Events

James Fallows has come out of his hiding place (he's writing a book and so has been offline since January 1st) to annotate President Trump's inaugural address. I didn't hear the speech, and now that I've read it, with Fallows' annotations, I'm incrementally more nervous about the next four years. And then came the bald-faced lies about the crowd size at the inauguration. Crowd scientists, such as those at the CIA, estimated perhaps 160,000 people attended the inauguration, somewhat fewer than Obama's...

President Trump—oh, how I hate writing that, but I still respect the office—shut down the National Park Service Twitter account after they tweeted two photos comparing the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations. From Snopes: On 20 January 2017, the day Donald J. Trump took office as President of the United States, news outlets posted photos purporting to compare the size of the crowd attending Trump's inauguration to that attending Barack Obama's first inaugural ceremony in 2009. Although there was not yet an...

While there are vast differences between the Roman Republic and the United States, there are many ways they compare directly. There is always a temptation, in any system of government, for public officials to rule rather than govern; but a well-functioning republic has institutional safeguards to prevent that. Institutions can be corrupted from within, however. And just a few minutes ago, one of the deepest infections in American history just burrowed into the center of our government. I'll leave it to...

And I haven't fully read any of these: Amazon and BBC are co-producing a 6-hour miniseries of Good Omens. Sweet! There's a proposal in Springfield, Ill., to replace the 32-year-old Thompson Center with a 115-story tower. I'm really not happy about Scott Pruitt, and his confirmation hearing didn't make me feel any better. On the last full day of the American Republic, Trump's approval ratings are still historically low. Only a few more hours until we see how much closer to Rome we get.

Not that the incoming administration cares: Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row. The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming...

Tabs open but not read in my browser: Betsy DeVos, Trump's nominee for Education Secretary, knows almost nothing about public schools. Trump probably knows almost nothing about NATO, but is still a danger to the alliance. Republicans in general know almost nothing about health insurance. Sixty members of the House are skipping the inauguration, including mine. A drone operator managed to get a $1.2m fine reduced to $200,000. But they're still in trouble. There was one more item, but it's too big to...

Two big Obama stories today. First, the president has commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence. She'll be freed in May: In recent days, the White House had signaled that Mr. Obama was seriously considering granting Ms. Manning’s commutation application, in contrast to a pardon application submitted on behalf of the other large-scale leaker of the era, Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who disclosed archives of top secret surveillance files and is living as a fugitive in Russia. Asked...

I grew up in Chicago, so I have some recollection of how things were before Harold Washington's mayoral administration. Particularly under the first Mayor Daley, large sections of the city lived under authoritarian rule. It wasn't pretty. New Republic's Graham Vyse explains what this might look like nationally. It won't be The Hunger Games—and that's part of the problem: Tom Pepinsky, a government professor at Cornell University, recently argued that Americans conceive of authoritarianism in a...

This is what I saw last night: As a singer who's performed the original Messiah about 10 times, I pronounce Too Hot to Handel amazeballs, and I will be in the chorus next year.

The latest scandal surrounding Trump is either farcical or truly scary: Seven months ago, a respected former British spy named Christopher Steele won a contract to build a file on Donald J. Trump’s ties to Russia. Last week, the explosive details — unsubstantiated accounts of frolics with prostitutes, real estate deals that were intended as bribes and coordination with Russian intelligence of the hacking of Democrats — were summarized for Mr. Trump in an appendix to a top-secret intelligence report. Mr....