How are your home insurance rates?

Going up, we imagine.

Today the Tribune editorial board asks the question of what Springfield should do about those rate increases, specifically focusing on what is going on with Allstate, one of the largest insurers in Illinois.

Are you on Medicare? Would you know if you were? Today, we look at how individual states have created their own names for programs (such as BadgerCare in Wisconsin) and that has led to some Americans not even knowing that they are dependent on the federal program. We look at the future of this program which also has problems with fraud, especially in Minnesota.

In case you missed it Sunday, the board argued that the U.S. should ban social media for children under 16, a position that Rahm Emanuel among others have taken, as have countries like Australia. We are not generally fans of banning things and we know that enforcement would be far from easy. But we feel strongly that the impact of social media on kids is pernicious enough to take this step, which would give parents and schools more ammunition.

Our Opinion section this weekend has included a very spirited defense of the humanities from University of Chicago professor Shadi Bartsch. "The sciences and the humanities are different faces of the human search for knowledge," Shadi writes, "and not the opposites we have turned them into. If you hamstring one, you hamstring the other."

Meanwhile Jodie Bondi Norgaard takes issue with President Donald Trump's cruel tweet mocking the deaths of filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife. "The post was reckless and cruel," Jodie writes, "and the meaning was unmistakable: Nothing is off-limits anymore. Not illness. Not grief. Not even death itself."

As you perhaps read, the Tribune editorial board shares Jodie's outrage.

We also have a look at how a school raised attendance rates and what your holiday table has to say about leadership! "The holidays remind us of values such as gratitude and empathy, " writes Dawn Brown of Northwestern University. "For leaders, these are not seasonal sentiments; they are strategic imperatives."

Hope your short work week gets off to a great start.

— Chris Jones, editorial page editor

Submit an op-ed | Submit a letter to the editor | Meet the Tribune Editorial Board | Subscribe to this newsletter