Events

Billionaire Bill Ackerman lobbied Harvard's board hard to get president Claudine Gay fired last month, harping on her plagiarism as a key reason she wasn't fit for the job. Business Insider then published two stories alleging what looks like even worse plagiarism by Neri Oxman—Ackerman's wife. So Ackerman did what any self-deceiving, childish, hypocritical billionaire would do: he leaned on the paper's publisher. Because of course he did: At one point, Ackman wrote that a Harvard student who committed...

Chicago had its 4th-warmest December in history last month, with temperatures averaging about 4°C above normal. The trend has continued this month as well. That won't completely end tonight, though we may see some snow: The first “significant” winter storm to impact the Chicago region is scheduled to start Monday night, with meteorologists predicting two to five inches of snow accumulation and wind gusts up to 30 miles per hour across portions of central and northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana. A...

Welcome to stop #94 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Hopewell Brewing, 2760 N Milwaukee Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, Logan SquareTime from Chicago: 16 minutesDistance from station: 400 m The second stop on the "research expedition" my friend and I took on Saturday didn't excite us as much as BiXi or Revolution. My friend decided that Hopewell is what you get when you tell an AI to design a Logan Square taproom. She's not wrong. We tried six beers—well, I tried five, because I really...

Welcome to stop #93 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: BiXi 鼻息 Beer, 2515 N. Milwaukee Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, Logan SquareTime from Chicago: 16 minutesDistance from station: 400 m Yesterday I brought a friend along to visit three Logan Square breweries, starting with BiXi (pronounced "bee she") and ending with the granddaddy of the region, Revolution. We planned well, because BiXi has really great beer but also very tasty food. Plus, it's got a cozy vibe where I can imagine...

We got about 50 mm of snow overnight, even though the temperature barely got below freezing at O'Hare and never got below freezing at IDTWHQ. I expect most of it will melt today, but this morning it looked pretty: On the other hand, most of the models predict a huge winter storm next weekend. If I get supremely lucky, the worst of it will hit while I'm away. If my luck runs as usual, I'll spend a lot more time at O'Hare than I'd prefer. At least sunrises have finally started to get earlier. 

A small collection: The CTA's Yellow Line has resumed service seven weeks after a train hit a stopped snowplow near the Howard station. Europe needs more trains, so they're building them. Scholars examining some personal effects from a 17th-century shipwreck have some new answers and some new questions. A coalition of landlords and real estate companies doesn't want a referendum on the Cook County ballot that could levy a one-time tax on the sale of million-dollar properties. Finally, in her column on...

Facing a criminal trial for corruption that he will probably lose, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre resigned earlier today: Mr. LaPierre, 74, has led the organization for more than three decades. But his resignation came as he faced his gravest challenge yet, a corruption trial in Manhattan amid a legal showdown with New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Jury selection has already begun and opening arguments were scheduled for early next week. The announcement took place during a...

It was a busy day, so I didn't have a lot of time to write a substantial post. I did want to highlight Nate Cohn's comparison of President Biden's situation going into the 2024 election and another guy who did a pretty good job in his first term: Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as...

Paul Krugman succinctly puts to bed any obfuscation of Southern aggression: But it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels? Let me start with an assertion that may be controversial: The American...

Though my "to-be-read" bookshelf has over 100 volumes on it, at least two of which I've meant to read since the 1980s, the first book I started in 2024 turned out to be Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause, which I bought because of the author's post on John Scalzi's blog back in November. That is not what I'm reading today at lunch, though. No, I'm reading a selection of things the mainstream media published in the last day: Economic historian Guido Alfani examines the data on the richest people to live...