Marilynne Robinson created the Boughton and Ames families of Gilead, Iowa in her 2004 Gilead, a lingeringly beautiful epistolary novel in which the aging Reverend John Ames reflects on his life in a letter to his son. Robinson's three subsequent novels — Home, Lila, and, most recently, Jack, all as transcendently lovely as the first — return to Gilead's world, characters, and plot points, retelling and re-examining each one with lapidary care.

State Sen. Ram Villivalam says he plans to offer a proposal to create paid family leave in Illinois.

Villivalam, a Chicago Democrat, says the idea would be to allow workers to take leave with pay for themselves or to care for a new baby or other family member.

“There are people that are working, living paycheck to paycheck, without access to pay leave, and they're faced with the impossible choice: Do I care for my child or loved one in need? Or do I try to put food on the table?" he said. "Paid family leave eliminates this dilemma."

Illinois has awarded the first round of emergency funding to small businesses to help them during the pandemic.  

A Lake County power couple has allegedly been breaking state campaign finance laws for years, allowing the pair — who sit on the Lake County Board and Lake Forest City Council — to take in more campaign contributions than legally allowed, including from Republican mega donors Dick and Liz Uihlein.

Despite people's fears, sophisticated, deceptive videos known as "deepfakes" haven't arrived this political season. But it's not because they aren't a threat, sources tell NPR. It's because simple deceptions like selective editing or outright lies have worked just fine.

"You can think of the deepfake as the bazooka and the video splicing as a slingshot. And it turns out the slingshot works," said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley specializing in visual misinformation.

COVID-19 is still spreading across the U.S., but you would barely know it by how people are planning to vote this year.

As the pandemic took hold in the spring, voting experts predicted a national shift toward mail or absentee voting: some experts predicted as many as 70% of all votes cast could be by mail, as was the case in Wisconsin's April primary.