Events

O'Hare's high temperature today of 19.4°C occurred at 5am. From then until about 9am the temperature lingered around 19°C. And then the cold front came through. Between 9am and 11am the temperature plunged 8°C. It's now 11°C and raining. Tomorrow it'll be 11°C and sunny. Overnight it'll be 3°C in the city and -2°C in the far Western suburbs. Autumn comes to Chicago all at once. Today's the day it chose this year.

Not too much: The Guardian asks, what happens if cities act to mitigate climate change but nations don't? Meanwhile, the New York Times shows where in the U.S. emissions are coming from. Josh Chafetz suggests the House should arrest Rudy Giuliani. Dan Lavoie asks, what if President Trump resigned? Ukraine's president talked to reporters yesterday for many hours. Closer to home, Greg Hinz examines the power struggle between the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools. The Navy Pier Bike...

The Guardian has ranked the 20-largest polluters worldwide based on their addition to atmospheric greenhouse gases since 1965. You will not be surprised: New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the industry’s devastating impact on the planet. The analysis, by Richard Heede at...

President Trump has told Congress that he doesn't believe they have any right to investigate him or any other part of the executive branch. This, ah, innovative view of the Constitution has garnered some criticism from just about everyone: Legal experts have already torpedoed the absurd idea that the White House gets to declare the House’s impeachment inquiry illegitimate. The Constitution grants the House “sole power of impeachment,” and the chambers set their own rules. The White House claims the...

My task this afternoon is to parse a pile of random text that has, shall we say, inconsistencies. Before I return to that task, I'm setting aside some stuff to read later on: The Chicago-area transit agency Metra plans to spend $2.6 bn over the next five years on fixing things. It can do this because Republican Bruce Rauner, who basically froze the state budget for his entire term, got booted out of office a year ago. The Trump Administration continues its assault on evidence-based research, for example...

How did I miss this? Monty Python's Flying Circus turned 50 on Friday: The Pythons included a prolific diarist – Palin has published three hefty volumes already – but, dismayingly, the months around the start of the first Python show are one of the longest gaps. Palin attributes this to the busy-ness of filming, and having a young child and ailing elderly father. Although comic weirdness had been introduced to the BBC by The Goon Show, Monty Python went even further. BBC production teams may have sensed...

Hard to believe that I visited Ukraine more than 10 years ago, but not hard to believe that it keeps coming up in US politics. Julia Ioffe explains why: Whenever Ukraine appears in our news cycle, it is talked about as if it’s a simpler place than it is. The political dynamic gets reduced to neat binaries—the forces there are either pro-Russia or pro-West; leaders are either corrupt actors or laudable reformers; the good guys versus the bad guys. But that framework belies the moral complexity of the...

John Judis thinks she might: At the risk of appearing foolhardy several months hence, I want to say that in the last week, it has become very likely that Elizabeth Warren will win the Democratic nomination. A two-tier race, with Warren, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders in the top tier, has become a race largely of Warren against herself. Sanders – justifiably in my opinion, and I am of the same rough age – always faced questions about his age.  These questions have been answered in the negative, sadly, by...

Author Peter Pomerantsev says that the behavior of the Trump Administration, especially around its false accusations of illegal behavior by Hunter Biden, could not have better demonstrated how much Vladimir Putin has taught the West: The message of much of Kremlin propaganda is not to showcase Russia as a beacon of progress, but to prove that Western politics is just as rotten as President Vladimir Putin’s. We may have corruption, the argument goes, but so does the West; our democracy is rigged, but so...

What I did on my autumn vacation: About once a year the Apollo Chorus does a day-trip to somewhere nearby. Yesterday we went to the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Champaign, Ill., on the University of Illinois campus. Fun but exhausting.