Events

In this must-read piece on Puck, Julia Ioffe interviews Serhiy Leschenko, one of Volodymyr Zelensky's principal aides: What about American fears that this will set off World War III? It’s absurd. If Russia has become so weak that it couldn’t hold on to Bucha, Irpin, and Hostomel, then what World War III could you possibly be talking about? They’re just incapable of doing it. The threat of using nuclear weapons is just the appearance of a threat. He’ll never fire it. Because this decision isn’t made by...

Actually, it's 5pm here. And I have a few stories queued up: Oklahoma has a new law making abortion a felony, because the 1950s were great for the white Christian men who wrote that law. Monika Bauerlein explains why authoritarians hate a free press. Not that we didn't already know. Jonathan Haidt explains "why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid." ("It's not just a phase.") Inflation in the US hit a 40-year high at 8.5% year over year, but Paul Krugman believes it will drop...

Canada has put the Prairie Provinces on a winter storm warning as "the worst blizzard in decades" descends upon Saskatchewan and Manitoba: A winter storm watch is in effect for southern Manitoba and southeastern Saskatchewan, with snowfall accumulations of 30 to 50 centimetres expected mid-week, along with northerly wind gusts of up to 90 kilometres per hour, said Environment Canada on Monday. “Do not plan to travel — this storm has the potential to be the worst blizzard in decades,” the agency warns....

Thursday evening, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance: That's Bill Kurtis, Peter Sagal, Karen Chee, Alonzo Bodden, and Helen Hong at this week's "Wait Wait" taping. The "Not My Job" guest was actor Matt Walsh: Then yesterday, Cassie and I trundled up to Spiteful Brewing in the sun: Not a bad few days, in all.

Via Molly White, a new company called Gripnr wants to monetize your D&D campaign, and it's as horrible as it sounds: Gripnr plans to generate 10,000 random D&D player characters (PCs), assign a “rarity” to certain aspects of each (such as ancestry and class), and mint them as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Each NFT will include character stats and a randomly-generated portrait of the PC designed in a process overseen by Gripnr’s lead artist Justin Kamerer. Additional NFTs will be minted to represent...

US Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) excoriated Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) on the floor of the Senate this week. Greg Sargent follows Josh Marshall in exhorting more Democrats to get messages like this out more often: Grandstanding and disingenuousness are endemic to politics. The tension between sordid political theatrics and the higher ideals they serve goes back to the ancients. But at a certain point, the pileup of absurdities becomes so comically ludicrous, so obviously unmoored from even the most basic...

When I launched the final weather archive import on Tuesday, I predicted it would finish around 1pm today. See my accuracy for yourself: 2022-04-08 12:54:05.0975|INFO|Moved 118,773,651 weather archives from v3 to v5 2022-04-08 12:54:05.0975|INFO|Finished importing; duration 3.03:41:19.2445019 2022-04-08 12:54:05.0975|INFO|Import finished Not a bad prediction. So Weather Now 5 now has about 260 million historical records going back to 2006, including Chicago's weather from 15 years ago this hour. And...

The US Senate did something pretty cool yesterday: The Senate on Thursday confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, making her the first Black woman to be elevated to the pinnacle of the judicial branch in what her supporters hailed as a needed step toward bringing new diversity and life experience to the court. Overcoming a concerted effort by Republicans to sully her record and derail her nomination, Judge Jackson was confirmed on a 53-to-47 vote, with three Republicans joining all...

Cassie has spent the last two weeks creating found art out of one of my area rugs. Yesterday the "found" part got too much for me and I let the rug go. Pity, too; I won it at a silent auction for $300 only in 2016, and neither Parker nor Cassie tried to destroy it until this spring. Here's Cassie's final expression of the piece. Note not only the center section, which Cassie exfiltrated from the house a small bit at a time, but also the left edge, where she expressed a more compelling feeling of the...

I've gotten two solid nights of sleep in a row, and I've got a clean desk for the first time in weeks. I hope that this becomes the norm, at least until November, when I'll have a packed musical schedule for six weeks as the Apollo Chorus rehearses or performs about 30 times. But that's seven months off. That gives me plenty of time to listen to or read these: Time Zone Database coordinator Paul Eggert explains the TZDB, its history, and how it works. David Sedaris discusses how the US changed between...