Chicago - A message from the station manager

The [Wednesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

1. “I wanted to be a journalist from age 16 onward, and I wanted to cover education – but before that, I thought I would be a poet or a novelist,” says Chalkbeat CEO Elizabeth Green.

I signed up for my high school newspaper, because it seemed like the practical thing for an aspiring poet or novelist to do. One day, I was doing this assignment about “hallway behavior.” You know, a typical high school newspaper topic: “Is it okay to have PDA in the hall?” I interviewed a bunch of different people in the cafeteria during lunchtime, and one of them was this girl who I’ll never forget – I remember her name and everything. She totally changed my life. I was interviewing her, and she started talking about how everyone assumed that she’d drop out of school and become a welfare mom. She said, “That’s what people expect of me, and I work hard because I want to prove them wrong.” I said, “Who do you want to prove wrong?” And she looked me right in the eye and said, “You.”

In that moment, a lot of things happened for me. I started thinking differently about my school, which was very diverse. I’m white, and I was in the minority. My parents had both gone to college, and everyone assumed I would go to college. And here I was sitting down with this student, who was the same age as me, from the same town – Silver Spring, Maryland – with very similar goals and dreams. But the opportunities available to us to pursue those dreams looked completely different, because she was Hispanic and her parents hadn’t gone to college.
I changed that story topic from “hallway behavior” to Hispanic youth in my high school, and that was the first of several stories I wrote for the student newspaper about academic inequality. It felt so powerful to lift up that student’s voice – so that I wasn’t the only one who heard it, so that I wasn’t the only one who experienced that moment of reckoning and confrontation, and so that we could have a difficult conversation as a community. I saw the power of writing stories like that one, and I’ve wanted to keep doing that ever since. I also realized that my craft was not poetry, but journalism. Which is good, because I sucked as a poet anyway.

2. “In back of Brentano Elementary, by the school’s playground and bright green turf field, there’s a cluster of apartment buildings that say a lot about Logan Square,” writes Mina Bloom for Block Club Chicago.

All six buildings – the only ones you can really see from the back of the school – have been renovated within the last several years, according to school principal Seth Lavin. In each case, developers bought the properties, rehabbed the apartments and hiked up the rent, forcing out residents who could no longer afford them, many of them Hispanic.
Among the residents driven out of their homes were Brentano parents who, for years, and sometimes generations, lived just yards away from their kids’ neighborhood school. When the rent went up, those families moved away. Some found new schools, while others managed to keep their kids at Brentano, long bus rides and all.
“Gentrification has made it very difficult for our families who lived here and grew up here to stay in this school,” Lavin said. “Our families work so hard to stay Brentano families. We see the housing costs in the neighborhood making that harder every year.”

3. “The comedian Tig Notaro, who chronicled her cancer diagnosis in a special that also changed her life, said she was ‘utterly floored’ by Ms. Gadsby’s hourlong show,” writes Melena Ryzik for the New York Times.

“Nanette should be required viewing if you’re a human being,” she wrote in an e-mail. “It really takes days to take in everything she presented, to fully comprehend it all.”

Apparently there wasn’t time for Notaro and Ryzik to connect by phone.

Josh Thomas, a young Australian star who hired Ms. Gadsby as a writer and performer on his TV series Please Like Me, about a young man coming out, thought that as a gay man with a supportive family himself, he had it easy.
“But then,” he wrote in an e-mail, “I see storytelling like Hannah’s, where she rages about the homophobia in the world, and I cry and I realize that I grew up with so much shame.”

Apparently Ryzik doesn’t have a phone. It seems to be going around. Maybe we start a GoFundMe for reporters not being supplied with phones?
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Or maybe it’s something else: Phonophobia sweeps journalism!
4. A Chicago Tribune Columnist Thinks Helping Opioid Users Is ‘Accommodating’ Them.
5. The Kind Of Misuse Of State Property America Needs.
6.” Federal jury deliberations are expected as early as today in IBM v. Groupon, a case closely watched by the tech industry,” according to Law.com’s Morning Minute.

IBM’s $166 million lawsuit in Delaware alleges Groupon Inc. infringed on four patents that date back to the early days of the Internet. IBM argues that Groupon built its business model, despite prior warnings, using IBM’s patents for online password management and advertising. At least 10 companies – including Go Daddy, Facebook and Twitter – have moved to intervene in the suit to protect confidential information related to agreements they had with IBM.

7. “P.F. Chang’s China Bistro Inc. workers have asked an Illinois federal court to greenlight a $2.65 million agreement to settle claims the restaurant chain shortchanged its tipped employees on their wages in violation of federal and state labor laws,” reports Danielle Nichole Smith for Law360.
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Similarly: Chicago Servers, Bartenders Swindled Out of More Than $30M in Tips by Restaurant Group: Lawsuit.
8. Wisconsin’s Decisive Shift Towards The Dairy Cow.
9. Déjà Voodoo: Pharma’s Promises To Curb Drug Prices Have Been Heard Before.
10. “The Palos Park tool company behind the Bionic Wrench is no longer in line to receive millions of dollars in damages after Sears and its supplier prevailed in a patent lawsuit,” reports Lauren Zumbach for the Tribune.

A federal jury in Chicago last year awarded LoggerHead Tools nearly $6 million in damages after finding that Sears and supplier Apex Tool Group willfully infringed on two of LoggerHead’s patents.
LoggerHead sued Hoffman Estates-based Sears Holdings Corp. and Maryland-based Apex in 2012, claiming Sears’ Craftsman-brand locking wrench was a “virtual copy” of its Bionic Wrench, an adjustable-size wrench with a plierslike grip, according to the lawsuit. Sears used to sell the LoggerHead product until it introduced the cheaper Craftsman-brand wrench, the lawsuit said.
Sears and Apex challenged the verdict last year, arguing that the judge made an error interpreting LoggerHead’s patent and a feature LoggerHead used to distinguish its wrench from existing products.
Apex had designed the Craftsman wrench to avoid infringing on the LoggerHead patent, said Mark Sernel, an attorney for Apex and Sears.
A federal judge who took over the case after the prior judge died last year agreed with Sears and Apex and ordered a new trial. Both sides asked the court to reconsider and decide the case without a new trial.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer sided Friday with Sears and Apex “because no reasonable jury could conclude” that the Craftsman wrench infringed on LoggerHead’s patents, she wrote in a court order.

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ChicagoGram


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ChicagoTube
The Origins Of Chicago Hip-Hop With Kevin Coval.

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BeachBook
Gary Orfield via Bill Ayers:

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TweetWood
A sampling.


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The Beachwood Tronc Line: Just in time.

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Posted on July 25, 2018