Events

Not all of this is as depressing as yesterday's batch: Dana Milbank raises the question, once again, whether President Trump is just a liar or really mentally ill. McCay Coppins describes how professional troll Stephen Miller got and kept his job. Illinois is getting an anti-carjacking bill that doesn't go as far as Chicago's police superintendent wanted. Josh Marshall wonders why Missouri Governor Eric Greitens resigned so abruptly yesterday. Via Bruce Schneier, an explanation of numbers stations....

Aaron Blake explains how President Trump's legal team have seized on the ambiguous term "collusion" to set up their ultimate strategy for getting him off the hook for criminal activity: Rudolph W. Giuliani went on TV and blurted out the Trump team's Russia investigation strategy this weekend. “It is for public opinion,” Giuliani said on CNN, “because, eventually, the decision here is going to be impeach/not impeach. Members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, are going to be informed a lot by their...

I've queued up a few articles to read while eating lunch. I just hope I don't lose said lunch after reading them: Jeet Heer worries about President Trump's willingness to destroy everything around himself to distract from his own scandals. Catherine Rampell walks through the ways the administration's policy of separating children from parents at the border reveals the GOP's grand scam. James Fallows lays out the ways the administration continues to screw up our relationship with China. Josh Marshall...

Every so often I like to revisit old photos to see if I can improve them. Here's one of my favorites, which I took by the River Arun in Amberley, West Sussex, on 11 June 1992: The photo above is one of the first direct-slide scans I have, which I originally published here in 2009, right after I took this photo at nearly the same location: (I'm still kicking myself for not getting the angle right. I'll have to try again next time I'm in the UK.) Those are the photos as they looked in 2009. Yesterday...

This past weekend's performances went better than I expected, even with last night's temperature hovering around 32°C on the Pritzker stage. Our entire Memorial Day weekend has been hot. Yesterday's official temperature at O'Hare (36°C) hit an all-time record for May 27th and was the warmest day in Chicago since 23 July 2012, almost 6 years ago. So let me tell you how great it felt to be outside, wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and black jeans, singing, for an hour. The forecast calls for record heat...

The Apollo Chorus is joining Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this weekend in two performances of Rachmaninov's The Bells. Thus, no real blog post today. But if you're in Chicago, swing by the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park at 6:30pm for our free concert.

Via Bruce Schneier, interesting research into how to use mouse movements to detect lying: Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have long noted a big "tell" in human behavior: Crafting a lie takes more mental work than telling the truth. So one way to spot lies is to check someone's reaction time. If they're telling a lie, they'll respond fractionally more slowly than if they're telling the truth. Similarly, if you're asked to elaborate on your lie, you have to think for a second to generate new...

Chicago Public Media's Curious City blog examined the city's plan to replace 270,000 sodium vapor streetlights with LEDs in the next three years: [C]ity officials are undertaking an ambitious four-year plan to use LEDs for about 80 percent of the city’s streetlights. They hope this plan will save the cash-strapped city $100 million over a decade and improve public safety. This summer, the city will charge forward with the next phase of the plan, which will ultimately replace 270,000 lights around the...

Former DNI James Clapper, now a private citizen (though one who knows a lot more about these things than almost everyone else), believes Russia threw our 2016 presidential election: Clapper noted that the intelligence community’s formal 2017 assessment of Russian interference was not charged with assessing its impact. But this is exactly the point. It wasn’t the place of the intel community to place its imprimatur on this debate one way or the other. But now that Clapper is free to offer his own view...

Darryl Fears, writing for the Washington Post today, highlights a new study that explains why coyotes have adapted so well to human environments: As mountain lions and wolf packs disappeared from the landscape, coyotes took advantage, starting a wide expansion eastward at the turn of the last century into deforested land that continues today. For reasons biologists do not quite understand, coyotes prefer open land over forest. It could be that bigger predators that kill them over territory and...