Jim Slusher
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A columnist and the balance between seeing the world and changing itDec 04, 2025 4:00 am - In most newspapers, the news, entertainment, sports and features pages are where you get to see and understand what is going on in the world. The opinion page is where yo...
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A number of things behind an important Thanksgiving reminderNov 27, 2025 4:00 am - Columnist Jim Slusher: Reading the news or following events on broadcast or social media can often seem to consign Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous line from the poem “Happy Thought” to the realm of quaint naivete. But then, there is Thanksgiving.
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Not exactly John Henry, but still a lesson on humans and technologyNov 25, 2025 4:00 am - I received numerous responses to last Thursday’s column lamenting the incompetence of Artificial Intelligence to identify a Dick Van Dyke Show episode that included a han...
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A cautionary tale on news judgment and AINov 20, 2025 4:00 am - A funny thing happened on the way to writing this column. Well, maybe not so funny. Maybe a little scary. Hopefully, a little funny. You decide. It starts with a morning ...
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Aside from punditry, keeping our coming primaries in perspectiveNov 13, 2025 4:00 am - Columnist Jim Slusher: There were precious few off-year elections around the country last week, but those we saw produced a bounty of analysis, punditry and political hand-wringing. Perhaps more than anything, this is a sign of the tensions governing our election politics these days.
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History, politicians, truth, untruth, lies, beliefs and balanceNov 06, 2025 4:00 am - EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Slusher is taking some time off. The following column is a reprise of his “Letter to Readers” from Feb. 9, 2023. Probably since before Charles Pin...
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Daily Herald takes top honors in regional journalism awardsOct 31, 2025 4:06 pm - For both its print and online editions, the Daily Herald has won top honors in the 2025 Northern Illinois News Association contest, and individual Daily Herald staff members were recognized with 47 first-, second- and third-place finishes in the annual competition.
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Two events on one day: A disparity in scope, a familiarity of purposeOct 30, 2025 4:00 am - Columnist Jim Slusher: Stories about two very different museums on the same day expose the commonality between them in appealing to the heart and mind through visual arts.
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Tweets, reality TV and confused excitementOct 23, 2025 3:02 pm - Columnist Jim Slusher: I wonder if you can guess which part of this phrase, which I noticed while reviewing X one day, got me to click on the link that followed: “that is not how you use an exclamation mark, kim kardashian.” That’s right. It was “exclamation mark.”
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A lesson about lessons and getting outside our comfort zonesOct 16, 2025 4:00 am - Columnist Jim Slusher: I have written in the past about the many unexpected things we can learn about subjects other than what a news story is actually about. Today, I write about how unexpected lessons can form the central theme of news events themselves, and the lesson we all can take when that happens.