This week's guest is Austan Goolsbee, a former economic advisor to President Barack Obama, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and currently the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. As the pandemic has surged, Goolsbee’s been keeping a close eye on the major questions confronting our economic future: inflation, supply chain and the future of work. We recorded on the afternoon of Jan. 14, when Chicago and Illinois seemed to be showing a dip in COVID cases, but already, the economic signs for January were pointing downward. Goo ..read more

Chicago is poised to end 2021 with more than 800 homicides, the most violent year in a quarter century. Discussing the rising violence is Susan Lee, chief of strategy and policy at Chicago CRED – an anti-gun violence organization. CRED works with men at risk – of being shooting victims or becoming a shooter themselves. It connects them with cognitive behavioral therapy, life coaching and job opportunities, conducts street outreach to defuse conflict and broker peace agreements between rivals, and advocates for more funding for programs like theirs. Preliminary studies suggest CRED and similar ..read more

On this week's episode of A.D. Q&A, Dr. Emily Landon, a professor and the medical director for infection prevention and control at UChicago Medicine, describes what we know – and don't yet know – about omicron. "On paper, it looks like a superpredator," Landon says of the variant, which appears more transmissible and less susceptible to vaccines. It will take days or weeks to know how it affects more vaccinated populations. "What we need to know is how fast this spreads and how well it does in, basically, a cage match against delta. Then how effective vaccines really are with it." Ideally ..read more

While we’re thinking about big Thanksgiving meals, few folks in Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration have more on their plates than Samir Mayekar, deputy mayor for economic and neighborhood development, a.k.a. the mayor’s business guy. He’s a Day One Lightfooter who came from the tech world, running a Bronzeville-based lithium battery materials startup called NanoGraf. Now he’s the go-to in the administration on a series of key agenda items: the Chicago casino, the city’s post-COVID recovery, development programs like Invest South West, and keeping a watchful eye on the city’s growth ..read more

If you read Crain’s, you’ve probably spent a good amount of time thinking about the future of work – e-commerce, automation and telecommuting. Even if you don’t spend much time thinking about it, it’s abundantly clear that covid has rapidly accelerated those trends. Remote schooling and telehealth became necessities. Online shopping that might’ve been limited to clothes or homewares pre-covid exploded, with more people getting things like groceries delivered much more often. And there’s a heightened awareness of the importance of lower-wage work classified as “essential” during the pandemic. T ..read more

After more than a decade away, Pedro Martinez rejoined Chicago Public Schools as CEO with an overflowing inbox. A safe reopening amid the pandemic was first and foremost, but testing was low, and so was the number of eligible kids who were fully vaccinated. There were kids who couldn’t get to school, thanks to a shortage of bus drivers. And there were dirty classrooms, thanks to a shortage of custodians. A.D. Quig spoke with Martinez on Nov. 3 – before the departure of CPS’ facilities chief over those dirty classroom, and before the district announced Nov. 12 would be a day off so CPS families ..read more

The Chicago Reader is one of the city’s best-known free papers and one of a few remaining alt-weeklies to survive the media crunch that killed dozens across the country. Until recently, the Reader seemed like it was about to go under, too. Our guest this week is the Reader’s publisher, Tracy Baim. She’s been in the Chicago media world since she was a kid. Her mother, father and stepfather were all in the biz. Fresh out of college, she founded the LGBTQ publication the Windy City Times. In 2018, she stepped in to lead the Reader. And what a ride it’s been. When print advertising from bars, rest ..read more

Chicago's Office of the Inspector General has published many blockbuster reports over the years. Its job is to investigate corruption, misconduct, waste, fraud and abuse big and small. In recent years, it's found a culture of sexual harassment in the Chicago Fire Department, blasted the Chicago Police Department’s response to summer looting in 2020, and helped U.S. Attorney John Lausch secure indictments of City Council members. But despite its importance to chipping away at city waste, the office’s top post was left vacant for roughly eight months. Deborah Witzburg, this week's guest, was con ..read more

As the Chicago City Council takes up Mayor Lori Lightfoot's $16.7 billion budget proposal, A.D. Quig asks, Does this budget set the city up for a roaring recovery? Are we spending money on the right programs? She discusses the budget's economic implications with Justin Marlowe, Professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy and associate director of the school's Center for Municipal Finance. He is an expert with UChicago's Urban Network ..read more

When the U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion leaked suggesting Roe v Wade would be overturned this summer, immediate reaction came from the political sphere. What did President Biden say? Gubernatorial candidates? Pro- and anti-abortion groups? And what did this mean for Illinois as a so-called abortion access oasis? But reaction from the medical community trickled in slower. This episode presents a conversation A.D. Quig had with the CEO of the American Medical Association, Dr. James Madara, last Thursday. It was supposed to be a sit-down in front of AMA staff marking the organization’s 175th an ..read more