Events

Travel writer Rick Stevens points out that European cities made deliberate choices to become walkable. American cities can do that too: You know, it's funny, when Americans are in Europe, they marvel at the energy and the people friendliness of the urban cores. But oftentimes, they don't put it together.  But you walk around these towns—you walk around Rome, you walk around Copenhagen, you walk around Amsterdam and Warsaw—and think, “Where are all the cars? There's just happy people.” I was in...

My friend's pittie mix Hazel does not always like other dogs. So my friend had some trepidation about letting Hazel stay over for a night. It looks like no one need have worried: She and her driving partner are already passing through Rapid City, S.D. Hazel doesn't like being in the car that long, but she's doing fine with some Doggie's Little Helper from the vet.

Google plans to move 2,000 employees into what used to be the State of Illinois Building at Randolph and Clark. The 1985 Helmut Jahn building has stood vacant for several years, literally leaking money: The city has granted permits to demolish the exterior and atrium of the Thompson Center — a critical early step in Google’s $280 million efforts to remake the former state government building into the company’s Chicago headquarters. Under permits issued Oct. 13 by the Department of Buildings, Google will...

An old friend stopped by today on her way from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest, and insisted we take our dogs to the dog beach. It's 14°C and sunny. What do you think I did? Yeah: Fortunately it's the middle of the sprint, and I have a metric shit ton (a shite tonne) of PTO hours, so this was my afternoon. If you're my boss and reading this...I swear, this is not what I planned for the day.

Yesterday I wrote down some of my thoughts on the Gaza war, and promised to curate a list of other writers who have done a better job than I have. I don't necessarily agree with these folks 100%, but at least they're trying to bring some sanity to the conversation. Julia Ioffe: Two years ago, during the last war between Hamas and Israel, I did a little survey on social media and asked people where Jews came from, originally. Most people said “Europe.” It was deeply telling and explained why, in so many...

Yesterday, during the eclipse, which I guess some people in the US and Mexico got to enjoy: Gotta love Chicago during astronomical phenomena. Next April, I will make sure that I'm somewhere along the eclipse path where I can actually see the eclipse. Today, though, we have much better weather, as Cassie will attest: I've got chicken soup in my slow cooker, but I have two hours until I need to pull the chicken, so I'm going to go do nothing of value for a bit. With the dog.

Between the destruction of Twitter as a platform of consequence and my good fortune that most of my Facebook contacts are sane (and I can mute the others for 30 days at a time), I haven't seen much of the disinformation and propaganda about the Hamas pogrom and Israeli response that others have reported on. But I have read some good commentary that recognizes the context of the current conflict, particularly that its outlines haven't changed one bit in at least 3,000 years. Before I highlight some of...

Not shown: she's snoring.

Sadly, my doctor did not tell me to try to have fun no matter what I do, though we did have a brief conversation about which Bourbons we both like. Nope, he just said I'm perfectly healthy: I exercise enough, I eat right, I don't drink too much, my vital signs are perfect, and I get enough sleep. Doctor visits should be like software releases: boring. If only that were true elsewhere: Israel has given the 1.1 million residents of Gaza City until tonight to evacuate to the southern part of the territory...

I'm iterating on a UI feature that wasn't 100% defined, so I'm also iterating on the API that the feature needs. Sometimes software is like that: you discover that your first design didn't quite solve the problem, so you iterate. it's just that the iteration is a bit of a context shift, so I'm going to read for about 15 minutes to clear my head: Kevin Philips, whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority laid out Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" and led to the GOP's subsequent slide into...