Illinois Public Media News

In August, Governor J.B Pritzker signed a new bill that will allow students to take off up to five mental health days from school starting in January. We answered your questions about how these days would be implemented.

Today on the show, we talked about some of the issues affecting Latino communities in Illinois — from representation in the General Assembly to the state’s COVID response with a representative from the Latino Policy Forum. 

A survey done by Pew Research Center showed that people who were Black believed that marrying someone outside of their race was generally a bad thing twice as much as people who were white. We talked with two essayists who recently wrote about interracial relationships. 

Like a lot of places around the country, Quincy, Illinois, is struggling to fill jobs and has experienced population loss in recent years. The city's mayor and a new resident of Quincy joined The 21st today.

After the most restrictive abortion restrictions in the country were allowed to go into effect in Texas, ripples are already being seen in the rest of the country, including in Illinois. We were joined by representatives from both sides of the issue.

Emily Oster is an economist, known for using data to apply rational thinking to everything from COVID risk to family matters, like pregnancy and parenting. She joined The 21st to talk about her latest book, “The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years.”

Due to climate change, scientists believe summers in Illinois will likely have months of days with temperatures above 95 degrees. Already, farmers are making changes to keep their livestock safe in the heat.

Dawn Turner grew up on the south side of Chicago and went on to have a successful career as a columnist at the Chicago Tribune. But her sister and best friend were not so fortunate. Turner recounts the different paths their lives took in her new memoir, Three Girls from Bronzeville.

Despite a court order, Illinois’ child-welfare agency continues to fail Spanish-speaking families; that’s the conclusion of an investigation by ProPublica. We talked with one of the reporters behind the story.

Illinois lawmakers have approved major changes in the way the state gets its electricity. Nuclear power plants will be kept online, and solar and wind developments will continue to grow. Meanwhile, coal and natural gas power plants are expected to gradually be taken offline.