Events

So...I hate to admit this, but I'm going to US Cellular Field tonight, because my trivia team won a bunch of Sox tickets. This will make me 0-for-3 on paying to get into the place, which I like. And tonight, in a very literal way, the park will go to the dogs: The White Sox will receive an attendance boost from some canine fans Tuesday when the team hosts its annual “Bark at the Park” event, and they hope it’s enough to set a new Guinness World Record. The Sox are attempting to set a record for the most...

James Fallows has a long article in the upcoming Atlantic attempting to answer this question: The most famous story about modern presidential campaigning now has a quaint old-world tone. It’s about the showdown between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in the first debate of their 1960 campaign, which was also the very first nationally televised general-election debate in the United States.   The story is that Kennedy looked great, which is true, and Nixon looked terrible, which is also true—and that...

At work, I typically sit at an east-facing window on the 35th floor of the Sears Willis Tower. Here's my view: That means I can often see Michigan, Indiana, and everything in between, including very large boats out on the Lake. For the last half-hour I've watched a huge white thing slowly steam South, wondering what it was. It turns out, there's a website for that. And the boat is, in fact, pretty big: So the 138-meter Glostrander is puttering southward at 19 km/h towards South Chicago. Good to know....

The Economist has found that craft breweries are inversely correlated with religiosity in the US: Some states are craftier than others. Atop the list of craft breweries per capita is Vermont, with 44 of them crammed into one of the nation’s smallest and least populated states. In addition to being better liquored, Vermonters are a good bit more godless than the national average. This reflects a broader trend: there is a markedly negative correlation between a state’s religiosity and breweries per...

Usually I just link to articles I haven't read yet. This morning, here's a list of videos friends have posted. (They take longer than articles.) And, OK, one article: Politico interviewed dozens of people who were involved with getting the president home on 9/11, fifteen years ago today. Their accounts are riveting.

So, a couple weeks ago, I replaced my LG G4 with an LG G5. I thought about getting the Samsung Galaxy 7, but it was $350 more and didn't really have a lot of extra features. Turns out, it did have one extra feature that really my phone doesn't: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says owners of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphones should turn them off and stop using them because of the risk that their batteries can explode. The agency also says it's working with Samsung on an official recall of the...

Workers digging London's Crossrail tunnel have helped uncover a 350-year-old mystery about the Great Plague: [T]he Great Plague...killed 100,000 Londoners (roughly a quarter of the city’s population) around 350 years ago. Last year, workers constructing a future new ticket hall at Liverpool Street Station unearthed a charnel pit adjoining the old Bedlam Hospital, in which 3,000 skeletons were interred. Now it turns out that some of these skeletons had the answer to a centuries’ old mystery, hidden away...

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...