Events

I had enough time during today's 8-hour meeting to queue up some articles to read later. Here they are: From August 2012, Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand Reader From today, Sam Harris on the high cost of tiny lies and an interview with Paul Bloom The New Republic reminds us that Rob Ford may be awful, but Mel Lastman paved the way for him, and how bad a burst pipeline really is to your community Split family portraits, by artist Ulric Collette, are really cool Anita Sarkeesian has another installment in her series...

Geography is fun. It explains how Canadian airline WestJet can manage their newest trans-Atlantic flight which gets to Dublin in a little more than 4 hours using a 737-700: Dublin itself might not be that strange, but this isn’t coming from a big city. No, it’s actually going to be a flight from St John’s, way out in Newfoundland. The metro area, if you can call it that, has almost 200,000 people. That’s good enough to be the 20th largest metro area in Canada. Yeah… 20th. For WestJet, there is very...

I always seem to miss the live shows: A nude woman claiming to be the "goddess of the train" halted southbound Red Line service for a short time early Saturday afternoon until police could escort her off to jail at the Granville station. The "goddess" said she was going to the front car to drive the train and told everyone else to get off, according to Anne, who shared these photos. The Sun-Times speculated "it appeared she was suffering from a mental illness." That's just harsh. I suspect performance art.

This little app is fun. Red are places I've been to but not stayed overnight; amber indicates at least one overnight; blue shows multiple visits; and green means I've lived, worked, or spent more than 30 aggregate days there: Clearly I need to visit the Maritimes and Territories. Oh, and Alaska and Hawaii.

At least, by number of stations: There’s more good news on the Divvy bike-share front. The Chicago Department of Transportation announced this morning that they scored a $3 million federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement grant to add 75 more docking stations to the 400 already planned. The system recently reached 300 stations and 3,000 bikes. While the expansion of Divvy is an exciting development, CDOT’s press release exhibits a bit of Second City syndrome, boasting that with 475...

Another packed day, another link roundup: Richard Cohen is still racist. Suzanne Somers is merely stupid. (As one person in my office put it, "You know nothing Chrissy Snow.") Bikers in Chicago often have wearable cameras because we piss off drivers a lot. It's going to be 16°C on Sunday even though it was below freezing yesterday and today. If you missed Allie Brosh on Fresh Air yesterday, go and listen to it. All for now.

Saw this coming: American Airlines and US Airways struck a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow the airlines to complete a $17 billion merger and create the world's largest carrier, the airlines announced Tuesday. The deal, which heads off a trial planned later this month, calls for the combined airline to give up some takeoff-and-landing slots and some airport gates, including two American Airlines gates at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. It also requires the combined...

Or, "Jenny McCarthy is an idiot." We on the left have stupid people in our midst, same as they on the right. The right's stupid people say mixed marriages make them gag and bring assault rifles where moms are meeting to plan gun-control events. On the left, our stupid people think vaccines are dangerous. You know, jabs: those little pricks that have saved millions of us from dying of childhood diseases. As we've known for 40 years or so, if you don't vaccinate enough people, you get disease epidemics...

Colin Woodward, writing in this quarter's Tufts alumni journal, summarizes his book about the regional views of violence in the U.S—dividing us up into 11 "nations" with cohesive cultural and social histories: Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of...

The Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has ruled that One World Trade Center is taller than Willis Tower: The decision by the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat hinged on whether the tower's mast was a spire, which counts in height measurements, or an antenna, which doesn't. The decision will end Willis Tower's reign of 40 years as the nation's tallest building. The announcement culminated weeks of speculation about the ruling, which drew widespread...