Events

The city began an experiment at the corner of State and Jackson this morning, turning the intersection into a pedestrian zone during stoplight changes similar to Oxford Circus in London. The Tribune's Jon Hilkevitch has details: The test involves stopping all vehicles — heading east on Jackson and north and south on State — for 35 seconds every third traffic light cycle to let pedestrians cross in all directions, including diagonally. The test got underway at 10:17 a.m., and some pedestrians cheered and...

Oh, my, some doozies today: Via Calculated Risk, Fermanagh, Ireland, has put up a Potemkin village to reassure all the G8 leaders that everything is fine. This includes, for example, putting photos of a thriving butcher shop over the boarded-up windows of a former butcher shop. It's a laugh-and-cry moment. The New York Times Magazine published a story about a near-crash on a commercial airliner that...doesn't make sense. Aside from reading like an undergraduate creative-writing assignment, it's simply...

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) won't be running next fall: Mrs. Bachmann, defiant as ever as she insisted that she would have won re-election had she tried, also said the legal inquiries had nothing to do with her decision. She vowed to continue to fight for the principles she said she holds dear — religious liberty, traditional marriage, family values and protecting innocent life, she said. “I fully anticipate the mainstream liberal media to put a detrimental spin on my decision not to seek a fifth...

This morning, the Senate Republican caucus, representing a minority of the U.S. Senate, a minority of the States, and a minority of the American people, sent a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the President is thwarting the will of the people: All 45 Republican senators co-signed an amicus brief filed Tuesday calling on the Supreme Court to curtail the President’s power to temporarily appoint nominees without the Senate’s approval. “[R]ecess appointments have become a means to sidestep...

Yeah, one of those days: Has the NRA fatally over-reached? Niel deGrasse Tyson examines whether Superman can really fly. How visionary is Eric Schmidt, really? (Could it be instead survivorship bias?) Can we stop worshiping Reagan, please? What happens when a rural town dies? I'll get to these eventually...

I didn't do anything of value of the weekend except continuing to read Before the Deluge. It's making me wonder what would have to happen in the U.S. to have such a stunning collapse of civilization. So the book not only makes me pause every few paragraphs to really absorb what I'm reading, but also I keep going off to Wikipedia to get maps and context. It's taken me years to figure out that I breathe mentally. Inhaling means reading and watching movies; exhaling means writing and coding. (No idea how...