Events

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago has some epic binge drinking: The data looked at the 500 largest cities in the country, split into more than 28,000 smaller areas. Large swaths of Lake View ranked in the top 1 percent for binge drinking nationally in 2014, the most recent year data were available. The CDC estimates that in some parts of Lake View, more than a third of residents are engaged in binge drinking, which is defined as more than five...

So: Hillary Clinton officially won 2.9 million votes over Trump, making her the most popular losing candidate ever. What's this about a supervolcano in Italy? Christmas Day in Chicago will be unusually warm. I won't be here, but when I get back, my car will be out of its snowdrift (I hope). OK, traveling tomorrow, reports as circumstances warrant.

Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley died 20 December 1976: Daley was 74 years old, in his 21st year as Mayor of Chicago.  He’d been having chest pains over the weekend, and had made an appointment with his doctor. That’s where he was now. The doctor had examined Daley. You have to be admitted to the hospital immediately, he’d told Daley.  The mayor had phoned one of his sons.  Then, while the doctor was busy making hospital arrangements, the mayor had collapsed. At 3:50 p.m., the mayor was dead. So...

Krugman's column from yesterday—the day Donald Trump was actually elected our next President—echoes a concern I've had for years: I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell. Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade. Famously, on paper the...

The usually-Republican Brookings Institution reports (.pdf) on why our Constitution has an emoluments clause, and how Trump is exactly why it has one: Foreign interference in the American political system was among the gravest dangers feared by the Founders of our nation and the Framers of our Constitution. The United States was a new government, and one that was vulnerable to manipulation by the great and wealthy world powers (which then, as now, included Russia). One common tactic that foreign...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago are literally in the mix of the upcoming Netflix show Sense8. You can hear us in this promo. We haven't been able to share this information until just now. The chorus recorded a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" at our November 21st rehearsal. (I unfortunately missed the rehearsal, so I'm not singing in the episode. Boo.)

It turns out, Spain may be changing time zones soon, away from the one established by Franco: After months of speculation, Employment Minister Fátima Báñez announced this week that the government is working on a plan to get more workers out of the office at 6 p.m., rather than being stuck at work until 8 or so, as many currently are. Báñez said that one important part of that policy under consideration is a switch from Central European Time (CET) to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), under which the clocks...

That's not a metaphor. The polar vortex has descended upon Chicago, promising temperatures below -17°C tomorrow and Friday in the coldest December in years: While the deep chill will be powered by the infamous polar vortex — the circulation of air around the Arctic Circle — meteorologists don't believe we're headed for anything like the winter of 2013-14 when Chicago suffered through its coldest four-month period ever. The polar bear at the Lincoln Park Zoo wouldn't even venture outdoors. But Tom...

Just when you think Trump's cabinet picks couldn't get any worse, the Washington Post connects dots that weren't immediately visible: Tillerson and Trump had no previous relationship, but the Texas oilman and the New York developer hit it off when they met face to face. One of the things that they have in common is their shared affection for the works of Ayn Rand, the libertarian heroine who celebrated laissez-faire capitalism. Andy Puzder, tapped by Trump last week to be secretary of labor, is an avid...

Trump continues to crap all over American institutions before he's even legally elected President. His latest cabinet pick is a doozy: [I]t is somehow an appropriate metaphor of our era that, if he is nominated and confirmed, this could be the sequence of U.S. Secretaries of Energy: 2009-2013, Steven Chu, winner of the Nobel prize in physics, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; 2013-2017, Ernest Moniz, professor of nuclear physics at MIT, former under...