Events

Happy Wednesday! Here's what I'm reading before my 8pm meeting, now that my 6:30pm meeting just ended: Alexandra Petri finds exactly the right analogy for the Republican complaints that an investigation into the January 6th insurrection would be "more partisan unfairness." Former election official Jennifer Morrell observed the unofficial Maricopa County, Ariz., recount, and found it even worse than you might have expected. University of Baltimore Law Professor Kimberly Wehle looks at the implications of...

The New York Attorney General's office has tightened the screws on the Trump Organization: "We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time," Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement. James' years-long probe into Trump's charitable foundation led to...

Washington Post columnist Helaine Olin argues for a simplified tax filing procedure in the US: Filing taxes is a time-consuming, bureaucratic chore that the Internal Revenue Service estimates will take the typical American 11 hours. Nationwide, that works out to some 6 billion lost hours a year, according to T.R. Reid, author of the 2017 book “A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System.” The thing is, filing taxes just doesn’t have to be this hard. In 36 countries...

I forgot how quiet San Francisco's financial district is on weekend mornings. And I forgot to factor in California's lagging re-opening in general. Of the places Yelp said would be open for a quick breakfast takeaway this morning, two had ended weekend hours, one was permanently closed (or at least hibernating through the pandemic), and one was delightful. Il Canto Cafe, on Sacramento between Battery and Sansomme, whipped up a lovely egg sandwich and (too-large) coffee in just five minutes. But...

Not having an adolescent dog who wants her breakfast at 6am to contend with this morning meant I actually got to sleep in. (Yes, 7:15 is "sleeping in" when I'm in California, because that's 9:15 back home.) The friends looking after Cassie reported last night: "Cassie's a bit confused...she said something about not signing up for the overnight package." This morning: "Very barky at noises. But she settled down. We're heading to the dog park after Meet the Press!" (Cassie will not be on the news program...

Almost 16 months since I last flew anywhere, I have returned to O'Hare: Despite traveling on Saturday afternoon, which historically has meant few delays and a quiet airport, the traffic coming up here was so bad my car's adaptive cruise control gave up. But she got a treat once we got to economy parking: I don't think I have ever parked that close to the elevators in 48 years of flying. Good thing, too, because the closest non-LEV space was in the next county. Once I got into the terminal, it took less...

Two travel stories arrived in my mailbox overnight. First, China has landed a probe on Mars, becoming the third country in history to do so: The touchdown makes China the second country in history to deposit a rover on the surface of Mars. After months in orbit around the red planet, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft released the Zhurong rover for a landing in Utopia Planitia, a vast plain that may once have been covered by an ancient Martian ocean. The 529-pound rover survived a perilous descent to the surface...

Now that I'm more than two weeks past my second Pfizer jab, I'm heading to O'Hare tomorrow for the first time since January 2020. I remember back in September 2018 when I finally broke my longest-ever drought from flying of 221 days. Tomorrow will mark 481 days grounded. But that's tomorrow. Today, I'm interested in the following: Mother Jones obtained leaked video showing the right-wing group Heritage Action for America bragging that it had essentially drafted all the voter-suppression bills going...

The CDC has changed its guidance on Covid-19. People who are fully vaccinated (that's me, 2 weeks as of today!) no longer need to wear masks in most places: The advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention comes as welcome news to Americans who have tired of restrictions and marks a watershed moment in the pandemic. Masks ignited controversy in communities across the United States, symbolizing a bitter partisan divide over approaches to the pandemic and a badge of political affiliation....

The Atlantic's Amanda Mull believes that workers will benefit most from choosing when to work from home or in the office themselves, rather than through corporate policies: [R]umors of the office’s death have been greatly exaggerated, as have those of its triumphal return. Most companies are still deciding exactly what their post-pandemic workspaces look like, which means many office-going Americans are about to enter a few months of relative freedom during phased, attendance-capped reopenings....