Events

Today's crop of articles: James Comey says the only law that matters in the impeachment proceedings is the one establishing the oath of office. Peter Osnos recounts the time when he edited one of Donald Trump's books. President Trump continues the American tradition, unknown in most democracies, of inciting vigilantes in support of formal political institutions. An anonymous British writer wrote a singular description of Trump. Speaking of blond-haired windbags, the UK election campaign has begun with...

We have pretty normal autumn weather in Chicago right now, in that it's gray and cold with temperatures about 3°C below normal. Friday morning, when I fly out, temperatures will fall to 10°C below normal and then 13°C below normal when I get back Tuesday. We have this ridiculous late-autumn chill because of climate change. Warm air over Greenland and the Grand Banks has distorted the circumpolar jet stream into an omega shape, bringing the Arctic to Canada and the central US and bringing California to...

I realized this morning that I've missed almost the entire season of The Good Place because I don't seem to have enough time to watch TV. I also don't have enough time until Friday to read all of these pieces that have crossed my desk only today: Writing in the New Yorker, Steve Coll worries how the public phase of the House's impeachment hearings will move the public. Meanwhile, Seinfeld screenwriter and New York native Peter Mehlman points out that Donald Trump "was always a joke" in New York. (I...

Remember, remember the 5th of NovemberGunpowder and treason and plot.Now Johnson and Tories will rend and will sunderWhat Fawkes in his madness could not.

After a few rounds of voting, (now former) Labour MP the Rt Hon Sir Lindsay Hoyle has been elected the 158th Speaker of the House of Commons. As Harriet Harmon said in her speech just before the first round of voting, of the 158, only one was female. In other news, Voyager 2 has become the second human spacecraft to check in from the other side of the heliosheath separating the solar system from interstellar space. One of these stories is probably a lot more important than the other...

Chicago has the world's 6th busiest airport, with hundreds of thousands of aviation operations every year. Naturally the people who live nearby get an earful. I live about 16 km east of the approach end of runway 28C, the preferred landing runway from destinations south and west of Chicago. Even though the planes are about 4,000 feet up when they cross the lakefront, I can still hear them well enough to tell them apart by sound. (No machine in the world sounds like a 747, I assure you.) Starting today...

On 4 November 1979, "students" stormed the American Embassy in Tehran: After a three-hour struggle, the students took hostages, including 62 Americans, and demanded the extradition of the deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was receiving medical treatment in the United States for the cancer that ultimately would kill him. Some hostages would later be released amid the crisis, but it would take over a year for all to be freed. It would take 444 days—until the last day of President Jimmy Carter's...

It was a lovely afternoon for a concert. We performed selections from Händel's Messiah, Rachmaninoff's Aleko, and Bach's St John Passion in the gorgeous St Michael Catholic Church in Old Town, Chicago: Inside, just before the concert: Our next performances will be with Chicago Opera Theater on the 14th, 16th, and 17th. Then some of us will be back at St Michael for Messiah on December 6th. It's going to be a hectic couple of months.

On Wednesday night it snowed, and the temperature spent several hours below freezing. That caused this to happen: Those leaves fell en masse from a linden tree in my neighborhood. Which means they won't fall in two weeks when they're bright yellow. Most of the trees in my neighborhood, and the ivy covering my own building, dropped all their leaves the morning after the snowstorm. So we don't really get an autumn this year. And that makes me sad. Nature, sometimes you suck.

It's the first day of November 2019, the month in which the 1982 classic film Blade Runner takes place. Los Angeles has a bit of haze today from wildfires in the area, but I'm glad to report that it isn't the environmental disaster portrayed in the movie. No flying cars, no replicants, and no phone booths either. In other news: Chicago woke up to 75 mm of snow on the ground from the largest Halloween snowfall in the city's history. Despite the white stuff on the ground, a study at CBRE Group and...