Angie Schmitt

New Deal Alert! Congratulations to Angie Schmitt, author of PLAYING IN THE STREETS, a nonfiction book about how infrastructure can be redesigned to better include children and families, sold to Catherine Tung at North Point Press!

A mother who works about 70 hours a week received a school calendar listing all the holidays, early releases, and teacher planning days. Curious, she used ChatGPT to organize every day her kids would be off from school during the year. When she saw the full list, she was shocked by how many days there actually were. Her husband stays home with the kids, but she started wondering how families with two full-time working parents manage all those days off. School schedules can look manageable at first glance, but when you add up all the days off, it really highlights how challenging childcare logistics can be for many working families. How do households where both parents work full-time handle the large number of school holidays, early release days, and breaks during the year?

There’s endless examples of romanticism about the city, and about romanticizing the country. What’s the best art that romanticizes the suburbs?

The gutting of Chicago’s news stations is disastrous. It’s bad for the city, residents and future generations of journalists. Increasingly, journalists need to be a “brand” or else you’re expendable. This is bad. Worse, schools are in denial about this and aren’t adapting.