The Daily Parker

It happens every September in the mid-latitudes: one day you've got over 13 hours of daylight and sunsets around 7:30, and two weeks later you wake up in twilight and the sun sets before dinnertime. In fact, Chicago loses 50 minutes of evening daylight and an hour-twenty overall from the 1st to the 30th. We get it all back in March, though. Can't wait.

Speaking of waiting:

• Buckingham Palace just warned people that the queue to see Queen Elizabeth's coffin has a 24-hour wait at the moment, so...dress warmly!
• Drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike will have to wait even longer to get into the Holland Tunnel after a planned $4.7-billion project adds even more induced demand.
• Via Bruce Schneier, Uber has had a data breach. No, scratch that—Uber lost control of its entire computing universe, because the company culture of cheapness and bullshittery extends to their IT security as well.
• Ronald Brownstein finds this year's election...really weird.
• David Brooks asks, why do we not have a strategy to defeat the XPOTUS?
• Matt Ford points to Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) as the future of Republican campaigning: trolling the libs.
• The Cook County State's Attorney has charged two Chicago cops with multiple felonies after they shot an unarmed man in Pilsen and lied about it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria visited Kyiv, Ukraine, to learn the secret of the country's success against Russia.

Just a few before I take a brick to my laptop for taking a damned half-hour to reformat a JSON file:

• The King has a long history of meddling in architecture and urban planning, with the divisive planned community of Poundbury, Dorset, his largest project to date.
• Meanwhile, in the US, architect Adam Paul Susaneck argues that cities need to remove highways that segregate communities. (Plus they're ugly and they cause the traffic they're built to alleviate, but that's another argument.)
• The Queen's death has gotten a lot of people's Irish up over the colonial history she oversaw as monarch. (I even decided to pause someone on Facebook for a month for dancing on her grave.)
• Developers found three time capsules while redeveloping Chicago's Tribune Tower this past year, one of which apparently contained a ball from the 1919 World Series.
• In a case that will make school administrators think thrice about joining student protests, Oberlin College in Ohio has agreed to pay a local bakery $37 million after a jury found the college had endorsed students labeling the bakery "racist."

Oh, good. My laptop has finished parsing the file. (In fairness it's 400,000 lines of JSON, but still, that's only 22 megabytes uncompressed.) I will now continue with my coding.

I took Friday off, so it felt like Saturday. Then Saturday felt like Sunday, Sunday felt like another Saturday, and yesterday was definitely another Sunday. Today does not feel like Tuesday.

Like most Mondays, I had a lot of catching up at the office, including mandatory biennial sexual harassment training (prevention and reporting, I hasten to point out). So despite a 7pm meeting with an Australian client tonight, I hope I find time to read these articles:

• The Chicago Bears have revealed a preliminary map of the Arlington Park redevelopment that includes a new football stadium. At least it has a Metra station, so people might actually not have to drive to see the games.
• Music critic Jim DiRogatis, who broke the R. Kelly rape story for the Chicago Sun-Times, moved to quash a subpoena in Kelly's ongoing trial.
• Michael Tomasky thinks the XPOTUS will destroy the Republican Party before he destroys democracy in America, but that ship might already have foundered.
• Paul Krugman argues that President Biden's economic policies have been great for workers.
• Strong Towns explains how McMansions aren't just ugly, they're also bad for their towns.

Finally, the Hugo Awards were announced in Chicago over the weekend, and now I have a ton more books to buy.

When I visited Hailstorm Brewing in March 2021, I chose not to walk along the sidewalk-free 80th Avenue and instead, after Froggering across the aforementioned stroad, I went through one of the most depressing subdivisions I've ever seen.

I had to repeat that stretch in order to visit Soundgrowler Brewing last Friday. And since Banging Gavel Brews is just over 3 km away (directly, anyway), I decided to walk from one to the other. The walk did not go as planned:

Most of that trip, until well past the 4 km marker, went through treeless, car-centric subdivisions with parks no one would ever want to play in and houses so ugly they would make even Kate Wagner cry. But the truly enraging bit happened around the 1.6 km mark, as you can see here:

My goal, supported by Google Maps and even satellite photos of the area, was to walk straight up Timber Drive to Harlem, without crossing the tracks. But you can see how that didn't work. At the point where I had to turn around and traipse through the (treeless, ugly) parking lot on my way to schlepping through the (treeless, ugly) circular subdivision, the local authorities had put up a roadblock and "no trespassing" signs. I have no idea why. Maybe even Tinley Park has parts so unconscionably ugly they can't bear to show them to anyone? Seems likely.

I took some photos along the way but I'll spare you.

It's possible that I have a particular sensitivity to this right now because I just finished Jeff Speck's Walkable City, a successor to his 2009 book Suburban Nation. I strongly recommend both books to anyone concerned about the environmental and mental destruction that our car-centric culture has wrought.

So I'm going to have to postpone reading all of these:

• Isaac Chotiner interviews UT Law professor Steve Vladeck about whether former presidents deserve special treatment.
• Does the Republican Party even have a message this election cycle?
• Julia Ioffe argues that Vladimir Putin's "triumph of the will" turned out better than most people realize.
• Your mental model about what causes traffic is almost certainly wrong.
• From 2016, author Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem) examines contemporary Chinese science fiction.
• A new distillery-pub has opened in Skokie, and will go on the Brews & Choos list very soon. Alas, local favorite The Grafton will close for good on Sunday.
• London's Elizabeth Line (formerly known as Crossrail) will start Heathrow to Abbey Wood service in November—with 22 trains an hour.

And Cassie, who has not actually had much patience the last few minutes, will now get a walk.

