Here’s fellow Huffington Post blogger Kyle Hillman’s take on the process, which led to 18 majority black and 13 majority Latino wards:

It is difficult to say which map would have ultimately been wiser for Chicago residents. The Latino caucus map seems to have followed the one-person-one-vote principle and was maybe easier to defend in court, on the other hand, the Black caucus map clearly had the best compromise potential. Regarding the potential one-person-one-vote, I think maybe Chicago needs to just turn a blind eye toward the discrepancy.

One of my favorite online conversations occurred on Twitter when two people were discussing my diverse North Side neighborhood: Rogers Park. In their discussion one lady inquired how safe living in Rogers Park is because she heard it was bad. Her friend’s response, “… it is North Side, bad not Englewood bad.” That spot-on statement makes me at peace with the idea that my alderman might have to handle five thousand more residents. It also makes me ok with both minority caucuses fighting to figure out a creative way to acquire or maintain voices in city council.

For all the issues we have with crime in Rogers Park it isn’t Austin bad; as bad as Gale Elementary is it is not nearly as bad as several of the CPS schools on the chopping block. While I would like to see the Indian Desi corridor on Devon maintained in one ward, it isn’t nearly as important as keeping the Back of the Yard community together.

Whatever they came up with regarding the compromise map, it just has to help. Otherwise this exercise really was about jobs for currently elected officials and their families. What a wasted opportunity that would be.

For those looking for a more cutting take, there’s always Ben Joravsky’s trenchant columns in the Chicago Reader.  In December of last year he proposed, a ward-remap process  variety on Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal:

So, really folks, why waste a dime on this silliness? As I’ve suggested before, we should just divvy up the city into 50 wards without regard to ethnicity.

Let’s spend the $30 million on things we need—like librarians, teachers, firefighters, and cops. You know, the people who do the real work around here.

The price tag to which Joravsky referred is the price that a law suit could cost the city-it still may happen-from people who say the process did not follow the law.

While he may not sue, rookie alderman Nicholas Sposato certainly was unhappy with the result, which saw his ward’s demographics become substantially more Latino.  So, too, was 43rd Ward Ald. Michele Smith, whose Lincoln Park district  was divided into five wards (There was less squawking a decade ago, when the Back of the Yards had a similar fate.).

In the end, though, the proposal did pass, and the new wards will take effect until 2015.

We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see if Ben’s proposal is accepted, but we don’t have to hesitate before mentioning that one person who did acquit herself well was City Clerk Susana Mendoza, the first Latina to hold this position.

She answered questions throughout the process, posted a jpeg image of the passed map within a couple of hours, and had a downloadable version of the map by the end of the night.

Of course, this was not too surprising, given that Mendoza also announced her wedding on Twitter, according to Shia Kapos.

Still, though, it was a welcome change and an example of how, as former Speaker of the House, always hail-fellow well met Tip O’Neill famously recalled, all politics is local.

Until tomorrow.

We’ve come a long way in the past year.

In March we had a successful gathering in Tucson for journalists who covered the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

In May we had our first major fundraiser in New York City-an event where Gloria Steinem spoke as we honored Frank Ochberg.

In June Jim Lehrer joined our ranks after we met him in Washington, DC.

And in August we launched Dart Society Reports, our online magazine.

Today we published our second issue.

Edited by Jina Moore, and ushered through by Deirdre Stoelzle Graves, this issue focuses on incarceration.

The main pieces are a story and video by Susie Greene about long-term solitary confinement.

It’s wrenching stuff.

Greene talks with men who were alone in their cells, with lights buzzing incessantly, for more than 20 years.

They talk about the mental toll it took on them, and how that pain has not ended with their release.

The product of years of research and correspondence with the prisoners, Greene’s project is just one of this issues treats.

As Jina Moore writes in her Editor’s Note:

Other Dart Society members and friends reflect on a varied prison landscape. We meet the end of things: Iraqi blogger Ali Rawaf interrogates the increasing use of capital punishment in Iraq. Patricia Murphy recalls witnessing her first execution, and Melissa Manware Treadaway wonders when she’ll get the call to watch the execution of a man she’s been writing to for nearly 15 years.

But we also meet the arts: Huascar Robles writes about bringing multimedia to incarcerated youth, and taking away surprising lessons. Mary Wiltenburg and Andy Nelson explore Shakespeare in prisons and one man’s surprising journey toward acknowledging his crimes.

