Events

New York Times reporter Alissa Rubin, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work covering Kabul, looks back on the Bush Administration's refusal to entertain a deal with the Taliban in 2001: “The Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time. Messengers shuttled back and forth between [Hamid] Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr....

Welcome to stop #51 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Two Hound Red, 486 Pennsylvania Ave., Glen EllynTrain line: UP West, Glen EllynTime from Chicago: 45 minutes (Zone E)Distance from station: 500 m You know? Downtown Glen Ellyn is a lot cuter than I expected. And Two Hound Red, which opened in June 2019, is worth the trip. If only they had fewer TVs... They don't have flights, but they will give you pairs of 5-ounce samples, so I had two. Meaning four. And they were pretty good—though it turned...

In a few minutes I'm hosting only the second in-person thing my chorus has done in the past 18 months: our last board meeting of the summer. We're all set to start in-person rehearsals on the 13th, though we will probably have to wear masks until our performances. That'll be weird—but at least we'll be in the same room. Other choruses in Chicago have the same challenges: “COVID shut us down completely because singing is a superspreader event,” said Jimmy Morehead, artistic director for the Chicago Gay...

Welcome to stop #50 on the Brews and Choos project. Note: EBC closed on 8 June 2025 and will be replaced in 2026 by 93 Octane Brewery. Brewery: Elmhurst Brewing Co., 171 N Addison Ave., ElmhurstTrain line: UP West, ElmhurstTime from Chicago: 32 minutes (Zone 3)Distance from station: 300 m Elmhurst Brewing opened in February 2018 and got through the pandemic with take-out and delivery. I can understand how: they have good beer. They brew in the back, then send the beer up to giant steel containers behind...

"Over-extended, hollowed-out, debt-burdened empires are not exactly intimidating to many enemies. Leaving Afghanistan is therefore not the blow to American power and prestige these pundits are claiming. Staying in Afghanistan is."—Andrew Sullivan.

Eugene Wesley Roddenberry would have been 100 years old today. Star Trek and NASA have a livestream today to celebrate. In other news: Guardian UK Washington correspondent David Smith highlights White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki's ability to expertly destroy Fox News reporter Peter Doocy. T-Mobile has suffered its sixth known data disclosure attack in four years, this time losing control over as many as 40 million customer records. New Republic's Scott Stern profiles former Monsanto lawyer Clarence...

The Washington Post columnist weaves together all the threads in the story and avoids putting the blame on any one person: The structure of the Kabul government has been rotting from within for all 20 years of the United States’ war. And every U.S. commander knew its weakness. They worried about the corruption and incompetence of the government, devised elaborate strategies to fix it, kept convincing themselves they were making progress. Hope is not a strategy, as every commander knows. In this case, it...

The Chicago Transit Authority's RPM project has claimed another victim: For comparison, here's the view from 10 days ago: Yep. The Lawrence El station is gone. By the end of autumn, the entire east half of the embankment should be gone as well. I will post updates as interesting things happen.

Eric Schnurer outlines the alarming similarities between our present and Rome's past; specifically, the end of the Republic in 54 BCE: History isn’t destiny, of course; the demise of the Roman Republic is a point of comparison—not prediction. But the accelerating comparisons nonetheless beg the question: If one were to make a prediction, what comes next? What might signal the end of democracy as we know it?  There is, it turns out, an easy answer at hand. While there is no precise end date to the...

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch: "[A] government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of American lives." Josh Marshall agrees: It is crystal clear that the Afghan national army and really the Afghan state was an illusion. It could not survive first contact with a post-US military reality. As is so often the case in life – with bad investments, bad relationships – what we were doing there was staying to delay our reckoning with the...