Events

The Washington Post enumerates them: MYTH NO. 1 The Beatles objected to trading leather outfits for suits and ties. “In the beginning,” John Lennon told Melody Maker, the British music magazine, in 1970, Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, “. . . put us in neat suits and shirts, and Paul was right behind him. I didn’t dig that, and I used to try to get George to rebel with me.” Lennon later complained to Rolling Stone that by giving up leather for suits, “we sold out.” Soon, the story of the Beatles...

Back in June 2016, I walked 29 km in one go, and posted "I don't need to do this ever again." You can see where this is going. Here's what I did yesterday: That distance, 32.2 km, is exactly 20 miles. I actually walked about 800 m farther than that because I accidentally paused my Fitbit for a few minutes. Also, the map's big red 32.16 km (which is just short of 20 miles) appears to be a rounding error as you can see from the official total at the top. This time I walked up the North Branch trail, and...

That's my guess for how often Chicago's weather looks like this. Today's forecast calls for cloudless 23°C skies and a cool, clear evening. So, naturally, I'm going to try to walk 30 klicks. And I'm totally not watching the England/Sweden match that's on right now. Nope.

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...