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While browsing the stacks of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago some years ago, noted historian Neil Harris made a surprising discovery: a group of nine plainly bound volumes whose unassuming spines bore the name the Chicagoan.  Pulling one down and leafing through its pages, Harris was startled to find it brimming with striking covers, fanciful art, witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles.  He quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a Chicago counterpart to the New Yorker that mysteriously had slipped through the cracks of history and memory.

Here Harris brings this lost magazine of the Jazz Age back to life. In its own words, the Chicagoan claimed to represent “a cultural, civilized, and vibrant” city “which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees.” Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the 1925 appearance of the New Yorker, it sought passionately to redeem the Windy City’s unhappy reputation for organized crime, political mayhem, and industrial squalor by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest.  Harris’s substantial introductory essay here sets the stage, exploring the ambitions, tastes, and prejudices of Chicagoans during the 1920s and 30s.  The author then lets the Chicagoan speak for itself in lavish full-color segments that reproduce its many elements: from covers, cartoons, and editorials to reviews, features—and even one issue reprinted in its entirety.

Last week I highlighted a great piece of Bloomberg reporting on America’s billions-wasted, failed agriculture policy. Since then, the rest of the seven-part series, Recipe for Famine, has been published online. Because Bloomberg did such a poor job of presenting its series, there’s no easy way to locate all the stories.

So I’ve taken the liberty of helping them out. Here they are. Some outstanding reporting from all over the world contained within:

Dead Children Linked to Aid Policy in Africa Favoring Americans

How Famine Lurked Behind Vienna Toast Where Joe Cocker Crooned

World Bank’s ‘Wrong Advice’ Left Silos Empty in Poor Countries

Government Bribes in Cameroon Divert Funds From Food Amid Riots

Wasting Enough Rice to Feed 184 Million Is Habit Only Rats Love

Corn Futures Spark Riots as Speculators Take Trading to Limit

Eating Isn’t Option When Minnesota Corn Burns in Houston Cars

I had a Fast Company story come out last week on Houston’s $40m effort to shield itself from the current bear market, and to become less economically reliant on the volatile oil industry. It’s hard to predict how much a plan like this will work, but a new report from the local chamber of commerce (called the Greater Houston Partnership, the organization behind the battle plan) makes the short-term outlook seem far from promising.

From the Houston Chronicle:

The Houston area could lose about 46,000 jobs over the next 12 months as the national recession — coupled with a sudden slump in the all-important energy markets — takes root locally, the Greater Houston Partnership said in its latest economic forecast.

The forecast itself — which, of course, GHP conveniently doesn’t list in its press releases or on its front page — includes one subhead that says, “Houston’s Economic Drivers are Sputtering.” (Hey, at least they’re honest, even if they are burying the truth.) One of the big problems is that, despite some diversification since the early-80s oil slump, Houston has a problem: If the energy markets are in bad shape, so is the city.

So do I feel stupid for writing a mostly-positive story about an area that will be slumping next year? Not really. For one thing, even if Houston hits a rough patch, it will still be among the strongest metro area economies in the U.S. (in other words, in a terrible national economy, it’s among those in “least bad” shape). And the Opportunity Houston plan is a long-term effort to protect the metro area from exactly the sort of problems it’s currently facing. After visiting Houston in October, I came away impressed with their tech tools, their strategy, and most of the GHP leaders I met with. Even if things don’t look great now, Houston has as good a shot as any region at torrid growth once the economy recovers. It may just take five or six years.

The basic storyline is that we have a federal program, USAID, which was started in the 1950s to handle America’s gigantic food surpluses. We take the extra food and ship it overseas to developing countries, often at reduced or no cost. It’s supposedly a win/win: American farmers sell extra crops, poor people in other countries get cheap food, their leaders love America. Except that doesn’t happen.

The rules require that all the food must be shipped from the U.S., and it doesn’t get there in time, and it’s expensive (not to mention an ecological disaster). So people who are supposed to get food starve and sometimes die. But farm and shipping lobbyists have stifled U.S. government efforts to make things simpler. Why? Because the program has basically morphed into welfare for American agribusiness megacorporations. According to Bjerga’s reporting:

Cargill Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Bunge Ltd. accounted for 47 percent of 2007 commodities spending for aid, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture…The rules also stipulate that 75 percent of the food must be transported on U.S.-flagged vessels, benefiting ship operators, including Liberty Maritime Corp., based in Lake Success, New York, and Sealift Inc., of Oyster Bay, New York. In 2007, the program’s shipping contracts were worth $385 million, according to the USDA.

