Events

I've queued up a few articles to read while eating lunch. I just hope I don't lose said lunch after reading them: Jeet Heer worries about President Trump's willingness to destroy everything around himself to distract from his own scandals. Catherine Rampell walks through the ways the administration's policy of separating children from parents at the border reveals the GOP's grand scam. James Fallows lays out the ways the administration continues to screw up our relationship with China. Josh Marshall...

Every so often I like to revisit old photos to see if I can improve them. Here's one of my favorites, which I took by the River Arun in Amberley, West Sussex, on 11 June 1992: The photo above is one of the first direct-slide scans I have, which I originally published here in 2009, right after I took this photo at nearly the same location: (I'm still kicking myself for not getting the angle right. I'll have to try again next time I'm in the UK.) Those are the photos as they looked in 2009. Yesterday...

This past weekend's performances went better than I expected, even with last night's temperature hovering around 32°C on the Pritzker stage. Our entire Memorial Day weekend has been hot. Yesterday's official temperature at O'Hare (36°C) hit an all-time record for May 27th and was the warmest day in Chicago since 23 July 2012, almost 6 years ago. So let me tell you how great it felt to be outside, wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and black jeans, singing, for an hour. The forecast calls for record heat...

The Apollo Chorus is joining Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this weekend in two performances of Rachmaninov's The Bells. Thus, no real blog post today. But if you're in Chicago, swing by the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park at 6:30pm for our free concert.

Via Bruce Schneier, interesting research into how to use mouse movements to detect lying: Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have long noted a big "tell" in human behavior: Crafting a lie takes more mental work than telling the truth. So one way to spot lies is to check someone's reaction time. If they're telling a lie, they'll respond fractionally more slowly than if they're telling the truth. Similarly, if you're asked to elaborate on your lie, you have to think for a second to generate new...