We meet disappointment: Gina Barton writes of losing a promising source to prison once more. But we also meet hope: Joseph Rodriguez shares one of the many stories of return he’s been documenting through photography over 20 years in Los Angeles.

In short, it’s a powerful issue and I hope you check it out and spread the word.

In the meantime, I want to congratulate all involved in the issue.  It’s another in a series of significant accomplishments as we continue to grow the organization.

Today’s source comes from South Africa.

I heard via email this morning from Vukani Cele, my exchange partner from 1995 who hosted me so magnificently in November and December when I was in Durban for COP17, the United Nations climate change conference.

Vukani opened his note with the following (Just so you know, “Mfowethu” means brother):

Mfowethu,

My mother turned 80 on Sunday, 15 January 2012. What a day! It was meant to be a small gathering just to acknowledge the day but no….it became a real party. Kids everywhere. Not all my family could make it because of short notice. My mother was so happy she just could not believe what was going on that day. You can imagine the food…Jeff, what a spread! For the first time in a long long time we met as family for something positive and not because someone had died. We have been meeting like that for many years in my family. It was such a beautiful start to the year.

In 1996, shortly before I left South Africa at the end of my Fulbright year, Vukani’s brother Xolo drove me to Mtwalume, the rural community in KwaZulu Natal Province where Vukani, his 10 siblings and he were raised (Vukani’s father had eight children by his first wife and four by their mother).

The times were not easy.

Vukani told me recently how his mother and father, both teachers, would gather the family, put the money they had earned on the table and go around asking each child what they wanted.

“This is what we have,” the parents would say.

The children would express their wishes, and the parents would do their best to meet them with what they had.

From this openness Vukani and his siblings learned about sharing and that his parents would do whatever they could to give their children what they desired.

Kind and generous, Mrs. Cele also displayed a wry sense of humor.

When I complimented her on how well she looked, she answered that it must have been because of the pills she was taking.

Meeting her then and seeing the area where Vukani grew up, learned to speak a rich brand of Zulu, and absorbed the traditions of slaughtering cows and goats and negotiating lobola, or bride price,  was, and remains, a treasured experience.

Seeing Mrs. Cele 15 years later at Vukani’s home as a surprise-he had not told me she was going to be there-made the pleasure even deeper.

After hugging and telling each other how glad we were to see each other again, Mrs. Cele explained me she would be soon turning 80.

She said that she knows she may not have long to live.

But, when her time comes, it will be all right because she knows her children are all right.

In other words, she is ready.

By that Mrs. Cele did not mean that she wanted to die tomorrow.

Indeed, she still wants to live.

But she has an acceptance of the inevitable end that will meet us all.

“That means you have lived a good life,” I said.

She nodded.

The wisdom, kindness and strength with which Mrs. Cele has lived in her 80 years inspires me, while the love she has brought to the world through her eldest son, who has become a brother to me, inspires the deepest gratitude in me.

The love she has given to her family has come back to her over and over.

Vukani and his two living brothers take turns hosting her until she decides she is ready to go back to Mtwalume.

Off she goes.

So, this morning, as I readied to head to downtown Chicago for work, I got a gift  in receiving the latest thread that Vukani has woven in our ever-deepening friendship.

And I got another one in reading and seeing the celebration of his remarkable mother,  who was born exactly three days after Dr. King in a land also filled with oppression and who has lived long and well enough to see it come out on the other side of justice.

While I’m generally not a fan of beauty pageants, the recently crowned Miss America 2012 showed guts and character in her choice of cause: supporting and mentoring the children of incarcerated parents.

It was a choice that she apparently wrestled long and hard with before making, and an area in which she has personal experience.

Joe Kaeppeler, her father, served 18 months in prison for mail fraud around the time his daughter was finishing high school.

Now that she has won the crown, Kaeppeler will seek to raise the profile and awareness of this all-too-little discussed issue.

Before starting to work at Hoy last March, I worked at The Chicago Reporter for five years.

One of the most powerful projects we did was about the children of incarcerated parents.

Our team did three major projects about this group of kids, who a number of people estimate make up about 2 million of our nation’s youth.

A disproportionate number are black and Latino.

