Events

Ah, Ribfest. The bane of my diet. This year I went back to a couple of old favorites and tried a couple of new ones: Chicago BBQ: Smoky, a little tug off the bone, tangy sauce. 3½ stars. Mrs. Murphy's Irish Bistro: Like last year, they glooped on a lot of (delicious) sauce. But the meat tasted better this year, and I got a bit of a lagniappe. 3 stars. Old Crow Smokehouse: I haven't tried them before. They were decent. Good smoke taste, but a little fatty and not a lot of sauce. 3 stars. Fireside...

Way back in my first day of law school, Prof. Neil Williams exclaimed that the basis of contract law was "the totality of the circumstances!" Meaning, when evaluating a contract (from whether it exists to whether it's enforceable), you have to look at the context, the facts, the intentions of the parties—everything. Take, for example, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice's description of the following circumstances: If Mr. Putin were calling the shots, he would ensure that America’s reliability...

Total Daily Parker bait: At the start of the last ice age, 2.6 million years ago, a sheet of frozen water formed atop North America that kept expanding and thickening until it reached a maximum depth of roughly two miles. At its southern edge, the vast body deposited tons of rocky debris — from sand and pebbles to boulders the size of school buses. Then, some 18,000 years ago, the planet began to warm and the gargantuan sheet of ice began to melt and retreat. Today, the southernmost edge of that frozen...

Tim Jones, writing in Crain's for the Better Government Association, says the experiences of Minnesota and Kansas put the lie to claims that people are leaving Illinois because of taxes: The scapegoat nominees include not just high taxes but House Speaker Michael Madigan, Gov. Bruce Rauner, government regulations, financial chaos and uncertainty from a two-year budget stalemate, not to mention old standbys greed and corruption. That's where Minnesota looms as a spoiler of the tax-cutting political...

Stuff that landed in my inbox today: Illinois has secured a $132 m grant to fix one of the worst rail bottlenecks in the state. Crain's Greg Hinz sort-of compliments Illinois governor Bruce Rauner for finally making a budget deal...in his 4th year as governor. Meanwhile, the administration's trade war will hurt Illinois harder than most—a feature, one suspects, and not a bug. WaPo's Amber Phillips lists the winners and losers from yesterday's primary elections in California and other states. New...

One of my Facebook friends just posted a photo of our high school graduation program—from 5th June 1988. Thirty years ago. I am screaming in my head, not just because I missed the anniversary yesterday, but also because 30 YEARS.

Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes points out that President Trump's legal team has not only made a frivolous argument about the president's obstruction of justice, but a stupid one: The president’s argument leads to an absurdity and it therefore must have a flaw, but identifying what precisely is wrong with it is a bit of a puzzle. And it’s worth doing carefully—not simply dismissing the argument because of the clownish aspects of the letter or because of the argument’s audacity. The key question...

New Republic's Matt Ford points to Rod Blagojevich's cynical attempts at getting President Trump to pardon him as evidence that Trump is "the world's most powerful rube:" All of this makes Trump essentially the perfect mark: a man who’s easily flattered, short-tempered, quick to blame others, intellectually incurious, brimming with self-assurance, and unwilling to reflect on his own misjudgments. That’s an extraordinary stroke of luck for Blagojevich, since any other president would probably have seen...

We just got back from the vet. The x-rays show that Parker's leg is almost completely healed, so he's finally cleared to go back to his play group. He has no idea about this right now but tomorrow morning he'll be very, very happy. Now I'm about to run to my office, so I'm queuing up these articles to read later: Affluence appears to be a better predictor of kids passing the "marshmallow test" than anything else. Fallows posts two reader responses to his post on our deteriorating foreign policy...

A student at the University of Cincinnati has filed a fascinating lawsuit against the school for discrimination in its enforcement of sexual misconduct: Is it possible for two people to simultaneously sexually assault each other? This is the question—rife with legal, anatomical, and emotional improbabilities—to which the University of Cincinnati now addresses itself, and with some urgency, as the institution and three of its employees are currently being sued over an encounter that was sexual for a...