Events

It is hot in Chicago: 34°C that feels like 38°C because of the 22°C dewpoint. Last night the temperature didn't even go below 77°C. I helped a friend move a couple of things into storage this morning and I'm now soaked through. Parker hates it especially because he has two fur coats. (He deposited a significant amount of one of them around the house this week, though.) I plan to spend the rest of the day inside with my air conditioning. You know where else it's way too hot? East Antarctica. And that...

I kind of got into the flow today, so things to read later just piled up: Illinois found 1,532 new known Covid-19 cases as of today, with four downstate, bright-red counties now getting warned that their numbers are rising quickly. The GOP failures on containing this disease keep mounting. Greg Sargent points out that "Trump's authoritarian crackdown is so bad that even some in the GOP are blasting it." Maeve Higgins finds that her American passport just doesn't work anymore. Garmin's entire production...

– He lollygags around the Rose Garden. He lollygags on his way to the Hill. He lollygags in and out of the Oval. Do you know what that makes him? Larry? – A lollygagger! – A lollygagger. What's his record, Larry? – Won in '16! – Won in '16. How'd he ever win one? – It's a miracle! – It's a miracle. This is a simple game. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. You got it? Now we have got a global pandemic raging for months. Hearing's at 8 in the morning. – Ball, catch, throw, elephant...

Four days after I switched from Fitbit to Garmin, all of Garmin's online services have gone offline: The problems with those services also mean that a range of features can't be used on Garmin's own devices: it is not possible to create new routes to go running or cycling, for instance, or to share those activities on services like Strava once they are completed. The devices themselves continue to work as normal with the data they do have, however, meaning that any data collected during the outage will...

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...