Events

While I wait for a continuous-integration pipeline to finish (with success, I hasten to add), working a bit later into the evening than usual, I have these articles to read later: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Lib-Papineau) called a snap election to boost his party, but pissed off enough people that almost nothing at all changed. Margaret Talbot calls out the State of Mississippi on the "errors of fact and judgment" in its brief to the Supreme Court about its draconian abortion law. Julia...

I have a Roomba. I have a dog. When these two things live in the same house, every dog-and-Roomba owner has the same anxiety: will they interact in such a way that will require a messy cleanup? iRobot, who manufacture Roombas, have a new model advertised (only $850!) to reduce this anxiety considerably. I do not have this new model. I have an older model. And yesterday, anxiety turned to horror. Fortunately (depending on how you look at it), Cassie's accident must have happened at least 12 hours before...

Yes, that Guinness. They've found a derelict railway building in the Fulton Market area and plan to open a new stop on the Brews & Choos Project: Chicago developer Fred Latsko has struck a deal with Irish beer brand Guinness to open a brewery and beer hall in a long-vacant Fulton Market District building while he lines up plans to build what could be one of the former meatpacking neighborhood's tallest office buildings next door. Guinness is poised to open the venue as part of a revival of the...

Today might be the last hot day of the year in Chicago. (I hope so, anyway.) While watching the cold front come through out my office window, with the much-needed rain ahead of it, I have lined up some news stories to read later today: My alderman got attacked on Saturday a couple blocks from my house by a well-known local vagrant. Josh Marshall believes US Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has no plans to run for re-election. In related news, CNN explains what happens to all the rats when a hurricane...

Writing in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost explains better than I could why I stopped using my Kindle a few years back: A particular reader’s receptivity to ebooks...depends on the degree to which these objects conform to, or at least fail to flout, one’s idea of bookiness. But if you look back at the list of features that underlie that idea, ebooks embrace surprisingly few of them. An ebook doesn’t have pages, for one. The Kindle-type book does have text, and that text might still be organized into sections...

Welcome to stop #57 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Horse Thief Hollow, 10426 S. Western Ave., ChicagoTrain line: Rock Island, 103rd–Beverly Hills Time from Chicago: 26 minutes (Zone C)Distance from station: 1.3 km About 180 years ago, the low, swampy area where 111th Street meets Vincennes Avenue today provided excellent cover for a band of horse thieves who plagued the farmers far to the south of Chicago. In 2013, Neil Byers opened a restaurant and brewery nearby. Eight years in, they are...

Welcome to stop #56 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Open Outcry Brewing, 10934 S. Western Ave., ChicagoTrain line: Rock Island, 111th–Morgan Park Time from Chicago: 30 minutes (Zone C)Distance from station: 1.1 km Yesterday I snuck out of the office before sunset and headed out to Tinley Park to see the new beer garden at Banging Gavel Brews. Despite my very careful reading of train schedules to visit three Rock Island Line stops in one evening, I did not read Banging Gavel's website carefully...

In a CityLab article from this summer (which for some reason they put on today's newsletter, and not the one from June 25th), Tony Frangie Mawad examines the decline in American public transit since the late 20th century: Back in 1970, 77 million Americans commuted to work every day, and 9% of them took a bus or a train. By 2019, the number of U.S. workers had nearly doubled, to more than 150 million. But the vast majority of these new workers chose to drive: The number of public transit riders...

The Brews & Choos Project continues this evening with a short trip to the South Side. Beverly (probably named after the one in Massachusetts) became one of the city's most diverse neighborhoods in the mid-20th century, and remains so today. I would call it the most North Side-like part of the South Side. (I'll also visit Morgan Park, just a little below 107th Street.) To celebrate this occasion, enjoy this fun ditty by John Forster:

Eddie Lampert, corporate murderer, has managed to drive his once-great company out if its home state: Sears' last Illinois location, at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, is set to close in November. The Hoffman Estates-based retailer’s parent company, Transformco, announced the decision today. "This is part of the company's strategy to unlock the value of the real estate and pursue the highest and best use for the benefit of the local community," the company said in a statement. Ah, yes, because under the...