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Letters: Illinois must keep its promise and maintain evidence-based funding for schools
Letters: Illinois must keep its promise and maintain evidence-based funding for schools

Chicago Tribune

time28-05-2025

  • Politics
  • Chicago Tribune

Letters: Illinois must keep its promise and maintain evidence-based funding for schools

Illinois made a promise to its children in 2017 — a promise that every student, no matter their ZIP code, deserves a fully funded public education. Lawmakers kept that promise by passing the evidence-based funding (EBF) formula. Since then, students are doing better. Schools are stronger. Communities are more stable. Now, that progress is at risk. Before EBF, more than 160 school districts in Illinois were operating with less than 60% of the resources they needed. That meant outdated textbooks, overcrowded classrooms and not enough counselors, nurses or special education services. Today, just one district remains below that 60% mark. The average adequacy level in underfunded districts has climbed from 67% to 77%. That's not just a number — that's more teachers in classrooms, more help for struggling students and more opportunities for success. Take the small district that was finally able to hire a full-time social worker. Or the growing high schools that now offer dual-credit programs, saving students thousands in college tuition. In Chicago and beyond, pre-K classrooms have expanded, graduation rates have risen and students are recovering from the deep impacts of COVID-19 faster than in many other states. None of this happened by accident. It happened because the Illinois General Assembly made a long-term commitment to invest in public education: $300 million in new state dollars each year, targeted to the districts that need them most. The plan also included reimbursements for special education and transportation, plus a Property Tax Relief Grant fund to help ease the pressure on local taxpayers. This wasn't a one-year fix. It was a deliberate, bipartisan effort to repair decades of inequity — and it's working. But seven years in, some are questioning whether we can keep going. The economy is uncertain. Federal COVID-19 relief funds have disappeared, and other federal funds are in jeopardy. Districts have seen reimbursements for non-negotiable mandated categorical (MCAT) costs erode. And inflation is hitting families and school budgets alike. That's exactly why now is the wrong time to pull back on EBF or MCATs. Our schools need steady support to keep moving forward, not to start slipping back. EBF isn't just good policy. It's also one of the most effective education investments Illinois has made in a generation. Lawmakers deserve credit for enacting it — and for holding the line through tough years. Now we're calling on them to stay the course. Let's keep our promise to Illinois' nearly 2 million public school students. Let's keep building on the progress we've made. And let's send a clear message: In Illinois, we don't shortchange the future.A bill, HB 1234, that is pending in the Illinois Senate proposes putting the secretary of state's office in charge of studying the fairness of underwriting factors used in auto insurance pricing — specifically, credit scores, ZIP codes and age. While the insurance industry is not opposed to a study, the way this legislation is structured raises serious concerns. Rather than forming an independent task force to conduct an impartial review, the measure would place full control of the study in the hands of the secretary of state's office, which wants to eliminate these very factors. This arrangement is akin to putting the wolf in charge of the hen house — the conclusion seems predetermined. The secretary of state's office has no insurance expertise, and it does not possess the technical knowledge needed to accurately assess and evaluate the factors that contribute to pricing in the auto insurance market. The fact is this: No one wants to pay more for insurance than they should. And that's why insurers use a wide range of driving and nondriving factors to ensure that no single variable has a disproportionate impact on an individual's premium. When insurers can accurately price policies, consumers benefit with lower rates overall, more choices