CHICAGO — Here's what DNAinfo Chicago staff is reading, from Chicago neighborhoods to a certain notorious compound in Pakistan.
Tell Us How You Really Feel: Whole Foods Sauganash's plan to buy the parking lot north of its store at 6020 N. Cicero Ave. is a "highly wasteful" project, according to an article in Streetsblog Chicago by Michael Podgers that reporter Heather Cherone is reading. The grocery chain plans to renovate the lot to create a community gathering space and ease a parking crunch. Although Ald. Margaret Laurino (39th) and city officials have already blessed the plan, Sauganash would be better served with more multi-unit housing, as originally planned before the Great Recession wiped out the project, Podgers argues. In addition, Podgers blasts Whole Foods for betraying its pledge to "reduce waste and consumption of non-renewable resources" when there is plenty of underground parking available for shoppers. A Laurino representative told Streetsblog the alderman was confident that project was the right fit for the area.
A rendering of what Whole Foods Sauganash's parking lot could look like after it is renovated. [Whole Foods Market]
Hit the Road, Kids: Getting back to college, or getting your kid back to college, in Illinois would be a lot harder under cuts proposed by Gov. Bruce Rauner. Senior editor Andrew Herrmann is reading a Lee Newspapers report of how reps from the state's biggest colleges showed up at a state legislative committee on Tuesday to gripe about Rauner's proposal to slash subsidies to Amtrak by some 40 percent. Illinois State University president Larry Deitz said more than 55 percent of the student body at the Bloomington Normal school come from the Chicago area, many of whom count on the train to get there. Carbondale mayor John Henry said Southern Illinois University is trying to grow enrollment and "cutting Amtrak's funding would seriously hinder these efforts."
How to Join the 1 Percent: A book about the 1 percent turns out to be an instruction manual for joining the upper echelons of power. The Economist's review of “Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs" by Lauren Rivera of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management describes a step-by-step guide to the top. The instructions are pretty simple: Go to an Ivy League university, apply for a job in management consulting, investment banking or law and then crush it in the interview. Sam Cholke is curious how the style-over-substance approach the book describes extends to those outside the Ivies that get a foot in the door at "diversity events."
What Osama bin Laden read: The feds released the list of books that were on Osama bin Laden's compound bookshelf before the terrorist mastermind was killed by U.S. Special Forces in Pakistan, in a story reporter David Matthews is reading in MarketWatch. The list is sparse on fiction, with bin Laden apparently preferring books on American foreign policy by journalists including Bob Woodward, as well as literature on The Illuminati secret society and other conspiracy theories. The document release by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence followed an extensive federal interagency review.
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