Events

Yesterday I started Federico Finchelstein's new book A Brief History of Fascist Lies, and it may have kept me awake longer than I wanted last night. Finchelstein's central thesis is that for fascists, truth was a matter of faith, not of empirical fact, and this truth was made incarnate in the fascist leader: Fascism defended a divine, messianic, and charismatic form of leadership that conceived of the leader as organically linked to the people and the nation. It considered popular sovereignty to be...

As Illinois hits 2,662 Covid-19 deaths and the CDC says the country will hit about that number every day by month's end, May the 4th be with us: Newly-disgorged White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany began her very first press briefing by saying "I will never lie to you." You'll never guess what she did next. James Fallows draws a comparison between former President George W Bush's video message to the country last week and the current president's behavior. New Republic's Libby Watson says, "For...

On 4 May 1970, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State University outside Cleveland: The sky was cloudless, the spring air warm and still. As the morning wore on, the growing crowd of students, now numbering in the thousands, became feisty, and some taunted the soldiers. Just after noon, a group of guardsmen suddenly huddled together, retreated briefly, wheeled toward the right, turned in tandem and fired at the students for 13 seconds. The students were not only...

Poor Commander Borodin, the executive officer on the Red October, who never got to live his dream: Only it turns out, during a pandemic, it's not such a dream: “Most R.V.s are not set up to be disconnected from utilities for extended periods of time, so as a result, when a shelter-in-place order is issued, it creates a nationwide game of musical chairs for people trying to find a spot to hunker down in,” said Shawn Loring, chief executive of the Escapees RV Club, one of the country’s oldest and largest...

Clarence Busch, a man with multiple arrests for intoxication including a hit-and-run drunk-driving charge from less than a week earlier, killed 13-year-old Cari Lightner on a quiet road in Fair Oaks, California, on 3 May 1980. In response, Cari's mother Candace founded MADD: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which in just four years got the Federal Government and most of the states to crack down on drunk driving. The organization and the legislation they got passed reduced drunk-driving deaths 40% by 2000....

A couple of blocks from Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, artist Jim Bachor has made mosaic art in potholes. He added two new installations in the last couple of weeks: The mosaics depict a roll of toilet paper, a bottle of Purell and a can of Old Style, each depicted with halos. Such items have been in limited supply as Americans stocked up amid the pandemic or — as in the case of the beer can — because they’re a product people have relied on for solace during this unprecedented time. “People...

Happy May Day! Or m'aidez? Hard to know for sure right now. The weather in Chicago is sunny and almost the right temperature, and I have had some remarkable productivity at work this week, so in that respect I'm pretty happy. But I woke up this morning to the news that Ravinia has cancelled its entire 2020 season, including a performance of Bernstein's White House Cantata that featured my group, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago. This is the first time Ravinia has done so since 1935. If only that were...

Congratulations! You've made it to the end of April. This month has felt like one of the longest years of my life, and probably yours. So as we head into May, here's what the last few hours of April have wrought: Yesterday, we found out that US GDP had declined 4.8% in the first quarter. Today, we found out another 3.6 million people filed for unemployment last week, bringing the total to 30 million. The worst economy in a decade has become the "worst in our lifetime." The New York City subway will halt...

Security guru Bruce Schneier says Zoom has cleaned up its act a lot, judging by recent surveys of video conferencing apps by the NSA and Mozilla: The company has done a lot of work addressing previous security concerns. It still has a bit to go on end-to-end encryption. Matthew Green looked at this. Zoom does offer end-to-end encryption if 1) everyone is using a Zoom app, and not logging in to the meeting using a webpage, and 2) the meeting is not being recorded in the cloud. That's pretty good, but the...

Thanks, Obama! No, really. The countries that don't pity us are laughing their asses off. This video from a Chinese satire program sums it up nicely: China: We discovered a new virus.America: So what?China: It's DangerousAmerica: It's only a FluChina: Wear a MaskAmerica: Don't wear a Mask... pic.twitter.com/Qxugv8z73J — China Xinhua News (@XHNews) April 30, 2020 Josh Marshall is outraged—at the Trump Administration: [The video] is certainly self-serving from the Chinese perspective. But big picture...