Evan Osnos' profile of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in the New Yorker painted a pretty rosy picture of the city Daley has run for almost 20 years. Too rosy, as Ben Joravksy notes. From his column in this week's Reader, in which he catalogs the civic problems that Osnos overlooked:

I'll just ask our visiting correspondents to reconsider the pervasive view that Chicago needs a temperamental tyrant who oversees a corrupt and inefficient regime in order to get anything done.

If we're talking about city services—collecting garbage, clearing snow—they were delivered every bit as well under Byrne, Washington, and Sawyer as they are today. As for the hard stuff, like creating high-paying jobs, eradicating poverty, making sure poor kids do as well in school as rich ones—on those matters Daley's as clueless as every other mayor.

Read the whole piece here.