for coverage, and greater market and price stability. Misguided legislation can have direct financial consequences for residents. For example, the state of Washington serves as a cautionary tale: After banning credit-based insurance scoring in 2021, over 60% of Washington drivers saw increased premiums. Given the secretary of state's established opposition to certain underwriting factors, handing over control of this study raises significant concerns about impartiality. A more credible approach would be to entrust an independent body, such as the University of Illinois Office of Risk Management & Insurance Research, with conducting a truly objective analysis. By having the University of Illinois conduct the study, policymakers could ensure that Illinoisans receive unbiased findings and avoid unintended consequences that may increase costs for consumers.I am writing to express my concerns about the safety issues faced by thousands of public transportation operators like me. I'm a proud member of ATU 241 and have been a CTA bus driver for seven years on routes such as King Drive and Cottage Grove on the South Side. These routes are crucial lifelines for the community. Every day, I transport children to schools such as Simeon Career Academy and Phillips Academy High School and adults to work or medical appointments. My work supports people like Mary, a wheelchair user I regularly take to the University of Chicago Medical Center. She relies on me to get her there safely. Many others depend on the CTA for their daily needs. If we fail to pass a bill soon, people like Mary and the communities I serve will be adversely affected, impacting all of Illinois. However, growing safety challenges overshadow my responsibilities. Transit workers face physical attacks and threats. Bus drivers operate their routes without any other staff. Despite having a panic button in my bus, I often resort to prayer for reassurance, which is unsustainable. Our community deserves safe public transport, free from fear. Incidents of attacks on workers and riders make headlines, yet effective safety improvements are lacking. If we are to retain a quality workforce that can serve the ridership demands, it is imperative that any legislative reform must also address safety. I urge state legislators to prioritize funding for the United We Move legislation to enhance security and support for drivers. Our goal is a safe and welcoming environment for everyone relying on public transportation. Improving bus safety is not just a priority — it's also essential. By working together, we can ensure every journey is safe for our community members. Both public transit operators and passengers are desperately relying on this immediate Leslie S. Richards' op-ed 'Philadelphia's transit faces deep cuts. Chicago can still avoid this fate.' (May 21), she makes a clear case that Chicago needs to act now in order to avoid drastic and ultimately costly reductions in service. I accept that. Too many people need reliable and continuous rail and bus service, and it would be awful for a city the size of Chicago not to have suitable mass transit. But what continues to infuriate me is how and why Chicago is in this mess in the first place. Sure, the pandemic impacted ridership significantly, but everyone knew ridership would continue to be slow to come back, and we certainly knew when federal dollars would dry up. Many of the structural problems facing mass transit in Chicago existed well before the pandemic and could have been addressed years ago, before the current crisis. Chicago's transit system got stuck with an old funding model that couldn't keep up with rising costs. Leaders should've taxed more services, such as streaming, to raise steady money. They also missed chances to keep riders on board with improved safety and better service. Merging agencies and setting aside a rainy-day fund would've helped too. Instead, the city leaned on temporary federal cash, and now that that's gone, we're facing this huge gap. This is typical of our city: Don't address the problem initially and then simply wait for the crisis in order to attempt to fix it. Poor leadership all around. And the city and state taxpayers will bear the cost of any fix — and does anyone really think our government is capable of doing that effectively?

