Events

On this day in 1954, the Supreme Court handed down Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which ended "separate but equal" education after finding that the two concepts are antagonistic. Also on this day in 1954, the City of Chicago announced plans for the Stateway Gardens housing project, which eventually replaced an African-American slum with a high-rise hell-on-earth housing African Americans. As historian John R. Schmidt comments, "Maybe the new public housing projects were an attempt to keep...

The Swiss have built a 57 km tunnel under the Alps, and it opens June 1st: [T]he new Gotthard Base Tunnel burrows deep beneath the mountains to connect Switzerland’s German- and Italian-speaking regions, ultimately linking the Swiss lowlands with the North Italian plain. It exceeds the length of its longest predecessor, Japan’s Seikan Tunnel, by a little over three kilometers (1.9 miles). Running at up to 8,000 feet below mountain peaks at times, it also runs deeper below ground level than any other...

New Republic's Brian Buetler reports that the wing-nuts in the Republican Party (i.e., about half of them) are already laying the psychological groundwork for the increased reporting on Donald Trump's past coming out now that he's the presumptive nominee: The Republican primary campaign revealed (or rather reestablished) that Donald Trump is a bigot and a sexist and a creep. In fairness, this was not entirely a testament to fearless journalism; Trump happily exhibited all of these behaviors in front of...

Yes, I've posted a few things about the killing of Sears lately, because Eddie Lampert's investor call the other day was a train-wreck. Well, Crain's has attempted to tote up the damage, and it turns out Lampert has reduced the value of Sears stock by over 90%—not counting the dead spin-offs: Since he combined Sears Roebuck with Kmart in March 2005, Sears Holdings stock has lost roughly 90 percent of its value, dropping to an all-time low of $11.53 a share yesterday. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index has...

After announcing yesterday that Sears will close its oldest retail store in the U.S. in the wake of a $1.13 bn loss last year, CEO Eddie Lampert told investors that he intends to return the chain to profitability in five years. Apparently their loyalty program is the problem: Shop Your Way members sign up to receive coupons, and free shipping, and earn points that can be converted into dollars. Membership also provides access to a “social commerce” community on shopyourway.com that lets shoppers see...

This is Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s very first brick-and-mortar store, located just a few blocks from my house: The store opened in November 1925, and is closing this summer, as a consequence of Eddie Lampert's rape and involuntary homicide of the company. Our local NPR affiliate, WBEZ, has the complete story.

A feature film based on a wicked creepy Neil Gaiman story from his anthology "Fragile Things" will be released later this year: Director John Cameron Mitchell brings Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman to a seedy east London location for his latest feature, a punk-alien love story. [He] looks to be in his element. It is December 2015 and he is on an industrial site in Wapping, east London, surrounded by aliens, punks and Nicole Kidman in a spiky white wig. The US actor-writer-director is instructing...

Canadian brothers Tim and Alex Foley discovered that their parents were spies for the Russian SVR when the FBI raided their house on 27 June 2010: [T]he FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their...

Via Daily Kos, the President gave the commencement address at Howard University Saturday, giving a clear rebuke to Bernie Sanders' central message throughout: The president was not attacking Sanders’ ideology of fairness. But he was clearly separating himself from Sanders’ dogmatic insistence on revolutionary transformation. If you want to make life fair, then you have to start with the world as it is. The balance between idealism and pragmatism was clearly at the forefront of the president’s mind....

With two performances and two rehearsals over the weekend, I didn't have any time to post. I also didn't have as much time as I wanted to walk, though I did manage 20,249 steps for the weekend. (That was a little disappointing, especially because yesterday's weather was perfect for being outside.) Meanwhile, the chorus have finally put up videos of our April fundraiser. So, yeah, we did this: I'll leave finding videos of me holding a puppet as an exercise for the reader.