Support Tribune journalists: Don't cross the click-it line on Thursday

& rethinking the "Chicago Rat Hole."

2-1-2024 (issue No. 126)

This week:

• In Solidarity — The Chicago Tribune newsroom and other Tribune Publishing Co. newsrooms have called a one-day strike for Thursday; what they want you to do

• Last week’s winning tweet

• Rats! — The famous Roscoe Village sidewalk “hole” appears likely to be a squirrel indentation

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Jon Stewart on deep dish pizza — He’s wrong, but I still love him

• Swift Derangement Syndrome has infected the political right — And I am here for it!

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week — A special guest!

• Quotables

• Re:Tweets — The winning visual tweet and this week’s contest finalists

• Tune of the Week — A now-timely song about an enduring, mysterious tragedy

• Mistakes were made — Three corrections from last week

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

In solidarity

Journalists at many Tribune Publishing Co. newspapers are staging a one-day walkout Thursday to protest the flinty stewardship of Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that acquired the company in May 2021, shortly before I took a buyout and left the Chicago Tribune.

They are asking readers to refrain from engaging with Tribune content for the day — don’t open the emails, click on the links or purchase a paper.

Former staff columnists Mary Schmich, Rex Huppke, Dahleen Glanton, Heidi Stevens and I have released a joint statement of support:

Though we're no longer on the staff of the Chicago Tribune , our hearts remain with our former newsroom colleagues and the remarkably talented journalists who have since joined them. We joined the union before we left and we still support the union because we know that the people who put out the Tribune deserve to be treated better by the paper’s owners.

In a time of diminished resources, they are working harder than ever to cover this big, beautiful, messy city. They write stories that hold the powerful to account and celebrate those who are brightening our world. Because of them, readers know more about shenanigans at City Hall, the intricate backstories of major trials, the lives of struggling migrants, Chicago's cultural scene and so much more.

While the Tribune’s owners — Alden Global Capital — continue to rake in millions in profits, the paper’s staff is overworked and underpaid, denied a new contract that would give them the security and dignity to keep them at the paper. They deserve better. Chicago deserves better.

Former restaurant critic Phil Vettel signed onto this statement Wednesday evening.

The Chicago Tribune Guild released this open letter:

Dear Alden Global Capital,

We are going on strike. We want you to understand why.

When our journalists walk out, we will be protesting for better pay and working conditions. But this is much bigger than a workplace dispute. We are fighting for our communities.

We believe in the awesome power of the First Amendment and its importance to the public. Our work keeps citizens informed about local government and holds political leaders accountable for their words and deeds. We expose wrongdoing by businesses defrauding the public, companies polluting our air and water, hucksters scamming.

Arthur Miller once wrote: "A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself." In that tradition, our newspapers make sure people know what's happening with their beloved sports teams, the latest trends in food and dining, societal changes. You are threatening our ability to do our jobs, and that harms all of society.

In your time owning Tribune newspapers across the country, you have shrunk our staff by dozens, cut freelancer budgets and limited access to critical information. You are trying to take away our 401k match. You attacked our healthcare. You don't prioritize equity.

Your company has been described as a vampire "destroyer of newspapers." And not without reason.

We can't sit back and let you stall and bleed our newspapers to death. It hurts us. It hurts the whole country.

We take this unprecedented step together, with more than 97% of our membership voting in favor of the strike and signing a public declaration to demonstrate our solidarity.

We have overwhelming support of reporters, photographers and front-line editors from every department in the newsroom. You'll find their names on our publicly-released pledge.

We go on strike to force you to confront the importance of our work and our workers. We will not give up on our communities or each other.

From The Washington Post’s coverage of the planned strike:

At the Tribune papers, the reporting corps is now less than half the size it was when Alden first took seats on Tribune Publishing’s board in 2019, according to the NewsGuild, the union representing the media workers. Within a year of Alden acquiring the company in 2021, every news or feature columnist at the Chicago Tribune had left the paper, said Stacy St. Clair, a veteran reporter there. …

“We are walking out over their proposal to eliminate our 401(k) match, which is essentially a 4 percent pay cut. It’s 4 percent of our benefits being cut,” St. Clair said. “If you go six years without giving people even cost-of-living raises, and you have a policy of not matching 401(k), it becomes a less attractive place to work. How do you build toward a future retirement if you’re falling behind every year?” …

For the most part, the crescendo of one-day walkouts at media companies, including The Post in December, didn’t substantially hinder production. Reporters withheld their bylines for work completed before the strike began, while managers and other nonunion employees scrambled to update websites and publish print editions. These strikes aimed more to call public attention to what staffers see as failures of corporate owners than to play hardball in contract fights, the strategy in longer-term strikes.

