Events

The US Supreme Court ruled today that the 8th Amendment rule against "excessive fines" applies to the states as well as to the Federal Government: The decision is a victory for an Indiana man whose luxury SUV was seized after he pleaded guilty to selling heroin. It is also a blow to state and local governments, for whom fines and forfeitures have become an important source of funds. In an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court seemed to regard the basic question before it as an easy one. The...

From a longtime reader in the UK comes the story of British Airways (callsign: "Speedbird") celebrating the airline's 100th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of the Boeing 747 by painting one in its 1964-to-1974 BOAC livery: Large crowds turned out at Heathrow on Monday to welcome the plane, decked out in livery not seen for four decades. The plane will keep flying in its retro BOAC design until 2023, British Airways said in a statement. Tuesday's flight retraces the first route a Boeing 747 took in...

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has published a study of Chicago income by census tract, and has found a disturbing trend: Chicago’s middle class, once the backbone of the city, is declining so swiftly that it’s almost gone, and a set of maps from a local university lays that reality bare. The dynamic stands to affect nearly everything about Chicago going forward, from politics to schools to who will live here. “It raises a lot of questions as to what kind of city it will be,” said Janet...

Paul Krugman says the president actually doesn't want to: Why isn’t Trump building anything? Surely he’s exactly the kind of politician likely to suffer from an edifice complex, a desire to see his name on big projects. Furthermore, during the 2016 campaign he didn’t just promise a wall, he also promised a major rebuilding of America’s infrastructure. But month after month of inaction followed his inauguration. A year ago he again promised “the biggest and boldest infrastructure investment in American...

First, William Giraldi, writing in Medium, proclaims "[e]verything you need to know about the mess that is America in 2019 can be explained by our deepening national belief that Bigfoot is real:" Bigfooters believe they are questing for bipedal apes in California, but they are really questing for their own lost boyhoods, their Boy Scout days, those formative experiences in the woodlands of fancy and faith, and for the thrill of certain belief as it was before the adult world broke in to bludgeon it....

Seven Labour MPs quit the party today, accusing the party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, of anti-Semitism and mishandling Brexit: At a morning news conference, Parliament member Luciana Berger said she had become “embarrassed” and “ashamed” of the Labour Party, which she said was “institutionally anti-Semitic.” Berger, who is Jewish, added she was leaving behind a culture of “bullying, bigotry and intimidation.” Chris Leslie, another breakaway lawmaker, said the party had been “hijacked by the machine...

New thinking says longer ago than you might think—with implications throughout the animal kingdom: If [Attention Schema Theory (AST)] is correct, 300 million years of reptilian, avian, and mammalian evolution have allowed the self-model and the social model to evolve in tandem, each influencing the other. We understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also understand ourselves by considering the way other people might see us. Data from my own lab suggests that the cortical networks...

I rubbed these two butts all over and now I'm gettin' 'em hot: We'll see how they taste in 3½ hours. With a few different options for barbecue sauce.

WGN-TV is reporting this morning that we will have two extra days in February this year—and they'll be cold: No word yet on whether March will also have 30 days this year.

Demographers Richard Florida and Karen King crunched some numbers to determine which metro areas had more single men or single women. Some findings: In absolute numbers, heterosexual men have a considerable dating advantage in metros across the East Coast and South. New York City  has more than 200,000 more single women than men; Atlanta 95,000 more; Washington, D.C. 63,000 more; Philadelphia nearly 60,000 more. The pattern continues for Baltimore and Miami. Meanwhile, the opposite is true out West...