Parenthood Cannot Be Optimized
Parenthood Cannot Be Optimized

Yahoo

time05-05-2025

  • Health
  • Yahoo

Parenthood Cannot Be Optimized

Americans, by and large, have become connoisseurs of preparation. Newlyweds scour online public-school ratings to decide on the neighborhood where they'll raise their notional children. Tutoring programs offer to help students with the SATS, MCATs, or just about any other standardized test. Leisure activities—pickleball, baking—tend to encourage rigging oneself up with just the right gear, and plenty of different product-review sites will recommend the best-fitting sports bra or superior pie dish. Even at rest, there is something to do: Rings and watches track heart rates and sleep states and inform wearers of their 'daily readiness' first thing in the morning. This phenomenon is rampant in the great American sport of childbirth and child-rearing. As Amanda Hess, a New York Times critic at large and a savvy analyst of the online world, lays out in her spot-on and brutally funny new book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, approximately no amount of online prep actually readies you for the experience of having a baby. The only thing that can prepare you for parenthood is experiencing parenthood. But that experience is free (well, after accounting for the skyrocketing costs of caring for that child). So what parenting experts are selling—via the latest tech and all-seeing algorithms—is the illusion of control. Hess starts her story with the unexpected: When she was seven months pregnant, she had an 'abnormal' ultrasound, one of those hour-long affairs in which a medical technician murmurs to herself and refuses to confirm or deny any trouble at all. Her son was eventually diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, a congenital condition that, among other things, causes rapid physical growth. Hess was already perennially online, but misfortune—and its kin, helplessness—turned her pregnancy and her son's young life into a mystery to be understood. 'If I had the phone,' she thinks in the middle of her ultrasound, 'I could hold it close to the exam table and google my way out. I could pour my fears into its portal and process them into answers.' But the phone itself is just a gateway—I imagine that women in the 15th century lined up outside Gutenberg's press for pamphlets that would help them tame their wikked cild. What Hess analyzes, even when it's laughable, distasteful, or downright harmful, is expertise. This is what so many participants in the online attention economy crave, and the internet is all too ready to proffer it up. But parents who are less online feel the same pressure, because the marketplace of expertise trickles out far beyond the realm of influencers and e-tailers. As a member of the particularly online elite, Hess herself is also an expert of sorts, one I'll gladly follow into the dense digital jungle. Yet she also smartly paints herself as just another willing victim of the internet, a contradiction that speaks to how so many people view their online habits. Information, she explains, is simply waiting to be accessed and used. Everything she sorts through is fodder for Second Life's questions about who—and what—to trust online when bringing a human into the world. [Read: What parents of boys should know] Hess does all of this without sharing a drop of advice—hallelujah. Instead, she escorts readers on a wry tour of the buffet of options available to desperate new parents. First there are the apps: Flo, the cutesily named period tracker created by two men; Baby Connect, a sleep-and-feeding tracking app that drove my husband and me crazy over how many milliliters our newborn was eating. Next come the gadgets: the Snoo, a shimmying bassinet that allegedly makes babies sleep for at least an hour longer than a typical crib; the Nanit, an eye-of-Sauron-style video monitor; Owlet, a sock-like heart-rate and oxygen sensor that turns your baby's crib into a mini NICU. Lastly, of course, there is the parade of experts: freebirthers, who deliver alone in the wild; the self-taught parenting sages of Instagram; the Dr. Beckys of the world. Individually, these service providers have been well covered by journalists. Some of them are earnestly engaged in helping parents navigate a bewildering time of life. But as pieces of an ecosystem that encourages the monetization of parental helplessness, they take on new force. What they promise, collectively, is a level of insight—into sleeping habits, developing psyches, and much more—so powerful that it will bulldoze a path through what we know to be intractably rocky terrain. Flo, for instance, promises its users they will 'become an expert' on themselves, Hess writes. In practice, that means it offers women information about ovulation phases and mood shifts. And then, reportedly, it sells the data to Facebook. Hess uses it anyway: 'Online advertisers already profited off the assumption that I hate myself. Would it really matter if they found out exactly when I hated myself the most?' The app claims to predict not only the timing of her periods, but 'the emotional contours of my days'—which is not the same thing as helping her deal with them. A period is, to a degree, manageable—birth control (there's that word) can regularize it, or sometimes even cut it down to an annual lining shed. But the experience of having a period simply must be endured: No information can get you out of it entirely (though an IUD might). The same goes for the gizmos that enable new parents to observe their little ones in previously unobservable ways. Track their heart rate; measure how much they twitch in their cribs: What used to be a beautiful and endearing, if sometimes nerve-racking, moment—watching a newborn sleep—has been sold as a method to ward off the specter of harm. Nowhere is the clamor for tricks and hacks more pronounced than in the flood of personalities who sell online courses with titles such as 'Taming Temper Tantrums' and 'Winning the Toddler Stage,' as if a tiny child were a foe to be defeated. When I solicited 21 sets of parents from my 8-year-old's class to send me names of experts they loved or loathed, 26 names arrived in just a few hours. This cavalcade of professionals has induced many new parents like Hess, and me, to imagine that we are on a pathway toward resolving the 'problem' of parenting (that it's hard) with techniques that will stamp out childishness itself, as Hess describes it. 'Eating paint, resisting baths, ruining the holiday family photo: any permutation of normal childhood behavior could trigger a specialized, expert tip.' Experts promise not only tips that are essential but new methods that are 'revolutionizing'—as the media have put it—the back-and-forth between parent and child. These breakthroughs, Hess suggests, are oversold. Seeking historical perspective, she reread Benjamin Spock's 1946 classic, Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, imagining that his advice would sound relatively conservative and fusty to herself and many modern parents. 'Instead,' she writes, 'I found that the advice was virtually unchanged. Spock advised parents against scolding children, threatening them, punishing them, giving them time-outs, or shooting them cross looks. He advised them to embody the role of the 'friendly leader,' the parent who casually redirects their toddler with the full understanding that pushing boundaries is the child's job.' The basic guidance is the same; it's just been commodified and reproduced in so many forms that most parents can't help but buy into the notion that more information is better than good information—and that, as Hess puts it, 'our kids could be programmed for optimal human life.' [Read: The biggest surprise about parenting with a disability] For all her button-pushing, Hess is never snarky or sentimental. She generously recognizes that she is bumping up against narratives that regard child-rearing as a perfectable behavior. It is no surprise that so many moms and dads (including me) have fallen for it. Our phones now serve as both the cause and the proposed solution for all of our anxieties. The possibility that the perfect parenting fix is just a click or two away has become just as addictive as any other handheld engagement bait. Some advice is certainly helpful, but the idea of mastery in parenting is an illusion—one that seems to lurk just beyond an ever-receding horizon. At one point, a friend of Hess's reminds her that the obsession with choice shared by 'a class of professional strivers' is a way 'to control and optimize every aspect of life.' Hess's reflection on her friend's comment is telling. 'Babies don't work like that, and that's part of what makes parenting meaningful: you do not get to choose.' Article originally published at The Atlantic