Black children were nine times more likely than their white counterparts to have a parent in prison, while Latino children were three more times, we learned

The first package was based on a survey we did of close to 25 agencies that work with these children.  In it we found that there was often little communication between agencies and organizations, with the result being that children of incarcerated parents were often the invisible victims of crime.

Friend and colleague Fernando Diaz wrote about the challenges of transportation for families trying to visit their loved ones.  He found a negative correlation between the distance from home where the parent was incarcerated and the number of visits that parent received from family.

Our third project looked at the system from arrest to release, finding that children’s needs were addressed in a piecemeal, rather than systematic, fashion.

The work we did, along with activism by members of the Civic Action Network, contributed to legislative hearings at the state level about the subject.

I am proud of the journalism we did and of the impact we were able to have.

And, for me, one of the most powerful legacies of that work is my reporting memories.

For the first project, my brother Jon and I went to Lincoln Correctional Center with 15 families the Saturday before Christmas 2006.  The families were among the more than 200 who had applied to take the trip down south from 87th Street to visit their mothers, sister, aunts and grandmothers for just three hours.

For almost all of these families, this was their Christmas.

The reunion took place in a chilly gym.

After the hugs and kisses, the families moved upstairs, ate, talked, played volleyball and visited with each other.

For much of the time, observing the parents and their children looked like they could have been anywhere, rather than in the confines of a state prison.

The three hours passed in an instant.

One of the prison officials told the families it was time to go.

The women retreated to one side of the volleyball net, while the children and other family members lined up against the wall.

Then the wave came.

The children and mothers waved to each other, feeling like they were getting farther and farther away with each successive movement of the hand.

I wanted to move forward and to ask the mothers what they were feeling, to look at the children’s eyes for the tears that I knew had to be forming.

But I couldn’t.

Somehow the lump that formed inside me rooted me to the spot.

I had to take a minute to compose myself.

I rode the bus back with Jon and the families, took the Red line home from 87th Street and hugged Dunreith and Aidan tighter than usual when I got there.

I’ve done a lot of reporting since then, including the third project on that topic, and that day has remained inside me.

As Laura Kaeppeler makes her rounds across the country, I’ll think of her courage in using her personal struggle to benefit the larger society.

I’ll also think about the 2 million other children in the same situation.

And I’ll think about those mothers in Lincoln Correctional Center, their children and the wave they exchanged.

In particular, the future destination of the NBA’s top center Dwight Howard, he of the mile-wide shoulders, slam dunk championship and 2.9 million Twitter followers.

I didn’t get Mike’s point at first, and hearkened back to the days when superstars like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson spent their entire careers with a single team.

He was going in a different direction, though.

Rather Mike was bemoaning the fact that top-notch players like Howard, LeBron James, Chris Paul and others are just choosing where and with whom they want to play.  This leads to three or four super teams with a legitimate chance of winning the championship, with the vast majority of teams having no hope whatsoever of doing so.

We revieved the two decades starting with Bird and Magic’s arrival in 1979 and ending with Michael Jordan’s shove of Byron Russell before launching a jumper from just beyond the foul line to clinch the Bulls’ sixth championship in eight years in 1998.

Here was the tally of championships during that era:

Bulls: 6

Lakers: 5

Celtics: 3

Pistons: 2

Rockets: 2

Sixers: 1

The concentration of power was even more intense during the first nine of Magic and Bird’s career, when their teams won all but one of the titles (This dominance shows why the title of their co-authored book, When We Owned The Game, was pretty apt.).

Still, though, I believe Mike, my brother that is, was onto something important.

Many people commented on the “AAU mentality” after LeBron James’ Decision in which players think it is their right to seek whichever teammate they think gives them the best chance to win.

While James’ attitude elicited a dismissive sniff from Jordan and a biting commercial from his Airness that Jordan denied making, it is not unique.

In fact, I would argue, it’s shared by many, many members of his generation.

Like our son Aidan.

Growing up in what I call the “IPod generation,” Aidan could barely comprehend the idea of unquestioningly purchasing an entire album, rather than just the songs that appealed to him.

I had the same experience when I taught a class of graduate students at the University of Chicago in 2009.  Many of them could not see the value in having a collective experience, rather than simply, as one student explained, “what is useful” for us.

I don’t write this to disparage, as Jordan did, the new way.

