Events

Just a quick post of articles I want to load up on my Surface at O'Hare: Dana Milbank says that we've now lost the Cold War. In his preceding column, he said "Rudy Giuliani is the fool for our time." BBC Scotland reported last week that "more than a third of vintage Scotch whiskies...have been found to be fake." (Last year, Whisky Advocate had a list of ways to check the authenticity of your vintage Scotch.) Chicago Public Media explains how Chicago got some of its street names—and how to pronounce...

Yesterday was a bit busy. I spent my morning getting this: I haven't named it yet. Current thoughts are Hinata (一陽), Hana (初夏), and Asahi (旦陽). (The new car was built in Naguro, Japan; thus, a Japanese name.) The new Prius replaces Magdalena (built in Munich), the BMW 335iX that I got in 2012. Poor Lena, she was so old and decrepit she just couldn't go on much longer. She was burning 13.9 L/100 km, which is just awful. The new car, so far, hasn't burned any gasoline at all—it's only run off batteries....

The December solstice happens today at 22:21 UTC, which is 16:21 here in Chicago, which it turns out is the exact time of tonight's sunset. This is also true for everywhere along the lightest gray line on this map: Note also that Africa and Europe will have a brilliant gibbous moon at the same time. Happy solstice!

As someone joked after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned yesterday, "we have to worry when the grown-up in the room is nicknamed 'Mad Dog.'" His resignation letter doesn't seem that mad: One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without...

Citylab has a list: Georges-Eugène, Baron Haussmann, 1809-1891 It’s hard to overstate the urban legacy of Baron Haussmann, prefect of the Seine during the reign of France’s Emperor Napoleon III. Between 1853 and 1870, Haussmann used his authoritarian mandate to transform the medieval Paris into the paragon of a modern city. He ran broad new boulevards through maze-like old neighborhoods to slow the spread of disease and improve transportation (and, some historians have said, make it easier for troops to...

Via Bruce Schneier, a report on how third-party Amazon sellers use Amazon's own policies to attack their rivals: When you buy something on Amazon, the odds are, you aren’t buying it from Amazon at all. Plansky is one of 6 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the company’s third-party platform. They are largely hidden from customers, but behind any item for sale, there could be dozens of sellers, all competing for your click. This year, Marketplace sales were almost double those of Amazon retail...

I'm heading to the Ancestral Homeland in a few days, and this chart is a veritable Christmas present from the Brexit idiots: The last time Sterling was this low was Christmas 2016—the last Christmas I was in London. Thank you, Boris Johnson, and your tourist-friendly policies.

Engineer Mark Rober came up with a beautiful response to people stealing packages from his front porch: I sense a Kickstarter in his future...

As we finish the 23rd month of the Trump Administration, Philip Bump has a graphic showing how all of the investigations into the president's organizations overlap: An article from The Washington Post on Saturday opened with such a striking line that it’s worth lazily co-opting for the opening of this article: “Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, nearly every organization he has led in the past decade is under investigation.” That report outlined the scope of existing probes targeting...

Forty years ago, Des Plaines, Ill., police arrested John Wayne Gacy on suspicion of murder. Then they found more than 20 bodies in his crawlspace. The Tribune has a retrospective: John Wayne Gacy’s confession to the rape and murder of more than 30 people didn’t just awaken America to a nightmare hidden in its own backyard. The discovery 40 years ago of the dank, muddy mass grave underneath Gacy's yellow brick ranch house at 8213 W. Summerdale Ave. forever shattered the image of the safe suburban...