Parenthood Cannot Be Optimized
Parenthood Cannot Be Optimized

Atlantic

time05-05-2025

  • Health
  • Atlantic

Parenthood Cannot Be Optimized

Americans, by and large, have become connoisseurs of preparation. Newlyweds scour online public-school ratings to decide on the neighborhood where they'll raise their notional children. Tutoring programs offer to help students with the SATS, MCATs, or just about any other standardized test. Leisure activities—pickleball, baking—tend to encourage rigging oneself up with just the right gear, and plenty of different product-review sites will recommend the best-fitting sports bra or superior pie dish. Even at rest, there is something to do: Rings and watches track heart rates and sleep states and inform wearers of their 'daily readiness' first thing in the morning. This phenomenon is rampant in the great American sport of childbirth and child-rearing. As Amanda Hess, a New York Times critic at large and a savvy analyst of the online world, lays out in her spot-on and brutally funny new book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, approximately no amount of online prep actually readies you for the experience of having a baby. The only thing that can prepare you for parenthood is experiencing parenthood. But that experience is free (well, after accounting for the skyrocketing costs of caring for that child). So what parenting experts are selling—via the latest tech and all-seeing algorithms—is the illusion of control. Hess starts her story with the unexpected: When she was seven months pregnant, she had an 'abnormal' ultrasound, one of those hour-long affairs in which a medical technician murmurs to herself and refuses to confirm or deny any trouble at all. Her son was eventually diagnosed with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, a congenital condition that, among other things, causes rapid physical growth. Hess was already perennially online, but misfortune—and its kin, helplessness—turned her pregnancy and her son's young life into a mystery to be understood. 'If I had the phone,' she thinks in the middle of her ultrasound, 'I could hold it close to the exam table and google my way out. I could pour my fears into its portal and process them into answers.' But the phone itself is just a gateway—I imagine that women in the 15th century lined up outside Gutenberg's press for pamphlets that would help them tame their wikked cild. What Hess analyzes, even when it's laughable, distasteful, or downright harmful, is expertise. This is what so many participants in the online attention economy crave, and the internet is all too ready to proffer it up. But parents who are less online feel the same pressure, because the marketplace of expertise trickles out far beyond the realm of influencers and e-tailers. As a member of the particularly online elite, Hess herself is also an expert of sorts, one I'll gladly follow into the dense digital jungle. Yet she also smartly paints herself as just another willing victim of the internet, a contradiction that speaks to how so many people view their online habits. Information, she explains, is simply waiting to be accessed and used. Everything she sorts through is fodder for Second Life 's questions about who—and what—to trust online when bringing a human into the world. Hess does all of this without sharing a drop of advice—hallelujah. Instead, she escorts readers on a wry tour of the buffet of options available to desperate new parents. First there are the apps: Flo, the cutesily named period tracker created by two men; Baby Connect, a sleep-and-feeding tracking app that drove my husband and me crazy over how many milliliters our newborn was eating. Next come the gadgets: the Snoo, a shimmying bassinet that allegedly makes babies sleep for at least an hour longer than a typical crib; the Nanit, an eye-of-Sauron-style video monitor; Owlet, a sock-like heart-rate and oxygen sensor that turns your baby's crib into a mini NICU. Lastly, of course, there is the parade of experts: freebirthers, who deliver alone in the wild; the self-taught parenting sages of Instagram; the Dr. Beckys of the world. Individually, these service providers have been well covered by journalists. Some of them are earnestly engaged in helping parents navigate a bewildering time of life. But as pieces of an ecosystem that encourages the