Events

I mean... Police in Massachusetts arrested 11 people Saturday after an hours-long standoff with a group of heavily armed men near Interstate 95, sparking stay-at-home orders for nearby residents and a highway shutdown during the holiday weekend. According to the Wakefield Police Department, several men carrying rifles and handguns took off into the woods after refusing to comply with orders during a motor vehicle stop around 1:30 a.m. The men claimed to belong to a group that “does not recognize our...

Welcome to stop #45 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Milk Money Brewing., 75 S. La Grange Rd., La GrangeTrain line: BNSF, La Grange RdTime from Chicago: 26 minutes (Zone C)Distance from station: 500 m La Grange Road has a lot of competition, being essentially the restaurant district of La Grange. So for a suburban brewery, Milk Money does a good job. I stopped by on the Friday before July 4th, when the weather felt more like September and the vibe felt more like 2019. They don't do flights per...

The Atlantic's current issue adapts veteran writer George Packer's latest book, in which he argues that the US has fractured into four distinct world views: National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy...

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld died Tuesday at age 88: Mr. Rumsfeld had the distinction of being the only defense chief to serve two nonconsecutive terms: 1975 to 1977 under President Ford, and 2001 to 2006 under President Bush. He was also the youngest, at 43, and the oldest, at 74, to hold the post — first in an era of Soviet-American nuclear perils, then in an age of subtler menace by terrorists and rogue states. A staunch ally of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who had been his...

The two most recent US Supreme Court appointees may have agreed with the moderate justices on a couple of issues this term, but as the last opinions come out this morning, they have reminded us that the Republican Party's anti-democratic policies remain their top priorities. Despite no evidence of retail election fraud, in 2016 Arizona's Republican majority enacted a law making it a crime to collect ballots from voters. Many voters in Arizona and elsewhere have difficulty making it to the polls, and in...

In another implicit rebuke to the lump of clay that occupied the Governor's Mansion for four years, Illinois finally got a bump in its credit rating after Governor Pritzker started paying our bills again: In upgrading Illinois’ credit by one step — to two notches above junk bond status instead of one — Wall Street ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service noted that the $42 billion spending plan for the year starting July 1 “increases pension contributions, repays emergency Federal Reserve borrowings and...

After Fox network blowhard Tucker Carlson whined that the National Security Agency, the US intelligence service tasked with spying on communications outside the US, had tapped his phones, the agency clapped back on Twitter: TPM's Cristina Cabrera reports, "Carlson doubled down on his accusation shortly afterward on his program, saying the NSA’s statement 'an entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community’s lackeys at CNN and MSNBC.'" The NSA is just having a bit of sport...

The good news: putting my phone number and a close friend's phone number on Cassie's ID tags worked! The bad news: I gotta trek back to the dog park to pick up Cassie's tags. Because of the way they lay on her collar, they don't jingle when she walks, only when she shakes or (as happens from time to time) rolls over to let me demand that I rub her belly. So while walking back from the dog park, I had no idea that she didn't have her tags anymore. Sigh.

After the World Happiness Report comes out each year, everyone wants to live in Scandinavia, which usually dominates the top 10 every time. But people seem not to understand why Norway, Denmark, Finland, and the rest rank so high. Perhaps it's not hygge but lagom. Or maybe it's free health care: Sort of like how the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led Americans to feel like their country was falling behind technologically, or how the results of international standardized tests in the 2000s led them to feel...

At the moment, the 10 hottest places in the world are all in the Pacific Coast states and British Columbia. The Dalles, Ore., hit 48°C at 4pm Pacific; Portland hit 46°C, the same as Palm Springs, Calif.; and even Lytton, B.C., reports 46°C right now—the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada. All of those figures exceed yesterday's forecast and broke all-time records set just yesterday. It's bonkers. And it won't be the last time this happens. Here in Chicago we have a perfectly reasonable 26°C....