• Chicago’s downtown is bigger than midtown Manhattan, better-educated than downtown Boston, has more homeowners than any other, and grew faster than downtown Atlanta between 1990 and 2000. More from Penn planning prof Eugenie Birch at the Brookings Institution and at her home school.

  • I know they play a lot more games, but I’m still astonished to learn from Crain’s that the Kane County Cougars (the what who?) put more bodies in the seats than the Bears did last year. Final: Cougars 518,394, Bears 496,965.

  • The astute Salim Muwakkil writes in In These Times that the arrest of “terrorism” suspects in Miami is “a case of governmental entrapment even more threatening than the NSA spying program.” It looks to him like “a reprise of the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program that ran from 1956 to 1971 and was designed to ‘neutralize’ black nationalists and other domestic dissidents.”

  • Are conservatives and libertarians no longer BFF? And why did anyone ever think they could be?

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