But Alden — dubbed “the grim reaper of American newspapers” by Vanity Fair and “the hedge fund killing newspapers” by the Atlantic — has already endured years of public criticism, including a warning from U.S. senators decrying its “reckless acquisition and destruction of newspapers.”

The secretive hedge fund’s indifference to criticism and to the mission of journalism does not give me hope that a one-day strike — or even a longer strike — will motivate or shame the company into improving the lot of my former colleagues and bolstering local journalism. In the digital age, when publications can be cobbled together remotely and freelancers can be summoned to cover stories, staff journalists have very little leverage unless they get buy-in from those who produce and transport the print product, which is still the source of significant income.

If freelancers and advertisers cooperate with this 24-hour work stoppage, there is a small chance it will catch Alden’s attention. It’s definitely worth a try.

“The News Business Really Is Cratering” is a sobering reminder by Politico’s Jack Shafer that the political leanings of journalists or editorial boards have little to nothing to do with the ominous trends in the industry.

The cause of the business’ decline is simple. As tech analyst Benedict Evans succinctly put it in a post this week, “There’s very little you can say about the finances of the newspaper industry that you couldn’t have said 15 or 20 years ago. The old model went away: you had an oligopoly over both advertisers & readers, and real-estate agents and car dealers paid for your social purpose. Now they don’t need you.” … As journalism falls into eclipse but does not completely vanish, newsrooms will continue to contract. This is terrible for the workers who will be discarded. But worse still, it sends a market signal to aspiring journalists that they should avoid the profession because there are no vacancies to fill.

It’s important to underscore that the Tribune union does not want you to cancel your subscription. Just the opposite. Subscriptions make papers healthier and better able to support their newsrooms.

Last week’s winning tweet

If you’re going to walk a mile in my shoes, please also wear my Fitbit. — @JayTorch1031

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

A Squirrel-Hole Truther speaks out

“The Rat Splat” or “Splatatouille” are much more colorful names than “Squirrel Impression” for the Roscoe Village sidewalk imprint that recently became an international sensation. But YouTuber Nicholas Black explains in the video above why we must abandon references to rats in discussing the viral phenomenon.

I deal with wildlife and wildlife specialists every day and that is a goddamn squirrel. … There are not (paw)prints around the outline, leading me to believe that the animal fell from a tree. Rats prefer to den underground and while they can climb trees, most don't. … Lincoln Park Zoo's Dr. Seth Magle, the director of the Urban Wildlife Institute, also believes it's a squirrel. Essentially, he agrees that squirrels are more likely to fall from a tree than a rat. He makes a fantastic point and says squirrels are diurnal creatures, so it's more likely they'd be active during the day when the cement is wet. And he also addresses the tail in the interview, and says that fur is not as dense as bone so it likely would not leave an outline. … I'm a squirrel-hole truther and refuse to stand back and watch as you all worship a false god.

The reference to fur addresses why the imprint of the tail looks more ratty than squirrelly.

Hard to argue with this logic. I say it’s time to tell the entrepreneurs to rename their Chicago Rat Hole cookie cutters and “Visit the Chicago Rat Hole” t-shirts.

Land of Linkin’

• “Biden’s Bookkeeper Is Latest GOP Witness to Blow Up Impeachment Claims.” Too bad, so sad. The Daily Beast reports that “Eric Schwerin, who was also a longtime business partner to Hunter Biden, told a House committee (on Tuesday) he never saw the president benefit from his son’s business deals.”

• Jim Cooper of Kalamazoo is the composer of “Hash Brown,” my new favorite fiddle tune.

• Former Bulls head coach Phil Jackson crushed the competition in Axios Chicago’s bracket tournament poll asking readers to pick the best Chicago coach of all time.

• “New Data Show Migrants Were More Likely to Be Released by Trump Than Biden” — The Cato Institute

• Highlights of University of Iowa basketball superstar Caitlin Clark dropping 35 against Northwestern Wednesday night. Oh, my!

