Illinois Public Media News

Meteorologist Ed Kieser is teaming up with Andrew Pritchard to provide forecasts and breaking weather information. He was Illinois Public Media's fulltime meteorologist from 1987 until 2010.

Gambling in Illinois used to mean a trip to a riverboat, a racetrack, or the lottery counter. Now it's in restaurants and gas stations — and on the phone in your pocket. Illinoisans lost more than $7.7 billion gambling last year, and a third of that money flows to state government.

But a recent investigation — "Addicted to gambling in Illinois," a joint project of the Illinois Answers Project and Capitol News Illinois — found the state invests relatively little in helping the hundreds of thousands of residents estimated to have a gambling problem.

Brian Mackey talks with reporters Casey Toner and Maggie Dougherty about what they found, from a Metropolis gas station that's taken in more than $223 million to the gap between gambling revenue and treatment funding. They're joined by Jimmy M., who has been in recovery from compulsive gambling for more than a decade and hosts the podcast Gambling Recovery: Take Back Your Life.

If you or someone you know is struggling, Illinois' helpline is 1-800-GAMBLER.

Many of us were taught Mary Lincoln was a spendthrift, a little crazy, and a drag on her husband’s greatness. We’ll challenge all that with journalist Lois Romano, who’s written a new biography of Abraham Lincoln's wife.

“I think once a narrative is formed, it’s really hard to shake it,” Romano told The 21st Show. “And her narrative was written 150 years ago, and it was written by men who just couldn’t stand her. And they projected onto her things that just weren’t there.”

The book is called “An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln.”
 

Technology developed by Illinois engineering professor Bill King has been incorporated into the cleats worn by soccer players at this year’s World Cup. We'll talk with him about what it is, how it was developed, and how the same tech has also made its way into colon cancer surgery and automobile tires.

Schools in Illinois discipline Black students at much higher rates than their white peers. Public radio education reporters Emily Hays and Peter Medlin dug into the data for two schools with the most extreme disparities: Kennedy Middle School in Rockford and Lanphier High School in Springfield.

We'll talk about what they found, hear some of the stories behind the numbers, and learn about schools that are doing things differently.