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I had a busy Friday and a busier Saturday, so I just got to these this morning: The entire Chicago Public Schools board resigned Friday in the latest salvo in the fight between Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez. The Supreme Court rejected two emergency applications from polluters who want to continue polluting while their cases work through the system. Brett Stephens looks back at a year of increasing anti-Semitism disguised as "anti-Zionism." (This is exactly why I'm reading...

Yesterday's productivity apparently included my nose producing a few billion coronaviruses: This comes almost exactly two years after my last bout with the disease (that I know of). That one took about 5 days to resolve, so I figure I'll be fine by Tuesday. I've had a couple of colds since June 2022 but tested negative for SARS-Cov-2, though before 2020 I rarely got colds of any kind. I'll get my next Covid booster in September when flu shots come out, but I think going forward, I'll get one every six...

The XPOTUS has agreed to "debate" President Biden twice before the election: President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump agreed Wednesday to participate in general election debates on June 27 and Sept. 10. A press release from CNN said the first, on June 27, would start at 9 p.m. ET and will be held in the news organization's studios in Atlanta. “I’ve also received and accepted an invitation to a debate hosted by ABC on Tuesday, September 10th," Biden said on X. "Trump says he’ll arrange his...

My Garmin watch thinks I've had a relaxing day, with an average stress level of 21 (out of 100). My four-week average is 32, so this counts as a low-stress day in the Garmin universe. At least, today was nothing like 13 March 2020, when the world ended. Hard to believe that was four years ago. So when I go to the polls on November 5th, and I ask myself, "Am I better off than 4 years ago?", I have a pretty easy answer. I spent most of today either in meetings or having an interesting (i.e., not boring)...

I got my Covid and flu boosters yesterday afternoon, which my body noticed around midnight. I spent a couple of hours overnight with a mild (<2°C) fever and feeling generally unpleasant. Last year's jabs worked, as far as I know. I hope this year's do as well. Right now, though, I could use a nap. And both my arms are sore.

The first day of a sprint is the best day to consolidate three interfaces with three others, touching every part of the application that uses data. So right now, I am watching most of my unit tests pass and hoping I will figure out why the ones that failed did so before I leave today. While the unit tests run, I have some stuff to keep me from getting too bored: The XPOTUS keeps confirming every theory about his behavior, this time that he only wants to run in 2024 to postpone the consequences of...

I see a connection between all of these. First, the city has accepted six proposals to convert office buildings on LaSalle Street to apartments. I used to work in one of them, so that should be interesting. These will go through community review, and will cost over $1 billion, but could bring almost 2,000 apartments to the Loop. Second, Zurich Re and Motorola have separately sued the Chicago suburb Schaumburg, Ill., one of the most dismal suburban hellscapes I've ever seen, to get the $100 million in...

Both of our Messiah performances went well. We had too few rehearsals and too many new members this year to sing the 11 movements from memory that we have done in the past, which meant that all us veterans sang stuff we'd memorized with our scores open. So like many people in the chorus, I felt better about this year than I have since I started. We got a decent review, too. Also, we passed a milestone yesterday: 1,000 days since my company closed our Chicago office because of the pandemic, on 16 March...

I've written often enough about wearing a fitness tracker, and I've been pretty happy with my Garmin Venu. The device has a feature called "body battery" which uses heart-rate variability and other measures to estimate how much energy you have. I've actually found it a reliable measure, in that when I check in on how I feel and then compare that to my body battery score, it seems right. For instance, I would say this chart is a pretty decent proxy of how I've felt for the past week: My symptoms hit...

A little more than four days after I first noticed Covid-19 symptoms, my body appears to have won the war, with my immune system putting down a few rear-guard actions in my lungs and sinuses quite handily. If I wake up tomorrow without residual coughing or sneezing, I'll be able to partially resume normal life, albeit masked. Good thing Cassie has a few weeks worth of food on hand. In sum, I should be perfectly healthy to deal with the two crises sure to blow up next week: the final Supreme Court...

Even though I feel like I have a moderate cold (stuffy, sneezy, and an occasional cough), I recognize that Covid-19 poses a real danger to people who haven't gotten vaccinations or who have other comorbidities. So I'm staying home today except to walk Cassie. It's 18°C and perfectly sunny, so Cassie might get a lot of walks. Meanwhile, I have a couple of things to occupy my time: Arthur Rizer draws a straight line from the militarization of police to them becoming "LARPing half-trained, half-formed kids...

The Atlantic makes a solid case for treating Covid-19 as a behavior problem, not a virus: The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention. The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par...

Other than making a hearty beef stew, I have done almost nothing of value today. I mean, I did some administrative work, and some chorus work, and some condo board work. But I still haven't read a lick of the books I've got lined up, nor did I add the next feature to the Weather Now 5 app. I did read these, though: An Illinois state judge has enjoined the entire state from imposing mask mandates on schools, just as NBC reports that anti-vaxxer "influencers" are making bank off their anti-social...

It turns out, tenors don't actually spread Covid more readily than the other three sections, despite what you may have heard from the Welsh Government: The advice appears to have been motivated by a spoof social media news post, created by meme page Quire Memes to appear as if written by us here at Classic FM. A doctored headline claimed that ‘Tenors should sit three metres away from other choir members, COVID study says’. The post, which is categorically fake news, is captioned: “Tenors found to...

The snow has finally stopped for, we think, a couple of days, and the city has cleared most of the streets already. (Thank you, Mike Bilandic.) What else happened today? The James Webb Space Telescope reached Lagrange-2 this afternoon, and will now settle into a "halo orbit" that will hold it about 1.46 million km from Earth. (It's still traveling at 200 m/s, which gets you from Madison to Peterson in about a minute.) Lord Agnew (Con.), the minister responsible for policing Covid fraud in the UK...

Boris Johnson attending a holiday party the night before Prince Philip's funeral outraged the UK because no one hates anything more than moral hypocrisy: Moral hypocrisy — behaving badly while simultaneously hectoring the rest of us to do good — evokes a level of anger that neither lying nor wrongdoing bring out on their own, studies have repeatedly found. Mr. Johnson’s real sin, in this telling, was pushing Britons to go without for the common good, all while his office held events that violated this...

Josh Marshall lays out the evidence that the Omicron Covid variant hit hard and fast, but as in South Africa, appears to have a short life-span: New York City was one of the first parts of the United States hit by the Omicron variant. The trajectory of the city’s surge now appears remarkably similar to the pattern we saw earlier in South Africa and other countries. Data out of South Africa showed a roughly four week interval between the start of the Omicron surge and its peak. “Peak in four weeks and...

Nathan Evans recorded his original 59-second TikTok on 27 December 2020. By January 18th...this had happened: As I understand it, Evans has launched a recording career now. I hope a couple of other contributors to this mash-up get some recognition as well.