• “More than 200 Spokane churches were asked to open their doors to homeless people during dangerously cold weather — four agreed.”

• I see where union-bashing former Tribune columnist John Kass is having another Rumpelstiltskin fit on social media claiming that members of the Tribune Guild “forced” him to leave the newspaper three years ago. As promised, whenever he sows these contemptible lies, I link readers to “The truth about John Kass’ dispute with the Tribune and the Tribune Guild” and remind them that the wee Hoosier pundit has never gainsaid a word of this account, nor have any of his slavish followers.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ Dead malls: Axios Chicago tours three shopping centers that feel like “an episode of ‘The Last of Us’” and surveys suburban efforts to breathe life back into some.

■ 2017 photos captured the haunting remains of what once was a thriving Chicago-area shopping center.

■ Tech columnist Alex Kantrowitz: “I canceled Amazon Prime and you probably can too.”

■ In what ProPublica calls “one of the most catastrophic recalls in decades,” Philips has agreed to stop selling sleep apnea machines in the U.S.

■ Consumer Reports wants your signature on a petition to demand products be designed to be repaired: “You shouldn’t have to replace electronics every few years.”

■ Stop the Presses columnist Mark Jacob counts off a dozen reasons Trump’s dictator threat is real.

■ Columnist Robert Reich ventures to predict Donald Trump’s running mate—a woman who “checks all the awful boxes.”

■ Wanted: Election judges. The state’s running short of people willing to take on an increasingly challenging job for the primary, and a Sun-Times editorial encourages you to do it. Here’s where you can volunteer in Chicago and Cook County.

■ The Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg looks back to the 1930s, when his paper’s predecessor played a key role in exposing a “rapidly growing army … preparing ... to seize control of the United States.”

■ Relief picture: Chicago’s finally getting a handful of public restrooms—four, to be precise.

■ A bill pending in the General Assembly would end the only-in-Illinois requirement that drivers older than 74 take a test to renew their licenses.

■ Platformer’s Casey Newton says Taylor Swift’s a poster child for researchers’ longstanding prediction of AI-powered harassment.

■ In the correction of the year—so far—NPR appended this note to its report on all the tech workers getting laid off: “The headline for this story has been corrected to add the omitted word ‘off.’”

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Deep-dish pizza: Like sex with a corpse made of sandpaper? Or a delightful dining experience?

I’m thrilled that former host Jon Stewart is coming back to host “The Daily Show” one night a week, though I still haven’t forgiven him for his epic 2013 diatribe against Chicago-stye deep-dish pizza, which I believe he confused with stuffed pizza. Here is a transcript, with the bleeped-out swear words included:

Deep-dish pizza is not only not better than New York Pizza, it's not pizza. It's a fucking casserole. I'm surprised you haven't thought to complete your deep-dish pizza by putting some canned onion rings on top. It's a cornbread biscuit which you've melted cheese on, and then, in defiance of God and all things holy, you poured uncooked marinara sauce atop the cheese! Atop! The cheese! Atop! The sauce! Naked, cold on display like some sort of sauce whore. You know the expression there's no such thing as bad sex or bad pizza? Your pizza is like sex with a corpse made of sandpaper. Let me tell you something. This is not pizza. This is tomato soup in a bread bowl! This is an above-ground marinara swimming pool for rats. Let me tell you something about your fucking not-pizza. I wanna know, when I get drunk and pass out on my pizza, that I'm not gonna drown. Let me tell you something. I look at this — you son of a bitch — I look at this — Gabagool! When I look at your deep-dish fucking pizza, I don't know whether to eat it or throw a coin in it and make a wish. And if I made a wish, it would be that I wish for some real fucking pizza. Now, in all due respect, I realize it’s very cold in Chicago, very cold. It's windy. You need to be able to, I don't know, have a pizza and maybe cut it open and climb inside it, like a tauntaun, to keep warm. Seriously, who are you kidding? Who uses an iron skillet to make a pizza? You don't use an iron skillet to make a pizza. You use an iron skillet to fend off someone who tries to serve you fucking pizza made this way.

Stewart’s over-the-top indignation was for comic effect ,and of course he pulled it off, but the “it’s not pizza!” sentiment is one I’ve heard from dozens of people over the years who, for one reason or another, are particularly aggrieved by what they consider to be a grotesque category error.

