Events

I didn't have a chance to read these yesterday: Boxer Joe Louis had a home in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. As of yesterday, none of the 4 major U.S. air carriers has propeller-driven airplanes in service anymore. Juggalo makeup can reliably defeat facial recognition software. Contra this article by Franklin Foer, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior really is annoying. Now I'm off to work. The heat wave of the last few days has finally broken!

Just hours after I posted a Citylab article reciting all the ways the EPA has helped people's lives over the years, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has resigned: Mr. Pruitt had been hailed as a hero among conservatives for his zealous deregulation, but he could not overcome the stain of numerous ethics questions about his alleged spending abuses, first-class travel and cozy relationships with lobbyists. Mr. Pruitt also came under fire for enlisting aides to obtain special favors for him and his family...

Before Scott Pruitt and friends destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, it's worth remembering the good it has done over the years: Whatever happens to the EPA, this might be a good time to reflect on its legacy, especially in urban spaces. Though environmentalism conjures “America the Beautiful” images of purple mountains and unspoiled wilderness, much of the EPA’s heaviest lifting in rescuing this nation from its own filth happened in cities. Long before fracking made tap water ignitable...

Large areas of the planet are experiencing record heat this week, as predicted by the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis: No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming. But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world. Denver tied its all-time high-temperature record of 105 degrees on June 28. Burlington, Vt., set its all-time warmest low temperature ever recorded of 80 degrees on July 2....

Writing for NBC News, UT law professor Steve Vladeck reflects on how we celebrate today, and not Constitution Day, as the birthday of our nation: As Lincoln would have it, Union soldiers weren’t fighting for the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, or even the supremacy of the federal government (although that theme had often been invoked in the earlier years of the war). Instead, Lincoln suggested they were fighting for liberty from tyrannical government and the equality of all men (and...

As I eagerly await the start of the England-Columbia World Cup match that starts in a few minutes, I'm taking a moment to absorb Emily Atkin's report on the political implications of encased meats: [T]he rise of cheap meats—fueled by hot dogs but also salisbury steaks—fed into more nationalist sentiments, too. Americans began to feel as though they were better than Europeans, who didn’t have enough land for grazing to make meat cheap enough for the masses. “If you’re a working-class factory worker in...

Amsterdam is building a new subway line directly beneath the Amstel River, so they drained it, as one does. Then they let a team of archaeologists go wild: The excavations in the Amstel yielded a deluge of finds, some 700,000 in all: a vast array of objects, some broken, some whole, all jumbled together. Damrak and Rokin proved to be extremely rich sites on account of the waste that had been dumped in the river for centuries and the objects accidentally lost in the water. The enormous quantity, great...

I'll have an update to the semi-annual Chicago Sunrise Chart later this week, but otherwise not a lot to post about. Or, anyway, that I want to post about. At least the weather cooled off. We finished June hot and sticky but yesterday a cold front brought delightful summer weather to the city. It's predicted to last about another four minutes.

The Uptown Theater in Chicago will reopen in a few years after developers raised $75m for renovations: The theater, a Spanish Baroque Revival dazzler designed by the kings of movie palace architecture, C.W. and George L. Rapp, is an emblem of Uptown’s lost glamour. Graffiti mars its exterior. Near the top of its bright red marquee, some of the script letters that spelled out the names of its developers, the theater chain owners Balaban & Katz, are missing, like gaps in a row of teeth. Little is known at...

Now that Kim Jong Un has gotten everything he always wanted from the United States for free, thanks to the truly amazing negotiating skills of President Trump, it turns out—wait for it—he lied the whole time: U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months — and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration, U.S. officials...