monetization of parental helplessness, they take on new force. What they promise, collectively, is a level of insight—into sleeping habits, developing psyches, and much more—so powerful that it will bulldoze a path through what we know to be intractably rocky terrain. Flo, for instance, promises its users they will 'become an expert' on themselves, Hess writes. In practice, that means it offers women information about ovulation phases and mood shifts. And then, reportedly, it sells the data to Facebook. Hess uses it anyway: 'Online advertisers already profited off the assumption that I hate myself. Would it really matter if they found out exactly when I hated myself the most?' The app claims to predict not only the timing of her periods, but 'the emotional contours of my days'—which is not the same thing as helping her deal with them. A period is, to a degree, manageable—birth control (there's that word) can regularize it, or sometimes even cut it down to an annual lining shed. But the experience of having a period simply must be endured: No information can get you out of it entirely (though an IUD might). The same goes for the gizmos that enable new parents to observe their little ones in previously unobservable ways. Track their heart rate; measure how much they twitch in their cribs: What used to be a beautiful and endearing, if sometimes nerve-racking, moment—watching a newborn sleep—has been sold as a method to ward off the specter of harm. Nowhere is the clamor for tricks and hacks more pronounced than in the flood of personalities who sell online courses with titles such as 'Taming Temper Tantrums' and 'Winning the Toddler Stage,' as if a tiny child were a foe to be defeated. When I solicited 21 sets of parents from my 8-year-old's class to send me names of experts they loved or loathed, 26 names arrived in just a few hours. This cavalcade of professionals has induced many new parents like Hess, and me, to imagine that we are on a pathway toward resolving the 'problem' of parenting (that it's hard) with techniques that will stamp out childishness itself, as Hess describes it. 'Eating paint, resisting baths, ruining the holiday family photo: any permutation of normal childhood behavior could trigger a specialized, expert tip.' Experts promise not only tips that are essential but new methods that are ' revolutionizing '—as the media have put it—the back-and-forth between parent and child. These breakthroughs, Hess suggests, are oversold. Seeking historical perspective, she reread Benjamin Spock 's 1946 classic, Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, imagining that his advice would sound relatively conservative and fusty to herself and many modern parents. 'Instead,' she writes, 'I found that the advice was virtually unchanged. Spock advised parents against scolding children, threatening them, punishing them, giving them time-outs, or shooting them cross looks. He advised them to embody the role of the 'friendly leader,' the parent who casually redirects their toddler with the full understanding that pushing boundaries is the child's job.' The basic guidance is the same; it's just been commodified and reproduced in so many forms that most parents can't help but buy into the notion that more information is better than good information—and that, as Hess puts it, 'our kids could be programmed for optimal human life.' For all her button-pushing, Hess is never snarky or sentimental. She generously recognizes that she is bumping up against narratives that regard child-rearing as a perfectable behavior. It is no surprise that so many moms and dads (including me) have fallen for it. Our phones now serve as both the cause and the proposed solution for all of our anxieties. The possibility that the perfect parenting fix is just a click or two away has become just as addictive as any other handheld engagement bait. Some advice is certainly helpful, but the idea of mastery in parenting is an illusion—one that seems to lurk just beyond an ever-receding horizon. At one point, a friend of Hess's reminds her that the obsession with choice shared by 'a class of professional strivers' is a way 'to control and optimize every aspect of life.' Hess's reflection on her friend's comment is telling. 'Babies don't work like that, and that's part of what makes parenting meaningful: you do not get to choose.'

