Events

It's hard to believe that I started my MBA program in London 10 years ago. Wow.

Just a few for my commute home: New York Times reporter James Stewart interviewed Jeffrey Epstein on background a year ago, and it was weird. The Post analyzes temperature records to find which parts of the US have warmed faster than others. Chemist Caitlin Cornell may have discovered an important clue about the origin of life on Earth. The site of the city's first Treasure Island store, just two blocks from where I lived in Lakeview from 1994-1996, might become an ugly apartment tower unless residents...

A former FBI agent is using "cold-case" techniques to figure it out: Gertjan Broek, a lead researcher with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, believes that the search for an informant might prevent researchers from discovering what really happened. “By asking ‘Who betrayed Anne Frank?’ you actually assume tunnel vision already. You leave out other options,” he says. It’s possible, Broek says, the Franks weren’t betrayed at all—instead they might have been discovered by accident. There’s a chance that...

Including sitting with a lost dog for 45 minutes this morning, I've had a pretty lazy Sunday. Here are some of the articles I might read if I decide to do anything productive today: Astronomers in Hawaii have mapped the structure of the entire universe. Closer to home, what's up with Jupiter's great red spot? A book published in 1968 attempted to predict the world in 2018, and got some things right. Graeme Wood calls President Trump's El Paso photo "obscene." Andrew Sullivan says, of the Democratic...

This morning, as Parker and I went for our pre-breakfast walk, we encountered this fluffy girl trotting down the street with no humans in sight: We manage to corral her in a neighbor's yard, while I posted on Facebook and called animal control. She seemed healthy, well-fed, and accustomed to people and other dogs (though really scared and disoriented). Unfortunately she didn't have a name tag or a phone number. Happy ending, though. After about 45 minutes her owners came by. They'd been canvassing the...

Yesterday, I attended my first professional NFL game* at Chicago's Soldier Field. I can't complain about the view: The Bears did not play their best, but I had a great time at the game. And after, I got to walk in sticky August weather with a stadium's worth of people to the Red Line, which everyone loves after 11pm. I'm being unfair. The tickets came from last April's Apollo After Hours, via a generous donation from one of our members and a lucky bid on my part. And now, I've been to a professional NFL...

That Sgt Pepper taught the band to block a street in London: It was on August 8, 1969, that the band snapped the photo that would change Abbey Road’s future forever. The following month they would release an album named after the northwest London street where it had been recorded, and that album’s iconic cover would seal the street’s fate. A photo of the Fab Four crossing the street in tidily-arranged profile made Abbey Road the site of the most famous crosswalk in the world. In terms of traffic...

Continuing my series on logical fallacies, we come now to "non causa pro causa," or false cause. Post hoc ergo propter hoc "After this, therefore because of this." The argument attempts to attribute cause to the thing that happened before. (See, also, "correlation is not causation.") This is essentially where superstitions come from. Example: "I've created a million jobs since I'm president," a politician claimed after six months in office. It turns out, that job growth was consistent with (but slightly...

A diverse flock this afternoon: FedEx will sever ties with Amazon as the latter builds its own logistics operation. Jennifer Rubin complains about the inanity of intra-party debates that miss larger issues. The #MeToo movement has changed the way film studios direct sex scenes. Alex Pareene expresses frustration with Washington reporters not talking about the blatantly obvious reason the president has gone after politicians of color. CityLab has a primer on the history and language of municipal zoning...

As I continue my series on logical fallacies, I'd like to note cartoonist Scott Adams' latest blog post. For years, Adams has talked about how people see what they want to see in the president's speech and actions, but only he and other Trump supporters deal with reality. He claims that people who believe the president is a racist are hallucinating, and that the media perpetuate this hoax. The post contains extensive demonstrations of many, perhaps all, of the fallacies the complete series will discuss....