Events

President Trump met with the 2017 state Teachers of the Year yesterday, and, as usual, made the event all about himself: Usually, the National Teacher of the Year speaks. This year, that didn’t happen. Usually, the president spends some time talking with the teachers, giving many of them individual attention. That barely happened Wednesday, according to several participants who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because they said they fear Trump addressing them on Twitter or press...

This weekend, a "luxury" festival on a remote island in the Bahamas failed to live up to expectations, in the same way bricks fail to hover: The organizers of the Fyre Festival promised “two transformative weekends” on a “remote and private” island in the Bahamas that was “once owned by Pablo Escobar.” Kendall Jenner promoted it on Instagram. Ja Rule was one of the organizers. Festival-goers paid thousands of dollars for what they believed was going to be a luxury experience. Anyone who could afford the...

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...