From around now through the middle of October, the days get noticeably shorter, with the sun setting 2 minutes earlier each day around the equinox. Fall is almost here—less than 8 days away, in fact. But that also means cooler weather, lower electricity bills (because of the cooler weather), and lots of rehearsals and performances.

Before any of that happens, though, I'll read these:

• Damon Linker warns that "there is no happy ending to America's [XPOTUS] problem."
• Anthony Fauci has announced he'll retire at the end of 2022.
• The Post describes algorithmic redistricting with some pretty decent animations.
• Chicago will consolidate election precincts for the upcoming midterms, reducing the total number by 40%.
• New Republic argues that President Biden should weaponize existing laws the same way Stephen Goebbels Miller did during the last administration.
• Chicago Magazine divides Chicago into 15 "sub-cities," including "Upper Caucasia" and "Obamaland." (They also incorrectly place US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel's house in North Center, when actually he lives in Lakeview.)

Finally, some ace developers at Hyundai secured one model's in-vehicle infotainment system with an encryption key published in a programming example in many online tutorials of how to use that particular kind of encryption.

The South's misfortune is Chicago's benefit this week as a hot-air dome over Texas has sent cool Canadian air into the Midwest, giving us in Chicago a perfect 26°C afternoon at O'Hare—with 9°C dewpoint. (It's 25°C at IDTWHQ.) Add to that a sprint review earlier today, and I might have to spend a lot more time outside today.

So I'll just read all this later:

• The Justice Department and the XPOTUS have gone back and forth about what parts of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant to publicize, with the XPOTUS really wanting to find out who ratted them out.
• The XPOTUS's supporters forgot the cardinal rule of XPOTUS lies: it's always worse than it initially sounds.
• Former DHS Assistant Secretary Juliett Kayyem explains yet another way that the XPOTUS document theft has scared the bejesus out of our allies.
• Elizabeth Kolbert asks, "how did climate change become a partisan issue?"
• Jonah Goldberg asks, why do Republicans want to turn us into a banana republic?
• Pity Freya the Walrus, euthanized in Oslo this week because people couldn't leave the poor girl alone.
• The new owners of a $13-million Winnetka house from 1902 have decided to tear it down rather than renovate it.

Finally, the leader of the Westminster city council in London really wants to close down the "American" candy stores opening up all up and down Oxford Street.

At least I don't have an opera rehearsal tonight. That means I might, just might, have some time to read these once I finish preparing for a 7am meeting tomorrow:

• Robert Wright warns that the war in Ukraine could lead to war in Taiwan if we aren't careful.
• As if we needed reminding that right-wing conspiracy propagandists and competence by definition don't co-exist in the same people, Alex Jones's lawyers accidentally sent opposing counsel the contents of his phone, which uncovered a remarkable amount of perjury.
• Lindsay Beyerstein calls on Blue America to fight back.
• Jennifer Rubin looks at last night's pro-choice victory in Kansas as a sign that other extreme right-wing ideas may not survive the midterms either.
• Pity Rocky the Coyote who lives in a cage as an exhibit in the Cook County Forest Preserve District. The FPD wants to give him a bigger cage while community members want him released.
• Xochitl Gonzales wonders, "why do rich people love quiet?" Oh, so many reasons...
• The Chicago Transit Authority has asked for $2 billion to extend the Red Line down to 130th St, and swears that this time it'll really happen as Mayor Richard J Daley promised in 1969.
• Speaking of 1969, Mark Cenedella suggests you may not come across as sufficiently modern if you have a land line, use an AOL email address, or set your Zoom camera to look up your nose in meetings.
• Writer Allison Davis reflects on her 10-year relationship with Tinder.

Finally, the old Morton Salt plant on Chicago's Near North Side opened last night as a new music venue called "The Salt Shed." It even got a new coat of paint.

It's a lovely day in Chicago, which I'm not enjoying as much as I could because I'm (a) in my Loop office and (b) busy as hell. So I'll have to read these later:

• Josh Marshall points out the obvious, that the filibuster is a direct threat to American democracy. Brynn Tannehill says, actually, that's only one part of how we become Hungary.
• Someone just paid $11.25 million for a lakefront house in Winnetka that, if the renderings are accurate, I hope they tear down. This comes with new figures showing Chicago real estate prices have jumped 25% over two years, one of the largest increases in history.
• Law professor Mary Ziegler wrestles with the question of why abortion opponents suddenly also oppose saving the lives of pregnant women.
• Bruce Schneier sketches out Apple's lockdown mode.

Finally, Mick Jagger turns 79 today, which surprised me because I thought he was closer to 130.

In just a few minutes I will take Cassie to boarding, then head up to Northwestern for a rehearsal (I'm in the chorus at Ravinia's upcoming performances of La Clemenza di Tito.) I'll then have to pack when I get home from rehearsal, then head to a hotel by O'Hare. Ah, how much fun is an 8:30 international flight!

As I'll have some time at the airport in the morning, and no time now, I want to queue these up for myself:

• Jonathan Chait says Senator Joe Manchin (D?-WV) didn't kill President Biden's agenda all on his own. And Paul Kane says we should listen to what Manchin says in public, not what people think he said.
• Writing for the Post back in March, KK Olsen discusses how civil wars start with UCSD political scientist Barbara F. Walter.
• Josh Marshall sums up how the Democratic Party can regain power. Hint: we win by winning.
• Julia Ioffe and Tara Palmeri discuss the XPOTUS's upcoming campaign and Mark Meadows' "willies."
• Robert Wright says Obama may not have gotten it right about Russia and Ukraine.
• Commercial office buildings in Chicago's Loop have started thinking about converting to apartments, as everyone predicted.
• The Post has a series of maps showing just how bad the heat got this week in the US and Europe.
• National Geographic explains "The Knowledge" in a 2017 article on London cabbies.

All right, I'm off. After I pack.