Events

Vladimir Putin biographer Masha Gessen explains why autocrats like Putin and President Trump tend to be so gloriously incompetent: [A] careful reading of contemporary accounts will show that both Hitler and Stalin struck many of their countrymen as men of limited ability, education and imagination — and, indeed, as being incompetent in government and military leadership. Contrary to popular wisdom, they are not political savants, possessed of one extraordinary talent that brings them to power. It is the...

Washington Post retail reporter Sarah Halzack reviews the history of Sears and how it's done the last few years: Decades of missed opportunities have brought Sears to this. It lost its focus with ventures into Discover credit cards and Coldwell Banker real estate in an attempt to diversify. Then big boxes such as Home Depot and Best Buy chipped away at lucrative product niches. But maybe the biggest whiff: Executives knew as far back as the early 1990s that they had to wean Sears off its dependency on...

Paul Allen has funded development of an airplane designed to launch satellites into space. It's...huge: Called Stratolaunch, the plane has some impressive stats: a wingspan of 117 m, or longer than a football field, and a height of 15.24 m. Unfueled, it weighs 226,800 kg. But it can carry 113,400 kg of fuel, and its total weight can reach 590 tonnes. But, really ... how big is it? It’s so big that it has 28 wheels and six 747 jet engines. It’s so big that it has 96 km of wire coursing through it. It’s...

Item the first: S&P just cut Illinois' bond rating to one level above junk. Thanks, Governor Rauner. Item the second: According to Brian Beutler, at least, President Trump could be in serious trouble after James Comey testifies before Congress next week. Will Trump care? Will he even notice? Item the third: May was cold and dreary in Illinois. Today it's 24°C and sunny, which is neither cold nor dreary. Item the fourth: Cranky Flier believes that we absolutely should open up the U.S. to foreign...

The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came to America on 1 June 1967, and changed the world. As one might imagine, most news organizations have articles about it: Rolling Stone goes into the making of the album. CNN speculates on what the album cover might have looked like in 2017. The New York Times re-reviews the album, as does the Guardian, who also thinks the re-release could "re-unite Brexit Britain." (That's a change from their 2007 position that "Sgt. Pepper Must Die!") Here in...

(This is a cross-post with my employer's blog.) I'm the newest team member at DevMynd, and so far, the only one with a Windows PC. Since we do most of our work in Ruby on Rails, and since everyone else has Macs, this presents a challenge. If I wanted to do this the easy way, I'd simply run Rails on Windows natively. But I decided instead to do it the hard way and use Linux and BASH. First, I had a couple of free days to get up to speed last week giving me some time to experiment. Second, I figured that...

Via my company's Slack #general channel, San Francisco cartographer Justin O'Beirne has analyzed the changes Google has made to its Maps feature over the past year, while Apple Maps has stagnated: So it seems that Apple is updating its map more frequently than Google. But when we look closer, this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening. For instance, near the park’s southeast corner, there’s a group of three auto service-related businesses: Domport Auto Body Service, Fell Street Auto Service, and...

Pilot and author Patrick Smith points out that air travel is so much better than it was even 20 years ago, it's hard to see how far we've come: People often talk about a proverbial “golden age” of air travel, and if only we could return to it. That’s an easy sentiment to sympathize with. I’m old enough to recall when people actually looked forward to flying. I remember a trip to Florida in 1979, and my father putting on a coat and tie for the occasion. I remember cheesecake desserts on a 60-minute...

We have a child in the White House. And European leaders are saying they can no longer rely on the United States: Trump’s speech alone is likely a sufficient explanation. But I suspect there’s an additional element. Most of the major European and NATO leaders had already met Trump in Washington – Merkel, May, Gentiloni, Trudeau and others. But I suspect in meeting as a group, over a more extended period and in a context specifically focused on Europe and NATO there was a further realization that what...

Andrew Sullivan's note Friday analyzes the President's trip to the Vatican from a distinctly conservative and Catholic perspective: Trump is not an atheist, confident yet humble in the search for a God-free morality. He is not an agnostic, genuinely doubtful as to the meaning of existence but always open to revelation should it arrive. He is not even a wayward Christian, as he sometimes claims to be, beset by doubt and failing to live up to ideals he nonetheless holds. The ideals he holds are, in fact...