This article is wonderful piece of reporting — and, according to the tagline, part one of a seven-part series. Definitely the most interesting coverage of the agriculture/farm world since the excellent Washington Post farm subsidy boondoggle stories of 2006. (I know you’re thinking — “Who cares about agriculture?” — but this is billions of your tax dollars wasted here.)

It’s too bad so few people will see this (unlike those who get, say, Vanity Fair, most Bloomberg readers blow through articles hunting for information, not thorough investigative reporting). And despite some shrewd moves by the company of late, its editorial policies still severely limit the writing style, to the point that even the most dedicated will have trouble plowing through more than 1,000 words of Bloomberg copy. Not that this article is poorly written, it’s just…well, it’s just that the writing and narrative structure don’t nearly do justice the high quality of reporting. Still, great work.

Take Hepatitis B, which I just wrote about for Miller-McCune. A couple million people in America have it and don’t know it, or are susceptible and haven’t been vaccinated. Asian Americans suffer at rates 20 times as high as the general population, partly because many emigrated from countries where the disease is even worse than in the U.S. (or are children of immigrants).

Vaccinations and tests aren’t too expensive, and these disease is even manageable. So why don’t we have this under control? Many people who should know better — and their doctors — are unaware, ignoring the problem, or not doing anything about it. Even in San Francisco, a major hub for Asian Americans, nearly one-third of highly educated Asians said they hadn’t been tested, and half of physicians didn’t know which test to use to screen such patients. Stories like this make me want to found an advocacy group or something. That said, the public health model the article talks about is a pretty interesting way to deal with it, at least on the small scale.

This is not a new idea, as The Long Now Foundation and RAND and others have been on it for awhile. But it’s great to see this moving further toward mainstream policy circles. It’ll be interesting to see whether Summers, who President-elect Obama named head of the National Economic Council, will actually put this sort of thinking into practice, especially given that he’s jumping into a once-in-a-century crisis.

Another thing that came up while reporting on these ideas: What if we experienced a second for twice as long as it is? What if a minute were 75 seconds long? Does our way of thinking about time and our time horizon change the way we view the world? I have no idea, but if you want to give yourself a headache feel free to think about these sorts of questions.

There was one piece of information that was new:

The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly.

Unfortunately, this news hook wasn’t really explained. I think this would be a great idea, I hope they can make it work…as I said in the M2 article, management expertise is the big achilles heel of these organizations, and a project like this is no simple task.

One they missed: he serves (served?) served (UPDATE: NMH media relations says he resigned in October) on the board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, at least according to Guidestar and this program from a United HealthSystem Consortium conference. The title of the panel/presentation Flanagan seems to have served on was “Engaging the board in the pursuit of quality and accountability” — ironic given that the conference took place just weeks before the suit was filed. The program also lists him as chair of the Northwestern Memorial Hospital board’s Professional Standards Committee.

You would think more of these organizations would have the technological skills to take the name of a board member allegedly under SEC investigation down from their all-too-public Web sites. Here’s something else that’s new from the Web: the Lyric Opera Web site lists Deloitte as a Golden Grand Benefactor ($25k-$49k), under Flanagan’s name. I wonder if they’re making that gift in ’09?

More worth reading: the comments on the re: The Auditors post about the case has [people claiming to be] Deloitte employees going back and forth about what happened and why. All sorts of rumors that I don’t want to repeat, so go there and read up. One link from Francine worth checking out, the attorney on the case for Skadden Arps, Paul Lockwood. For anyone who doesn’t know the legal world well, these guys are top tier, and their litigation department made the American Lawyer best-of list this year.

Reuters and a few other outlets published stories with no new information. Again, little credit given to Courthouse News or anyone else.

This is so the Tribune to pull a jerk move like this and pretend that other news outlets don’t exist. I said in a previous post that Crain’s has this “We’re the only business publication in Chicago that matters” attitude. The Trib is worse…their attitude is “We’re the only Chicago publication that matters.” Maybe the business editors will actually put something better in the Sunday paper that actually justifies their solipsism.