The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime.
Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these:
- Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS.
- On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS.
- Ross Douthat worries that "it's going to be normal to have extreme beliefs."
- Amtrak has announced it will bring brand-new Alstom train sets into Acela service this spring, bringing the top speed of the route up to 250 km/h—at least for the Trenton-to-Newark segment. (At this rate, assuming no improvements in European train service, Acela should reach comparable speeds in the 2050s.)
Finally, a friend recently sent me a book I've wanted to read for a while: The Coddling of the American Mind, which civil-liberties lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt expanded from their September 2015 Atlantic article. I have noticed that people born after 1995 don't seem to have the same resilience or tolerance for nuance that even people born a few years earlier have. Lukianoff and Haidt make an interesting case for why this is. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I finish.