From a U. of Chicago email announcing the establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute:

The Milton Friedman Institute will occupy buildings that currently house the Chicago Theological Seminary on the north side of 58th Street between Woodlawn and University.

It would seem a fairly mischievously buried lede. The story you expect from the headline “Old Friends Say Drugs Played Bit Part in Obama’s Young Life” is the story of, well, drugs playing a bit part in Barack Obama’s young life. Turns out, as we don’t learn until the sixth paragraph of the article, the real news is this:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs [in his memoir Dreams From My Father] significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use.

Or, as the New York Times reporter who filed the story, Serge V. Kovaleski, puts it a little further on:

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental [College] recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

In other words, the story is more about the bit than it is about the drugs.

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The full text of an SMS I received at 11:13am this morning:

Please check your campus e-mail for a message from the president about a homicide that occurred last night on S. Ellis Ave.

The text message was the first non-test output of an emergency response system put in place at the U. of C. after the Virginia Tech shootings. The email, from U. of C. president Robert Zimmerman, related these further details:

It is with the greatest possible sadness that I write to inform you of the tragic killing of one of our graduate students last night. Amadou Cisse, an international student completing his Ph.D. degree in chemistry, was shot and killed at 1:26 a.m. in the street near 6120 S. Ellis Ave. We are saddened and outraged by this terrible event, and our hearts go out to the student’s family, friends, colleagues and neighbors.

According to an article in today’s Tribune, Cisse was 28 29, a graduate student in chemistry from Senegal whose research examined atomic oxygen erosion. He successfully defended his dissertation last week, and was scheduled to receive his degree on December 7. The University will award his doctorate posthumously.

UPDATE (11/20/07):

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In case poetry and gender isn’t your thing, here’s something from today’s NYT:

Chicago police officers are the subject of more brutality complaints per officer than the national average, and the Police Department is far less likely to pursue abuse cases seriously than the national norm, a legal team at the University of Chicago reported Wednesday….

The national average among large police departments for excessive-force complaints is 9.5 per 100 full-time officers. For a department of Chicago’s size (13,500, second only to New York), that would correspond to 1,283 complaints a year. From 1999 to 2004, however, citizens filed about 1,774 brutality complaints a year against Chicago officers [i.e. 13.1 out of 100 officers].

The report from the U. of C. Police Accountability Project also says:

Less than five percent of the Department account for nearly half of all abuse complaints against the CPD. Indeed, 662 Chicago police officers, a little less than 5% of the CPD’s 13,500 member force, amassed 11 or more official misconduct complaints between 2001 and 2006. Because the vast majority of officers get only a few complaints in their entire careers, it is easy to identify those who may be engaged in a pattern of abusive behavior. They literally jump off the page….Yet, the CPD refuses to look or allow others to look at its “repeater” data. It chooses not to know—avoiding critical self-examination and fighting public and judicial scrutiny of its practices….

As the numbers detailed above illustrate plainly, “not knowing” about police abuse in Chicago requires a great deal of active effort. It requires a deep commitment to the machinery of denial, including denying incidents of brutality, turning a blind eye to patterns of abuse, refusing to look at data that is just a key stroke or two away, and passively encouraging a culture of silence in the face of abuse perpetrated by fellow officers.