CHICAGO — Here's what we're reading today.
Pay Moshe's Rent: Comedian Moshe Kasher is asking his fans to pay his rent. "Again, to be super clear, rent is never a slight problem for me to afford. But it is a huge inconvenience. I like my money and I want to keep it. I want to keep it very much," Kasher says on his GoFundMe page. It's a clever lampooning of wealthy celebrities who ask their fans to fund their pet projects and it has reporter Sam Cholke chuckling (though is he required to read it because Kasher's wife, comedian Natasha Leggero, is also from Rockford, Ill., and there are the "Rockford Rules," which are too lengthy to explain here).
Kids These Days: Senior editor Andrew Herrmann — who as a teen toiled many summers hauling hide-a-beds to the top of Chicago three-flats — is reading how an "improving economy and falling unemployment" is making it easier for kids to get summer jobs. Except, the kids don't want 'em.
An exec with the Chicago placement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas said that since the mid-70s, fewer and fewer young people get jobs when school lets out. They're not lazy, insists Andrew Challenger: "Today, teachers are expected to do three hours of homework a night, participate in extracurricular activities, be on a sports team, do plays. So, when summer rolls around they need a break." Still, Challenger says, those kids are missing out on some life lessons. Like, don't buy a hide-a-bed if you live on the top floor of a walk-up.
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A Brutal Rape Goes Unpunished: Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times revisited the rape of a 14-year-old girl in Robbins, Ill. She managed to survive a brutal rape and attempted drowning in 1991, but her rape kit went untested by the corrupt police department. The piece includes an interview with Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who describes the trainwreck he walked into when the sheriff took over the Robbins department more than a decade later:
"Dart says that Robbins once hired a police officer who supposedly had worked in the Los Angeles Police Department. His evidence of previous employment was a photocopy of an L.A.P.D. badge — and only after he was hired did someone look closely and see that it was just a printout of Sgt. Joe Friday’s badge from the television show 'Dragnet.'"
DNA testing done on the girl's kit by the sheriff's office found that a serial sex offender was her attacker. But the statute of limitations had run out. Her rapist still walks free.
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