(Editor’s Note: We are reposting Mark Frank’s essay on Seattle as the winner of this quarter’s Prescience Trophy.) by Mark Franke “If we could only be more like Seattle . . .” How often have you heard that comment from city leaders, Chamber of commerce spokesmen and other economic development officials? They conjure up images of highly paid millennials living in expensive downtown condos and freely spending their disposable income at all sorts of retail establishments.…

by Andrew Horning My first job in healthcare was in the arbovirus surveillance unit of the Indiana Board of Health in the mid 1970s. My job was all about the flaviviruses carried by birds and mosquitos. As a young man thus indoctrinated in the hemorrhagic syndromes, fatal mucosal disease, birth defects and encephalitis caused by such viruses, I became one of the many with serious concerns about humanity’s preparedness for pandemics. We really could all…

by Leo Morris I’d like to confess something I feel guilty about. It happened a long time ago, back in high school. One of my classmates – I won’t give his name or even a pseudonym, for obvious reasons – was a gangly, pimply wreck of a teenager. His walk was a shambling lurch, his speech a jumbled garble, his dress grotesquely scruffy. He was the odd one of our class, the goofy one who…

MARGARET MENGE, an alumnus of Indiana University, has filed a complaint against the university in Monroe County Circuit Court alleging violation of the state public records law. Menge, a freelance journalist, is researching the policy of state universities regarding students from China. According to the complaint, the university denied Menge’s request for emails unless her formal request stated both the sender and recipient. This, she argues, violates the letter and spirit of the Indiana Access to Public Records Act, Indiana Code 5-14-3). Menge quotes…

STATE OF INDIANA In the Monroe Superior Court, July 2, 2020 MARGARET MENGE, Plaintiff, v. INDIANA UNIVERSITY and IU BOARD OF TRUSTEES, Defendant. COMPLAINT Margaret Menge is filing this complaint against Indiana University for its violation of the Indiana Access to Public Records Law. She is seeking declaratory relief. She states and alleges the following: She is a professional journalist working in the state of Indiana and also an adjunct scholar with the Indiana Policy…

Solipsism, the late Charles Krauthammer liked to say, is the belief that the whole world operates pretty much like suburban Boston, his euphemism for any place in America where self-satisfaction and shallow thinking rule. Indiana has a bad case of self-satisfaction and shallow thinking, particularly in the governor’s office in Indianapolis and with the trustees at Indiana University. Neither has demonstrated due diligence in distinguishing between a person of Chinese ancestry and an agent for a self-interested or…

BEGINNING WITH the Coronavirus outbreak here, Margaret Menge, an adjunct scholar for the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, began researching the policy of her alma matter on students from China.  She learned that in the 2019-2020 academic year, students from China paid just over $80 million to IU-Bloomington in tuition and fees alone. This is close to half the total amount of funding that IU Bloomington gets from the state of Indiana each year, which is around…

The author, an alumnus of Indiana University, is a veteran journalist now working from Bloomington. She has reported for U.S. News & World Report, the Miami Herald, Columbia Journalism Review, Breitbart, the New York Observer and the American Conservative. by MARGARET MENGE March 6 was a busy morning on the campus of Indiana University. Every seat in the auditorium in the new, glassy, Hamilton-Lugar School of Global and International Studies was taken and people were standing up…

REACTING IN PART to protests hundreds of miles away, our Republican county chairman has asserted his “wokeness” by welcoming the resignation of a county councilman rebuked for a racial comment and nominating a black female lawyer as the replacement. And he pulled the name from an affirmative-action hat, a bipartisan one if that makes any sense. Does this heal our wounds, as they like to say? First, this is not how it’s supposed to work in a democratic republic. The electorate…

by Leo Morris In 1936, Bob Wian sold his car and used the $350 as a down payment on a 10-stool diner in Glendale, Calif., which he turned into a hamburger joint called Bob’s Pantry. Shortly, thereafter, the story goes, two things happened. Members of an orchestra stopped in and asked if Wian could come up with something different from the usual hamburger. What he created was a “double-deck cheeseburger” with two beef patties and…