New Republic Natalie Shure points out the absolute, crashing idiocy of getting private health insurance companies involved in procuring free Covid testing, because their whole reason for being is to prevent the efficient procurement of health care: This rollout will be a disaster. And really, that should have been obvious: There’s a reason that the Covid-19 vaccines, monoclonal antibody treatments and antiviral drugs have been made free at the point of use, rather than routed through private insurers....

Three items: James Fallows reminds us that the US Senate filibuster "is a perversion of the Constitution," that "enables the very paralysis the founders were desperate to avoid," among other things. (He also links to an essay by former US Senator Al Franken (D-MN) about how cynical the filibuster has become.) Jacob Rosenberg brings together workers' own stories about how they got fed up, illustrating how "the big quit" happened. Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon has had enough of the...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters bottomed out at -16.5°C around 8am today, colder than any time since February 15th. It's up to -8.6°C now, with a forecast for continued wild gyrations over the next week (2°C tomorrow, -17°C on Monday, 3°C on Wednesday). Pity Cassie, who hasn't gotten nearly enough walks because of the cold, and won't next week as her day care shut down for the weekend due to sick staff. Speaking of sick staff, New Republic asks a pointed question about the...

Today is the second anniversary of the first reported Covid-19 case, a fact I had forgotten when I booked my booster shot two weeks ago. Since 2019, about 5.8 million people have died of it, 822,000 of them here in the US. And it has also befuddled peoples' senses of time. NBC has a quiz to see if you remember when things happened in the last two years. I got 28, which embarrasses me. I really did forget all about Kanye West's divorce and Alex Trebek's death. Let's hope that next year is 2,022, and not...

I've spent today alternately upgrading my code base for my real job to .NET 6.0, and preparing for the Apollo Chorus performances of Händel's Messiah on December 11th and 12th. Cassie, for her part, enjoys when I work from home, even if we haven't spent a lot of time outside today because (a) I've had a lot to do and (b) it rained from 11am to just about now. So, as I wait for the .NET 6 update to build and deploy on our dev/test CI/CD instance (I think I set the new environments on our app services...

671 days. The Apollo Chorus of Chicago last performed in public on 15 December 2019, 671 days ago. This morning we performed at the Chicago History Museum, outside, without masks, to an audience of about 100 people. It is absolutely wonderful to be performing again. The cool, sunny weather helped, too. And the decision not to wear tuxedos.

Former Chicago Fraternal Order of Police president Dean Angelo died yesterday of Covid-19. And yet the current FOP president, John Catanzara, has promised to sue the City over the requirement that police officers either show proof of vaccination by Friday or go on a twice-a-week testing regimen if they want to keep getting paid: "It literally has been like everything else with this mayor the last two and a half years," said FOP President John Catanzara. "Do it or else because I said so."In a social...

Some of these will actually have to wait until tomorrow morning: Adam Serwer thanks Justice Samuel Alito (R) for confirming Serwer's complaints about the Court. A trove of XPOTUS-branded gifts meant for foreign heads of state representing "significant" monetary value disappeared at some point. Can't imagine how. The BBC Reality Check column suggests that reports in some journals about Invermectin may have painted an incomplete picture, putting it mildly. Cranky Flier explains that Southwest Airlines'...

Jonathan Chait points out that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police and other police unions might want to reconsider their threats to resign en masse if the cities enforce mask and vaccine mandates on them: Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has mandated vaccination for all city employees, and Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara is not taking it well. “This has literally lit a bomb underneath the membership,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re in America, goddamn it. We don’t want to be...

Those topics led this afternoon's news roundup: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 6th periodic report on the state of the planet, and it's pretty grim. But as Josh Marshall points out, "Worried about life on earth? Don’t be. Life’s resilient and has a many hundreds of millions of years track record robust enough to handle and adapt to anything we throw at it. But the player at the top of the heap is the first to go." Charles Blow has almost run out of empathy for people who...

While I look out my hermetically-sealed office window at some beautiful September weather in Chicago (another argument for working from home), I have a lot of news to digest: The infrastructure bill unveiled in the US Senate this morning would give $66 billion to Amtrak, which desperately needs the money. Josh Marshall argues that social-group identity drives resistance to vaccination. Brooke Harrington elaborates by pointing out that people who are conned usually can't admit to being conned. In...

A few examples of idiocy, bad intent, or general ineptness crossed my desk this morning: Apparently Illinois has an "Israeli Boycott Restrictions Committee" of our investment policy board. Despite the (very Jewish) founders of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream explaining one more time that criticism of Israel's government is not anti-Semitic, the Committee wants to divest from Unilever to protest the ice cream manufacturer's divestment from the occupied West Bank. Now, why would anyone think Simone Biles doesn't...

I haven't had time to read a lot lately, as I mentioned. Maybe these explain why: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) stomped off in a tantrum after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected two House members who participated in the insurrection from serving on the committee investigating the January 6th insurrection. Josh Marshall calls this "the best possible outcome." Meanwhile, defendants in criminal cases for their actions on January 6th have made some pretty interesting arguments in their...

After 448 days, the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago have lifted all capacity limits and most other intrusive Covid-19 mitigation factors. We haven't gone completely back to normal, but it feels a lot more so than it did even a month ago. The Tribune has a round-up of what rules remain in place and what has lifted. Mainly we still need masks on public transit and in places where owners or managers require them, and some "Covid theater" will continue where people demand it. But restaurants...

As much fun as Cassie and I have had over the last few days, the news around the world didn't stop: After 448 days, Illinois will finally reopen fully on Friday. Security expert Tarah Wheeler, writing on Schneier.com, warns that our weapons systems have frightening security vulnerabilities. Fastly's content-delivery network (CDN) collapsed this morning, taking down The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg News, and other major properties; no word yet on the cause, but we can guess. About 12,000...

The northern hemisphere started meteorological summer at midnight local time today. Chicago's weather today couldn't have turned out better. Unfortunately, I go into the office on the first and last days of each week, so I only know about this from reading weather reports. At my real job, we have a release tomorrow onto a completely new Azure subscription, so for only the second time in 37 sprints (I hope) I don't expect a boring deployment. Which kind of fits with all the decidedly-not-boring news that...

NBC has a story this afternoon about people who have gotten full vaccinations against Covid-19 yet prefer to stay masked: As mask mandates ease across the country, many people are finding that their affinity for face coverings extends beyond health reasons. Even with no requirement to wear their masks, some people are continuing to do so — having come to appreciate the reprieve they provide from stifling social expectations while out in public. These mask-wearers say they see a multitude of benefits to...

I confess to some difficulty talking to people who exhibit willful irrationality. If you don't want to wear a mask or get a vaccine because you somehow equate that with a political party, I don't know what to tell you. But for the people who may just have some irrational fear without making a political statement about it, the New York Times has a helpful interactive training article for you. In other news, an iceberg slightly larger than Long Island broke away from Antarctica this week. So that's fun.

The Atlantic's Amanda Mull believes that workers will benefit most from choosing when to work from home or in the office themselves, rather than through corporate policies: [R]umors of the office’s death have been greatly exaggerated, as have those of its triumphal return. Most companies are still deciding exactly what their post-pandemic workspaces look like, which means many office-going Americans are about to enter a few months of relative freedom during phased, attendance-capped reopenings....

Sunday evening we had 4°C gloominess with gusty winds. Today we've got 28°C sunniness with gusty winds. We've also got a bunch of news stories to glance through while a build completes: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued new guidance about the relative safety of various activities given vaccines and masks (see chart below). On this day 500 years ago, Ferdinand Magellan died when he got involved in an internecine dispute in the Philippines. Climate change will increase flood...

Getting my first Pfizer-Biontech SARS-COV-2 vaccine today comes on the heels of Chicago setting a new one-day record for vaccine administration: The 7-day daily average of administered vaccine doses is 112,680, with 154,201 doses given on Wednesday. Officials also say a total of 6,707,183 vaccines have now been administered. Illinois next week will make 150,000 first-dose appointments for coronavirus vaccinations available at 11 state-run mass vaccination sites in the Chicago suburbs and at area...

I got my first Pfizer Biontech jab this morning, and will get the second one in three weeks. So far, no side-effects. And Cassie seemed to enjoy being with me for the portions of the morning involving the car, though she didn't seem all that pleased with the car itself. In related news, I've booked a flight for mid-May. I feel better already.

Via Josh Marshall, Pfizer has halted vaccine shipments to Israel because political chaos there has made the company worry about getting paid: Pfizer has halted shipments of coronavirus vaccines to Israel in outrage over the country failing to transfer payment for the last 2.5 million doses it supplied to the country, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Senior officials at Pfizer have said they are concerned that the government-in-transition will not pay up and the company does not want to be taken advantage...

Chicago got up to 21°C yesterday, tying the record for March 9th set in 1974. It's already 20°C right now, close to the record 22°C set in 1955. In other news: One chart shows the difference between the XPOTUS's 2017 tax cut for rich people and President Biden's pandemic-relief bill, which he will sign into law tomorrow. Lou Ottens, who invented the audio cassette tape, died at the age of 94. A survey of Windows computers found that 26% of them have not applied the WannaCry patch after four years of...

The CDC just released guidance on how vaccinated people should behave. It doesn't seem too surprising, but it also doesn't suggest we will all go back to the world of 2019 any time soon. In other news: Washington Post global opinions editor Karen Attah likens living in Texas right now to "an exercise in survival." The New York Times looks at where US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) came from, without explicitly telling him to go back there. Crain's Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz outlines what Chicago...

Senate Democrats gave the opposition three whole days to stop dicking around with the latest Covid-19 relief package. Then today, with no more than a shrug, they told the Republicans they're tired of the crap: Senate Democrats took the first step Tuesday toward passing a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill without Republican support, advancing their efforts to avoid a GOP filibuster. The vote to kickstart the budget reconciliation process, which passed 50-49, is a sign that leadership expects to have the full...

Top 20 single-day death counts by disaster in the US for the past 100 years: Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The House of Representatives have started debate on a resolution to ask Vice President Mike Pence to start the process of removing the STBXPOTUS under the 25th Amendment. As you might imagine, this was not the only news story today: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking officers in the US military, released a letter to the entire military reminding everyone that the military serves the Constitution, not the man who happens to hold the office of President. Bandy X. Lee, interviewed in the next...

The expansion of unemployment benefits combined with sensible precautions against transmission of Covid-19 have made criminals' lives much easier: From March through the end of November, there have been more than 2 million initial claims filed for regular state unemployment benefits, according to the agency. That figure excludes people filing claims under five federal pandemic jobless aid programs the state implemented last year. The agency has said the rise in unemployment fraud is likely due to large...

We had a relatively quiet day yesterday, but only in comparison to the day before: Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (wife of presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned after nearly four years (and with nothing to gain from staying in Cabinet) mostly because they no longer needed those jobs. Said the Post: "Resigning now feels a little like eating all but the last bite of a piece of cake at a restaurant and then asking for a refund." The BBC has a...

Revisiting the numbers of people killed in one day by a single disaster, we find that Covid-19 now occupies 10 of the top 15 spots: If we only look at the last 100 years, it gets even starker: And the band played on.

The New Yorker next week has Lawrence Wright's excellent long-form history of "the mistakes and the struggles behind America's coronavirus tragedy:" There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the covid-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently. The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was...

A couple of articles piqued my interest over the last day: Via IFL Science, a team of graduate students from three European universities studied how long humans would survive the emergence of a vampire population. (It depends a lot on how effective your slayers are.) They even built a calculator. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe, writing in the Financial Times, argues the STBXPOTUS should face prosecution for using the pardon power to obstruct justice. Emma Goldberg describes some coronavirus-era...

The December solstice happened about 8 hours ago, which means we'll have slightly more daylight today than we had yesterday. Today is also the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's meeting with Richard Nixon in the White House. More odd things of note: Former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel attorney Erica Newland has some regrets. Congress finally passed a $900 million stimulus bill that has no real hope of stimulating anyone who's unemployed or about to lose his home. Nice work, Mitch. Canada...

Welcome to the (abbreviated) lunchtime roundup: Not only have attackers breached hundreds of networks due to a subtle flaw in a complicated piece of software, it turns out that a Dutch software engineer has—for the second time—exposed a rather glaring flaw in an uncomplicated piece of wetware by guessing the STBXPOTUS's Twitter password. (It was "maga2020!". I am not making this up.) Thomas Edsall decries "the rise of 'political sectarianism'." It's time once again for Drew Magary's "Hater's Guide to...

Josh Marshall outlines how the STBXPOTUS and his friends in the Senate have structured vaccination funding to give President Joe Biden a black eye within two weeks of taking office: Here are some basic outlines of what’s happening. As we learned last week the Trump White House skimped on actually buying enough doses of vaccine from Pfizer. But the federal government will cover the actual purchase of vaccines. The White House says the military is in charge of and has a plan to actual get the supplies to...

I posted a table about a week ago showing the number of American deaths per day from various disasters that we've had over our history. I did a bit more research, and we've had a lot more Covid-19 deaths, so I've updated the table: Average daily deaths from 1918 flu, October 1918: 6,290 Galveston hurricane, 9 Sep 1900: ~6,000 Battle of Antietam, 18 Sep 1862: 3,652 Covid-19, 9 Dec 2020: 3,411 Puerto Rico hurricane, 7 Aug 1899: 3,389 Covid-19, 6 Apr 2020: 3,156 San Francisco Earthquake, 18 Apr 1906...

