Events

Who could have imagined that the Supreme Court would rule, 5-4 along party lines in both instances, that closely-held corporations don't have to provide birth control and Illinois can't treat certain public workers as unionized employees? The rear-guard action against women and labor continues. Some day, I hope in my lifetime, people will look back on this era the way we look back on the late 19th century. I hope that in my lifetime these right-wing, anti-labor decisions are viewed the same way we today...

Peter Beinert points to an interview the former vice president gave to Charlie Rose this week as a repudiation of George W Bush: [E]arlier this week, Dick Cheney spent an hour on Charlie Rose and, in the guise of attacking President Obama, ripped his former boss’s foreign-policy vision to shreds. Cheney explained that he had recently traveled through the Middle East meeting with a “lot of my friends going back to Desert Storm days.” By which he meant Sunni tyrants in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and...

Via TPM, a funny (!) gun-safety PSA:

A Comcast installer showed up this morning within the appointed time frame, and in about an hour had taken my apartment the Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters from this: To this: I almost want to dance around singing "A Whole New World" but that would be very disturbing to my self image. Instead I'll head into the office, getting in a little earlier than I expected, and come home to real Internet speeds. In fact, I think right now I'll watch something on YouTube just because I can. Goodbye, AT&T....

This map surprised me: Max Fisher explains: It's no secret that European colonialism was a vast, and often devastating, project that over several centuries put nearly the entire world under control of one European power or another. But just how vast can be difficult to fully appreciate. Here, to give you a small sense of European colonialism's massive scale, is a map showing every country put under partial or total European control during the colonial era, which ran roughly from the 1500s to the 1960s....

The U.S. Supreme Court announced this morning their decisions in two closely-watched cases. In Riley v. California, the Court ruled 9-0 that police can't search your cell phone without a warrant: The court said on a 9-0 vote that the right of police to search an arrested suspect at the scene without a warrant does not extend in most circumstances to data held on a cell phone. Because technologically sophisticated phones may hold huge amounts of personal data, they may not be searched without a warrant...

Maryland dentist Edward Gramson got taken for a ride by British Airways: When a North Bethesda, Maryland, dentist planned a trip to Portugal for a conference last September, he decided he'd quickly swing by Granada, Spain, to see the famed Alhambra and other historical sites. But carrier British Airways had other ideas, and instead sent Edward Gamson and his partner to Grenada — with an E — in the Caribbean, by way of London, no less. Gamson, who said he clearly told the British Airways agent over the...

As mentioned earlier, today is the first day of my new job. That means orientation, setting up a computer, navigating paperwork, etc. Then tonight the Cubs play Cincinnati at Wrigley (weather permitting), so I'll probably go straight from work to the field. So I'll probably be a little slow posting things this week.

The Chicago Art Institute has released a video showing how conservator Faye Wrubel restored Caillebotte's masterpiece: The striking results of the restoration reveals greater saturation of color, sharper edges, and more contrast with an overall effect of more visual depth. Overpainting was removed from the once yellow sky, exposing a bluer surface with gradation indicating light and movement. “What we have been seeing all these years may have been beautiful, we may have all loved it, but it wasn’t...

Not quite, but in today's New York Times he tries to get Republican acceptance that climate change is real: We’re making the same mistake today with climate change. We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy. The warning signs are clear and growing more urgent as the risks go unchecked. This is a crisis we can’t afford to ignore. I feel as if I’m watching as we fly in slow motion on a collision course toward a giant mountain. We can see the crash...