Which city has the most fragmented government? Not Chicago. In American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality Minnesota state senator and polymath Myron Orfield tabulates census data to show that the metropolitan area with the most county, municipality, and township governments per 100,000 residents is Pittsburgh, with 17.7. Chicago places ninth, with only 6.6. Least fragmented, by this measurement, are San Diego (0.7) and Los Angeles and Phoenix (both 1.2).
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Things you can’t do by the numbers. Writing in Commonweal (June 15), Margery Frisbie recalls that the late Monsignor John Egan–revered for “enfranchising lay people, women, blacks, Jews, Muslims, the poor, and the homeless”–almost didn’t qualify for the priesthood because Greek and Latin were too hard for him at Quigley Preparatory Seminary. “Egan, you didn’t quite make it,” Father George Beemsterboer told him. “But I’m shading your grades a few points because we need priests who are kind more than we need priests who know Latin.”
Time travel. Marlin Bowles of the Morton Arboretum, quoted in Chicago Wilderness (Summer): “Wolf Road Prairie is the one place where you can look at a line drawn by the Public Land Survey people in the 1820s and then go there and still see the same prairie-timber boundary that they saw. That gives me goose bumps.”