Reading biographies of Jackie Robinson and Joe DiMaggio, two icons of the old era of fierce rivalries and players staying with a single team, reveals that they played their career’s one single-year contract at a time.  In those years, the owners had virtually all of the bargaining power (This was a labor system that Curt Flood fought courageously and successfully to end.).

I’m not comparing how Dunreith and I grew up as music consumers to 1940s era professional baseball players, but I am saying that, while there were singles, the piecemeal approach to music, sports, television or any other activity in which we now have assumed choice enabled by technology simply did not exist in the same widespread way that it does now.

Some may say that parenting styles play a role, and I can see that.

But I would say that the increasing connectedness and leveling aspect of technology plays a greater part in linking the son of a state trooper who is considering a different team to ply his trade and our son’s musical passions and choices.

Is there an IPod generation?  Is this viewpoint just a product of my moving deeper into middle age?  Have the assumptions about levels of choice changed?

II. After a 9 for 12 shooting night against the Knicks, Steve Nash is shooting 64 percent from the field this month.  That’s higher than Shaq used to shoot, and an awful lot of his shots were dunks.   Nash turns 38 next month.

III. There are 22 athletes who have more than 2 million Twitter followers.  The top two are soccer players: Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo.

IV. At different points during the City Council meeting today, Rahm Emanuel looked like he was channeling Benito Mussolini or Richard M. Daley.

V. The Chicago ward remaps are supposed to give 13 majority Latino and 18 majority black wards, but those numbers shrink when you look at the voting age, rather than total, population.

VI.  Taking notes in English of a native Spanish speaker who prefers English now but was being interviewed in Spanish and having poor handwriting dramatically increases your margin of error.

VII. Chicago will be the first city to host both the G8 and NATO summits since London did it in 1977, when Jimmy Carter was in the first year of his presidency, the Internet did not exist and jogging was a national craze here in the United States.

VIII. Heard on the Internet: “That’s so 14 seconds ago.”  Where do we see that sense of time leading?

IX. Facebook is expected to pass 1 billion users in August.  That’s, well, one in every seven people on the planet.

X. A Thai journalist who exposed corruption and wrote about land issues was gunned down recently in Phuket, a city better known to the outside world as a vacation resort.

Back to Sources of Joy and students tomorrow.

Sweet dreams, everyone!

As readers of this space may remember, we’ve already seen our son Aidan turn 19 and my brother Mike turn 45.

Today is Jon’s turn.

He’s turning 42.

I’m writing regularly this year about sources of joy, and Jon’s definitely one of them for a number of reasons.

At base, though, they center around his always having been his own person

He was like this as a kid.

Whereas Mike and I spent endless hours playing, reading and talking about sports, Jon, who had asthma, repeatedly read a book about skunks.  He told Mom once that he hadn’t caught enough people recently, so set about building a people catcher on our front lawn.

The device didn’t snare anyone, but it did move Jon further down the road of making his own choices and carving his own path.

A major part of that path is photography.

Grandpa Arthur, Mom’s father, gave Jon a Brownie camera in middle school.  The love of making pictures got Jon in the gut and hasn’t let go. He’s more than 20 years into a photographic journey that has taken him from Chicago’s South Side to elections in Afghanistan, from across the U.S./Mexico border to Haiti after the devastating earthquake almost exactly two years ago.

Jon’s consistently worked to define and expand the technique and scope of his craft.

He’s branched out from being a Chicago-based photographer to a global one.

He’s done two multi-year, remarkably intimate and comprehensive bodies of work and learned to do breaking news events like in Haiti or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Gulf region.

Jon’s work has earned some of the photographic world’s highest accolades.

We’re talking World Press Photography awards.  Guggenheim and Alicia Patterson Fellowships, the latter as a named fellow.  And, last year, a TED Fellowship.

That’s he’s been able to do that while also managing his finances in a way during tremendous upheaval in the industry and sustained global economic downturn is nothing short of remarkable.

Yet, to me what is at least as noteworthy is the manner in which he has conducted himself.

Jon and his cadre of photography brothers like Danny Frazier routinely edit each other’s work, even at times when they’re gunning for the same funding and recognition. This kind of commitment to each other and to their shared craft can only come from the deepest place within themselves, and is utterly commendable, too.

Today after work, Dunreith and I will get together with Jon, Lynette and our childhood friend Andrew Lichtenstein.  We’ll have some food and drink, talk about the day and our upcoming adventures, and laugh.

