Events

A recent study found that activity trackers can actually de-motivate teenagers: The problem with the monitors seemed to be that they had left the teenagers feeling pressure and with little control over their activities, as well as self-conscious about their physical abilities, said Charlotte Kerner, a lecturer in youth sport and physical education at Brunel University London, who led the study. The result was frustration, self-reproach — and less, not more, movement. “You can’t just give a child a...

I'd rather have an incompetent, sane person as president (see, e.g., most of the past Republican presidents) than an incompetent, insane one. But ya gotta dance with the one that brung ya: Twenty-seven psychiatrists and mental health experts evaluated the president, and came forward to warn everyone about his, ah, "psychological instability." Since then, thousands of others have signed on. Jeet Heer sees Trump's "descent into madness" as a worldwide crisis. Thomas B. Edsall lays out, point by point, how...

Michele Goldberg today: If you think 2017 was bad, imagine an America without allies fighting another two-front war, this one involving nuclear weapons, under the leadership of the most hated president in modern history, while a torture apologist runs the C.I.A. The world right now is a powder keg. Trump, an untethered maniac, sits atop it, flicking a lighter that Republicans in Congress could take away, but won’t. If everything goes up in flames, we can’t say we weren’t warned. Why imagine? He's...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's director resigned last week and named his chief of staff, Leandra English, acting director. Citing a statute predating the Dodd-Frank Act (which created the CFPB), the Trump Administration appointed the current OMB Director, Mick Mulvaney, to run the CFPB. The result is chaos: On Monday, Mulvaney occupied the CFPB director’s office, dispensed excellent New England doughnuts and emailed the agency staff to “disregard any instructions you receive from Ms. English...

A graduate student in New York has studied the genetic makeup of the city's rat populations, and discovered a divide between uptown and downtown: As a whole, Manhattan’s rats are genetically most similar to those from Western Europe, especially Great Britain and France. They most likely came on ships in the mid-18th century, when New York was still a British colony. Combs was surprised to find Manhattan’s rats so homogenous in origin. New York has been the center of so much trade and immigration, yet...

The Post's Aaron Blake, writing about yesterday's odd story of Project Veritas being kind of stupid, provides six examples of how they were stupid: 4. She used her real name and left a paper trail The above Web page was a GoFundMe account seeking to raise money for the relocation to New York of a woman named Jaime Phillips. One of the donors to it matches the name of Phillips's daughter, according to public records. So Phillips apparently went to work as a covert operative, still used her real name and...

CityLab has an interesting suggestion to manage the externalities of Uber and Lyft: The policy journey of São Paulo, Brazil, a vast metropolitan region of 20 million people, has been telling. The city council initially banned all ride-hailing services via apps, spurred on by allies of the taxi industry. Other parties, recognizing the inevitable popularity of Uber as well as two more homegrown companies, 99 and Easy Taxi, pushed back. The compromise allows the companies to operate, but charges them for...

Jaime Peters approached the Washington Post with a story about Republican Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore. The Post this afternoon published a story about her: A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets. In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman...

The Cloud—known to us in the industry as "someone else's computers"—takes a lot of power to run. Which is why our local electric utility, ComEd, is beefing up their service to the O'Hare area: Last month, it broke ground to expand its substation in northwest suburban Itasca to increase its output by about 180 megawatts by the end of 2019. Large data centers with multiple users often consume about 24 megawatts. For scale, 1 megawatt is enough to supply as many as 285 homes. ComEd also has acquired land...

Lots of stuff going on, so I haven't written a lot this past week. So I just have some links this morning in lieu of anything more interesting: Dana Milbank thinks our new awareness of sexual harassment won't end well, thanks to the lack of leadership from the White House. Fifty nine years ago this week, Chicago got its first helicopter traffic report. The Trump administration appointed a new Census deputy director who looks likely to sabotage the census. I thought I had more. Hm.