This is the grave of Big Bill Thompson. Born in 1869 in Boston, William Hale Thompson grew up in Chicago. In fact, his parents moved there when their baby boy was a mere 9 days old, which seems pretty early to move a baby! The family had roots in Chicago from its very beginning; his […]

Elimination day in a rare playoff appearance for my baseball team, so I will likely be a wreck for the next 3ish hours. The Tigers are actually favored on the road although the Mariners have a better offense. This is partly because the Tigers are starting the AL’s best pitcher. But part of it is […]

This is an ominous development indeed: A majority of the Supreme Court appeared sympathetic on Wednesday to arguments by an Illinois congressman that political candidates should be able to challenge their states’ election laws. During the approximately two-hour argument, the justices grappled with what political candidates, particularly those with nearly guaranteed success in an election, […]

This article is about 34 tons of plutonium that the US government doesn’t know what to do with. The current suggestion is to use it to power nuclear reactors to run all that AI nobody wants. The article lacks historical grounding and thus gets a lot wrong. There’s a story about that plutonium, but it’s […]

Great news for California, bad news for people who want higher housing prices, better electoral maps for Republicans, and fewer people living in states that protect reproductive rights: Today California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 79, a bill that will make it legal to build more homes near the highest capacity transit […]

Approximately every human being on the planet has been texting me about the Qatar air base story: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced Friday that the Pentagon has agreed to host a new Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho, saying that the nation has played a “core part” in securing the Gaza peace deal. […]

Most any discussion of Israel-Palestine in the United States these days boils down to intra-coalitional warfare. Unsurprisingly, the ceasefire that began yesterday is being weaponized for conflict with the Democratic coalition: There are a great many people who are deeply invested in the argument that Biden could have ended the war by applying even the […]

Tom Friedman is writing Tom Friedman things this morning, about how if Donald Trump stays all focused and committed and immersed in the crucial details and the difficult diplomacy, and sees the current Gaza “peace plan” all the way through he should be given the Nobel Peace Prize, “or maybe even two.” Besides the screamingly […]

I’ve been looking quite closely at the literature on various types of dementia, and it’s scary as hell. Basically if you’re diagnosed with say Alzheimer’s at age 79, top pick a number totally at random, the disease was already progressing in a subclinical way when you were 70 and quite possibly when you were 65. […]

On October 10, 1842, a planter Eli Capell noted the precise amount of cotton picked by each of his slaves in his logbooks. This seemingly minor moment is in fact a really useful way to understnad a core part of our labor history–how planters used modern capitalist techniques to control slave labor. Slavery built American […]

I think Max’s takeaway about how Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel cancelled the hotel room of a younger female colleague so she would be forced to stay with him is exactly correct: He was definitely hired *because* he's this kind of person, not in spite of it. [image or embed] — […]

If you’re going to make your political career as a Donald Trump tribute act might as well go all the way. To the bank! Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton went from being a middle-class lawyer to a multimillionaire during his two decades on a public official’s salary, according to thousands of pages of previously unreported documents that […]

 A grand jury has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on a fraud charge, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Thursday. James was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on one count after a mortgage fraud investigation, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because […]

MAJOR SCANDAL ALERT: Trump just briefly spoke to the Attorney General on an airport tarmac. No wait, it was this: There are certain hypotheticals you simply never get to test out. This seems to be an exception. How will a judge and later a jury treat an indictment if you had to fire multiple prosecutors […]

We have confirmation for what the text itself indicated: the Truth Social post Trump sent to Pam Bondi demanding that she maliciously prosecute James Comey was intended to be a direct message: In his second term, President Trump has taken control of the Justice Department in ways he could have only dreamed of during his first. Then, […]

It’s really hard to write commentary on or explication of today’s news. For one thing, we have Donald Trump. He is President of the United States of America and thus possesses stores of power incommensurate with his understanding of his job. So we have to pay attention to what he says, however demented. And that […]

We did it! We are now officially the dumbest place on Earth: I asked Aaron Rodgers about this, and he tells me that there’s some very limited evidence suggesting the possibility of a correlation between circumcision and autism rates. These are a couple of cohort studies with all the limitations that implies: other studies of […]

I’ve long believed that the real reason for the right of fascism in America is that they know that the people don’t support their ideas and so you have to fix the game by moving ever farther toward authoritarianism in order to win. It usually works too, but you do have to deal with the […]

I have an op-ed at the Lexington Herald-Leader on how foreign policy could matter for the 2026 election cycle. Most of the piece is about Kentucky-specific concerns about tariffs, immigration, and what not, but I conclude with a paean to civic responsibility: Public servants have responsibilities to their constituents. The first is to listen. Foreign […]

As Jack McCoy once said, there’s meat on a ham sandwich: A grand jury Tuesday night declined to indict two protesters in the Chicago area accused of assaulting law enforcement, the latest in a shocking string of failures by the Trump Department of Justice.  Securing grand jury indictments is usually nearly automatic; only the prosecutors get to […]

A few days ago I noted I don’t really know anything about I/P issues, and then proceeded to demonstrate that by speculating that I couldn’t imagine Hamas agreeing to a peace deal that seemed practically indistinguishable from the outside from an unconditional surrender: Israel and Hamas on Thursday edged closer to ending their devastating two-year […]

This is the grave of Richard Daley. Born in 1902 in Chicago, Daley grew up in the working class Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport. The family didn’t have a lot of money but his mother was deeply involved in suffrage politics, unusual for an Irish woman of that time and place. He went to the Catholic […]

OpEd: During the midterms, voters need to pay attention to the issues — from bourbon to aerospace — that affect them most.

A good lesson about “momentum.” I will admit that when a dropped fly ball set up a 3-run game-tying Judge homer after the Blue Jays got out to a 6-1 lead after absolutely destroying the Yankees over two games in Toronto, it had the feeling of a series flipping play. Well, as they say it’s […]