Animal wrongs. In a series of experiments lengthy and costly enough to make the pages of Successful Farming (March 1991), researchers at the DNX animal biology research center in Athens, Ohio, have injected DNA into 14,252 fertilized swine eggs in the last six years, seeking to produce a “better” market hog. “Out of these, only 86 (less than one percent) produced transgenic offspring, and of these 86, only 37 were functional,” according to a Successful Farming press release. The “functional” ones suffered from arthritis, diabetes, thinness, ulcers, sterility, and excessive hair growth (resembling “a cross between a pig and a woolly mammoth”). Facility director Carl Pinkert hopes for a breakthrough “in the next 10 years.” Meanwhile, it’s a hog’s life.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Suburbia on 35th Street. Old Comiskey Park and its contemporary ballparks were shaped by their cities, writes Philip Bess in Inland Architect (September/October). But the new Comiskey “requires the city of Chicago to do all the adjusting; it is essentially anti-urban and does not accommodate city life. The stadium itself freely interrupts the existing city street grid, and its form is unaffected by the site, except for 35th Street….The bars, shops, restaurants, and other sorts of commercial street life that one would typically find around a traditional urban ballpark have been banished from the immediate vicinity of the new Comiskey Park; no pre- or post-game food and drink will be found, or allowed, within nearly half a mile of the stadium. The ballpark assuredly could have been, but is not, oriented to afford a view of Chicago’s world-famous skyline, and the ISFA [Illinois Sports Facilities Authority] and the White Sox have resisted efforts to preserve even the smallest fragment of the original Comiskey Park as an historic landmark. The new park might as well be where the White Sox originally wanted it–in suburban Addison.”
“While conventional wisdom holds that Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy in 1954 by doing away with ‘separate but equal’ facilities, the Brown decision and others like it failed to repudiate one of the most important consequences of Plessy,” argues Steven Yates in a recent critique of affirmative action published by Chicago’s Heartland Institute: “the notion that the State may classify people on the basis of race when ‘reasonable.’…It matters little that today the goal is to achieve coerced politically correct ratios of African-Americans to whites in various institutions, whereas before it was to maintain coerced segregation; coercion is still coercion, and privilege is still privilege, regardless of the hopes of its advocates.”
