Who wants to be a farmer? A lot of Chicagoans would get the choice if Ken Dunn of the Resource Center had his way, reports Holden Frith in Conscious Choice (October). “The time has come for Chicago to commit to the idea of urban agriculture on a citywide scale. Chicago has 6,000 acres of unused land, which he says would support 42,000 full-time jobs if all of it were cultivated.”
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While you weren’t looking, the definition of “natural” changed. Martin Marty quotes Noah Efron (Golem, God, and Man) in his newsletter “Context” (September 15): “Depression or melancholia…has been a part of human culture and a part of many people’s lives, for worse, obviously, and for better. Once a drug like Prozac comes onto the scene and melancholia becomes a matter of choice or it becomes a pathology instead of just an existential condition, then what it means to be human has changed slightly. People can conceivably choose not to use Prozac, but then if you’re despondent it’s because you’ve chosen to do so. And no matter what you choose, you cannot change the fact that despondency, or melancholia, is now generally seen as a disease, abnormal, instead of part of the human condition.”
Well, they call it news. New figures from the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and the Alliance for Better Campaigns, in the ICPR’s October 1 newsletter, “Spot Check”: “TV stations in Illinois’ media markets took in $68.7 million from candidates and ran over 91,000 political ads during the 2002 elections.” Most of the ads we see are 30 or 60 seconds; ICPR’s newsletter says the average news sound bite on stations in the Chicago market is just 12 seconds.
