Newsletter 144: Robert Novak, and Going Back to the Daily Illini

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one is from February 2018. I’m headed back to Champaign in a couple of weeks and am honestly counting down the days.

It was November 1995, and I was in Daily Illini Edit Board. Edit Board took place every Sunday at noon, and it featured the newspaper’s top editors, as well as its opinion columnists, gathering in the DI conference room to write the week’s editorials. Our opinions editor, an infinitely patient kid named Kris Kudenholdt, would toss out 10 timely topics of the day, abortion, the Chief, campus parking, Quebec separatism, whatever, and we would all debate them. At the end of the debate, we would take a vote to decide the Official Daily Illini Stance, and Kudenholdt would write the results and publish them in the paper throughout the week.

They appear to still be doing Edit Board at the DI — takes this week include, “It takes two seconds to put on a coat” and “Don’t be a jerk during finals” — and I would like to apologize to the current staff of the Daily Illini for not strangling this baby in the crib when we had the opportunity. There was nothing more miserable than Edit Board. Edit Board had five fatal flaws: