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Well, some of it is interesting, anyway: Adam Kinzinger uses the Great Drone Panic of 2024 to remind us how right-wing media spin people up over nothing. O'Hare may reclaim its title as the World's Busiest Airport if the Federal Aviation Administration confirms flight-tracking company AirNav Radar's statistics next month. Sam Kahn explains "how the New Yorker became irrelevant." Duke evolutionary anthropology PhD student Hannah Salomons conducted a study of how puppies learn that has recently been...

So in case I don't have a chance to read all of these tonight: Did the White House staff put up tacky, gold-colored, signage outside the Oval Office because the OAFPOTUS is a classless tool, or because he's well along the dementia highway? Dan Rather puts the blame for declining educational outcomes in the US squarely on the party who has attacked public education for 40 or 50 years now. DOGE has officially ended, having accomplished absolutely nothing good, and of course it'll be up to my party to...

Naturally, the press had a lot to say about the largest protest in my lifetime (I was born after the Earth Day 1970 demonstration): As many as 250,000 people turned out for the downtown Chicago event, which included a procession that carried a 23-meter replica of the US Constitution, and resulted in zero arrests or reports of violence. (The video of the procession leaving Grant Park is epic.) David Graham of The Atlantic explains why the protests got under the OAFPOTUS's skin: "Trump’s movement depends...

I jotted down two notes earlier this week about things I heard that made me think. They come from two journalists who I've followed for a while, both of whom have reasoned and careful takes on events in their home countries. The first came from New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who posted a video on Monday discussing Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought, about whom Politico ran a depressing article just this morning. Bouie says Vought believes that "if you can get rid of the...

The OAFPOTUS sued the New York Times in the Middle District of Florida on Monday. It only took until this morning for Senior US District Judge Stephen Merryday to throw it out: Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, said the president’s 85-page complaint was unnecessarily lengthy and digressive. He criticized Mr. Trump’s lawyers for waiting until the 80th page to lodge a formal allegation of defamation, and for including, ahead of it, dozens of “florid...

The authoritarian project currently underway in the United States, like all other authoritarian projects in history, has nothing to do with any specific policies or official statements except those that concentrate wealth in friendly hands. It's entirely about power and control. The specifics do not matter to the people trying to take over. Corruption is the main reason why Disney/ABC pulled comedian Jimmy Kimmel from its network yesterday. The conglomerate claimed that this was because of Kimmel's...

I agree with most of what the British comedian says, except I would say while both the Right and Left have descended into illiberalism, the Left aren't actually shooting anyone:

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely. In other eclipses this past week: The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de...

I have a chunk of work to do this afternoon, but I'm hoping I can sneak in some time to read all of these: Dan Rather cheers on the Democratic Party for finally finding the fight. Francis Fukuyama says: move over Berlusconi; the Clown Prince of X has done considerably more to harm Western civilization than you ever did. David Daley puts responsibility for the exploding fight over Congressional maps squarely on US Chief Justice John Roberts. Jennifer Rubin wants us to stop using the word "guarantee" when...

Dayrestan, Iran, sits on an island just inside the Strait of Hormuz directly across the Persian Gulf from the UAE. At 9:30 am local time Thursday, the airport weather station reported a temperature of 40°C with a dewpoint of 36°C, which makes a heat index of 83.2°C (181.8°F). AccuWeather says it was likely an instrument error, though the next station over, in Bandar Abbass, reported a temperature of 39°C with a 27°C dewpoint for a heat index of 52.3°C (126.1°F) at the same time—hardly an improvement....

With my PTO cap continuing to force me into Friday afternoons off this summer (the horror!), and the sunny but (smoky 23°C) weather, Cassie and I will head to the Horner Park DFA just as soon as I release a new version of Weather Now in just a few minutes. When Cassie and I come back, I'll spend some time reading all these nuggets of existential dread: The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last 3 months of US jobs data down to basically nil (which Krugman blames on tariffs), prompting the OAFPOTUS to...

The acclaimed journalist was 91: Billy Don Moyers was born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on June 5, 1934, and grew up in the northeast Texas town of Marshall. His father worked as a day laborer, while Mr. Moyers’s mother raised him and an older brother, James. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Mr. Moyers, not yet 30, became one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s key lieutenants. Time magazine called him “LBJ’s young man in charge of everything.” He was named White House press secretary in July 1965. [In 1967]...

On my flight yesterday, I finally read Nicholas Confessore's explanation of how US v Skrmetti got to the Supreme Court, and...wow. I am actually shocked at how illiberal and extremist the ACLU's leadership has become, and how far the transgender rights movement has moved to the left: For Chase Strangio, the stakes were both personal and political. He joined the A.C.L.U. in 2013, a few years after undergoing top surgery, or a mastectomy, a procedure that “saved my life,” as he later wrote. “When you...

I'm flying tomorrow and Sunday, giving me a few uninterrupted hours to read between now and Monday. So I'm just queuing some of these things up: The US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibits certain medical interventions for minors who want to transition genders. As the opinion came from Justice Samuel Alito (R) and the dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I), I have a feeling both it and the dissent will satisfy no one. The Times characterizes the decision as setting back "the movement" a...

The pilot and journalist, who wrote clear and readable articles and books about complex topics, has died at age 70: For 10 years running, from 1999 to 2008, his pieces were finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he won it twice: in 2007 for “Rules of Engagement,” about the killing of 24 unarmed civilians by U.S. Marines in 2005 in Haditha, Iraq; and in 2002 for “The Crash of EgyptAir 990,” about a flight that went down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1999 with the loss of all 217 people aboard. Mr....

I have had no more than 15 consecutive minutes free at any point today. The rest of the week I have 3½-hour blocks on my calendar, but all the other meetings had to go somewhere, so they went to Monday. So just jotting down stories that caught my eye: Ukraine's masterful and crippling strike against the Russian Air Force over the weekend has changed warfare forever, writes Max Boot. Jen Rubin wants to end the creeping normalization of the OAFPOTUS and his droogs because, as she says, they're all nuts....

We've had a run of dreary, unseasonably cold weather that more closely resembles the end of March than the middle of May. I've been looking at this gloom all day: We may have some sun tomorrow afternoon through the weekend, but the forecast calls for continuous north winds and highs around 16°C—the normal high for April 23rd, not May 23rd. Summer officially starts in 10 days. It sure doesn't feel like it. Speaking of the gloomy and the retrograde: Former US judge and George HW Bush appointee J. Michael...

Sunday's Sun-Times included an insert of recommended summer activities that may not have gone through the normal editorial process: The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist. Alongside actual books like Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, a summer reading...

Well, mixed, really. It turns out Cassie isn't entirely healthy, though at the moment she's fine and will remain so for a few years at least without intervention. (I'll get that sorted in a couple of weeks and explain more about it this weekend.) Also, there's all this crap: David Brooks argues that the OAFPOTUS's single strength—his audacity—can be turned into a weakness: "Lacking any sense of prudence, he does not understand the difference between a risk and a gamble. He does daring and incredibly...

Stuff to read: Forgetting (or just plain ignorant) that we have a Coast Guard better suited to the task of guarding our coasts, the OAFPOTUS has ordered the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to the Texas-Mexico border. The OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X, apparently not seeing the connection between weather forecasters and weather forecasts, have illegally fired 10% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff just as a violent tornado outbreak killed 40 people in the Midwest and...

Winter ends two weeks from tomorrow, but climate science and meteorology can only study nature, not command it. That explains why, despite ample sunshine, the temperature at IDTWHQ has stayed around -7°C since it leveled out this morning, and promises to shed another 8-10 degrees tonight. Then we're in for a few blasts of cold interspersed with warm days and some snow here and there for about a week before it consistently warms up. Elsewhere in the cold, cold world: The Senate confirmed the unqualified...

So much to read...tomorrow morning, when I wake up: Fallows and the Post have solid takes on President Biden's farewell address. Kim Lane Scheppelle shakes her head at how authoritarians use playground taunts keep their opponents off balance. John Scalzi does not expect much from the incoming administration. The Daily Overview has an amazing post today on the Los Angeles fires, and other fires in the recent past. Arwa Mahdawi calls out United HealthCare for going "villain mode." Heather Souvaine Horn...

We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too: The German government collapsed today after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag. People think the OAFPOTUS transition team are doing a great job for the simple reason that most people don't follow this kind of thing. Josh Marshall points out that it...

Two stories I mentioned previously have updates today: After a Federal judge in Oregon and a state judge in Washington rejected the Albertsons-Kroger merger, Albertsons has filed suit against Kroger for breach of contract in the failed deal. A Federal bankruptcy judge in Houston has rejected the Onion's acquisition of Infowars in the estate dissolution of Alex Jones, citing a lack of transparency in the process. As long as I've got five minutes before my next meeting, I also want to spike these two for...

Chicago-based humor magazine The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Alex Jones's InfoWars Media: The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems. The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation...

The sky above Chicago has nothing but sun this morning. It won't last—the forecast for tomorrow night points to July-like atmospheric moisture and epic rainfall—but Cassie and I will enjoy it as much as we can. Maybe I should stay away from these news stories until the rain starts for real: Michelle Goldberg reminds all you Hannah Arendt fans that fascism takes time to establish itself, so we have perhaps a couple of years to emigrate if the XPOTUS takes power in January: "The transition from democracy...

Well, here we go: the only real debate between the candidates for President of the United States during this election cycle. We have 8 weeks to go until November 5th. Both candidates are, for reasons passing understanding, neck and neck in the polls. (Don't read the polls!) Just remember what President George HW Bush said during the 1988 campaign: "It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or the other." I'll update this post throughout the event. I'm watching the PBS broadcast on...

The Democratic National Convention opened today here in Chicago, so naturally that's the main topic in today's lunchtime roundup: I can barely wait until Thursday when I get to see the sparkling-clean O'Hare CTA station, freshened up for the convention. The DNC projected fun messages onto the XPOTUS's eponymous Tower from their hotel across the river. (No comment from the XPOTUS.) Vice President Kamala Harris continues to climb in the polls as people come to realize that she's the real deal and the...

The problem with having 8 billion people on Earth is that every single one of us has different ideas and opinions. If there's an opinion out there so fringe and so bizarre that only 1/10th of 1% of us share it, that's still about a quarter of the population of Chicago. I thought of that because of how much news we have. And I imagine that from the ancestral environment thousands of years ago until the last century, we just didn't have all that much. I don't think that's entirely because of light-speed...

The XPOTUS's handlers cut short his appearance this afternoon at the National Association of Black Journalists convention just 2 km from where I'm sitting. The XPOTUS began by insulting the hosts and the panelists. Then, when one of the panelists had just brought up Project 2025 (the Republican Party's blueprint for rolling the country back to the 1850s), the moderator suddenly interrupted and said the campaign had told her to wrap it up. The 37 minutes of Harris Campaign footage the XPOTUS had already...

One of the many stories that piqued my interest this morning included a rant by the anti-Sorkin himself: Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It, does not like how "politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom." (He also implies that Liz Truss, and not Kamala Harris, most embodies the character of Selina Meyer.) Former President Obama has endorsed Vice President Harris. John Scalzi received a press...

But only for a moment. I've spent most of today trying to fix things, or at least trying to figure out what problems need fixing. One of the problems has generated a comment thread on a vendor website, now at 44 comments, and I think after all that work I found the problem in an interaction between my code and Microsoft Azure Functions. If I'm right, the confirmation will come around 3pm. Naturally, I haven't had time to read any of these: Jamie Boule points out that the myth of the convicted-felon...

The satirical newspaper The Onion just got bought by a newly-formed LLC called, yes, Global Tetrahedron. Longtime Onion readers will probably recognize the name; I had to remind myself. Other events in the past day or so: Among the labor-rights wins on Tuesday was a tweak to wage and hour laws that will qualify millions more Americans for overtime pay. Despite having earned the title "Useful Idiot of the Year" a couple of times already, we haven't heard the last of US Representative Marjorie Taylor...

It's a gorgeous Friday afternoon in Chicago. So why am I inside? Right. Work. I'll eventually take Cassie out again today, and I may even have a chance to read all of these: A Florida man set himself on fire across the street from where the XPOTUS was sitting through jury selection, apparently to protest the lack of mental health care in the US. Josh Kovensky draws a straight line from the XPOTUS's narcissistic need to cast everyone who disagrees with him as an enemy to be defeated to his lawyers trying...

First, to get it out of the way, I'm a Leadership Circle member of my local NPR affiliate, WBEZ. I listen to Morning Edition every weekday, and Weekend Edition every weekend day. I have high confidence in the NPR News team. And though I do chuckle sometimes at their editorial choices, I think the network's only "skew" simply follows Krugman's Law: "Facts have a well-known liberal bias." Apparently Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner, who resigned from the network yesterday, feels differently: It’s true...

I learned this morning that I have a meeting at 6am Wednesday, because the participants will be in four time zones across four continents. Since I'm traveling to Munich later that day, I'll just comfort myself by remembering it's 1pm Central Europe time. I'm already queuing up some things to read on the flights. I'll probably finish all of these later today, though: Jennifer Rubin highlights four ways in which the XPOTUS has demonstrated his electoral weakness in the past few weeks. Republican pollster...

With the news this morning that Ukraine has disabled yet another Russian ship, incapacitating fully one-third of the Russian Black Sea fleet, it has become apparent that Ukraine is better at making Russian submarines than the Murmansk shipyards. Russia could, of course, stop their own massive military losses—so far they've lost 90% of their army as well—simply by pulling back to the pre-2014 border, but we all know they won't do that. In other news of small-minded people continuing to do wastefully...

I really have a hard time understanding why so many news organizations have trouble covering the substance of politics rather than the game of it. The general reporting on Special Counsel Robert Hur's (R) exoneration of President Biden shows what I mean. I mentioned in passing Saturday that James Fallows called Hur's report "tendentious," but he had more to say: After Biden finished his remarks last night, White House reporters bayed and yelled at him, more aggressively than I can ever recall. They...

I grabbed a friend for a couple of Brews & Choos visits yesterday, and through judicious moderation (8-10 oz of beer per person at each stop), we managed to get the entire West Fulton Corridor cluster done in six hours. So in a few minutes I'll start writing four B&C reviews, which will come out over the next three days. Before I start, though, I'm going to read all these stories that have piled up since Friday: Sports Illustrated shut down publication and laid off the entire editorial staff after an...

My socials today have a lot of chatter about the weather, understandably as we're now in our fourth day below -15°C. And yet I have vivid memories of 20 January 1985 when we hit the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, -32°C. The fact that winters have gotten noticeably milder since the 1970s doesn't really matter during our annual Arctic blast. Sure, we had the coldest winter ever just 10 years ago, but the 3rd and 5th coldest were 1977-78 and 1978-79, respectively. I remember the snow coming...

I don't usually do link round-ups on Saturday mornings, but I got stuff to do today: Josh Marshall is enjoying the "comical rake-stomp opera" of Nikki Haley's (R-SC) primary campaign. The Economist pokes around the "city" of Rosemont, Ill., a family-owned fiefdom less than 10 km from Inner Drive Technology World HQ. The New York Times highlights the most informative charts they published in 2023. The Chicago Tribune lists some of the new Illinois laws taking effect on Monday. My favorite: Illinois will...

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died. Of course every news outlet has an obituary, but Spencer Ackerman's in Rolling Stone pretty much nails it—"it" being a nail in Kissinger's coffin: Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. McVeigh, who in...

Despite the XPOTUS publicly declaring himself a fascist (again), the world has other things going on: Josh Marshall plots out how House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) knows he has to pass a budget that Democrats can stomach, but because he still has to placate the extreme right wing of his party, he's pretending he can pass something else. And the clown show continues. The US Supreme Court has published their new ethics rules, which look a lot like a subset of the rules the rest of the Federal courts have...

I closed a 3-point story and if the build that's running right now passes, another bug and a 1-point story. So I'm pretty comfortable with my progress through this sprint. But I haven't had time to read any of these, though I may try to sneak them in before rehearsal: The XPOTUS has started using specific terminology to describe his political opponents that we last heard from a head of government in 1945. (Guess which one.) Says Tomasky: "[Republicans] are telling us in broad daylight that they want to...

I could have worked from home today, and probably should have, but I felt well enough to come in (wearing an N95 mask, of course). It turned that I had a very helpful meeting, which would not have worked as well remotely, but given tomorrow's forecast and the likelihood I'll still have this cold, Cassie will just have to miss a day of school. I have to jam on a presentation for the next three hours, so I'll come back to these later: Alex Shephard says this is the week Twitter finally went totally evil....

Another Tuesday, another collection of head-shaking news stories one might expect in the waning days of an empire: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau (Lib-Papineau, QC) formally accused the government of India of assassinating a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. Paul Krugman traces the road from Mitt Romney to MAGA. Jonathan Last accuses "Meet the Press" of acting like 2016 never happened. Police in Birmingham, Ala., Tased a band director for not ending the band's song a minute early as ordered....

Even though the United States Constitution prohibits the US or the States from issuing titles of nobility, the longing for lifetime honors still exists in certain status-conscious professions. Politicians, probably more than any other group of people, fit that description. Despite the desire of every SES2 to retain his or her title long after being fired by the under-secretary just above in rank, really only three offices of the United States confer a lifetime title, and only by custom, not by statute...

Since today is the last Friday of the summer, I'm leaving the office a little early to tackle one of the more logistically challenging itineraries on the Brews & Choos Project. So I'm queueing up a few things to read over the weekend: The XPOTUS finally won his "long hard battle" to finally get a mugshot, which the Internet immediately (a) put on swag you can buy and (b) compared with the Kubrick Stare. But where did the Fulton County Jail get his height and weight? US intelligence sources believe the...

The Times posted an article Monday morning, complete with animated 3D graphics, guarantee to alarm most of the flying public. In short, when a non-pilot passenger hears "close call" they imagine the airplanes passing wingtip-to-nose at impossible speeds. When a pilot hears "close call" they mean the planes got within 2 km of each other—and sometimes 10 km qualifies. But the Times decided to go with the wingtip-to-nose meaning: The incidents — highlighted in preliminary F.A.A. safety reports but not...

My home office sits at the top of my house as a loft over the floor below. I think it could not have a more effective design for trapping hot air. (Fortunately I can let a lot of that out through this blog.) This afternoon the temperature outside Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters didn't quite make 25°C, and it's back down to 23°C with a nice breeze coming through the window. Wednesday and Thursday, though, the forecast predicts 36°C with heat indices up to 43°C. Whee. (It gets a lot better...

A few of them have come home or are en route: Cato Institute scholar Clark Nelly says the XPOTUS "is toast," as the deranged wannabe fascist (my words) won't be able to stop himself from lying to the Georgia jury on live TV. Speaking of crazy old people, author Michael Beckley backs away slowly from the historical implications of having two septuagenarian dictators aging along with their nuclear stockpiles loose in the world. The Marion County, Kan., prosecutor has filed a motion to have all the Marion...

The XPOTUS continuing to get indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election wasn't the only bit of authoritarian fuckery this week: Constitutional law professor Deborah Pearlstein wonders, as do many other people, why so many of the XPOTUS's mooks are lawyers. Nicholas Grossman can't figure out why the media spend so much time trying to understand the populist right when Biden got millions more votes than the other guy. The Marion, Kan., police department raided the town newspaper and seized its...

I'm in my downtown office today, with its floor-to-ceiling window that one could only open with a sledgehammer. The weather right now makes that approach pretty tempting. However, as that would be a career-limiting move, I'm trying to get as much done as possible to leave downtown on the 4:32 train instead of the 5:32. I can read these tomorrow in my home office, with the window open and the roofers on the farthest part of my complex from it: Judges occasionally get facts wrong, but they really hate...

Here is the state of things as we go into the second half of 2023: The government-owned but independently-edited newspaper Wiener Zeitung published its last daily paper issue today after being in continuous publication since 8 August 1703. Today's headline: "320 years, 12 presidents, 10 emperors, 2 republics, 1 newspaper." Paula Froelich blames Harry Windsor's and Megan Markle's declining popularity on a simple truth: "Not just because they were revealed as lazy, entitled dilettantes, but because they...

Some stories to read at lunch today: The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the US Postal Service's requirement that a religiously observant letter carrier deliver packages on the Sabbath. Since Justice Alito (R$) wrote the opinion, I'll also have to read Justices Sotomayor's (I) and Jackson's (I) concurrence. Of course, as Josh Marshall predicted, the Court split along partisan lines in a decision that essentially abolishes affirmative action for college admissions, which will likely reverse the gains...

I think I finally cracked the nut on a work problem that has consumed our team for almost three years. Unfortunately I can't write about it yet. I can say, though, that the solution became a lot clearer just a couple of weeks after our team got slightly smaller. I will say nothing more. Just remember, there are two types of people: those who can infer things from partial evidence. Just a few articles left to read before I take Cassie on her pre-dinner ambulation: Titanic director James Cameron, who has...

I did not watch the CNN town hall with the XPOTUS on Wednesday night. I do feel bad for the journalists who had to, starting with the Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler: For more than an hour, former president Donald Trump sent forth a torrent of false and misleading claims during a CNN town hall. Here’s a roundup of some of the more notable ones, arranged by subject matter. “I took in hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes from China.” Through the end of his presidency, Trump-imposed tariffs garnered...

We finally have a real May-appropriate day in Chicago, with a breezy 26°C under clear skies (but 23°C closer to the Lake, where I live). Over to my right, my work computer—a 2017-era Lenovo laptop I desperately want to fling onto the railroad tracks—has had some struggles with the UI redesign I just completed, giving me a dose of frustration but also time to line up some lunchtime reading: Both Matt Ford and David Firestone goggle at how stupidly US Rep. George Santos (R-NY) ran his alleged grift...

I'm chasing down a bug that caused what we in the biz call "unexpected results" and the end-users call "wrong." I've fixed it in both our API and our UI, but in order to test it, I need the API built in our dev/test environment. That takes about 18 minutes. Plenty of time to read all of this: Ruth Marcus wants you to really think about Jean Carroll's testimony in her defamation suit against the XPOTUS. Tom Nichols sees narcissism, not "misguided patriotism," as the root of the classified intelligence...

Two stories, related only in the self-perception of their protagonists. First, this morning Fox "News" announced that Tucker Carlson uttered his last bigotry for them on Friday: A reason was not immediately provided. “Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st,” a statement read. “Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.” The shock announcement ends Carlson’s meteoric rise at Fox News...

As professional narcissist Elon Musk threatened, on Thursday Twitter abruptly ended their verified "blue check" program. Suddenly, Twitter users had no way to know for sure whether tens of thousands of government agencies, celebrities, journalists, and other people whose jobs depend to some extent on their credibility, were who their Twitter accounts purported to be. It only took two days for someone to hoax the City of Chicago: Impostors posing as Chicago government officials, including Mayor Lori...

The clouds have moved off to the east, so it's a bit warmer and a lot sunnier than yesterday. I still have to wait for an automated build to run. For some reason (which I will have to track down after lunch), our CI builds have gone from 22 minutes to 37. Somewhere in the 90 kB of logs I'll find out why. Meanwhile, happy Fox News On Trial Day: Jennifer Rubin foresees years of aftershocks from the Tennessee legislature's expulsion of two Black members last week. Why are right-wingers making up conspiracy...

Often when I think about Elon Musk, Spike Jones' 1942 hit "Der Feuhrer's Face" comes to mind. Substack, whose links Musk recently banned from Twitter, brings us A.R. Moxon's similar thoughts: If you were the world’s smartest man, after all, you’d have turned your apartheid inheritance into the world’s largest fortune, and since you haven’t done that, you aren’t the world’s smartest man. Why, you might not even be a man, the definition of which is something the world’s smartest man seems to have some...

At my day job, I go into our downtown office at least once a week, which turns out to be about once a week longer than almost everyone else. I like the change of scene, and Cassie gets to spend those days at day camp, so it's a win for everyone. The 90%-or-so remote work that people have elected also means we have tons of empty offices while our multi-year leases run their courses. So, after waiting almost a year for the furniture upgrade that never came, the office manager today said "just go take the...

Newspapers around the country finally chucked "Dilbert" into the bin after the cartoon's creator, Scott Adams, gave them the excuse: Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’s long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them. The Washington Post, the USA Today network of hundreds of newspapers, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times and other publications announced they...

I spent way more time than I should have this morning trying to set up an API key for the Associated Press data tools. Their online form to sign up created a general customer-service ticket, which promptly got closed with an instruction to...go to the online sign-up form. They also had a phone number, which turned out to have nothing to do with sales. And I've now sent two emails a week apart to their "digital sales" office, with crickets in response. The New York Times had an online setup that took...

Speaking of loathsome, misogynist creeps, former Bishop of Rome Joseph Ratzinger died this morning, as groundbreaking journalist Barbara Walters did yesterday. In other news showing that 2022 refuses to go quietly: The House Ways and Means Committee released the XPOTUS's tax returns for tax years 2015 through 2020, re-confirming his incompetence, malfeasance, and incompetence at malfeasance. One looks forward to the Justice Department's take on them. Pilot and journalist Jim Fallows digs into the...

I can't quite draw a line between all of these stories, but it feels like I should: Elon Musk suspended several top journalist's Twitter accounts last night while ranting about nonsense "assassination coordinates," making the money-losing media service less relevant by the day. The XPOTUS made a "major announcement" about...a hilariously pathetic NFT project that lost value within minutes of its release. Mazars—the only firm sketchy enough to do the XPOTUS's taxes—decided crypto firm Binance was just...

Crain's reported this morning that a company I used to work for has laid off 180 workers, about 10% of its workforce. I hope none of the people I'm still friends with was affected. Also unfortunate is the URL that Crain's content server generated, which makes the story seem much more complicated than the news would otherwise suggest: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/technology/west-monroe-lays-180-workers I really hope that (a) none of my friends had that happen to them, and (b) some prankster gamed the...

With tomorrow night having the earliest sunset of the year, it got dark at 4:20 pm—two hours ago. One loses time, you see. Especially with a demo tomorrow. So I'll just read these while devops pipelines run: Reversing their First Amendment argument from only 18 months ago, the Chicago Tribune editorial board finally agrees with most Chicagoans that the big sign facing down Wabash Street from the tower named after the XPOTUS has to go. After reporting on elections for 22 years, Josh Marshall finally...

James Fallows wants to put the domestic political press in a time-out: [I]n historic terms, the midterm results under Joe Biden in 2022 are likely to be far better for the incumbent party and its president than for other modern presidents. As Biden would say, it’s a BFD. [But] what has happened appears to be entirely at odds with what the political-reporter cadre — the people whose entire job is predicting and pre-explaining political trends — had been preparing the public for. The Democrats have...

I'm starting to adapt my habits and patterns to the new place. I haven't figured out where to put everything yet, especially in my kitchen, but I'll live with the first draft for a few weeks before moving things around. I'm also back at work in my new office loft, which is measurably quieter than the previous location—except when the Metra comes by, but that just takes a couple of seconds. I actually have the mental space to resume my normal diet of reading. If only I had the time. Nevertheless: Texas...

Last night while packing I caught this interview with Rebecca Jennings, whose recent trip to Positano, Italy, taught her something important about travel in the Instagram era: Positano is blessed with a mild Mediterranean climate and a proximity to luxury and wealth; it is home to one of the most famous and majestic hotels in the world and provided the backdrop for Diane Lane’s whirlwind romance in Under the Tuscan Sun. Twenty years later, the town has become synonymous with the grandest of influencer...

I've had a busy day. I finally solved the token-authentication problem I've been working on all week for my day job (only to discover another flavor of it after deploying to Azure), while dealing with a plumber ($1600 repair!), an HVAC inspector ($170 inspection!) and my buyer's mortgage appraiser (not my problem!). That left some reading to do tonight: Support for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has waned somewhat as Ukraine continues to kick Russian ass. Michael Dobbs warns that Putin has taken all...

In her last column, the Washington Post veteran warns that journalists still have a long way to go to properly deal with the anti-democratic party to the right: Here’s the good news: The media has come a long, long way in figuring out how to cover the democracy-threatening ways of Donald Trump and his allies, including his stalwart helpers in right-wing media. It is now common to see headlines and stories that plainly refer to some politicians as “election deniers,” and journalists are far less hesitant...

If Cassie could (a) speak English and (b) understand the concept of "future" she would be quivering with anticipation about going to Ribfest tonight after school. Since she can't anticipate it, I'll do double-duty and drool on her behalf. It helps that the weather today looks perfect: sunny, not too hot, with a strong chance of delicious pork ribs. Meanwhile, I have a few things to read on my commute that I didn't get to yesterday: Remember when psychiatrist Bandy Lee got shouted down when she warned...

South Texas College of Law Houston Law Professor Josh Blackman sketches out a timeline pointing to a right-wing Justice's clerk as the likely source of the Dobbs leak: First, where did the leak come from? Most people are presuming this leak came from someone with access to the opinion, such as a Justice or a clerk. That presumption is probably correct, but it is also possible there was some illegal exfiltration of the document. ... People who are fanatical about abortion may go to great lengths to...

This headline made me laugh so loudly I scared Cassie: The article explains: The building at 2222 N. Halsted St. went up in 1808 and is considered “orange-rated” in the Sheffield Historic District, meaning it possesses some qualities that contribute to the historical nature of the area. Um. No. There was not a 3-flat sticking up out of the prairie 5 kilometers from the nearest European settlement in the middle of Potawatomi land four years before the Fort Dearborn Massacre. Chicago looked like this in...

Julia Ioffe remains one of the clearest voices about Russia in the Western press, not surprising as she was born in the USSR and lived the first few years of her life in Moscow. Her analysis of the first week of the Ukrainian invasion is a must-read: For America, World War II was Pearl Harbor, island hopping in the Pacific, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge. As bloody and horrific as those events were, they pale in comparison to what Europe experienced. In six years of war, the continent was leveled. Tens...

And wasn't it just Tuesday? I got an email from HR this morning reminding me that I'm approaching the upper limit for paid time off in my bank. I thought, what with taking half a day here and there over the past year, I might not already have almost a month of vacation to use. Cue searching on VRBO for places Cassie and I might like. Meanwhile, back in the present: Satirist and frequent Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me panelist PJ O'Rourke has died at 74. Anne Applebaum screams in frustration about how Western...

The temperature dropped 17.7°C between 2:30 pm yesterday and 7:45 this morning, from 6.5°C to -10.2°C, as measured at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. So far it's recovered to -5.5°C, almost warm enough to take my lazy dog on a hike. She got a talking-to from HR about not pulling her weight in the office, so this morning she worked away at a bone for a good stretch: Alas, the sun came out, a beam hit her head, and she decided the bone could wait: Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Julia...

Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe recently interviewed Russia expert Fiona Hill for Puck. It's worth a read: Do you think Putin’s going to invade Ukraine? And if so, what form would it take? I do. I think it’s really the form that it’s going to take. There is still a chance that he won’t, right? And we have to really keep on going with diplomacy. But Putin has run a risk now. He said he’s going to do all of these things. He said he’s not going to invade Ukraine, but so what? They’ve said that the...

Private equity only knows and only cares about money. Starting from that uncontroversial statement, it takes even less imagination and storytelling skills than private-equity-driven G/O Media possesses to predict the ultimate fate of A.V. Club: Top editorial staff at the Chicago-based A.V. Club, a sister publication to The Onion, are exiting the entertainment website en masse after refusing a mandatory relocation to new offices in Los Angeles. The seven employees, including the managing editor, TV...

We have one of those lovely January days when a tongue of cold air pushes south from Canada and gives us the warmest temperature of the day at midnight. Yesterday the Inner Drive Techology World Headquarters got up to 6°C around 3:30pm, stayed around 5°C from 6:30 pm until 1am, and since then has cooled down to -5°C. The forecast calls for continued cooling until reaching -13°C around 6am tomorrow. Yesterday's weather conditions encouraged the formation of "pancake ice" on Lake Michigan. Block Club...

In his final novel, Friday (1986), Robert Heinlein spoke through an atavistic character to warn America of its impending doom: Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot. ... It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start...

NPR's Steve Inskeep worked for six years to land a 15-minute interview with the XPOTUS, and yet no one felt any shock or surprise when it ended abruptly: Trump and his team have repeatedly declined interviews with NPR until Tuesday, when he called in from his home in Florida. It was scheduled for 15 minutes, but lasted just over nine. After being pressed about his repeated lies about the 2020 presidential election, Trump abruptly ended the interview. When pressed, it was excuse after excuse — it was...

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle read through a week of newspapers to understand the hot topics of 100 years ago: First, there is news of the great Washington Naval Conference, which has commanded half of the front page since opening in mid-November. The idea of the conference is for the great powers to jointly reduce their armaments, so everyone can spend the money on better things. Inside the paper, we may spend some time browsing the ads, perhaps pausing over the homage to the REO Speed Wagon...

The Times reported last night that the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index had its highest rate of increase since 1982 in November, and yet they (and most other news outlets) completely missed the bigger story: The data came as a rising number of Omicron infections makes the inflation and economic outlook hazier. On one hand, the virus could slow the growth of the economy and of prices if it prompts furloughs at a time when the government is no longer stepping in to fill the void...

I swear, the local poké place used three shots of chili oil instead of one today. Whew. (Not that I'm complaining, of course.) While my mouth slowly incinerates, I'm reading these: University of Baltimore School of Law professor Kimberly Wehle warns that the legal theories the Republicans on the Supreme Court suggested this week could roll back a lot more than just abortion rights. Also in The Atlantic, actor Joshua Malina wonders why anyone would hire raging anti-Semite Mel Gibson. Daniel Strauss asks...

As the last workday in October draws to a close, in all its rainy gloominess, I have once again spent all day working on actually coding stuff and not reading these articles: Andrew Sullivan says the GOP could own clean energy by pushing nuclear power. Brian Merchant says Facebook has decided to change its name because it's boring. The last sane GOP representative, Adam Kinzinger (IL-6), won't run for re-election to the House, both because the new Illinois district map favors Democrats and also because...

The United States Supreme Court began their term earlier today, in person for the first time since March 2020. Justice Brett Kavanagh (R) did not attend owing to his positive Covid-19 test last week. In other news: The Post, Guardian, and other news outlets have released their stories on the largest document dump ever, which purports to show how the ultra-rich avoid taxation by stashing their money overseas. Indians taking a highly-competitive test to become teachers in the state of Rajasthan paid...

Eugene Wesley Roddenberry would have been 100 years old today. Star Trek and NASA have a livestream today to celebrate. In other news: Guardian UK Washington correspondent David Smith highlights White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki's ability to expertly destroy Fox News reporter Peter Doocy. T-Mobile has suffered its sixth known data disclosure attack in four years, this time losing control over as many as 40 million customer records. New Republic's Scott Stern profiles former Monsanto lawyer Clarence...

Yesterday, Boston University clinical journalism instructor and WGBH-Boston reporter Jenifer McKim presented a story on NPR's Morning Edition about Grindr, the gay dating app. NPR's Steve Inskeep introduced the story by saying "the dating app Grindr is a popular site for men seeking other men. It's also used by underage boys, which can put them at risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking." Between that introduction and the body of the story, I got pretty steamed. This morning I sent the following...

The Atlantic's current issue adapts veteran writer George Packer's latest book, in which he argues that the US has fractured into four distinct world views: National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy...

May 5th has some history, and not just about a relatively minor battle in Mexico that most Mexicans don't even remember. For example, two hundred years ago today, Napoleon died and The Guardian was born. I never knew about that coincidence. TIL. And this morning, Facebook's Oversight Board upheld the social-media company's ban on the XPOTUS, at least for the next six months. Also TIL that my main programming language, C#, commands 7% of the Internet's mind-share, making it the 4th most-popular...

The American news and information radio network turns 50 today: It's been a turbulent time, with a deadly pandemic and a chaotic — sometimes violent — political climate. In the midst of all this, NPR is marking a milestone; on May 3, 2021, the network turns 50 years old. On the same day, in 1971, we started holding up our microphone to America. Just outside our doors, on the streets of Washington, DC, one of the biggest antiwar protests in American history was taking place. NPR's story is that of a...

It was 40 years ago today that Walter Cronkite signed off for the last time: Over the previous 19 years, Cronkite had established himself not only as the nation's leading newsman but as "the most trusted man in America," a steady presence during two decades of social and political upheaval. Cronkite had reported from the European front in World War II and anchored CBS' coverage of the 1952 and 1956 elections, as well as the 1960 Olympics. He took over as the network's premier news anchor in April of...

As the night follows the day, now that Republicans have lost power they're once again all a-flutter about deficits. This time, Democrats aren't having it: Twelve years ago, Barack Obama entered the White House amid somewhat similar circumstances: The economy was in a tailspin; stimulus and relief were desperately needed. His administration spent weeks watering down a bill that was more aimed at winning Republican support than adequately filling the yawning hole in the economy: The bill’s bottom-line...

In just four years, the XPOTUS lied over 30,000 times: “We also built the greatest economy in the history of the world…Powered by these policies, we built the greatest economy in the history of the world.” FACT CHECK: This is Trump’s favorite false claim, so there should be no surprise he said it twice in his farewell address. (In this database, we only count a falsehood once per venue.) By just about any key measure in the modern era, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton presided...

The US Constitution, Amendment XX, section 1, says point blank that the STBXPOTUS will be XPOTUS in less than 24 hours. Between now and then, I have no doubt he'll shit the bed (possibly even literally) on his way out the door. Just a few minutes ago the Times reported that the outgoing administration has declared China's treatment of Uighurs "genocide," which may complicate President Biden's plans to pressure the country diplomatically. (Biden apparently supports this designation, however.) From...

Where to begin. Yesterday, and for the first time in the history of the country, an armed mob attacked the US Capitol building, disrupting the ceremonial counting of Electoral Votes and, oh by the way, threatening the safety of the first four people in the presidential line of succession. I'm still thinking about all of this. Mainly I'm angry and disgusted. And I'm relieved things didn't wind up worse. But wow. Here are just some of the reactions to yesterday's events: American late-night hosts Seth...

With apologies to Radio Netherlands, Goldberg hits Jeffrey Toobin's latest HR incident with frequency until it hertz: There’s been a lot of handwringing—so to speak—about Toobin, the New Yorker’s legal correspondent. One writer, after running through a string of jokes about Toobin’s prosecution of his “southern district,” insists that we should act like a jury ordered by the judge to ignore evidence. In one of the greatest understatements ever written, he says, “Granted, there are few things more...

I cracked the code on an application rewrite I last attempted in 2010, so I've spent a lot of my copious free time the past week working on it. I hope to have more to say soon, but software takes time. And when I'm in the zone, I like to stay there. All of which is why it's 9:30 and I have just gotten around to reading all this: The president stomped out of a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl, and for reasons passing understanding, has threatened to release it himself. Pope Francis has officially...

It could be worse. It might yet be: Covid-19 cases have started to climb once again in the US, passing 8 million just three weeks after passing 7 million. In Illinois, we hit a second consecutive record, with 4,554 new cases today. (There were a record 4,015 yesterday.) TNR's Alex Shepherd says NBC did the Biden campaign a huge favor by booking the president, forcing a direct comparison between the two candidates in real time. The Atlantic's Adrienne LaFrance compares the absurd conspiracy theory QAnon...

Take 20 minutes to fully understand the incompetence that brought us to 205,000 Covid-19 deaths when our peer countries have only a fraction:

Talk-show host Stephen Colbert has set up a website called Better Know a Ballot where you can check on the voting requirements for your state. He's producing videos for each state (starting with North Carolina) to explain the rules. That's the bright spot of joy for you today. Here are other...spots...of something: The president answered questions from "undecided" voters at a town hall on Tuesday, and naturally lied almost every time he spoke. The Washington Post lists his most egregious falsehoods....

I put on a long-sleeved shirt to walk Parker this morning, and I'm about to change into a polo. It's a lovely early-autumn day here in Chicago. Elsewhere... In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, former NSC adviser Alex Vindman calls the president "a useful idiot" and warns against complacency. Jonathan Chait argues that the president is a crook, and needs to be tried for his crimes. Jeff Wise points out the criminal case has already started. Steve Coll adds his voice to the chorus wishing an end to the...

Yesterday, Axios and HBO ran a 45-minute interview between Axios' Jonathn Swan and the President of the United States filmed last Tuesday. I haven't seen it, and I'm not sure I can stomach the whole thing after watching some excerpts. Fortunately, other people watched it for me. Greg Sargent cites it as an example of "how to interview a serial liar and narcissist who is unfit to be president:" Again and again, Swan practically pleaded with Trump to demonstrate a shred of basic humanity about the...

It has cooled off slightly from yesterday's scorching 36°C, but the dewpoint hasn't dropped much. So the sauna yesterday has become the sticky summer day today. Fortunately, we invented air conditioning a century or so ago, so I'm not actually melting in my cube. As I munch on some chicken teriyaki from the take-out place around the corner, I'm also digesting these articles: James Fallows points to the medieval alcohol-distribution rules in most states as the biggest threat to craft brewing right now....

I'm back in the office tomorrow, after taking a 7:15 am call with a colleague in India. So I won't spend a lot of time reading this stuff tonight: Tom McTague sees other countries pitying us, and would prefer they get back to loathing. Harry Cheadle says we've "failed the existential-crisis test." The Economist decries the politicization of the Justice Department. So do Aaron Blake and Aaron Zelinsky. Eric Lach muses over "Donald Trump's empty campaign rally in Tulsa." Jamelle Bouie calls the President...

I think today is Tuesday, the first day of my 10th week working from home. That would make today...March 80th? April 49th? Who knows. It is, however, just past lunchtime, and today I had shawarma and mixed news: Carbon emissions have declined 17% year-over-year, thanks to Covid-19-related slowdowns reducing petroleum consumption. (See? It's not all bad news.) Crain's Chicago Business reviews how businesses rate Mayor Lori Lightfoot's first year in office. And their editorial board says we should "start...

The President continues to fire anyone suspected of disloyalty despite the ongoing national emergency: The president’s under-cover-of-darkness decision late the night before to fire Michael K. Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general who insisted last year on forwarding a whistle-blower complaint to Congress, swept away one more official deemed insufficiently loyal as part of a larger purge that has already rid the administration of many key figures in the impeachment drama. Mr. Trump...

I had a lot going on at work today, so all I have left is a lame-ass "read these later" post: Cranky Flier wonders why Delta is Tweeting to individual passengers. James Fallows looks at Bob Garfield's latest book. Bruce Schneier says China isn't the problem in crappy 5G security. And John Scalzi has a new book coming out, which he'll sign if you pre-order. I'd say "back to the mines," but I believe I have a date with Kristen Bell presently.

As I try to understand why a 3rd-party API accepts one JSON document but not another, nearly-identical one, who could fault me for taking a short break? Feargus O'Sullivan explains in more detail why London wants Uber gone. Hypocrisy and absurdity collide as Franklin Graham literally demonizes the president's opponents. A man from rural California explains to Brits in the Independent why his neighbors support Trump. Continuing the Republican Party-as-farce stories, Columbia University Graduate School of...

It has become a lot more likely in the last two weeks that my party will nominate Elizabeth Warren for President. (Note: I am a financial contributor to the Warren campaign.) One way you can tell is that journalists have started writing misleading stories about her: It is certainly true, as CBS noted, that some people have questioned Warren’s account [of being fired because she was pregnant in 1971]. A story in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, did so, as did a writer for Jacobin...

This morning I pointed to William Langewische's essay the New York Times Magazine published this morning about the 737-MAX airplane crashes last year. Lagnewische has flown airplanes professionally and covers aviation as part of his regular beat. He has written, among other things, analyses of the Egypt Air Flight 990 suicide-murder in 1999; an entire book about the USAirways 1549 Hudson River ditching in 2009; and numerous other articles and essays of varying lengths about aviation. His father...

Or, as Tom Lehrer once remarked, "I'm beginning to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis." The latest exhibit: how the press reacted to Robert Mueller's testimony on Wednesday. Adam Serwer: In any other administration, in any other time, a special prosecutor, former FBI director, and decorated Marine testifying that the president of the United States was an unprosecuted felon who encouraged and then benefited from an attack on American democracy in pursuit of personal and political gain...

Beloved humor magazine of my childhood and my father's Mad Magazine will effectively end its 67-year run with the August issue: Sources tell [The Hollywood Reporter] that after issue 9, MAD will no longer be sold on newsstands and will only be available through comic book shops as well as mailed to subscribers. After issue 10, there will no longer be new content in subsequent issues save for the end-of-year specials (those will be all-new). Beginning with issue 11, the magazine will only feature...

I saw this on the video monitor of an elevator I took heading back to my desk just now, and laughed out loud with all the derision I could muster (I was alone in the elevator): This debt could force you into bankruptcy, and it’s not student loans No shit. Student loans have huge barriers to discharge in bankruptcy in the US, so it's unlikely they would show up as "the cause" of bankruptcy actions. I'm not sure what CNBC's goal was, but my guess is to counter the talking points from some of the...

President Trump's two biggest liars supporters made news today, one by quitting, and the other by refusing to. First, the president announced yesterday that Press Secretary Sarah Sanders would leave at the end of the month. Though it remained unclear whether Sanders knew about this before the Tweet, she confirmed she will depart government service in two weeks, after successfully destroying the credibility of her office over the past two years: The White House press secretary—the office, if not the...

A large number of articles bubbled up in my inbox (and RSS feeds) this morning. Some were just open tabs from the weekend. From the Post: Reporters, tired of catching White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders in bald-faced lies, try to figure out what to do about it. Jennifer Rubin says former White House counsel Don McGahn's testimony "should rock Trumpland." Aaron Blake concurs. In an Op-Ed, Hillary Clinton advises Americans how to respond to the Mueller Report. Student reporters at Bear Creek High...

I've had a lot going on this week, including seeing an excellent production of Elektra at Lyric Opera of Chicago last night, so I haven't had time to read all of these articles: A 12-year-old journalist in southern Arizona stands up to the local marshal and wins. The US Dollar is still the world's reserve currency—and in fact foreigners are buying more than ever. The Jussie Smollett case was the least important of a number of stories in the news this week. The North Carolina 9th shows us an "important...

WGN-TV is reporting this morning that we will have two extra days in February this year—and they'll be cold: No word yet on whether March will also have 30 days this year.

I'm under the weather today, which has helped me catch up on all these stories that I haven't gotten to yet: The Chicago Tribune announced their critics choice dining awards for 2018. Yum. Megan Garber explains why female Democratic representatives wore white to the State of the Union address. Matt Ford says the actual speech was a waste. Chicago History Today compares North Michigan Avenue today with 1931. Josh Marshall says the president is scared—and should be. Jeff Bezos calls the National...

James Fallows argues that television networks have clear precedents as well as unprecedented reasons not to air President Trump's speech tonight: The challenge for the news media was to “make the important interesting,” rather than to search for the purely interesting. Car-crash footage, or the last seconds of a sudden-death playoff game, will always be more eye-catching than reports on a drought, or on sexual-harassment patterns, or emergency-room standards, or a million other topics. But things that...