That meal, and my anticipation of it, are both sources of joy.

So, too, is the life lived by my youngest brother, who on this day joins Mike and me in moving deeper into our fifth decade.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.

I used to be pretty loud.

I’m not saying I’m silent now.

Mom’s theory was that I was short, so was making up for it by talking loudly.

I’m not saying she’s wrong, but that wasn’t all of it.

I didn’t feel completely seen.

Many people have helped me change that feeling, and Paul Tamburello’s near the top of the list.

My former fourth grade teacher, mentor, friend and fellow writer has been a witness since I was a student in his class at Brookline’s Pierce School in 1974.

Being seen had its drawbacks, of course.

There was the time I kept talking in morning meeting after he warned me.

Paul shook his head, picked up the yellow piece of chalk and wrote my name on the board.  This meant I had to stay after school.

This was both a rare exception and part of the pattern that illustrated the rule.

He saw us.

About a dozen years after I entered Paul’s classroom my parents were in a very serious car accident.

I stopped out of school in California and moved back to Brookline to be with my family.

During this time Al Fortune, the principal at my former elementary school, invited me to his office.  His voice filled with concern, he asked me how my parents were doing and if I would like to work as a recess aide at Pierce.

This meant I started working in Paul’s classroom, the start of a two-year apprenticeship under his tutelage.

My time there helped me enormously on many levels.  Paul schooled me in the mechanics of being a teacher-I’m glad he did this because, beyond having been a student, I had no idea what I was dong-and, more basically, through his witness, on how to trust and believe in myself.

At the time and in the years afterward, Paul would explain to me that the benefit was mutual, that my being in his classroom as a former student was in some ways the ultimate tribute to, and manifestation of, his impact as an educator.

Although I went on to be come a full-time educator myself for 15 years and had many meaningful interactions with students myself, I didn’t fully feel what he meant.

Until very recently.

Last month I had the unusual privilege and honor of traveling to Durban, South Africa to cover COP17, the United Nations’ conference on climate change.

The conference itself was extraordinary in many ways, and the experience was also drenched in personal meaning.  This was true because 15 years ago I had lived and taught at the Uthongathi School in Tongaat, a formerly Indian community about 25 miles north of Durban.

The year was a very important one for me.

Having been active in the divestment movement as a college student, I had wanted to travel to the country for a decade.  Teaching and coaching soccer at Uthongathi, one of the country’s first private, multi-racial schools, traveling around the country and seeing places like the Cape of Good Hope, and getting to know my exchange partner Vukani Cele’s friends were all contributed to realizing many deeply held dreams for me.

While I was in Durban last month, Vukani arranged for us to meet with four former students from that year.

It was a glorious reunion filled with laughs, satisfaction at hearing how they are all making their way in the world, and exclamations at time’s passage illustrated by the realization that Manqoba, Malindi, Ruwen and Vishan were all older now Vukani and I had been when we taught them.

In one of the evening’s more humorous moments, Malindi, who lectures in Commerce at the University of KwaZuluNatal, told us, “Mr. Lowenstein, Mr. Cele, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time.”

We leaned forward, uncertain what she was going to say.

“When both of you were on dorm duty on the weekends, we knew we could stay out all weekend and never get caught!” she said.

This revelation surprised, but did not completely shock, me.

I had taken more than a month to believe my colleagues that it truly was all right to leave the students unsupervised each morning at 10:00 a.m. while we retreated to the staff room for our daily tea break.  And on the one or two weekends each term that I had dorm duty, I had followed the instructions to check and see if they were sleeping at 11:00 p.m. before turning in myself.

Vukani, on the other hand, looked utterly shocked.

“Jeff?!” he exclaimed.  “What are they telling us?”

I didn’t have much time to answer that question because, to paraphrase American patriot John Paul Jones, Malindi had just begun to confess.

All manner of transgressions issued forth from her.

Where this one drank.

Where that one smoked.

Where the other one fooled around with another student.

Vukani looked more and more stunned with each progressive statement from Malindi.

“What is she telling us, Jeff?” He asked again.

“She’s telling us we were the weakest link,” I replied.

PART II: Shared memories with Manqoba.

Here, courtesy of their sister-in-law Ann Hsieh, is a photo gallery of some of their pre-wedding shared experiences.