I'm not good at it, personally. But NBC News has some advice they've titled "How to talk to your friends and family about Covid, vaccines and wearing masks:" “You always want to offer your empathy first,” said Amy Pisani, executive director of Vaccinate Your Family, the nation’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to vaccine advocacy. “If they have a personal story, start with your shared values.” Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of British Columbia in...

My company gives us the usual American holidays off, and adds two "floating holidays" you can take whenever you want. I took my first one in January and just remembered last week that I hadn't taken the second one. So I took it today. Which gave me some time to read a bunch of things: The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wishes politicians in both parties understood how Covid-19 spreads. Paul Krugman wonders whether the president's efforts to kill Covid relief come from ignorance or cynicism. (I'd imagine...

The city's plan would vaccinate every adult who lives or works in Chicago in 2021: Initial vaccine doses will be sent to all 34 hospitals in Chicago, city officials said. Health care workers who treat COVID-19 patients or are at high risk for coronavirus spread will be first to receive it, city officials said. After health care workers, vaccines will be prioritized for a broad group of people including residents and staff at long-term care facilities, individuals at high risk due to underlying medical...

To thoroughly depress you, SMBC starts the week by showing you appropriate wine pairings for your anxiety. In similar news: Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) seeks a 19th term as Speaker, but new Federal indictments and that people voted against Democrats statewide because they don't want him around anymore have made his bid unlikely. Vermont and South Dakota have similar demographics and both have Republican governors, so how did Vermont keep Covid-19 infections low while South Dakota...

The first polls close in the US next Tuesday in Indiana at 6 pm EST (5 pm Chicago time, 22:00 UTC) and the last ones in Hawaii and Alaska at 7pm HST and 8pm AKST respectively (11 pm in Chicago, 05:00 UTC). You can count on all your pocket change that I'll be live-blogging for most of that time. I do plan actually to sleep next Tuesday, so I can't guarantee we'll know anything for certain before I pass out, but I'll give it the college try. Meanwhile: The US Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the...

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...

I dropped off my completed ballot this afternoon, so if Joe Biden turns out to be the devil made flesh, I can't change my vote. Tonight, the president and Joe Biden will have competing, concurrent town halls instead of debating each other, mainly because the president is an infant. The Daily Parker will not live-blog either one. Instead, I'll whip up a stir-fry and read something. In other news: Chris Christie continues the tradition of Republican politicians not understanding something until it happens...

Someday, historians may discover what former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker—I don't have to remind you, a Republican—got in exchange for the ridiculous deal his administration made with FoxConn. After the Taiwan-based company created only a tiny fraction of the jobs it promised in exchange for billions in tax credits, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation has finally told them, no, you don't get all that money for nothing. In other news: Republican Jennifer Rubin excoriates the president...

Three items, somewhat related: The president's doctor, Sean Conley, released a memo pronouncing the president "no longer considered transmission risk to others," without providing any information on whether he tested negative for Covid-19, because why would you want clarity around the president's health? The president, meanwhile, has openly called for prosecutions of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, in a desperate bid to hang on to power befitting a small, whiny loser. Three Washington Post...

City Lit Books in Logan Square will close December 1st, a sad addition to a lengthening list of Chicago shop and restaurant closures due to the pandemic. I also found out today that Fountainhead, a gastropub in my neighborhood with one of the best whisky lists in the city, will close on November 14th. And my favorite Chicago rib joint, Fat Willy's, closed two weeks ago. Reading lists of closed restaurants is depressing. So far, though, only two breweries on the Brews & Choos List has gone under. Knock wood.

Let's start with the good news: Julie Nolke has a new video. OK, ready for everything else? The president called Kamala Harris "this monster" in an interview Thursday, because of course he did. The New England Journal of Medicine came a millimeter from endorsing Joe Biden in an editorial published yesterday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) have introduced legislation to create a commission on presidential capacity, without naming the person who inspired the bill....

Starting in March, this year has seemed like a weird anthology TV show, with each month written and directed by a different team. We haven't had Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme yet; I'm hoping that'll be the season finale in February. This month we seem to have Armando Iannucci running the show, as the President's antics over the weekend suggest. So here's how I'm spending lunch: With only 4 weeks to the election, a new CNN poll out this morning has Biden up 16 points among likely voters nationally....

My company just sent out an email: "Given the current state of our COVID rates and timeline on an anticipated vaccine, as well as the upcoming flu season, we have made the decision to move our expected Return to Office (RTO) date to Tuesday, July 6th, 2021." Welp. At least I can go in once a week. But that means almost 15 months of an almost empty building. That can't be good for anyone, especially the building management and support teams.

After presidential adviser Hope Hicks tested positive for the coronavirus yesterday, he and the First Lady have also tested positive, and he showed symptoms at a fundraiser in New Jersey last night: President Trump is showing symptoms of the novel coronavirus, but mild ones, according to two people familiar with his condition. The president, who said on Thursday night that he had tested positive for the virus, has had what one person described as coldlike symptoms. At a fund-raiser he attended at his...

More than 200,000 people have died of Covid-19 since we started paying attention six months ago. Let me put that into perspective: The columns represent the total number of deaths for each event (blue) or per year (gray). The line represents those deaths on an annualized basis. At 400,000 deaths per year, Covid-19 now ranks as the third leading cause of death in the US for 2020 after cancer and heart disease. We're on course to have 133 9/11s or 12 times our usual number of car crash deaths just this...

Choral board meeting followed by chorus rehearsal: all on Zoom, and as president and generally techy guy, I'm hosting. After a full day of work and a 5 km walk. Whew. So what's new? David Corn advises the Democratic Party to "go nuclear." Greg Sargent views the malarkey from Republican senators and the president as unmasking their "vile game." The CDC abruptly withdrew guidance warning about the airborne spread of Covid-19, which could not have more obviously come from political interference. Democratic...

As Covid-19 cases rose in large cities, people started moving to the suburbs in larger numbers. Crain's reports that the combination of fear, downtown office closures, and low interest rates caused home sales nearly to double in 14 Chicago-area suburbs. Barrington, a wealthy village of horse barns and huge houses, saw the largest number of home sales last month, with Lake Forest (a similar place) close behind. Amanda Mull, writing in The Atlantic, sees this as a big gamble: When we talk about people...

Just a few of the things that crossed my desktop this morning: Astronomers have detected phosphine gas in the clouds on Venus, which is a strong indicator of life. Astronomers have also detected a ping-pong-ball-sized black hole orbiting the sun, getting as close as 133 kAUs in its orbit. An aircraft made a precautionary landing on an Interstate in Tennessee, and got a full police escort on take-off. No one was hurt. Car manufacturers are teaming up with insurance companies to share data on almost every...

