Events

I've opened nearly every window in my house to let in the 15°C breeze and really experience the first real fall morning in a while. Chicago will get above-normal temperatures for the next 10 days or so, but in the beginning of October that means highs in the mid-20s and lows in the mid-teens. Even Cassie likes the change. Since I plan to spend nearly every moment of daylight outside for the rest of this weekend, I want to note a few things to read this evening when I come back inside: TFW your bogus...

James Fallows destroys any idea you may have that "reasonable people on both sides" have a disagreement about raising the Federal debt ceiling: In reality, as nearly everyone reporting on this issue understands, this is not a “showdown.” It is not even a “disagreement.” Those terms might apply to questions like the size of the infrastructure-spending bill, or prospective judicial nominees, or what to do about Haitian refugees. Instead, this is a naked threat. It has exactly zero legitimacy as a “policy”...

According to the Washington Post's Robert Kagan, the end has already begun: The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking...

After years of legal marijuana sales at the state level, the House of Representatives has finally proposed a solution to the problem of what to do with the money: The U.S. House of Representatives will vote this week on a bill that would let banks do business with cannabis companies without fear of penalty.  The so-called SAFE Banking Act, which is the least disputed reform sought by the growing industry, got picked up as part of broader legislation, and its inclusion in the National Defense...

So these things happened: The FBI withheld REvil decryption keys from victims so not to tip off the criminals. Anonymous hackers have doxxed an ISP that provides services to right-wing hate groups. Two disbarred lawyers have filed suit against the doctor who admitted to performing an abortion in contravention of Texas law. As feared, Chicago-area animal shelters have started to fill up as selfish people return the pets they took home when Covid made them lonely. Josh Marshall frames the current...

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...