing.
                                For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
                                that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

     "Like winter, which even now is passing." Now that's a cheery thought in this deep freeze. And the days are getting longer -- people remark upon it. No more midnight murk at 5 p.m. It doesn't descend until 5:30 p.m.
     Though it's still cold as hell. Well, not quite. I expect hell to be colder. Until then, the cold is a challenge to us all, to keep going, as if it weren't happening. A challenge to adults dressed for it, and to the younger folk who are not, but instead defy the cold, out of pride, and as practice, to hone their ability to face a cold world, a hard world that will certainly crumple them up too, and leave them old, in layers of wool and fleece and cotton, shuffling stiffly through the frozen Chicago winter, savoring it, or trying to, even the coldest winter in 20 years, knowing that that with all its depth and length, the cold will not last—nothing lasts—and the winter of 2014 is neither cold nor long, not compared to the endless winters lying in wait for all of us, young and old. Let's enjoy it, best we can, if we can, while we can.


Postscript: Sunday morning, bagels and cream cheese,  orange juice and smoked fish. Mozart on the stereo. My wife and younger son — the older still asleep of course. Son II and I get up to shovel and, getting dressed, I mention that today's blog post is, in part, about getting dressed for the cold.  It isn't as if he'd ever read it. My wife says something along the lines of: we adults have more experience, more savvy.
     "That's only part of it," I say to her. "He's testing himself against the world. I've already tested myself against the world, and..."
     "Lost," my 16-year-old interjects. 
     Another dad might go for his belt. That's not the kind of ship I run. Besides, we all know where he gets it from. "Yes," I reply. "Exactly."

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Great theater awaits up a steep staircase

     When the weather is this lousy, the tendency is to cocoon, to stay inside, climb under the covers and not go out for any reason. That's a mistake, particularly if where you're not going is to see live Chicago theater. Because usually it's something worthwhile, even great, each production an experience that is here for a short time, then gone forever.

     A reader sent me an email about Divvy. “Have you tried taking your bike on the el?” he wrote, signing it, “David Zak, executive director, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, Jan. 9 to Feb. 9.”

     I wrote back that, with only 30 minutes use, muscling a Divvy on the L is a bad idea, adding, “Where are you doing ‘The Children’s Hour’? I’ve always wanted to see it.”

     All I knew about “The Children’s Hour” was that it is about teachers accused of being lesbians. I never had a burning desire to see it, filing it away with “Waiting for Lefty” under “1930s Plays I Haven’t Seen.”         

     But I like to check off classics, the way some men visit various ballparks. Zak said it was playing at the Collaboraction in Wicker Park. Which for some reason did not dissuade me from attending.

     “Collaboraction” doesn’t quite scream “grab those tickets and go,” does it? I wish every bright-eyed fledgling Chicago drama type forming a new theater tempted to call it “The Rectal Itch Players,” or “SaveTheWorld,” or whatever edgy name they think up over a couple of bottles of red wine, would consider tired suburbanites pondering whether to haul themselves off the sofa and attend. (I’d call mine “The Comfy Chair Theater,” but people would think we did only Monty Python. Maybe the “Ample Parking Playhouse.” We suburbanites worry a lot about parking).

     My wife and I parked easily near the Collaboraction (shiver) and happily strolled up Milwaukee Avenue to the Flatiron Arts Building, curiously goggling all the tattoo parlors, yoga studios and other marginal enterprises exuding warm life. I gotta get out of the Loop more, thought I. Climbing the stairs to the Collaboraction (no, let me guess, for "Action through Collaboration," and since "Acticollab" sounds like a kind of staph infection, "Collaboraction" it was).
     The Collaboraction ( bleh) space is what you'd expect—rambling and dirty and cluttered, with sliding metal doors and strange offices and walls jammed with student (God, I hope) artworks. In the theater itself, some 50 chairs around a neat, spare set. The lights dimmed.      
     My expectations were zero.
     And then the damnedest thing happened.
     The play began.
     "The Children's Hour" is about two woman running a school who are accused by the original mean girl of being lesbians. The teachers, played by Britni Tozzi and Whitney Morse, undergo an amazing transformation from calm authority figures deftly managing their crew of chatty students, to broken victims of cruel events outside their control. Theater on this scale leaves no distance—the actors were 5 feet away—and you could study their faces: Tozzi's streaming with tears and black mascara, Morse's frozen with shock. Michelle McKenzie-Voight was marvelous as Mrs. Lily Mortar, the clueless old biddy who starts all the trouble, one of those performers so good you just assume she's really like that.
     Chicago is so rich in theater, but most of the attention goes to the Steppenwolf and the Goodman and the big Loop Broadway shows. But the truth is you can blunder up almost any staircase, by utter chance, and see something really extraordinary. I had been reluctant to go to "The Children's Hour" because it involved leaving the house, and now it is an experience I will never forget. It scared me to think that I might have missed it. Don't. "The Children's Hour" runs until Feb. 9, and if you're wondering if the 80-year-old play seems dated, the bad news is: not at all. The front page of The New York Times on Thursday had a story about teachers being fired because they're gay.