Here we go: A wildfire currently burning north of Sacramento has become the largest in California history. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr Anthony Fauci doesn't expect us to get back to normal until "well into 2021." Law professor Rosa Brooks reviews Bob Woodward's Rage and finds nothing surprising. The Kissimmee Star Motel outside Orlando, Florida, is a case study in the state's abrogation of its basic duties to its citizens, or the apotheosis of the Calvinist ethics...

With 58 days until the election, the noise keeps increasing. Here's some of it: Jeffrey Goldberg reports from multiple sources that the president referred to wounded soldiers as "losers" and "suckers" for serving the country. The administration moved quickly to lie about this. Andrew Sullivan calls the president a "metastasizing cancer." Catherine Rampell suggests ways to talk to right-wingers about the president's failures. Nick Martin asks, "how did 'if I die, I die' become this country's mantra?"...

I'm glad I took a long walk yesterday and not today, because of this: In other news: State health officials warn that suburban Cook County (the immediate suburbs surrounding Chicago) has experienced a resurgence in Covid-19 cases, and placed it and 29 other counties on warning that social restrictions could resume next week. Moreover, Covid-19 leads in a massive wave of excess deaths reported by the Cook County Medical Examiner this week. Suicides, homicides, and overdoses are also at near-record...

Chicago's key Covid-19 metric, the 7-day rolling average positivity rate, ticked above 5% yesterday, as it's been near the 5% threshold for a couple of weeks. It rose from 4% to 5% between July 19th and 30th, suggesting that relaxed discipline has led to more infections. Today Governor JB Pritzker announced stricter policies requiring masks to protect restaurant workers: [The] new statewide restaurant and bar policy requiring all patrons to wear a mask while interacting with waitstaff and other...

It's been 153 days since the State of Illinois instituted an emergency shutdown of the economy. Friday March 20th was the last "normal" day in the state; since then, we've lived with lockdowns, social distancing, and all the other fun bits of our pandemic response. I mention this because January 20th is 153 days away. We'll get there.

Today is former president Bill Clinton's 74th birthday. Last night, he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where the party formally nominated former vice president Joe Biden to be president. In other news: Chicago removed Wisconsin from the list of states too dangerous to visit without quarantine. With the exceptions of California and Nevada, the map now looks a lot like projections of the 2020 election. Five Thirty Eight updated its interactive guide to voting by mail this fall. In Illinois...

I'm taking a day off, so I'm choosing not to read all the articles that have piled up on my desktop: Tropical Storm Josephine has formed east of the windward islands, becoming the earliest 10th named storm on record. The National Hurricane Center promises an "extremely active" season. By tracking excess deaths in addition to reported Covid-19 deaths, the New York Times has concluded we've already surpassed 200,000 and could hit half a million by the end of the year. The General Accounting Office, a...

I admire the New York Times for digging into how our pandemic response was so much worse than every other rich country, but ultimately, we already knew: First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic. It is a large country at the nexus of the global economy, with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical...

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...

First, this chart: And yet, there are so many other things going on today: NPR has the clearest take-down on the president's election-postponement trolling I've seen today, noting in particular that "Trump's tweet came about 15 minutes after news of the worst-ever-recorded quarterly performance of the American economy." Josh Marshall just says "don't cower." Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens believes people like him "lost the battle for the Republican Party's soul long ago:" "I feel like...

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 kind of got into the flow today, so things to read later just piled up: Illinois found 1,532 new known Covid-19 cases as of today, with four downstate, bright-red counties now getting warned that their numbers are rising quickly. The GOP failures on containing this disease keep mounting. Greg Sargent points out that "Trump's authoritarian crackdown is so bad that even some in the GOP are blasting it." Maeve Higgins finds that her American passport just doesn't work anymore. Garmin's entire production...

Major League Baseball will start a short (60-game) season tomorrow, with weird rules (including universal DH and starting extra innings with a runner on second). The games will have piped-in audience sounds because they won't actually have audiences: MLB is also launching an interactive website feature called "Cheer at the Ballpark" that will allow fans to cheer, clap or boo virtually, from home. The idea is that audio engineers at the ballparks can then adjust the recorded crowd sounds to reflect the...

A friend and I plan to go to a local beer garden this weekend—one on the Brews and Choos list, in fact—so we had to make a reservation that included a $7.50-per-person deposit. Things are weird, man. And if you read the news today, oh boy, the weirdness is all over: Alex Shephard calls Chris Wallace "the only person who's figured out how to interview Trump." About the same interview, Peter Wehner concludes "Donald Trump is a broken man." In his last long-form essay for New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan...

The new political theory of "executive underreach," defined as "a national executive branch’s willful failure to address a significant public problem that the executive is legally and functionally equipped (though not necessarily legally required) to address," only partially explains the willful idiocy of Republican actions in the past 24 hours. Exhibit A: White House Press Secretary Karen Kayleigh McEnany "won't let science get in the way" of schools reopening, whether they want to reopen or not...

Happy tax day! And now, we're off to the races: Jeff Sessions lost the Republican US Senate primary in Alabama. What the hell was the president talking about yesterday? George Will explains the differences, such as they are, between  Illinois governor JB Pritzker announced a tightening of the state's re-opening rules, while Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned we're dangerously close to shutting down again. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt tested positive for Covid-19. Author John M. Barry, who wrote about...

Today's interesting and notable news stories: This week marks the 25th anniversary of Chicago's deadly heat wave in July 1995, during which 700 people died and we hit a record 41°C with a 52°C heat index. Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman sees the Trump Administration's corruption as far worse than Nixon's. In a recent interview with CNN, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos repeated, without coherently explaining the how or why of it, that children should go back to school this fall. DeVos'...

For the first time since reporting its first Covid-19 death on March 11th, New York City yesterday reported zero confirmed or probable deaths from the virus: The milestone came Sunday in initial data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. New York State reported five deaths statewide on Sunday but didn’t specify where those fatalities occured. The highest number of deaths statewide was reported on April 9, at 799. New York City has reported a total of 18,670 confirmed Covid-19...

Yesterday, Florida reported 15,300 new cases of Covid-19, handily breaking the one-day record for new cases we set waaaay back in early April. We've now passed 70,000 new cases nationally in one day (another record), and 230,370 new cases worldwide (another record). We could lose control of this situation completely any day now--as Florida already has. And yet, " 'There was no justification to not move forward' with the state's reopening in May, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday, according to NBC...

I was in meetings almost without break from 10am until just a few minutes ago, so a few things have piled up in my inbox: Writing in the Washington Post, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule explains why conservative justices vote with liberals more than the reverse (tl;dr: our system of government has a well-known and intentional liberal bias). NBC's Jonathan Allen calls the president's re-election campaign "desperate." The Mayor's Office in Chicago has put out a 100-page plan for how we can repair...

