Events

I've been meaning to post this photo from July. No story behind it; I just think it's cool.

So far today, the following have crossed my browser: Donald Trump's campaign actually did set up a policy office, but after the convention most of them quit. Jonathan Chait thinks Matt Lauer completely sucked at the policy debate last night; Josh Marshall thinks he really didn't. The Economist's Schumpeter column has taken up the plight of us introverts in the workspace. Nature explains how to raise super-smart children. Back to the mines...

It's fascinating how working from home doesn't seem to give me more time to, you know, work. So these have backed up on me, and I hope to read them...someday: Simple Talk has a (year-and-a-half-old) article on MongoDB vs. Azure Document DB. UTA professor John Traphagan worries about America's cult of ignorance. Washington Monthly's Paul Glastris bemoans how the press is making the Clinton Foundation in to the new Benghazi. Fallows' 95th Trump Time Capsule entry points out the simple logic of Trump...

It turns out, no one wants to buy ugly big houses in the far suburbs. This apparently comes as a shock to their owners: The McMansion style, built between 2001 and 2007 and averaging 3,000 to 5,000 square feet, lacks the appeal with today's buyers compared to old vintage homes or large freshly built homes. The realization is especially hard on homeowners trying to sell because when they bought the giant homes in the early 2000s, they thought of them as great investments, Feinstein said. Then, the idea...

"...people do not relate guns with gun crime."—The American President And here in Chicago, where we lost more than one lawsuit over our attempts to get guns off the streets, we've had more murders this year than New York and Los Angeles combined. Thirteen people died this weekend alone: Thirteen people were shot to death in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend as the city logged its 500th homicide of the year. Thirty-one of the 65 people shot over the long weekend were wounded between 6 a.m. Monday and 3...

On my trip home from Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, I came across this lovely girl at the MSP airport: Didn't get to say hi, but ain't she sweet?

From yesterday's Times: you know how global warming is "just a theory?" Not anymore.

The results are in for meteorologcial summer 2016, and it was, in fact, really warm and soggy in Illinois. Chicago's average temperature of 23.5°C was 1.4°C above the 1980-2010 normal. That period was the warmest in history, however, so the summer that just ended Wednesday was Chicago's 18th warmest in recorded history, putting it at the 88th percentile. Did I mention wet? For June through August, we got 338.8 mm of precipitation, a damp 32.8 mm above normal—not a record, but still very squishy. Oh...

Airways magazine has the heartwarming story of American Airlines MD-80 N9401W heading off to retirement in New Mexico: This aircraft, and 19 others, were part of a symbolic retirement. A 20-aircraft order placed by American Airlines to McDonnell Douglas in 1982 marked the beginning of an era in which AA became the world’s largest MD-80 operator, but as the decades passed through and as new and more efficient aircraft joined the fleet, the venerable Mad Dog era is now heading into the sunset. Once the...

Two stories, in two directions. First, a cool interactive history of how the construction of Chicago's Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) displaced thousands of people and destroyed thousands of buildings: In the late 1940s, the Oak Leaves newspaper in Oak Park predicted that the new superhighway would replace the West Side’s “appalling slums” with “orderly dwellings where orderly people are living in health and comfort.” Of all the neighborhoods that the expressway sliced through, the Near West Side had the...