Events

A year ago today I posted that the previous month, July 2016, was my worst blogging month in 5 years. Well, July 2017 was my best blogging month in 3½ years. The last month I posted 47 posts was January 2014 before I slowed down to the point where this past February I only posted 20 times for a rate of 0.74/day, a number not seen since November 2010. I have some hypotheses why this happened, and why posting has rebounded. For now, though, I'll just say I've had three consecutive months of beating both...

President Clinton's chief of staff John Podesta has simple advice for President Trump's new chief of staff, John Kelly: Don’t take the job. Kelly, who has rendered extraordinary service and sacrifice to the nation, just signed up for what may truly be an impossible mission: bringing discipline, order and strategic focus to the chaos that is the Trump White House. To have any chance of succeeding, he will have to accomplish three extraordinary tasks, all at odds with President Trump’s instincts. First...

Via Eclipse2017.org, Xavier Jubier has created an interactive map showing all the data for the eclipse that takes place three weeks from today. I'll be staying here the night before, and I'm planning to watch from here the day of.

Crossrail, the UK's £14.8bn rail line connecting London's far western suburbs with its eastern ones, either represents the end of an era or the beginning of one, according to today's New York Times: Before Britain voted last summer to leave the European Union, Crossrail was conceived for a London open to the world and speeding into the future. Now, with Brexit, the nightmare scenario is that this massive project, to provide more trains moving more people more quickly through a growing city, ends up...

Scottish authorities are making it difficult for Donald Trump to expand his money-losing golf course outside Aberdeen: Two Scottish government agencies—the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage, a conservation agency—say they will object to the Trump Organization’s plans to build a second 18-hole golf course at Aberdeen, known as the Trump International Golf Links. If they succeed in killing this expansion, it will be a major setback for Trump and raise doubts about the...

There is one musical play, out of all of them, that I loathe more than any other. My hatred of this play far exceeds my antipathy towards Mitch McConnell, such that I would gladly prefer an evening reading his floor speeches than to listen to one single song from this abomination. Rogers and Hammerstein, you should be ashamed. Way back in May 2011, Melinda Taub wrote a gem for McSweeney's that suggest she agrees: Dear friends, family, and Austrian nobility, Captain Von Trapp and I are very sorry to...

Yesterday around 7pm, as I dropped a friend off at O'Hare, I was lucky enough to see the last United 747 take off from Chicago: Chicago-based United still has 14 747s in operation that typically only fly from San Francisco to a handful of cities in Asia and Europe. But United will have one of its 747s fly from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to San Francisco on Friday, the airline said. Tickets for the flight — UA2704, departing Chicago at 6:30 p.m. — went on sale Tuesday, said United spokeswoman...

A fundamentalist Mormon sect living along the Nevada-Arizona border has a serious problem with a rare genetic disorder, because everyone is closely related to everyone else: “With polygyny you’re decreasing the overall genetic diversity because a few men are having a disproportionate impact on the next generation,” says Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. “Random genetic mutations become more important.” In isolated communities, the problem is...

Three groups from whom one would expect general support of the President of the United States yesterday told the current occupant of that office to stop behaving like an ass: It’s far too early to know whether they mark a turning point in how people who have been at least nominally supportive of the president will approach him in the future, but Trump ought not to be dismissive of their significance. The critiques may not change the president’s behavior, but as a marker of the rising concern about the...

We have lovely weather in Chicago today—24°C and sunny—but summer has been pretty warm so far. It's been worse in other places. The Times demonstrates today that this is a worldwide trend: During the base period, 1951 to 1980, about a third of summers across the Northern Hemisphere were in what they called a “near average” or normal range. A third were considered cold; a third were hot. Since then, summer temperatures have shifted drastically, the researchers found. Between 2005 and 2015, two-thirds of...