The White House has simply stopped responding to basic press enquiries, not even bothering to issue a "no comment:" “This is the least responsive White House press operation I’ve ever dealt with by far,” said Peter Baker, a veteran White House reporter for the New York Times and one of the co-authors of the story about Trump’s isolation. “There are certainly individuals there who are professional and try to be helpful when they can, and I appreciate their efforts, I really do. But as a whole, I’ve...

No, we have not wiped out 60% of all animals, FFS: Since Monday, news networks and social media have been abuzz with the claim that, as The Guardian among others tweeted, “humanity has wiped out 60 percent of animals since 1970”—a stark and staggering figure based on the latest iteration of the WWF’s Living Planet report. But that isn’t really what the report showed. Ultimately, they found that between 1970 and 2014, the size of vertebrate populations has declined by 60 percent on average. That is...

Happy August! (Wait, where did April go?) As I munch on my salad at my desk today, I'm reading these stories: New Republic wonders if Charles Koch really thinks mainstream Democrats will embrace his vision. (tl;dr: not bloody likely.) Jennifer Rubin takes a look at President Trump's latest rally in Tampa with alarm at his supporters' disconnection from reality. The Atlantic outlines how Paul Manafort's trial in Virginia this week exposes the growing kleptocracy in Washington. In Chicago, businesses and...

The Economist's Johnson column last week (which I just got around to reading tonight) took on verb conjugations in journalism: On May 14th, as Palestinians massed at the Gaza Strip’s border, Israeli soldiers fired on them, killing around 60 people. Shortly afterwards, the New York Times tweeted: “Dozens of Palestinians have died in protests as the US prepares to open its Jerusalem embassy.” Social media went ballistic. “From old age?” was one incredulous reply. #HaveDied quickly became a hashtag...

Jeet Heer describes the vacuity of the current conservative media: While Trump remains a divisive figure among conservative intellectuals, the space for debating his merits is dwindling in the right-of-center media. Both the dictates of the market and the demands of employers like Salem are pushing conservative pundits and journalists to act, as [Salem Media Group senior vice president Phil Boyce] put it, as trial lawyers who defend their client regardless of their private scruples. What happened at...

I spent over 3 hours in my car today in principal because there were no public transit options to my remote, suburban destination. That, plus all-day meetings, means that instead of outlining what I'm planning for the weekend—I'll do that tomorrow—I'm just going to line up some articles I want to read: The Daily WTF explains why medical insurance is so expensive. The Intercept describes a reporter's life in the War on Terror. Jeet Heer calls the president an abusive patriarch, not a toddler. Don Norman...

As the Washington Post rounds up their biggest Pinocchios of 2017, they've encountered an unprecedented problem: Usually, this is an easy task, as we sort through the craziest Four-Pinocchio claims on issues of substance made by members of both parties. But this is the era of Trump, and nothing is ever easy. If we were not careful, we’d end up with an all-Trump list. After all, there has never been a serial exaggerator in recent American politics like the president. He not only consistently makes false...

The following appeared in my inbox while I was in the air. I'll read them later: I started reading Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation on my flight. I'm already 3/4 done. (Thank you to my co-worker MK for the loaner.) Andrew Sullivan thinks it was a big mistake to sue the no-gay-wedding-cake baker. I agree, for mostly the same reasons as he. Ted Genoways outlines some of the problem the east-cost press has in covering the rural Midwest. Joe Cahill lists the 5 best and 5 worst CEOs in Chicago. Illinois'...

Jaime Peters approached the Washington Post with a story about Republican Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore. The Post this afternoon published a story about her: A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets. In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman...

"A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot." —Robert Heinlein, Friday Montana's at-large congressional district will stay Republican after millionaire Greg Gianforte won yesterday's special election by 6 points. This is despite him assaulting a reporter Wednesday afternoon and being charged with the crime: The Republican candidate for Montana’s...

I'm sad that an urban area with 8 million people can no longer support two regional, daily newspapers. This makes me very uncomfortable: Tronc, the parent company of the Tribune, has entered into a nonbinding letter of intent to acquire Wrapports Holdings, which owns the Sun-Times as well other assets such as the Chicago Reader alternative weekly, the Aggrego digital content business and the syndicated column The Straight Dope. The announcement follows months of discussions between Wrapports and Tronc...

On Friday, President Trump sat down with AP reporter Julie Pace, and...well...here's the transcript, annotated by WaPo. I suppose I have to read it, but even in the first few moments, I'm struggling.

The Washington Post chronicles how President Trump's difficult relationship with the truth extends even to trying to correct the record: President Trump had a remarkable interview with Time magazine on March 22 about falsehoods, in which he repeated many false claims that have repeatedly been debunked. Trump consistently astounds us with his inability to acknowledge that he repeatedly gets facts wrong and consistently misleads the American public with inaccurate, dubious claims. He earns Four Pinocchios...

Welcome to February, in which I hope to increase my pathetic blogging rate (currently 1.23 per day for the last 12 months). Of course, even taking a day off to catch up on things doesn't seem to be helping, because I have all of these articles to read: How did Big Data help Trump win? How do you talk to dogs? How can we prevent seeing the Trump Administration as normal? How does Sam Harris analyze the Muslim ban? How can the Internet of Things work securely? How is the Trump Administration ginning up a...

Before discussing the most important sports story in North America since...well, since the States were United, let me highlight some of the political and professional stories percolating: The Economist has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. "This choice is not hard." Meanwhile, the High Court in London ruled today that Parliament must actually vote to trigger Brexit, which gives MPs another crack at the piñata and perhaps a way out. No telling when Teresa May plans to schedule this vote as the UK...

I thought earlier today that this was unique. James Fallows, who knows more about the presidency than most living journalists, agrees: To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before. Presidents of one party call nominees from the other party “bad choices” or “wrong for America” or “risky bets” or in some other way second-best options to their own preferred candidate. As far as I am aware, none of them has previously declared a major-party nominee categorically unfit. Again we...

Scott Adams and James Fallows have some overlapping thoughts on Donald Trump after the GOP debate last night. First Adams, who has a pretty good outline of how to detect a lack of thinking about the election: 1. If you are comparing Plan A to Plan B, you might be doing a good job of thinking. But if you are comparing Plan A to an imaginary situation in which there are no tradeoffs in life, you are not thinking. 2. If you see quotes taken out of context, and you form an opinion anyway, that’s probably...

More things I haven't read yet: Josh Marshall compares Ben Carson to Mr Magoo The Daily WTF describes a fate worthy of Brazil CityLab explains the slow demise of London's Garden Bridge James Fallows hails a young journalist for standing his ground professionally and politely Iraq War veteran Will Bardenwerper slams the NFL for trivializing patriotism And a customer technician spent 90 minutes over two days worth of conference calls denying that something obviously his responsibility was not, in fact...