Events

Sears, Roebuck & Co. was founded only a couple years after the Chicago fire (and the Apollo Chorus). For decades people equated the Sears brand with mail-order retail. They could deliver anything, anywhere, and people in rural 19th- and early-20th-century America depended on them. Their success and business acumen culminated in them commissioning the tallest building in the world just over 40 years ago. Their current chairman, Eddie Lampert, took over in 2004, and immediately applied the teachings and...

Salon's Seth Stevenson highlights the Cartography and Geographic Information Society's "Best of Show" map from this year. It may not be the best map of the U.S. ever drawn, but wow, it's impressive: David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a...

In the last 40 years, astronomers have gathered more and more evidence that our moon came out of a scarcely-imaginable collision between a baby (100-million-year-old) Earth and another proto-planet named Theia. (Watch this video for a good explanation.) Just two weeks ago, astronomers at UCLA announced a clarification: Theia didn't hit Earth in a glancing blow, as previously thought. Instead, the two planets hit head-on: “We don’t see any difference between the Earth’s and the moon’s oxygen isotopes...

Buzzfeed via TPM reports that Marco Rubio is probably not ready for the White House: The key line is: "Though generally seen as cool-headed and quick on his feet, Rubio is known to friends, allies, and advisers for a kind of incurable anxiousness — and an occasional propensity to panic in moments of crisis, both real and imagined." Now plenty of us get anxious. But there's probably nothing you want less in a President than a propensity to panic in moments of crisis. It's almost terrifying. Now I'm...

Former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin ran against Sanders during her 1986 re-election campaign: When Sanders was my opponent he focused like a laser beam on “class analysis,” in which “women’s issues” were essentially a distraction from more important issues. He urged voters not to vote for me just because I was a woman. That would be a “sexist position,” he declared. [B]oth Clinton and Sanders have declared they are favor paid maternity and sick leave, and equal pay for equal work. What sets them...

Calculated Risk updates the "scariest jobs chart ever:" The chart shows each of the post-World War II recessions in terms of job losses from the pre-recession peak. Notice that the 2001 recession line slides right into the 2007 line, as the Republican policies that led to the housing boom and bust tanked the banking sector. We haven't fully recovered from the 2001 recession, in other words. We've had a generally-down cycle for almost 15 years now. That is why we should not elect a Republican legislature...

Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg put the Rauner administration in context in a column a couple of weeks ago: Not only did Rauner fail to make tangible progress, but he didn’t even tread water properly. The normal operation of the state, such as passing an annual budget, failed to occur, sacrificed on the altar of the governor’s hunger for term limits, union enfeeblement and other unrelated pet causes. He’s like an office manager getting himself hired by promising to expand a business who then promptly...

Mark Russell, a writer in Oregon I've never met, posted one of the best descriptions of the differences between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders that I've seen on Tuesday: [T]he truth is that this is not a battle between good and evil so much as an awkward contest between two animals who evolved in entirely different ecosystems. Hillary Clinton is like a grizzled hunter in the Amazon. Every day is a battle for survival. She has suffered every venom and poison imaginable and from her time as being the...

I have three books in the works and two on deck (imminently, not just in my to-be-read stack) right now. Reading: Neal Stephenson, Seveneves. Christopher Dickey, Our Man In Charleston. Gene Kim, et al., The Phoenix Project. On deck: Kevin Hearne, "Iron Druid Chronicles" book 8: Staked. Kim Stanley Robinson, "Mars" trilogy book 2: Green Mars. Meanwhile, I have these articles and blog posts to read, some for work, some because they're interesting: Deeply Trivial dissects the bogus claim that six coin...

The European Commission yesterday announced they've reached a broad agreement with the United States to allow trans-Atlantic data transfers that respect European privacy laws: The EU-US Privacy Shield reflects the requirements set out by the European Court of Justice in its ruling on 6 October 2015, which declared the old Safe Harbour framework invalid. The new arrangement will provide stronger obligations on companies in the U.S. to protect the personal data of Europeans and stronger monitoring and...