Stuff to read: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany accidentally referenced the Armenian genocide, which would have been great if she had any clue why the Turkish embassy immediately demanded she apologize. Paul Krugman says that we lost the war on Covid-19 because of our leadership, not because of our culture. Crain's reports that Illinois had its best month ever in legal marijuana sales, and yes, they made a bad pun in their headline. NPR reports that phase transitions, the physics concept...

As I take a minute from banging away on C# code to savor my BBQ pork on rice from the local Chinese takeout, I have these to read: President Trump once again said the quiet part out loud, announcing he plans to gut fair-housing rules because otherwise they would "have...a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas." The Supreme Court will hear arguments whether the House can have access to Robert Mueller's unredacted report—in the fall. Josh Marshall goes over the "ominous and harrowing"...

Vox has called the US Senate Democratic Party primary in Kentucky for Amy McGrath, but the main national outlets don't have it yet. [Note: I have contributed financially to Amy McGrath's campaign.] So while I wait for confirmation from the Washington Post (or, you know, the Kentucky State Board of Elections), here's other fun stuff: As threatened, the European Union has barred travelers from the United States from entering, because of our shit response to Covid-19. The shit response includes record...

This morning, President Trump re-Tweeted a racist video that included a supporter yelling "white power," thanking the elderly Florida gentleman in question for his support. Even though that would end most other presidencies right there, it turns out that this weekend has seen even worse behavior throughout his administration: Five months after the novel coronavirus was first detected in the United States, a record surge in new cases is the clearest sign yet of the country’s historic failure to control...

Parts of the United States and the United Kingdom have started a friendly competition to see which English-speaking country can obviate months of combating Covid-19 in the stupidest ways possible. Up first, the UK, where so many people have flocked (in the 32°C heat) to the Channel Coast that Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole have declared a major incident: Bournemouth East MP, Tobias Ellwood, said half a million people had flocked to the beaches and said the situation was so overwhelming that the UK...

If I have to go more than a year without visiting Europe because my fellow Americans are too individualistic to stop the spread of Covid-19, I might have to move there permanently when able: In case you wondered what President Trump’s glorious triumph over coronavirus looks like to the rest of the world, the news that the European Union may bar Americans from entry due to our spiking cases provides a sobering reality check. If this goes through, it would mark a continuation of a prohibition that had...

My inbox does not respect the fact that I had meetings between my debugging sessions all day. So this all piled up: Josh Marshall calls our Covid-19 response an "abject failure" compared to, say, Europe's. Paul Krugman says it shows we've "failed the marshmallow test." Former CIA acting director Michael Morell says President Biden will inherit "a world of trouble." ("Arguably, only Abraham Lincoln, with Southern secession waiting, faced a tougher challenge when taking office than would Biden.") Illinois...

It's day 88 of my exile from the office, but I recently found out I may get to go in for a day soon. Will this happen before the 24th (day 100)? Who's got the over/under on that? Meanwhile, outside my bubble: A new book alleges that Melania Trump remained in New York during the first few months of her husband's presidency as a tactic in renegotiating her prenuptial agreement. Michael Tomsky asks, "Why does Trump lie?" Cellphone data shows that people in some parts of the country are gathering at...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its May jobs report this morning, showing that despite 2.7 million people losing their jobs in May, 2.5 million got back in work, and the unemployment rate dropped 2.4% to 13.3%: The surprising data comes amid the phased reopening of businesses across the country after months of economic pain from the coronavirus pandemic, which pushed up unemployment to Great Depression-era levels and obliterated all job gains since the Great Recession. Congress is currently...

Last weekend's tsunami continues to ripple: Ultra-right-wing US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), writing in the New York Times to great opprobrium, recommends sending in the troops. Former general and Defense Secretary James Mattis publicly rebuked President Trump in a 3-page letter published in the Atlantic, a move that Josh Marshall supports while adding that the letter also "its own form of militarization of society." Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen also criticized the president earlier this week. In...

Yes, June 1st, the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere (according to climatologists, anyway), and Chicago has never seemed more exciting. Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced last week that we would move into Phase 3 of the Covid-19 recovery plan on Wednesday, but then the weekend happened: Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she’s worried protests throughout the city this weekend could have been “super-spreading” events for the coronavirus. The vast majority of people in Chicago’s protests wore masks, and...

This morning, the Labor Department reported 2.1 million new unemployment claims, bringing the total to almost 41 million since the pandemic hit the US. As horrifying as that number is, I actually wanted to highlight two articles that appeared today. The first, by Trump biographer Tony Schwartz in Medium, warns us that having a psychopathic president makes November's election "a true Armageddon:" The trait that most distinguishes psychopaths is the utter absence of conscience — the capacity to lie...

I rode the El yesterday for the first time since March 15th, because I had to take my car in for service. (It's 100% fine.) This divided up my day so I had to scramble in the afternoon to finish a work task, while all these news stories piled up: Josh Marshall unmasks the PPE debate. Matthew Sitman explains "why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals [sic] mad." Michigan's Attorney General called the president "a petulant child," called Lake Huron "a big lake," and called the Upper Peninsula...

Author Franklin Schneider, who wrote a book about getting fired from 13 jobs in 10 years, thinks the president is begging someone to fire him: We didn’t need insider exposés about “executive time” spent shouting at the TV to know that Trump hates being president. It’s there in every seething tweet, every prickly exchange with reporters, every shrug of a coronavirus briefing. He despises everything about Washington — the modesty, the expertise, the functionaries around him who have the temerity to do...

Since January 2019, Chicago has had only two months with above-average sunshine, and in both cases we only got 10% more than average. This year we're ticking along about 9% below, with no month since July 2019 getting above 50% of possible sunshine. In other news: Former White House Butler Roosevelt Jerman, who served from 1957 to 2012, died of Covid-19 at age 91. One wonders, if the current White House had acted more propitiously, would Jerman have lived longer? Researchers suggest yes, if we'd locked...

You have to see these photos of the dark Sears Tower against the Chicago skyline—a metaphor for 2020 bar none. Also: The Chicago Teachers Union has sued the Chicago Public Schools and Betsy DeVos over the treatment of special-education students during the lockdown. Alexandra Petri imagines the sad, lonely life of a potato guardian. Three Floyds has closed their brewpub indefinitely, another sign of the apocalypse. President Trump really does believe his own quackery, though hydroxychloroquine as a dog...

Illinois has had a stay-at-home order in effect for over seven weeks now, though last week the state and county opened up forest trails and other outdoor activities that allow for proper distancing and discourage people clumping together in groups. So today I drove up to the northern suburbs to the site of the largest Civilian Conservation Corps project undertaken during the agency's run from 1933 to 1940. It was good to get outside. Not my fastest-ever pace, but still respectable, and somehow I got...

