Events

Just a few head-to-desk articles this afternoon: Washington DC's mayor has informed the President that the city's special security fund has no more money in it, thanks to the 4th of July Trumpaganza and the fact that the Trump inaugural committee hasn't reimbursed the city the $7.3 million it's owed since 2017. The economy seems to keep expanding despite a lack of inflation, according to the Fed. That might have something to do with wages not rising very much. We can tell these things are related...

Yesterday, Washington D.C. experienced its heaviest rainfall on record: In just an hour, about a month’s worth of rain drowned the District, a staggering 83 mm falling at Reagan National Airport. This hourly output was Washington’s highest since at least 1936 (National Airport is the city’s official weather observing site), the Maxar Weather Desk, a consulting group based in Gaithersburg, Md. discovered. “According to data from the Iowa Mesonet ... the 83 mm recorded between 8:52-9:52 AM yesterday was...

This is kind of cool, and could really help the city: Skender, an established, family-owned builder in Chicago, is making a serious play in a sector associated with young startups: modular construction. The company is building steel-structured three-flats, a quintessential Chicago housing type that consists of three apartments stacked on top of each other in the footprint of a large house. It believes it can deliver them faster and at lower cost at its new factory than by using standard methods of...

This week's Economist features a collection of "what-if" stories that attempt to present near-future events well within the realm of possibility. First up, what if an American destroyer were surrounded by small Chinese boats in the contested waters of the South China Sea...next October? The official account of the crisis begins with a terse Pentagon statement, issued on October 9th, that the McCampbell, an Arleigh Burke class destroyer, had been forced to stop in international waters by vessels...

The US Navy's latest ship class, the triple-hulled Littoral Combat vessels, have small crews chosen for their adaptability. This has given the Navy insight into how people learn: The ship’s most futuristic aspect, though, is its crew. The LCS was the first class of Navy ship that, because of technological change and the high cost of personnel, turned away from specialists in favor of “hybrid sailors” who have the ability to acquire skills rapidly. It was designed to operate with a mere 40 souls on...

An army convoy left the White House on 7 July 1919 and finally arrived in San Francisco two months later: The Army’s road trip got off to a rocky start, with several vehicles breaking down that afternoon on the hilly roads leading out of the District. The party made camp the first night in Frederick, Md., where a brevet lieutenant colonel joined the group as a last-minute observer for the Tank Corps. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then 28, was there “partly for a lark and partly to learn,” he wrote later...

We woke up in the US to two major stories about the planet, one with a short-term effect and the other with a long-term effect. The acute problem: a 7.1 mw earthquake in central California caused only minor damage and no fatalities because it happened in the middle of nowhere. But people reported feeling it from Phoenix to Sacramento: Southern California was jolted by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake at 8:19 p.m. on Friday one day after the region was hit by a 6.4 quake, the USGS reports. The epicenter was...

This bit: I mean: Historians ⁠— at least the ones fact-checking the president on Twitter ⁠— were not impressed. One likened the speech to “an angry grandpa reading a fifth grader’s book report on American military history.” On Friday, Trump confirmed he had problems with the teleprompter, telling journalists: “I guess the rain knocked out the teleprompter, so it’s not that, but I knew the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter. But the teleprompter did go out. And it was...

Beloved humor magazine of my childhood and my father's Mad Magazine will effectively end its 67-year run with the August issue: Sources tell [The Hollywood Reporter] that after issue 9, MAD will no longer be sold on newsstands and will only be available through comic book shops as well as mailed to subscribers. After issue 10, there will no longer be new content in subsequent issues save for the end-of-year specials (those will be all-new). Beginning with issue 11, the magazine will only feature...

That's what screenwriter Jeff Greenfield, writing for Politico, says: Celebrations of the Fourth do not tend to benefit both parties equally, and here, Trump may well be demonstrating his instinctive grasp of which way a big event tends to nudge the populace. In 2011, two academics who studied the political effect of Fourth of July festivities concluded that: "Fourth of July celebrations in the United States shape the nation's political landscape by forming beliefs and increasing participation...