Events

Nothing of political or social import this morning. Just a photo from yesterday, of my friend's 20-month-old daughter climbing up a slide. I watched this kid go up and down this slide structure like she owned it. I'm no developmental psychologist, but it sure seemed to me she was way ahead of where a 20-month-old would ordinarily be in spatial reasoning and motor control. Plus she's damn cute:

Embattled clothing retailer American Apparel tweeted an Independence Day ad yesterday showing a stylized photo of the 1986 Challenger explosion with the hashtags "#smoke" and "#clouds." (I will not post the image here.) Shortly after, they tweeted a heartfelt apology blaming the child that somehow they put in charge of social media. Unfortunately, they also have a child, Ryan Holiday (born in June 1987), running their entire marketing department, who threw his social media flunky under the bus to cover...

I love the night buses in London. Given my habit of staying on Chicago time, I've ridden my share of them. (If American 90 arrives after 11:30pm, I'm guaranteed to do so.) So today's story in the Atlantic's CityLab blog about the phenomenon made me smile: You see, London’s night buses are actually the great, unsung glory of the city’s travel network. Compared with cabs, they’re dirt cheap (they cost the same as a regular daytime bus), come extremely frequently and cover a wide area, and go quickly...

Last night I got an email from Microsoft saying the Windows Azure subscription that I got through work was disabled because it had run out of credits. Some context: The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) gives developers access to all of Microsoft's software development projects, along with a monthly credit to use Windows Azure that can go as high as $150. Because West Monroe Partners wants to make sure all of us have the right tools, we get the subscriptions with the $150 credit. I activated my MSDN...

Ed Kilgore thinks so: Many fair-minded people look sympathetically at the plaintiffs in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases as people who just want to be left in peace to nourish their eccentric and non-scientific views about the sacred human dignity of zygotes. But it’s impossible, of course, to divorce those views from the consequences for the affected employees. And so long as such companies operate in the secular world, they benefit like other secular entities from the various investments and...

Wow, last night's rain was officially epic: The rate at which rain fell across the Midwest Monday was extraordinary in a number of locations. Highland, Park’s 98 mm fell between 6 and 11:59 p.m. In just a fraction of that period, Midway Airport logged 20 mm. It fell in just 7 minutes! Lake In the Hills , IL received 66 mm in just 2 hours. But rainfall rates west in Iowa were even more dramatic. Williamstown received 133 mm in the day’s 3 waves of rainfall while 114 mm of Muscatine, Iowa’s 207 mm of rain...

I've written about weather for a while. And despite my raising the alarm about anthropogenic climate change, I'm not given to hyperbole. But, wow. This is going on in Chicago right now, and it's epic: Seriously, I think one of my neighbors just ushered a pair of squirrels into the boat he built today... Play us out, EFO:

The Atlantic Citylab blog today had a good item explaining why London's transport system has the best finances, and how other transport systems can learn from them: In U.S. cities, politicians often defer fare increases until there's a funding crisis too big to ignore. That leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth about the transit agency's ability to manage its finances. It also leads city residents to believe that fare hikes are only something that should rarely occur. In London, on the contrary, TfL...

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...