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced this afternoon a five-phase, evidence-based plan to reopen the state: The five phases for each health region are as follows: Phase 1 – Rapid Spread: The rate of infection among those tested and the number of patients admitted to the hospital is high or rapidly increasing. Strict stay at home and social distancing guidelines are put in place and only essential businesses remain open. Every region has experienced this phase once already, and could return to it...

Happy May Day! Or m'aidez? Hard to know for sure right now. The weather in Chicago is sunny and almost the right temperature, and I have had some remarkable productivity at work this week, so in that respect I'm pretty happy. But I woke up this morning to the news that Ravinia has cancelled its entire 2020 season, including a performance of Bernstein's White House Cantata that featured my group, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago. This is the first time Ravinia has done so since 1935. If only that were...

Thanks, Obama! No, really. The countries that don't pity us are laughing their asses off. This video from a Chinese satire program sums it up nicely: China: We discovered a new virus.America: So what?China: It's DangerousAmerica: It's only a FluChina: Wear a MaskAmerica: Don't wear a Mask... pic.twitter.com/Qxugv8z73J — China Xinhua News (@XHNews) April 30, 2020 Josh Marshall is outraged—at the Trump Administration: [The video] is certainly self-serving from the Chinese perspective. But big picture...

I have gone to North Center Ribfest since moving back to the city in 2008. Until 2018 I even brought Parker most years, when he could walk 60 blocks as easily as I can. (Now he has trouble walking four.) I also attended the smaller, less-well-run Windy City Ribfest a couple of times. The Chamber for Uptown just cancelled this year's Windy City Ribfest, and the North Center Chamber of Commerce cancelled their Ribfest two weeks ago. In honor of both events, I will have full slabs on both weekends (June...

A small-town Republican Illinois State Representative sued in a small-town State court to have Governor Pritzker's stay-at-home order overturned—for himself, personally: The ruling by Clay County Circuit Court Judge Michael McHaney came in a lawsuit filed by Bailey, a Republican from the small town of Xenia, which challenged Pritzker’s authority to issue extended stay-at-home orders under the state’s Emergency Management Act. In seeking the injunction April 23, Bailey asked the judge to find that the...

The only president this country has right now massively trolled my party and my state today: As talk in Washington has swiftly moved to the next coronavirus relief package, President Donald Trump on Monday questioned whether federal taxpayers should provide money of “poorly run” states and cities run by Democrats, specifically citing Illinois. “Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed...

James Fallows: Reporters from the Washington Post quoted Dara Kass, of Columbia University Medical Center, on the difference between this and Trump’s previous, now-discredited advice that people start taking a certain kind of pill: “The difference between this and the chloroquine [pills] is that somebody could go right away to their pantry and start swallowing bleach. They could go to their medicine cabinet and swallow isopropyl alcohol,” Kass said. “A lot of people have that in their homes. There’s an...

The President of the United States, a man who literally has the power to kill billions of people in an hour, made a suggestion at his press briefing yesterday: (NBC's report on the incident includes the line "He didn't specify the kind of disinfectant." Also, retired General Wesley Clark actually predicted it would come to this.) The Post: In a statement Friday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany noted that Trump had said Americans should consult with their doctors about treatment. U.S....

I suspended the Brews & Choos Project after March 7th as the state closed restaurants and bars to slow the spread of SARS-COV-2. I had planned to continue the project as soon as things opened up again, knowing the economic pause would certainly change the roster. Sadly, it already has, with the permanent closure of Argus Brewing on the city's south side on March 28th: Since launching in 2009 in a former Schlitz horse stable — a relic of when beer was delivered by hooves — Argus always hovered at the...

Another 4.4 million people filed unemployment claims last week, bringing the total unemployed in the US to 26 million and the unemployment rate to around 20%. This is the fifth straight week of record weekly unemployment filings, but the third straight week of declining filings, which is about the only silver lining in economic data today. For comparison, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), it took three years for unemployment to go from 4.7% to over 20% in the Great...

Welcome to day 31 of the Illinois shelter-in-place regime, which also turns out to be day 36 of my own working-from-home regime (or day 43 if you ignore that I had to go into the office on March 16th). So what's new? Oy: Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele says America "has been abused by this president." George Packer says "we are living in a failed state." Josh Marshall calls Covid-19 "an extinction-level event for news." The Trump International Hotel has asked its landlord, the...

Julie Nolke is a Canadian actor, comedian, and writer:

The number of new Covid-19 cases per day may have peaked in Illinois, but that still means we have new cases every day. We have over 10,000 infected in the state, with the doubling period now at 12 days (from 2 days back mid-March). This coincides with unpleasant news from around the world: Covid-19 has become the second-leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for 12,400 deaths per week, just behind heart disease which kills about 12,600. More than 5 million people filed for unemployment...

I mentioned this morning that the President has ordered a halt to payments to the WHO to shift the blame from his own failures. That explains part of the story; Graeme Wood explains the rest: Defunding the WHO (or at least threatening to do so) is yet another instance of Trump’s signature move, one that I described just weeks ago, when he insisted on calling SARS-CoV-2 “the Chinese virus,” and for a few days journalists and social-media scolds obediently modified their criticisms to fit his latest...

We all know President Trump's pathologies pretty well by now. Between the malignant narcissism and his natural distrust for anyone who knows more than he does on a particular subject, plus his well-documented habit of believing things he wants to believe instead of the black-and-white reality right in front of him, it doesn't take an Oliver Sacks to guess how he has reacted to everyone telling him he can't simply restart the economy on May 1st. And, sadly, he does not disappoint: Over the weekend, the...

Illinois' doubling time for Covid-19 cases has increased from 2.1 days to 7.9 days, as of yesterday. In other news: The Times has a complete timeline of how the White House missed all the warnings about the disease until it became too big to lie about. George Conway places the blame for Wisconsin's voting fiasco last Tuesday on the state legislature, not on the courts. Thirsty? How about a Covid-19–themed drink? NPR interviews a psychiatrist about how single people are coping with quarantine. Food &...

As we go into the fourth week of mandatory working from home, Chicago may have its warmest weather since October 1st, and I'm on course to finish a two-week sprint at work with a really boring deployment. So what's new and maddening in the world? The Trump Administration's chaotic response to the virus includes seizing states' protective equipment and giving it to private distributors, thus making states bid on stuff they've already obtained, sometimes for free. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics...

Indiana University history professor Rebecca Spang compares the world's response to Covid-19 to the conditions that led to the French Revolution in 1789: Fear sweeps the land. Many businesses collapse. Some huge fortunes are made. Panicked consumers stockpile paper, food, and weapons. The government’s reaction is inconsistent and ineffectual. Ordinary commerce grinds to a halt; investors can find no safe assets. Political factionalism grows more intense. Everything falls apart. This was all as true of...

