Events

Major League Baseball will start a short (60-game) season tomorrow, with weird rules (including universal DH and starting extra innings with a runner on second). The games will have piped-in audience sounds because they won't actually have audiences: MLB is also launching an interactive website feature called "Cheer at the Ballpark" that will allow fans to cheer, clap or boo virtually, from home. The idea is that audio engineers at the ballparks can then adjust the recorded crowd sounds to reflect the...

A friend and I plan to go to a local beer garden this weekend—one on the Brews and Choos list, in fact—so we had to make a reservation that included a $7.50-per-person deposit. Things are weird, man. And if you read the news today, oh boy, the weirdness is all over: Alex Shephard calls Chris Wallace "the only person who's figured out how to interview Trump." About the same interview, Peter Wehner concludes "Donald Trump is a broken man." In his last long-form essay for New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan...

Just a few things have cropped up in the news since yesterday: President Trump has threatened to send federal agents to "assist" with Chicago's efforts to curb gun violence, which no one except the Trump-supporting head of our police union wants. Michelle Goldberg calls the presence of federal agents in Portland a harbinger of fascism, while the ACLU calls it "a constitutional crisis" and has filed suit to reverse the policy. Also in Portland, an unidentified woman wearing only a hat and face mask...

I wore both my old Fitbit Ionic and new Garmin Venu for about 42 hours straight. Yesterday they overlapped for the entire day. And they came in with similar, but not quite the same, numbers. I thought that my Fitbit would record fewer steps overall, because it recorded about 450 (about 7%) fewer on my walk yesterday. For the whole day, though, the Fitbit counted 14,190 to the Garmin's 13,250—7% more. But I wore the Fitbit on my right (dominant) wrist, so it may have just had more activity in general. In...

Philip Bump puts in black-and-white terms why the president should perhaps shut up about his cognitive test results: “And they were very surprised,” Trump said of the doctors. “They said that’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what you just did.” No. That did not happen. Or, at least, it didn’t happen without a qualifier like, “rarely does anybody your age not demonstrate any of the impairments this test is meant to measure,” which is possible. But the doctors did not call this “an...

I'll get to the final head-to-head comparison between my Garmin Venu and Fitbit Ionic later today. Meanwhile: The Dept of Homeland Security plans to deploy 150 agents to Chicago, and no one will say why. Could Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan finally face consequences for his career-spanning corruption? Charles Blow asks: where's the outrage? Bruce Schneier explains and hypothesizes about the Twitter class break last week. And finally, because our Covid-19 numbers have started creeping up, indoor bar...

Before I get to the technical bits comparing the Garmin Venu (now on my left wrist) to the Fitbit Ionic, let me just list some "learnings" today: Both trackers are waterproof as advertised, as is my phone. I am glad that I keep a towel by my back door. I am glad that my washing machine—and, let's face it, my dryer—is by my back door. There comes a point where one's clothes have absorbed so much water that it really doesn't matter how much more water they will encounter. I have no one to blame but...