Yet another infantile billionaire
Billionaire Bill Ackerman lobbied Harvard's board hard to get president Claudine Gay fired last month, harping on her plagiarism as a key reason she wasn't fit for the job. Business Insider then...
View ArticleGross weather day
Looking out my 30th-floor office window this afternoon doesn't cheer me. It's gray and snowy, but too warm for accumulation, so it just felt like rain when I sprinted across the street to get my...
View ArticleAnnals of brilliant lawyering
When you don't pay your attorneys, and then you don't pay the attorneys you had to hire because the first set of attorneys sued you for payment, you start to look like an absolute ganif to the legal...
View ArticleAnd now for some actual lawyering, ICJ edition
Julia Ioffe interviews David Scheffer, a lawyer and professor who served as Bill Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes, to provide some clarity around South Africa's suit against Israel in the...
View ArticleWhat every traveler wants to see the day before flying
We knew this was coming eventually:URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service Chicago IL 243 PM CST Thu Jan 11 2024 ILZ006-103-104-120445- /O.CON.KLOT.WS.W.0002.240112T0900Z-240113T1800Z/...
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That was a very long trip
My five-and-a-half-hour-delayed flight got to Seattle in the usual amount of time, but the door-to-door duration—my house to my friend's house—set a new record for domestic travel: 15 hours and 20...
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Old Stove Brewing, Seattle
Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project.Brewery: Olkd Stove Brewinig, 1901 Western Ave., SeattleTrain line: Sound Transit, University StTime from Chicago: about 4 hours by airDistance...
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Too short and too cold
I'm watching my plane arriving from Chicago to get all of us going back there on it, a little remorseful that I couldn't spend more time in Seattle. I last visited in 2013 to watch the Cubs hold their...
View ArticleStill chilly, but not like 1985
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...
View ArticleYou'll get there in a few millennia
An Ottawa judge told the Crown Prosecution Service to return a suspect's mobile phones after prosecutors failed to unlock them after trying 175 million passwords:The police seized the phones in October...
View ArticleHow to explain this to future generations?
Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret:Conventional wisdom says that this scream...
View ArticleThe life and death of a Chicago squirrel
Wow, is this a Chicago story.On January 6th, a local comedian posted a photo of what he thought was the impression of a rat in concrete on a Chicago street. (Local residents claim it's actually the...
View ArticleBusy weekend
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...
View ArticleTwice. I hit Ctrl+W *twice* while writing this post
Ctrl+W closes the active browser window, you see. I meant to type the word "Wade" in italics but somehow hit the Ctrl key instead of the Shift key. There may be some irony there.Possibly the warmth has...
View ArticleSlick moves walking the dog
Walking Cassie to day camp took a lot longer than usual this morning because the freezing rain and near-freezing temperatures after a long cold snap laid a layer of ice over nearly every sidewalk and...
View ArticleYou don't need sunscreen in Chicago in January
A weather pattern has set up shop near Chicago that threatens to occlude the sun for the next week, in exchange for temperatures approaching 15°C the first weekend of February. We've already had 43...
View ArticleTheft from trains: capitalism eating its own tail
The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy story about the scourge of modern robber barons: massive thefts from trains. It turns out, the super-long container trains that the duopoly of railroad...
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El Niño plays with the excess energy
We talk about anthropogenic climate change in human-centric terms: the planet is getting warmer very quickly relative to the historical baseline of 1800 CE. But heat just means energy. A plane flying...
View ArticleOver-zealous PEAs
A few months ago a Chicago Parking Enforcement Agent (PEA) tried to give me a ticket while I was paying for the parking spot online. I kept calm and polite, but I firmly explained that writing a ticket...
View ArticleWho could have predicted this?
Metra's new fare structure took effect this morning, along with the planned closure of every ticket window that still existed. It was therefore crucially important that the Ventra app (now the only way...
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