The Washington Post columnist says he wanted to give President Trump some historical distance before pronouncing him "the worst president. Ever." Alas, events have overtaken desires: His one major competitor for that dubious distinction remains Buchanan, whose dithering helped lead us into the Civil War — the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Buchanan may still be the biggest loser. But there is good reason to think that the Civil War would have broken out no matter what. By contrast, there is nothing...

Man Booker-prize-winning author Arundhati Roy ("The God of Small Things") slowly immolates the Indian government for its unconscionable mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic: On March 24, at 8pm, [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed. He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who...

The Atlantic's Megan Garber looks at how the popular floorplan can make people crazy, which is what you get when architecture follows dudes liking TV shows with sledgehammers: The popular open layout, for example, eschews walls and other spatial divisions in favor of openness, airiness, “flow.” (“Look how everything flows!” Brian Patrick Flynn, the designer of HGTV’s Dream Home 2020, says in a promotional video.) On the plus side, an open floor plan allows for constant togetherness. On the minus side …...

Chicago Tribune architecture critic offers an alternative to sitting on your couch and bingeing Netflix: Here’s a suggestion: Go out for a stroll and take in some architecture. Walks are allowed under Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s stay-at-home order. You just have to be sure to maintain the social distancing that public health officials say is essential to halting the spread of the deadly virus. If you know where to look, you might come across something fabulous. Not too far from where I live, for example, is...

I had plans to do the Blogging A-to-Z challenge this year as I've done the last two, but reality intervened. In theory I have more time to write than last year. In fact I didn't have the energy required to plan and start drafting entries mid-March, for obvious reasons. Things have stabilized since my office closed on the 17th, and I've gotten back into the swing of working from home every day. But I feel like a full 26-post series this month would not rise to my own standards of quality for permanent...

Goldman Sachs released an economic outlook this morning predicting GDP growth of -9% in Q1 and -34% in Q2, along with 15% unemployment by June 30th. Both Calculated Risk and Talking Points Memo believe the recovery will take longer than the slowdown. In other words, we won't have a V or an L but probably something more like a U with a wide bottom. I looked at some figures of my own. Looking at 4-week moving averages, as of Sunday my spending on groceries is up 37% from the period between January 27th...

Just a few articles of note today: The City of Chicago urges residents to call 311 to report non-essential business remaining open. President Trump admitted on "Fox & Friends" this morning that adopting common-sense election reforms would mean "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." (Unless, I suppose, they changed their policies to match the mainstream, right?) The Times reports on General Motors' efforts to produce 2,000 ventilators a month (an order-of-magnitude change from...

Subway ridership numbers for New York City show a slower-than-expected drop-off. Still, IHME has New York Covid-19 cases peaking April 7th, while Covid Act Now says April 28th. Florida, where idiots flocked to beaches and churches this weekend, should see its peak mid-May with cases lingering through July. IHME puts Illinois' peak at April 18th; Covid Act Now, April 28th. But our shelter-in-place rules should lengthen our experience through the beginning of June. Oh, goody. The New York Times has new...

Because of Chicago's weather yesterday (14°C and sunny), a ton of Gen Z kids broke quarantine and headed to the lakefront. This has now had entirely predictable consequences: Multiple aldermen along and near Chicago's lakefront have confirmed the closure of the trail along Lake Michigan, less than 24 hours after Mayor Lori Lightfoot threatened closure because of a lack of social distancing among trail and park users. Aldermen say the downtown Riverwalk and the 606 Trail are closed, as well. Ald. James...

That seems like a reasonable conclusion based on recent statements from conservative broadcasters: At the heart of their campaign is a skepticism over the advice offered by experts and a willingness to accept a certain number of deaths to incur fewer economic costs. Many also see in the mass shutdowns and shelter-in-place policies a plot to push the country to the left. [Glenn] Beck, for example, suggested Democrats were trying to “jam down the Green New Deal because we’re at home panicked.” Heather Mac...

No, I don't mean Kenny Rogers, who died last night at age 83. I mean that Royal Dutch Airlines KLM has decided to remove all their 747s from service nine months early because of the pandemic: The current date of the final flight is March 26, though even that date could get moved up if more flight cancellations ensue. Generally speaking, fleet retirements are met with large fanfare. The last two major airlines to retire the 747-400, United and Delta, both in 2017, had large send-off parties and several...

Starting tomorrow at 5pm, through April 7th, Illinois will be on a "stay-at-home" order: Residents can still go to the grocery stores, put gas in their cars, take walks outside and make pharmacy runs, the governor said at a Friday afternoon news conference. All local roads, including the interstate highways and tollways, will remain open to traffic, as well. “For the vast majority of you already taking precautions, your lives will not change very much,” Pritzker said. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said “now is...

I'm trying to get my mind around a Conservative government announcing this a few minutes ago: The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced the government will pay the wages of British workers to keep them in jobs as the coronavirus outbreak escalates. In an unprecedented step, Sunak said the state would pay grants covering up to 80% of the salary of workers kept on by companies, up to a total of £2,500 per month, just above the median income. “We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” he...

I have tons of experience working from home, but historically I've balanced that by going out in the evenings. The pandemic has obviously cut that practice down to zero. Moreover, the village of Oak Park will start shelter-in-place measures tomorrow, so I expect Chicago to do the same in the next couple of days. The Oak Park order seems reasonable: stay home except for essentials like food and medicine, stay two meters away from other people, it's OK to walk your dog, and so on. Since I'm already doing...

Actually, things seem to have quieted down. Bars and restaurants in Illinois closed last night at 9pm, and my company has moved to mandatory work-from-home, so things could not be quieter for me. I'm also an introvert with a dog and gigabit Internet, meaning I have a need to leave my house several times a day and something to do inside. (I'm also working, and in fact cracked a difficult nut yesterday that made today very productive.) Outside of my house: New Republic's Nick Martin asks, why should we...

Some dingleberry from Tennessee thought he'd make easy money by stocking up on hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes. Now he's got a garage full of things Amazon won't let him sell. And he's whining about it to the New York Times: On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home...

Those words appear on the cover of a 450-page CDC-written manual called "Crisis Risk Emergency Communications." Apparently, if anyone in the Trump Administration has read the book, they have chosen to do the opposite, instead of bungling everything accidentally: Protecting vulnerable people from a virus that, according to some projections, could infect millions and kill hundreds of thousands, depends on U.S. leaders issuing clear public health instructions and the public’s trust to follow directions...

We just sent this out: Apollo community, After much deliberation, and in consultation with Music Director Stephen Alltop, the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra, and both of our concert venues, we have decided to cancel our concert at St Luke’s scheduled for this Saturday March 14th. The ESO has agreed that tickets to Saturday’s performance will be honored on Sunday at 3pm at the Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church performance. If you bought a ticket through our online system for Saturday’s performance and...