It’s as silly as getting worked up over the fact that cheesecake is not “cake,” that peanuts aren’t nuts but legumes and that there’s no chocolate in white chocolate.

Stuffed and deep-dish pizza is made from standard pizza ingredients — cheese, tomato sauce, crust and toppings/fillings — in different proportions than one finds in flat, thin-crust pizzas. I find it yummy and satisfying. If you honestly don’t, fine! We all have different tastes, and I certainly hope no one is forcing you to eat something you don’t like.

But complaining about or criticizing the food tastes of others is infantile — I’m looking at you, too, ketchup-on-hotdog critics. Grow up!

Meanwhile, on the pizza front …

I don’t want to get into the tavern-cut vs. triangle-cut pizza controversy again, but Jon Hansen posted this image on Twitter and asked which piece you would take first, adding the suggestion that if you didn’t take a certain number, you are a “monster.”

Look at the end of the newsletter for Hansen’s choice, but first tell me your choice (I have combined slices that are fundamentally identical. )

Taylor tantrums in full flower as Swift Derangement Syndrome grips the right

“Trump Allies Pledge 'Holy War' Against Taylor Swift” is a troubling yet also hilarious account of the paranoia that is gripping MAGA world over the romance between pop superstar Taylor Swift and standout tight end Travis Kelce of the Super Bowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs:

Former GOP presidential hopeful and current Trump hype man Vivek Ramaswamy took to Twitter following the latest Chiefs’ playoff win to claim that unnamed forces would rig the Super Bowl to give the as-yet nonexistent endorsement from the “artificially culturally propped-up couple” increased visibility. 

MAGA pundits have spent months fuming about Swift and her boyfriend — already a hated figure for his role as a Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine spokesman.

During a rant in November about the GOP’s losses across a string of state elections and abortion-related ballot initiatives, Turning Point USA founder and Trump ally Charlie Kirk warned that Swift was “going to come out in the presidential election” and “mobilize her fans,” adding that “all the Swifties want is swift abortion.” Fox News host and Trump buddy Jesse Watters declared Swift a potential “Pentagon psyop” and “a front for a covert political agenda” during a segment earlier this month. 

Fox Sports pundit Colin Cowherd delivered an on-air scolding to those upset by cutaways to Swift during Sunday’s playoff game in which the Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens.

There's a lot of really weird, lonely insecure men out there. The fact that a pop star — the world's biggest pop star — is dating a star tight end, who had one of his greatest games ever, and a network puts them on the air briefly, but it bothers you. What does that say about your life? …

The New York Times measured how long (Swift) was actually on the broadcast. Do you know how long it is, on average? Twenty-five seconds. In three and a half hours (Sunday) against the Ravens, it was up to a whopping 32 seconds. It was 14, Chiefs and Raiders on Christmas; 12, Chiefs and Bengals; 24 seconds, Buffalo-Kansas City. … And why wouldn't CBS, which you know has the Grammys, cross-promote the world's biggest pop star? …

(They put) a talented and beautiful woman … on the air — one who would never pay attention to lonely men —  and it bothers them. There's a stat out there — it's kind of uncomfortable for you sad guys — that 50% of men never have real intimacy with a woman. That means the other 50% have multiple intimate relationships with women. And those that don't are angry and sad and lonely, and they are often misogynistic and resent women who didn't give them the time they think they deserve. We celebrate all these goofballs jumping on tables in Buffalo, and (fans wearing) cheese hats. … (But) a young, attractive , beautiful, talented woman comes on for 25 seconds and you're bothered. … This anger says nothing about Taylor Swift, it says everything about the men bothered by it.

Minced Words

Eric Umansky, ProPublica

Investigative reporter Eric Umansky of ProPublica, author of “The Failed Promise of Police Body Cameras,” a recent New York Times magazine feature, joins “The Mincing Rascals” podcast panel this week and talks about how and why Chicago is using this technology better than New York City and many other municipalities.

