Events

Things to read today: Chicago Magazine bemoans the loss of two-flat apartment buildings in the city, citing increasing average rents. Josh Marshall catalogs all the times President Trump was surprised by knowledge that was only new to him. VIA Rail in Canada is offering a 10-day, Montreal to Vancouver rail journey to celebrate the country's sesquicentennial. Marin County, Calif., has an app that lets you try to mitigate climate-change induced flooding. Good luck. And finally, the Chicago Tribune has an...

TimeOut has their list for 2017. Definitely some on it I want to see, and some I have been to. Next, I think, will be The Ladies' Room and 1952½. Also, tomorrow I won't be coding all day and forget to write a blog post until 8:30. But at least I got all 12 hours of steps—it's been a frustrating week on that front.

Some articles: Jeet Heer writes about President Trump's catastrophic first 100 days. Josh Marshall says that Trump's "religion of 'winning'" is the problem. Crain's Joe Cahill thinks that the best thing to come out of the United Airlines passenger-removal fiasco is that Oscar Munoz won't become chairman. John Oliver on Sunday warned the world about the deficiencies and scary realities of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Harvard professor David Searls, in a post from September 2015, calls ad blocking "the...

Fitbit has a feature that tells you if you've taken at least 250 steps per hour. You can set the start and end times—mine are 8am and 8pm—but you can't turn off the feature entirely. This feature is driving me batty. Most days I'm pretty vigilant. Take last week, for example. I got my 12-hour goal almost every day: Those two hours last Thursday when I missed the goal bother me. But not as much as the 9am hour yesterday, repeated again today, during which I was engrossed in work, made a mental note at...

Property values in Chicago's Trump Tower have declined as other similar properties have gotten pricier. Go figure: "I've never seen such a glut" of condos for sale, said real estate agent Carla Walker of KoenigRubloff Berkshire Hathaway. "When people live where they've paid $1.5 million and up, they don't want to see people hanging out and demonstrating. And there's still a stigma there for some people." The number for sale "is amazing," said Gail Lissner, vice president of Appraisal Research...

The Atlantic has a collection of portraits of the Earth-Luna system you simply have to see.

On Friday, President Trump sat down with AP reporter Julie Pace, and...well...here's the transcript, annotated by WaPo. I suppose I have to read it, but even in the first few moments, I'm struggling.

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii announced this week that the atmosphere passed 410 ppm of carbon dioxide and is heading for a monthly average of 407 ppm, the highest values observed on earth in millions of years: Carbon dioxide concentrations have skyrocketed over the past two yearsdue to in part to natural factors like El Niño causing more of it to end up in the atmosphere. But it’s mostly driven by the record amounts of carbon dioxide humans are creating by burning fossil fuels. “The rate of...

A little busy today, so I'm putting these down for later consumption: Via the Illinois State Climatologist, NOAA has released its state climate summaries for the country. Brian Beutler worries about President Trump's ego driving life-or-death decisions. Hollywood Reporter has some new photos from Game of Thrones' upcoming 7th season. Space junk and thousands of tiny, new satellites might make low orbit inaccessible in 50 years. Why are Germany's nude beaches (and parks and lawns and basically every part...

Bloomberg has released its list of the best steaks in Chicago for 2017. It leaves off my current favorite (Kinzie Chophouse) and my old favorite (Morton's on State, before they got bought out), but it's not a bad list: If you had to name one quintessential steakhouse in Chicago, it would be Gibson’s, which serves expert, icy martinis at the bar and stellar beef from the grill. (It is the first steakhouse to be awarded its own USDA Prime Certification—USDA Gibsons Prime Angus Beef. Local hero chef Tony...