Events

President Trump's approval ratings have fallen to the lowest in his presidency: Thirty eight percent of Americans say they approve of Trump’s job performance — down five points since September — while 58 percent disapprove. Trump’s previous low in approval in the national NBC/WSJ poll was 39 percent back in May. The drop for Trump has come from independents (who shifted from 41 percent approval in September to 34 percent now), whites (who went from 51 percent to 47 percent) and whites without a college...

While Catalonia starts a civil war in Spain, and glaciers in the Antarctic advance more and more rapidly each year, it's good to know that Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks can agree on something. Sullivan: "This is what the Trump abyss looks like." Brooks: "This is the week Trump won." It's not really that bad. But it sure feels like it.

The Pew Research Center just released a massive study of American political attitudes: The political typology reveals that even in a political landscape increasingly fractured by partisanship, the divisions within the Republican and Democratic coalitions may be as important a factor in American politics as the divisions between them. In some cases these fissures are not new – they were evident in six previous Pew Research Center typology studies conducted over the past three decades, most recently in...

I made sure to take a photo of this while walking home from dinner last night: But, really, the sign should now say AC000101. Because the Cubs lost the playoffs. Again.

After traveling last week and the week before for my current project, we've now spent five solid days workshopping all the stuff we learned. It's a lot. We covered three walls and four windows in a 3 x 4 meter conference room with post-its, and today we've shuffled them around twice. It's kind of exhausting, but also a comprehensive way of sharing a ton of data quickly. All of this is by the way of saying I won't actually read a newspaper until tonight or tomorrow morning.

The Tribune has two sad stories this evening. First, the FCC has taken steps to end the main-studio rule—apparently to allow the Sinclair/Tribune deal to go through: The regulation, which was first adopted almost 80 years ago, requires broadcasters to have a physical studio in or near the areas where they have a license to transmit TV or radio signals. Known as the "main studio rule," the regulation ensured that residents of a community could have a say in their local broadcast station's operations. "At...

Just a quick note. I've had a Fitbit for three years as of today, and so far, I've logged 14.4 million steps. My mean over 1,097 days is 13,170 steps per day, though my median is 12,616, reflecting the fact that I have a number of very-high-step days against almost none when I failed to hit 5,000. I've hit 10,000 on 949 days, 87% of the time. And now I'm going to ratchet up another 4,000 on my way home.

Trump's friends have started looting Puerto Rico: For the sprawling effort to restore Puerto Rico’s crippled electrical grid, the territory’s state-owned utility has turned to a two-year-old company from Montana that had just two full-time employees on the day Hurricane Maria made landfall. The company, Whitefish Energy, said last week that it had signed a $300 million contract with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority to repair and reconstruct large portions of the island’s electrical...

The Annenberg Public Policy Center has released a poll of Americans showing widespread and extensive misunderstandings about our Constitution: Nearly half of those surveyed (48 percent) say that freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. But, unprompted, 37 percent could not name any First Amendment rights. And far fewer people could name the other First Amendment rights: 15 percent of respondents say freedom of religion; 14 percent say freedom of the press; 10 percent say the right...

A succession of cold fronts has started traversing the Chicago area, so after an absolutely gorgeous Saturday we're now in the second day of cold, wet, gray weather. In other words, autumn in Chicago. So here's what I'd like to read today but probably won't have time: Having been caught out in a bald-faced lie, the White House has been sending condolence letters by overnight mail to Gold-Star families since Wednesday. E.J. Dionne says, "What Trump did to Kelly shows how far we have fallen." Microsoft is...