Events

Tonight I've gotten invited to hear Lin-Manuel Miranda speak at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and after that, a masquerade. Then tomorrow is Chicago Gourmet. Then Sunday I'll either plotz or walk 30 kilometers. (Though in truth I'll probably be fine as my cold, tapering though it is, makes me not want to indulge too much.) Meanwhile, here are some articles that I may read in the next few hours: This month has been really hot and rainy in Illinois. Bleah. One more thing Trump is wrong about: Stop and...

Garrett Epps, writing for The Atlantic, warns that the advent of Trumpism comes mainly from an erosion of our collective understanding of and belief in the reasons our Constitution was written in the first place: Trumpism is the symptom, not the cause, of the malaise. I think we have for some time been living in the post-Constitution era. America’s fundamental law remains and will remain important as a source of litigation. But the nation seems to have turned away from a search of values in the...

Here are some things that are occupying me while I figure out who delivers matzoh ball soup: Andrew Sullivan recounts his time being an Internet addict. The Daily WTF explains how not to do caching. Deeply Trivial talks about natural-language processing. CityLab bemoans Chicago's crime wave. The AP describes how Trump screwed Gary, Ind., in much the same way he would screw the entire country. I also have a book or 50 somewhere. And I need a nap.

Via Deeply Trivial, BoingBoing's Caroline Seide posits the radical notion that Hillary Clinton's likability challenges may be simply because she's a complex woman: Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time. In fact, Donald Trump is the only candidate who is more disliked than Clinton. And he’s not onlyovertly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, but also unfit...

Four days after clinching the National League Central, the Cubs are still the only team in baseball to have gotten to the division championship, and the only team to have won 90+ games, and the only team to have lost fewer than 60. Hey, it could happen this year. Of course, the sign on Sheffield still says AC0071108, meaning it's been 108 years since they last won the World Series and 71 since they last won a pennant. 

The Chicago Tribune reports that the annoying trend of using smaller airplanes for longer routes is taking off over the Atlantic: The re-engined 737 Max and A320neo jets offer a 15 percent fuel saving meant to cut costs on the shortest inter-city services. At the same time the revamp has added about 800 km to their range -- just enough to allow the narrow-bodies to span the 5,000 km between the eastern U.S. and Western Europe. Norwegian Air Shuttle, JetBlue Airways and Portugal's TAP are among airlines...

One of the first photos I took with my poor, now-deceased G5:

My new LG G5 is now a brick, so I'm back to my slightly-cracked G4. Yesterday, the phone got hot, stopped responding to inputs, and rebooted itself twice in three hours. That's usually the sign of a runaway app. So upon turning it back on, I manually rebooted it to clear running apps (it auto-loads apps that were running when it resets), and all seemed fine. Then sometime while I walked home from Wrigley it shut itself off completely and has not yet woken up. Fortunately T-Mobile was able to move my SIM...

The Cardinals just lost 6-2 to the Giants, eliminating them from the division championship and giving the Cubs their first win since 2008. The game tonight was exciting from beginning to end, starting with some excellent fielding in the top of the 1st and ending with a 5-4 loss to Milwaukee. Tant pis. No fireworks. The important thing, though, is that the Cubs get to play in October. And they still have the best record in baseball at 93-53.

I'm going to my last Cubs game of the season tonight, and it could be historic. If the Cubs win against the Brewers, or if St. Louis loses their game, then the Cubs will be going to the post-season. Even without clinching the division tonight, they're still the top team in baseball right now with 93 wins and 52 losses. Stay tuned.