But Price wasn’t completely blaming himself, either. He wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, or the one who set events in motion by taunting him earlier that evening at 56th and Justine. “You could say it started when the first slave masters got the first slaves from Africa and brought them here,” he says. “You can dissect all this, but the whole thing was, a person died over nothing. Over the color of his skin, basically. Which boggles my mind.”

In a companion piece to his devastating two-part feature about the racially motivated murder of a little white girl in a Chicago neighborhood experiencing racial transition in the 1970s, the Chicago Reader’s Steve Bogira has an article about a black man in the same era who was murdered by white teens who seem to have never been brought to justice. It’s a tough reminder of a painful past. Judging by the comments it has inspired on the Reader website, it seems it’s also a necessary reminder.

Having just ponied up for another year of the New Yorker, it seems like a good time to highlight some of my recent favorites from the magazine.

In “Story of a Suicide,” Ian Parker provides some vital context on the sad suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi. The original angle on the story was that Tyler’s homophobic roommate outed him by using a webcam to voyeuristically broadcast a same-sex hookup. The truth is more nuanced—Tyler’s sexuality wasn’t exactly a secret and the “broadcast” was more abortive than actual. In the end, the roommate faces serious charges for behavior that’s undoubtedly invasive, immature and wrong…behavior that, nonetheless, seem to fall short of criminal.

Ian Frazier’s “Out of the Bronx” uses labor struggles at a Bronx-based cookie factory to tie together everything that seems to be wrong with American business: massive layoffs, constant moves in search of cheaper labor or slightly higher margins, maybe even the willingness of unions to hang themselves over principals instead of accept the best deal they’re going to get. But nothing is as simple as it seems here, and no one ends up happy.

Finally, Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Transfiguration” offers an amazing analysis of the surgical advancements that have made face transplants a reality as well as the psychological implications of transferring one person’s face to another. The details can be graphic—they need to be to tell the story. But the end result is one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time.

On the Imprint design blog, J.J. Sedelmaier has an exhaustive take on the gorgeous posters that were used to advertise Chicago rail service in the 1920s. The South Shore line stretched as far as my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, meaning replicas of these prints could be seen in some of the fancier shops around town growing up. I still love looking at them, and all of them are shared in the post.

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”

As the New York Times shares, for profit-education looks like the next big scam. I’m sure everyone will be suitably chastened when the bubble blows up in seven years.