Michael Romain

Last week, people everywhere rejoiced at the imminent passage of the $369 billion federal climate bill – the Inflation Reduction Act – which experts say is the largest single piece of climate legislation in U.S. history. The bill is not insignificant. That’s a lot of money. And it could mean serious…

With Labor Day ahead of us, I thought it appropriate to point out something odd I’ve noticed about the holiday over the years, which is that it’s hardly an occasion to celebrate actual work. The holiday is all about the day off from work and the store sales.

Jeremy Duffy has a simple response for anyone who asks why he’s running for a seat on the District 97 school board and what sets him apart from the other five candidates seeking one of four open seats in April.

Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, whose office runs elections in suburban Cook County, is calling on military veterans to sign up as election judges and poll workers in the Nov. 8 Gubernatorial Election.

Austin Eats, an initiative designed to expand access to fruits and vegetables and rewrite the narrative around food in Austin, and Austin Coming Together will screen two short documentaries that tell food stories on the West and South sides.

Recently, I’ve taken to nature as a way to temporarily escape the near-constant reminders of war, floods, famine, drought, nuclear apocalypse, wildfires, methane-belching rivers, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This summer, I wandered the expansive, 180-acre Buffalo Creek Reservoir in Long Grove, a quaint little town known for its historic covered bridge about a half-hour […]

Last week, the Cook County Department of Public Health released a new data portal called the Cook County Health Atlas — a searchable online database that provides 100 indicators of health — for over 120 Cook County suburbs. The data on overall life expectancy in those suburbs puts the health gap between Black spaces and […]

On Saturday, in the shadow of the luxury Emerson Apartments high-rise, a crowd of several dozen people gathered to remember the history of plunder underneath the cobblestone pavement and to install a permanent marker outlining the story of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church.

Last month, Cook County health officials announced that they’d launched a new, publicly available data portal called the Cook County Health Atlas.The data shows nearly 1 in 5 adults in Oak Park and River Forest are living with depression.

I’m writing this on the eve of Tuesday’s dreaded midterm election. In the weeks before Nov. 8, John Nichols, The Nation magazine’s national affairs correspondent who was invited to speak at Third Unitarian Church in nearby Austin last month, had described the election as the most important in history and possibly the last in which […]