•October 19, 2022•
As part of an ongoing effort to carefully roll back Illinois’s COVID-19 executive orders, Governor Pritzker on Monday updated masking and testing requirements for healthcare facilities and long-term care centers. These new guidelines, which went into effect Monday, are in line with updated Center for Disease Control recommendations. Federal requirements remain in effect for those facilities.
“Thanks to the tremendous efforts of our health care workers and residents, Illinois has done better at keeping our people safe with vaccines, boosters, and masking, which puts us in a position to continue to scale back health care requirements in line with the CDC,” said Governor JB Pritzker. “COVID-19 is on its way to becoming endemic, like the flu, but it still poses a real threat to our immunocompromised and disabled communities. Here in Illinois, we look out for one another—it’s what defines us as Illinoisans. Let us continue to live up to those ideals by masking up and testing when we have symptoms and getting COVID-19 booster shots—as I recently did—so that we can protect our neighbors.” Read More

•October 19, 2022•
October is College Changes Everything® (CCE) Month in Illinois, when the Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC) teams up with high schools and community partners to support students in completing their college and financial aid applications. During CCE Month and the Fall CCE Campaign from Labor Day through Thanksgiving, ISAC and its partners provide an intensive schedule of free college and financial aid application completion workshops available statewide. That’s especially important this year, as students will see changes in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) that will begin to simplify the application, and there will be expanded financial aid eligibility for some students. The 2023-24 FAFSA and the Alternative Application for Illinois Financial Aid became available Oct. 1, 2022. Read More

•October 19, 2022•
By Jim Baumann
NP Guest Writer

Sports columnist/word wizard Jim O’Donnell passed along to me a Washington Post column by Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer on what I’ll call poofy words. I found it most interesting.
In it Dreyer writes about his relentless search-and-destroy mission for the word “very,” which is often very unnecessary — just as my use of it in this sentence was.
He also might criticize my use of “most” to describe his column as interesting. It wasn’t the most interesting column I’ve ever read, but “interesting” by itself felt like I’d shortchanged it. Read More