A Blind Bicyclist and His Daughter Work in Tandem
A Blind Bicyclist and His Daughter Work in Tandem

New York Times

time02-05-2025

  • Sport
  • New York Times

A Blind Bicyclist and His Daughter Work in Tandem

Good morning. It's Friday. We'll look at a father-daughter team that is preparing to ride in the Five Boro Bike Tour this weekend. We'll also find out what prompted a composer to write a tribute after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for president. Thomas Panek has run more than 20 road races. His time in the New York Half Marathon last year was 2 hours 9 minutes 21 seconds. On Sunday, he will cover some of the same ground in a different way, as a rider in the Five Boro Bike Tour. 'I'm a little nervous,' he said. 'I don't know what to expect when you're using a different group of muscles in your body.' That sentence skipped over two things that will set him apart from most of the 32,000 other riders. One is that he will ride on a tandem bicycle. The other is that he is blind. He has retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disorder that left him legally blind by the time his daughter, Madeleine, was born 22 years ago. She will be the one in the front seat of the tandem, shifting the gears and calling out when turns are coming or she needs to brake. They have practiced stopping because, as he put it, 'if she were to suddenly brake, I would get thrown forward into her.' Many sightless athletes talk about their collaboration with their guides. 'Harmony and synchrony' was how the blind runner Jerusa Geber dos Santos of Brazil described the relationship during the Olympics in Paris last year. Madeleine Panek talked about how she and her father trust each other, an idea he echoed. 'Holding my hand when she was 2 years old, helping me cross the street, it's second nature for her to guide me,' he said. 'It takes some coordination to trust the captain if you're blind and you don't know the person. We already have that relationship. That is going to be the easy part. The hard part is getting it done.' He knows the route from running — it is similar to the course of the New York City Marathon. The two races start and end in different places, but both cover the 2.6-mile-long Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and highways like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Some of the hazards are similar, too, like potholes that can seem as large as craters on the moon. But some of the hazards are different for cyclists: Expansion joints between sections of pavement could be trouble spots. Riders who do not spot them in time could fly over the handlebars. Thomas Panek started a new job last month, as the president and chief executive of Lighthouse Guild, a nonprofit organization that provides services for blind people. When he heard about other cyclists from the Lighthouse Guild who would be riding, he signed up. He waited to ask his daughter to be the pilot 'because she just finished her MCATs,' he said — the standardized test for medical school applications. 'I didn't want to add any additional pressure,' he said. She is coming to New York for the weekend as she approaches graduation from Binghamton University and is applying to medical school. Bike New York, which runs the Five Boro Bike tour, says that 210 riders with disabilities will be in the ride on Sunday and that 101 of them will be visually impaired cyclists on tandem bicycles. Ken Podziba, the president of Bike New York, first rode in the tour in 2002 on a tandem bike with Matthew Sapolin, a friend who was blind and was the commissioner of the Mayor's Office for People With Disabilities under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Podziba, the sports commissioner under Bloomberg, loved it and ended up working for Bike New York. Thomas Panek said their tandem is 'a long vehicle,' adding that 'you have to account for the fact that it's almost like pulling a trailer.' 'On a tandem bike,' he said, 'you're pedaling for two. If I get tired at some point, Madeleine can pick up the level of effort.' And vice versa, he said. 'But on the Verrazzano, it's going to take everything from both of us.' There is a chance of showers throughout the day, but also sun and temperatures near 80. In the evening, there is a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, with a low around 63. In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day). The latest New York news A first New York performance of a requiem from the 1960s On a June day in 1968, a man named Frank Lewin drove his three daughters to a railroad station not far from where they lived in Princeton, N.J. He wanted to watch for a train that was going to pass by. 'I mostly remember standing there, and that it was very hot,' said one of the daughters, Naomi Lewin. The train Frank Lewin wanted to see was carrying the body of Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general and senator who had been assassinated while campaigning for president in Los Angeles a couple of days earlier. The funeral had been held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The train was bound for Washington; Kennedy was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Frank Lewin was a composer who was perhaps best known then for scores for television shows like 'The Defenders' and 'The Nurses' on CBS. But he wrote serious music, too, including an opera based on John Steinbeck's novella 'Burning Bright,' and decided to write a requiem Mass in memory of Kennedy. It will be given its first New York performance, with Matthew Lewis and the St. George's Choral Society, on Sunday at the Rutgers Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side. 'I think my dad felt there was a need for a requiem in the English language,' Naomi Lewin said. The works by Mozart, Verdi and Fauré follow Latin texts. Lewin's setting of the Lord's Prayer in English is particularly lovely. 'Dad wanted to compose music for an entire Catholic requiem service,' Naomi Lewin said. 'So instead of having the congregation speak the Lord's Prayer, as they would normally do during a church service, he wrote music for it, and labeled it to be sung by the congregation.' As for Kennedy, 'my dad obviously admired him,' Naomi Lewin said. The Lewins were German Jews who had come to the United States 'looking for freedom — and the sort of freedom that Robert Kennedy was fighting for,' she said. 'Robert Kennedy had a legacy of civil rights and helping poor people. This is history.' Frank Lewin turned to the Roman Catholic chaplain at Princeton University and others from the university's Aquinas Institute who 'gave him pointers because he didn't know about the Catholic liturgy.' The piece was first performed in the Princeton University Chapel in 1969. 'Dad used the Catholic text' for the Lord's Prayer, 'ending at 'deliver us from evil,' with no 'kingdom' or 'power' or 'glory,'' said Naomi Lewis, who was a professional singer and a classical music radio personality. 'Years later, having sung in countless churches, I told Dad that he should compose a Protestant ending.' So he did. Così fan tattoo Dear Diary: I have been attending operas for more than 25 years and getting tattoos for almost twice as long. On a trip to New York in 2018, I attended a Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart's 'Così Fan Tutte' that was staged in Coney Island and featured actual sideshow performers, including a fire-eater, a sword swallower, a snake dancer and a contortionist. Later that summer, I returned to the city for an annual tattoo show in Manhattan. Some of the same sideshow performers provided entertainment. As one woman came off the stage, I told her I had seen her earlier that year in the opera. She looked at the heavily tattooed and pierced crowd. 'I'm guessing you'll be the only person this weekend who tells me that,' she said. — Jil McIntosh Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@ Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.

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