Cate Plys, Austin Berg, host John Williams and I rounded out the panel. We also discussed the Tribune newsroom strike, the Illinois Board of Elections decision to leave Donald Trump on the primary ballot and Cate’s woes dealing with Microsoft customer support.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Quotables

 I love the idea that liberals conspired to get Taylor Swift to date Travis Kelce and then rigged the playoffs because this somehow abstractly helps Biden. That’s where we shine. We can’t get free healthcare but perfectly execute a Riddler-esque conspiracy to ruin a football game. — Andrew Nadeau

Taylor Swift shows so much more bravery and morality coming out against Donald Trump, even though she knows she could lose half her fans, than Republican politicians, who are too afraid to speak the truth about that damaged psycho and risk losing even a handful of MAGA votes. — Betty Bowers

I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn't want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is is really appalling.— Mitt Romney

Every time Republicans vote for Donald Trump they tell us their past rhetoric about being "the party of law and order" and upholding "moral values" was a lot of horseshit. — Mark Jacob

There’s a great man, a great leader in Europe: Viktor Orbán. He’s the prime minister of Hungary. He’s a very great leader, a very strong man. Some people don’t like him because he’s too strong. It’s nice to have a strongman running your country — Donald Trump

(Viktor Orbán’s) confrontational and hate-mongering politics, his embrace of Russia and China, and his continual infringements of European legal norms alienated many former followers. To maintain his popular base, Orbán’s party organized conspiracy theory campaigns to mobilize more frustrated and uninformed voters. — The New Republic

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

And here is last week’s winner, which I neglected to paste in:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• It used to be you could use a pulley system to raise a piano to a great height and drop it onto an enemy, and that person would simply accordion out from under it with a large lump on his head and his teeth replaced by the piano's keys. But nowadays that would kill a man. Because of woke.  — @YuckyTom

• Apparently, bosses don't like it when you refer to them as "you geniuses." — @muyrando

• Body: OK, sleepy time. Brain: OK, thinky time. — @NotTodayEric

• [First day in Hell] Me: This is just a Trader Joe's parking lot. Satan: Correct. — @difficultpatty

• The main cause of immigration is that we're still a country people want to come to But we're working on fixing that. — @InternetHippo

• The difference between a potato & a sweet potato is the sweet potato texts you good night. — @RickAaron

• Neti Pot would be a beautiful name for a baby girl — @matcha_mamiii

• The term “monkeying around” makes sense to me, monkeys are silly animals. “Horsing around” makes me mad, though.  It’s very, very disrespectful. Pretty much every horse I’ve met has a job. — @jestermaxxing

•  I take my phone with me when I go down into the basement, so if I fall and can't get up I'll still be able to tweet. — @WilliamAder

• Ultimately, I'm not sure what marriage signifies, if anything. Legally I guess it means something, for wills or whatever. But “spiritually?” It's just some words, a ritual, no more or less sacred than a high five after a touchdown. But I digress. You may now kiss the bride. — @kipconlon

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

News that Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company, has used sonar imaging to locate what may be Amelia Earhart’s long-lost airplane more than 16,000 feet underwater brings to mind a classic old folk song.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared (on July 2, 1937) while flying from New Guinea to Howland Island as part of her attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. She had radioed that she was running low on fuel. The Navy searched but found no trace. The U.S. government’s official position has been that Earhart and Noonan went down with their plane.

These details will be familiar to anyone who knows the beautiful ballad, “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight.” Red River Dave McEnery wrote it shortly after the plane disappeared, when the lyric “we pray that she may fly home safe again” still had a bit of real hope to it. Maybe she and Noonan were shipwrecked somewhere?

The Mudcat Café, an encylopedic folk music site, says it was the first song ever performed on commercial television.

There's a beautiful, beautiful field
Far away in a land that is fair.
Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart
Farewell, first lady of the air.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

Mistakes were made

When I become aware of errors in the Picayune Sentinel, I quickly correct them in the online version, but since many of you read just the email version, which I can’t correct after the fact, I will use this space periodically to alert you to meaningful mistakes I’ve made. (Not typos, in other words.)

• I got the wrong high school in my item last week about the Hinsdale coach who for some reason wasn’t fired. The correct school was Hinsdale South.

• I also had Michigan head football coach Jim Harbaugh headed to the San Diego Chargers, when in the team has been the Los Angeles Chargers since 2017

• I omitted the winning visual tweet last week. It’s published above today.

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Jon Hansen says the only decent choice is pizza piece number 6, whereas to me, a monster in his eyes, the answer is clearly 3 or 4.