CHICAGO — Here's what we're reading on this sunny Tuesday.
Chewbacca's No Fool: A few weeks ago, reporter Ariel Cheung noticed flyers advertising a Chewbacca roar contest posted around Lakeview. Turns out the flyers were an April Fools' Day prank by a girlfriend with a great sense of humor (high five, gurrl). But after getting a rash of impressive Chewy calls, TouchVision decided to upgrade the prank and host an actual contest. The results would make any Wookie proud.
College Prof Fails Entire Class: A professor at Texas A&M Galveston failed the entire class in his management course and called it "a disgrace to the school" after he said he required “security guards” for him to feel safe teaching, according to CBS Houston. According to the report, professor Irwin Horwitz said "students were spreading untrue online rumors about his wife and that he felt threatened enough ... that he required police protection." Senior Editor Justin Breen would like to know how many students were in the class, which the report said Irwin will no longer be teaching.
Why Kids Riot: It's been a brutal 24 hours on the internet. Everyone has something to say and a lot of that talk is aggressive or racist or just plain irritating. DNAinfo's Jen Sabella suggests reading this piece about what young people in Baltimore face every day: high rates of poverty, violence and depression. Vocativ explains that youth living in impoverished places like Nigeria are actually better off than poor Baltimore kids:
“When you think about poor adolescents, you may instantly think of a child in Africa because there are poorer countries there, but it’s not really the country that is important,” Dr. Kristen Mmari, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, told Vocativ. “Right here in Baltimore, we have kids who are much worse off than those in African cities. The inner-city kids who are exposed to all this violence are who we should be thinking about.”
Catholic charge: Pope Francis has American conservatives who contest climate change "nervous," says a report in the Boston Globe recommended by senior editor Andrew Herrmann. The pope is preparing what's being described as "a highly influential encyclical on environmental degradation and the effects of human-caused climate change on the poor." The pope's message will be followed by a 12-week campaign by the Catholic church on "environmental stewardship" in homilies, media interviews, and letters to the editor. Among those "angered": the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, "a libertarian group partly funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation, run by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers, who oppose climate policy."
Cute and Cuddly Creepy Crawlers: Two new species of spiders have been discovered in Australia and they look like something straight out of Pixar's central casting. Maratus jactatus, aka "Sparklemuffin," has luminescent blue and red strips on its belly. Maratus sceletus, aka "Skeletorus," has black and white markings that look like ... wait for it ... a skeleton. Reporter Patty Wetli isn't saying she'd like to meet either of these creatures in the dusty, dark corner of her closet but is brave enough to warmly welcome them to the family of carbon life forms in the pages of a scientific paper.
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