Events

At least, I don't think so. I'm about to go to a very small wedding where somehow we'll all stay two meters apart, meaning I'll be in my car or indoors all day. Outdoors, meanwhile, it's -13°C. It got down to -16°C overnight, so this qualifies as an improvement. I was hoping to make 10k steps every day this year, but living in Chicago and having some ability to balance "would like to" against "have to" goals, I say no to today. I will get 5,000 though. I haven't missed that number in six years.

These are just some of the things I read at lunch today: Ezra Klein looks at how a $1.9 trillion proposal got through the US Senate and concludes the body has become "a Dadaist nightmare." Several groups of ice fishermen, 66 in total, found themselves drifting into Green Bay (the bay, not the city) yesterday, when the ice floe they were fishing on broke away from the shore ice. Given that Lake Michigan has one of the smallest ice covers in years right now, this seems predictable and tragic. Writing in...

Chicago's temperature hung out right around freezing from 11am Wednesday until 8pm last night. Then the cold front passed. This morning we woke up to -12°C with "warming" predicted to take that up to -9°C this afternoon. Then...it gets serious: Below zero [Fahrenheit] wind chills Friday through Sunday drop to -20s Sunday morning. We're looking at 10 days of overnight lows below -18°C and daily highs around -10°C. But then, this being Chicago, it will warm up like magic the week of the 22nd, and we'll...

Writing for Just Security, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley decodes the structural and content similarities between the propaganda film that introduced the XPOTUS on the Ellipse on January 6th and the propaganda films a certain central-European country produced in the first half of the previous century: Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to...

It's exactly 0°C in Chicago this afternoon, which is a bog-standard temperature for February 3rd. And it's sunny, which isn't typical. So, with the forecast for a week of bitter cold starting Friday evening, I'm about to take a 30-minute walk to take advantage of today's weather. First, though: Trump political appointees who knew or should have known they would lose their jobs on January 20th are throwing tantrums because they lost their parental leave benefits at noon that day, despite other Trump...

Senate Democrats gave the opposition three whole days to stop dicking around with the latest Covid-19 relief package. Then today, with no more than a shrug, they told the Republicans they're tired of the crap: Senate Democrats took the first step Tuesday toward passing a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill without Republican support, advancing their efforts to avoid a GOP filibuster. The vote to kickstart the budget reconciliation process, which passed 50-49, is a sign that leadership expects to have the full...

I've often compared this era in American politics with previous eras, most notably the Antebellum period from Jackson on. Yale historian Joanne Freeman zeroes in on 1850—at least as far as our representatives' behavior in Congress Although couched in calls for unity, [Republican] warnings are remarkably one-sided. There is no talk of reconciliation or compromise. No acceptance of responsibility. Lots of blame casting. And little willingness to calm and inform their base. Even now, some Republicans...

Annalee Newitz, author of Four Lost Cities, explains that urban collapse doesn't look anything like dystopian fiction would have it: It’s always lurking just around the corner, seductive and terrifying, but it never quite happens. Lost-city anxieties, like the ones aroused by the pandemic, result from a misunderstanding of what causes cities to decline. Pandemics, invasions, and other major calamities are not the usual culprits in urban abandonment. Instead, what kills cities is a long period in which...

It's pretty, though: And today, we've even got sunlight. Happy February. I also had a houseguest last night, who has made a thorough job of covering my couch with hair: Thanks, Sophie.

On this day in 2011, Chicago got so much snow it shut down the city for almost 48 hours. So it's fitting we're having the biggest snowfall of the winter so far right now: With 241 mm of snow recorded at the National Weather Service office in Romeoville and 173 mm at O’Hare International Airport as of Sunday morning, the city officially logged its second storm this week with more than 150 mm of snow — something that hasn’t happened since January 2014, officials said. The heaviest period of snowfall was...