Events

This could make it harder to qualify for elite status: Starting next year, United Airlines frequent fliers will have to spend minimum amounts to achieve elite flier status, in addition to flying a certain number of miles or segments, the Chicago-based airline said Tuesday. Those who want to achieve the lowest elite tier of the MileagePlus program, called Premier Silver, will not only have to fly 25,000 miles or 30 segments, but also spend a minimum of $2,500 on United tickets. Purchases on partner...

On Sunday Salon published a description of Rahm Emanuel's management style that suggests he may inadvertently end the Imperial Mayor system we have in Chicago: Emanuel faces scrutiny from groups [former mayor Richord M.] Daley never alienated: public sector unions, liberal progressives and minority coalitions on the city’s South and West side. Since his election, Emanuel’s approval numbers started dropping, and some are charging him as racist — a “murder mayor” deaf to the marginalized swaths of Chicago...

Last night I poked around aa.com, musing about taking a pair of trips this fall. Two, because during the fall and early winter, airfares and hotels are cheaper than the rest of the year, at least in the places I like to go. My original thought was to buy a trip to London and use miles for a second trip somewhere else, on the theory that with 8 daily non-stops between Chicago and London, fares would be lower than to somewhere that has only one daily flight. No, not so much. For travel the weekend of...

Where to begin with the latest from the GOP: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday starkly warned Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) not to eliminate the filibuster on presidential nominations, warning that he’ll end the 60-vote threshold for everything, including bills, if becomes the majority leader. The minority leader sketched out what a Republican-led Senate would do with 51 votes. Job No. 1, he said, would be to repeal Obamacare. He also mentioned lifting the ban on oil drilling...

My poor sick dog didn't completely destroy my rugs, but Eli Peer has a job on his hands. Even without the, uh, contributions from Parker last week, the six years of accumulated dog hair mitigated in favor of a good deep cleaning as well. Eli recommends cleaning rugs every couple of years, so mine were long overdue anyway. Judging by the portion covered by the bookshelves in the photo below—a portion without dog hair, dirt, and innumerable other insults—they looked pretty dire. Here's the room in 2008...

And here is his annual birthday photo: For comparison, here is last year's.

Via Sullivan, scholar John Suiter discovered a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" at Oregon's Reed College in 1956: It’s also easy to forget that Allen Ginsberg’s generation-defining poem “Howl” was once almost a casualty of censorship. The most likely successor to Walt Whitman’s vision, Ginsberg’s oracular utterances did not sit well with U.S. Customs, who in 1957 tried to seize every copy of the British second printing. When that failed, police arrested the poem’s publisher, Lawrence...

As I promised four weeks ago, I have the final data on moving all my stuff to Windows Azure. I delayed posting this data because Azure pricing recently changed, as a number of services went from Preview to Production and stopped offering 25% discounts. The concrete results are mixed at the moment, though increasing within the next couple of months. The intangible results are much, much improved. First, electricity use. Looking at comparable quarters (March through May), my electricity consumption is...

A few weeks ago, Brooklyn writer Noah Shannon wrote a New York Times feature purporting to chronicle his near-death experience on a flight from D.C. that made an emergency a precautionary landing in Philadelphia. No one who knows anything about aviation believed him. Writer and pilot James Fallows, who knows quite a lot about aviation, checks in: I was not on that plane, but I can tell you: This. Did. Not. Occur. The dangling cap-in-hand; the sweat stains; the captain coming out of the cockpit and...

Via TPM, Australian Chief of Army Lt. Gen. David Morrison lays down the law on sexual harassment: