Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

Agreed. And it’s STILL better than the 4-lane nightmares I grew up with in suburban Indiana

Only 3 drivers are delivering books around the city. Usually there are 9. Some are on leave. But CPL is no stranger to staffing shortages. ✍🏽 Rachel Hinton blockclubchicago.org/2026/05/20/s...

Sample size of one, I guess, but this blazing hot take does not at all jive with my decade+ experience as a professor, during which my students have been unfailingly civil (perhaps too much so!) and always concerned about how classroom lessons apply to the real world—especially people not like them!

More on ICE agents detaining a person in North Chicago this morning, leaving a child behind in a car:

Missed this when posted on Friday but a great deep dive on the *other* stadium drama, with the Sox's future owner having his sights set on taking over Amtrak's 14th Street Yard for a new ballpark and an alder in no rush to swap an MLB stadium for an active rail yard. soxmachine.com/2026/05/just...

Recording accurate information, reasoning rigorously, honoring your sources with proper credit, all while also coming up with your own original framework and turns of phrase to inform and sometimes delight the reader have always been appropriately high stakes challenges for human writers

Every single rule, every single norm has broken down. Precision is tossed to the wind like a plastic wrapper from a recently opened package.

Chicago map lovers (you know who you are and there are too many of you to tag), look what's just been released! node.uchicago.edu/collection/m...

But everything will totally go back to normal if your university just cuts a deal. Right? Right??

Love baseball? Miss the days of reading through the box scores each morning, ad free? I built a thing. boxscore.email

Bizarro Paul Ehrlich shit. Read some history fellas

What a dipshit. Classic Cubs fan

Once again, this is money that has been disappeared from the economy University towns and neighborhoods that depend on their local engine of scientific progress for prosperity will suffer And the cutting-edge discoveries that could save so many future lives aren't made bsky.app/profile/maxk...

This happened to me recently and I was stopped at the crosswalk BECAUSE THERE WAS A PERSON CROSSING THE STREET

Yeah same vibes as “where are all the campus protests” BS takes

OMG THEY ARE WINNERS (for now)

And a suspension of the federal gas tax would come at the cost of already inflation-eroded (it hasn’t increased in more than 30 years!) infrastructure investment from the Highway Trust Fund that benefits most Americans instead of a special interest group hellbent on frying the planet

I need everyone in climate to understand that this is as big an emergency as hyperscale data centers.

In this ways and lots of others, our built environment is just not made for the amount of package delivery we suddenly started doing ~15 years ago

This is the problem they want to fix.

John Lewis had John Roberts' number from the jump: takebackthecourt.substack.com/p/john-lewis...

JFC

This is so terrible. The third country removals are human rights catastrophes; South Americans fleeing persecution in their homes, then being dumped in Kinshasa and told they can’t stay and must go… somewhere. Preferably right back to where they fled.

Independent Bookstore Day spots to hit up in Chicago: - Women and Children First (radical, great poetry section) - Myopic Books (huge, great poetry section) - Armadillo’s Pillow (best smelling bookstore) - City Lit Books (by a blind date book!) - Lilliput Books (another woman-owned spot!)

If you paid taxes for 2025, you likely paid: $124 — school lunch & nutrition programs $49 — diplomacy to prevent wars $19 — USPS $19 — Federal Aviation Administration $18 — national parks and $4,049 — weapons and war. These priorities are hurting us all. We need change. #TaxDay

I called up the owner of Chicago’s newest record shop, which opens in Rogers Park a week from Saturday. It’s stock includes a selection of records from Aadam Jacobs, the internet’s favorite live recording engineer (whose decades-long archive of concert recordings went viral last week)

“Why aren’t college students protesting” stories are almost always wrong (they are protesting), omit crucial context (they were brutally punished for protesting before), and somehow suggest that 19 yr olds have more moral responsibility than elected officials three times their age

I wish I could have sat in on the meeting where Anthropic decided the Claude logo should be Kurt Vonnegut's drawing of an asshole

So we are going to have a global carbon tax, supported by the US but administered by Iran...

We’re on strike today! Support our fight for a fair contract by NOT visiting the @propublica.org website or engaging with ProPublica stories today. Tell ProPublica’s management you won’t cross the picket line: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

The comment period to protect Chaco Canyon ends on Tuesday. They are giving less than a full week for public input on the desecration of one of the most holy places on earth.

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

I’m not religious in the least but even I thought, wow, on Easter, no less. Can’t wait to see how all the MAGA pastors and congregations rationalize this

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but usurping the power of the purse isn't just one constitutional violation among all the many others. It is, uniquely and singularly, the death of constitutional government altogether. Game over, end of story, you now live in an autocracy.

the trump administration is selling this country wholesale to rapacious, extractive industries that will destroy our collective resources for private profit morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-t...

Wilhoit’s law remains undefeated. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Proud of my 9-year-old’s protesting (and artwork)! This is what democracy looks like!

Our tollway system is fundamentally backwards: we charge drivers extra to skirt around the city and in the suburbs where there is no feasible transit alternatives, while letting suburban motorists drive straight in and out of the heart of the city for free, actively competing with Metra and the 'L'.

My resignation letter

hope you don’t need anything that comes in [checks notes] plastic packaging

Shocking but not surprising, part million www.statnews.com/2026/03/23/n...

Mask off moment here from likely candidate for Chicago Mayor

🤔

CHICAGO SUMMER IS HEEEEEERE

Ooohhheeee you know spring has arrived when the smell of mulch permeates the North Shore

I don't "feel" my work has been stolen. I know it. This kind of language use by the NYT is part of the problem. Framing it as some kind of emotional woo woo instead of a clear copyright breach...

Donahue is the agent who threatened to shoot bystanders in Evanston. We also saw him at the scene in Minneapolis immediately after feds shot and killed Alex Pretti:

Cesar Chavez gets me too’d in a big, big way. Can’t say I’m totally shocked but OMGGGGG what Dolores Huerta felt she had to keep secret for more than half a century to protect the movement that mattered most to her.

If he's going to get a national profile on the strength of a younger woman's campaign, I'm going to come out and say it: during his short-lived tenure as a math professor, Biss had an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of his undergraduate students. I was that student.