Events

I'm just going to link to this post from April 2011. (4/20 no less.) Sigh.

An MLS student in Portland, Ore., wants you to understand that even though you don't personally use them, libraries are thriving: Today, depending on the community they serve, a public librarian is part educator, part social worker, and part Human Google. What they aren’t is a living anachronism, an out-of-touch holdout in a dying job who’s consigned to a desk, scolding kids for returning books a few days late. An urban librarian in a struggling neighborhood, like Chera Kowalski in Philadelphia’s...

It's hard to believe, but if you're trying to use public transit to get to an airport, you might want to use Bing Maps instead of Google: Instead of advising you to take one of the “Airporter” buses from San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport, and San Jose International Airport to the north and south of the Bay Area, the app will propose a two- or three-step odyssey on Bay Area Rapid Transit rail and then local buses. As Google describes things, putting those city-to-terminal...

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.