Events

Josh Marshall argues that our inability to discuss gun control in any meaningful way has rendered us collectively impotent to prevent gun massacres: Do you really need an AR-15? For some people, it’s just fun to fire off an AR-15. I begrudge no one that fun. You’re at the range. It’s just cool. I get it. But maybe, because it’s also the weapon of choice for virtually every school massacre, to have that fun you need to do a background check not just for institutionalization or felony records but...

Via Bruce Schneier, Michael Chertoff and Grover Norquist (of all people) explain in the Washington Post how we can make our elections more secure: It should also be no surprise that hackers have U.S. voting systems in their sights. They’re a relatively easy target. Researchers have studied a range of electronic voting infrastructure — including touch screens, optical scanner systems and registration databases — and found serious vulnerabilities that could allow even moderately sophisticated attackers to...

Lots of things popped up in my browser today: New Republic's Adrian Daub reviews the new Netflix series Babylon Berlin. The Illinois State Climatologist points out that we had a cold and snowy first half of February—which will now become not as cold but rainy. And today, it's 6°C, with all that implies for the piles of snow all over the city. Two articles on buildings with horrifying pasts, some in San Francisco, and one in Chicago. President Trump's longtime personal lawyer admitted paying Stormy...

Coyotes and red foxes seldom interact in the wild, as foxes tend to give coyotes a wide berth. In urban areas, however, they seem to get along just fine: Over the years, foxes and coyotes, like so many other wild species, have settled in the city, and they’re inevitably here to stay. It’s not uncommon to see them scampering across their neighborhoods. Some animal species have adapted to thrive amid the human-dominated landscape of high rises, fragmented green space, and heavy traffic. Now, at least in...

Eurostar will launch London-to-Amsterdam service on April 4th. Airlines are worried: Currently, a Londoner bound for Amsterdam by train can expect the journey to take a little under five hours, with a change of trains in Brussels. The new service will reach speeds of up to 186 miles per hour and cancel the need to change in Brussels, shaving off over an hour. The prospect has already generated a palpable buzz, and the 900 tickets offered a day (starting at a reasonable $47 one way) are likely to sell...

Over the last two weeks, Chicago tied a record for the most consecutive days with measurable snowfall: Chicago logged a record-tying ninth consecutive day with measurable snowfall on Sunday, equaling similar nine-day runs from Jan. 29-Feb. 6, 1902 and Jan. 6-14, 2009. Measurable snow has now been logged daily from February 3-11. No snow is expected Monday, so the record should not be broken. The past nine days have also completely obliterated the 2017-18 seasonal snow deficit. Through midnight Saturday...

That was my step total yesterday: 9,971. All I had to do was look at my Fitbit before midnight and take 30 steps right then. So frustrating. My numbers have been off all year, mainly owing to the bitter cold early on and the buckets of snow in the past week. We've gotten some precipitation every day of the past 8 (and on Monday bitter cold as well), so that this morning there was 300 mm on the ground at O'Hare. Still, if I got 99.7% of the way to my daily step goal, I could have taken 30 more steps...

Andrew Sullivan cautions the American left against turning into the very thing it hates about the far-right: The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any...

North suburban New Trier High School—one of the richest public schools in the world—has a world-record 44 sets of twins (and one set of triplets) in the 10th grade class alone. I'm going to ask Deeply Trivial to help figure out, what is the probability this happened entirely by chance? Kathy Routliffe has the story for Pioneer Press: Their numbers are noteworthy, given that the class has slightly more than 1,000 students, according to New Trier officials. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

The Federal court in the Northern District of California ruled today that GrubHub delivery drivers are contractors, not employees: The ruling may have far-reaching implications for other sharing economy companies, including Uber Technologies Inc., whose business models are built on pairing customers with products and services through apps and typically avoid the costs of traditional employment. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco concluded Thursday, in a first-of-its-kind...