Events

Organizers estimate 75,000 people marched in downtown Chicago yesterday, joining groups in 2,000 other cities and towns across the country to protest against the OAFPOTUS's illegal and immoral actions since taking office: While the big-city rallies attracted the attention and the cameras, smaller events were organized in rural areas, including three dozen in Indiana, a state Mr. Trump won last November by 19 points. In Dallas, another stronghold of Mr. Trump’s support, crowds of protesters stretched...

Cassie enjoyed some couch time with me yesterday evening: Eventually she decided on a full-bagel nap:

I just finished 3½ hours of nonstop meetings that people crammed into my calendar because I have this afternoon blocked off as "Summer Hours PTO." Within a few minutes of finishing my last meeting, I rebooted my laptop (so it would get updated), closed the lid, and...looked at a growing pile of news stories that I couldn't avoid: Dan Rather calls tomorrow's planned Soviet-style military parade through DC a charade: "The military’s biggest cheerleader (at least today) didn’t serve in Vietnam because of...

Historian Timothy W Ryback outlines how the Chancellor of Germany used manufactured crises to take over the Bavarian State in 1933. If you hear an echo from the past coming from California this week, that may not be an accident: Adolf Hitler was a master of manufacturing public-security crises to advance his authoritarian agenda. The March 5 Reichstag elections delivered Hitler 44 percent of the electorate and with that a claim on political power at every level of government. The next day, 200,000...

The music legend has died at 82. Barenaked Ladies popped into my mind when I read the story. Meanwhile, I've got a meeting in 10 minutes, so let me also add just small note how the OAFPOTUS has affected Chicago. A friend of mine works for Northwestern University, and she is pissed off: In a message to the Northwestern community, the school’s leadership said the new measures would include a faculty and staff hiring freeze, reductions in academic budgets, and a “0% merit pool with no bonuses in lieu of...

I've had a lot to do in the office today, so unfortunately this will just be a link fest: I agree with Jeff Maurer that "I hate that when some dickhead sets a car on fire, we have to talk about it for a week." Journalist G. Elliott Morris argues that the Los Angeles protests have a higher probability of hurting the OAFPOTUS than helping him. Paul Krugman sighs that "we finally know what 'American carnage' was about." Russian emigrés Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev have a list of Russian words to help...

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it. Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist: Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of...

Pro tip: Get to Ribfest as soon as possible after it opens. Cassie and I arrived exactly at noon yesterday, allowing me to score three 3-bone samplers in just 45 minutes. Here, too, where I expect the lines would be a block long by 2pm: In the end, Cassie had a really good afternoon—at least until she went to sleep-away camp because of my concert: I sense ribs in my future today as well. And very likely a 5 km walk either coming or going from Ribfest. Sadly, we won't get there exactly at noon, because I...

Lunch today will be a sampler of ribs from the first vendor at Ribfest that looks appealing. Then Cassie goes to sleep-away camp and I go to a performance call in Glenview at 3pm. So tune in tomorrow morning for the first rib report.

A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past: A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is...