Events

Yesterday I bemoaned not only our depression-inducing lack of sunlight (predicted return of the sun: Sunday, maybe), but also Senate Republicans' efforts to hide or ignore information relevant to the impeachment trial now underway. Another story about how a lack of transparency causes damage has come to light. The Washington Post reports that the Saudi attack on Post owner Jeff Bezos' phone was helped to great extent by Apple's refusal to report security defects: A security report last week alleged that...

In Chicago this week, a persistent temperature inversion has kept us under a layer of stratus clouds that have obscured the sun for the past 5 days. Instead of the normal 42% of possible sunshine we get in January, this year we've only gotten 28%. It's a little depressing. The only silver lining, so to speak, is that the cloud layer has kept temperatures a lot warmer than normal, especially overnight. So we've gotten temperatures a degree or two above freezing and a degree or two below freezing, which...

The Star Trek actor likens the Space Force under President Trump to the Starfleet of the "Mirror, Mirror" universe: In this terrifying version of reality, violence and cruelty have displaced peace and diplomacy as the hallmarks of governance. The “evil” version of my own character, Sulu, plots to kill both Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock so that he can take command of the ship. In classic “Star Trek” style, the script for this episode carried loaded meaning. The writers were issuing a warning: A free and...

Author John Scalzi (The Old Man's War, Android's Dream, the Interdependency Trilogy) posted this morning a summary of his political beliefs. I agree completely with everything he said: 1. The president is the worst president of my lifetime, who is ignorant, bigoted, incurious, corrupt, has almost certainly engaged in criminal conduct before and after he was in office, is either a complicit or unwitting tool for the Russian government and its goals, never should have been in a position to become...

Author Nicole Hemmer outlines how the American right wing has prepared itself for the impeachment trial for the past 50 years, and it's to all our detriments: If you tuned in to Fox News to watch the opening arguments of the impeachment trial on Wednesday night, you were out of luck. Oh, the trial was still technically being broadcast on the network, but it had been reduced to a muted box on the side of the screen, while Sean Hannity assured viewers, “None of this will matter.” This was the purest...

Chuck Thompson understands why we travel, but still thinks we shouldn't: As evidence piles up about the deleterious impact of global tourism, the travel media charade is starting to feel like the almost comical hypocrisy of Trump surrogates ginning up increasingly contorted justifications on cable news for a worldview that’s becoming more detached from reality by the day. All motorized transport is a problem—cruise ships generate 21,000 gallons of sewage per day, much of it flushed into the ocean—but...

Dana Milbank puts a hunk of the blame for the impeachment trial on the Chief Justice of the United States himself: Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see. Ten...

A bomb snowstorm buried much of Newfoundland this week, breaking all kinds of records in the process: The historic blizzard that slammed Canada’s easternmost province is headed for Greenland — but it left snow-buried neighborhoods, a slew of power outages and shattered records in its wake. St. John’s superseded its record for the most snow in 24 hours, recording 762 mm, as the storm hit Newfoundland and Labrador on Friday. A state of emergency continued in the provincial capital and elsewhere through...

Jonathan Boccara compares the two: At the beginning of a Tetris game, you start with an empty game. It’s like the very beginning of a coding project when there is nothing yet. Then blocks start to fall down. The way you position each block has an impact on the rest of the game. If you place blocks around without much reflexion, letting holes slip in, you’re making life harder for the rest of the game. And if you manage to build a clean, compact structure, then it will be more manageable later in the...

As if by design, the Senate trial of President Trump looked more farcical than serious yesterday. But contra popular belief, David Ignatius argues that impeachment actually bolsters our brand overseas: A consistent theme through the Nixon and Clinton dramas, and now with Trump, is the presidents’ conviction that they didn’t commit any impeachable offenses and that the process is a partisan political sham. Nixon wrote: “I never for a moment believed that any of the charges against me were legally...