Recovering bookseller, skeptical lawyer, diarist manqué. Clinically exasperated. Mom always said, "you learn something new every day if you're not careful."
Urbs in Horto
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"I have seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that dogs think humans are nuts."
~ John Steinbeck
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MC Pastoret retweeted
Or, instead of using made-up Shakespeare-sounding phrases, you could deploy actual Shakespeare insulting quotes, like:
"You have such a February face, so full of frost, of storm, and cloudiness." — Much Ado About Nothing
“[You have] not so much brain as earwax.” — Troilus and Cressida
"Thy face is not worth sunburning." — Henry V
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MC Pastoret retweeted
“The purpose of punctuation is to make writing easier to read,” Louis Menand writes, “and making writing easier to read means giving greater and greater numbers of people access to the written word.” A new book by Florence Hazrat, celebrating punctuation in all its forms, makes the striking claim that the history of punctuation is the history of humanity itself. It has entered into a class of books about the mechanics of writing—to which Sarah L. Kaufman’s “Verb Your Enthusiasm” belongs. But how do we think about these sentences, words, and marks amid a current evolution in the phenomenology of reading? Authors like Hazrat and Kaufman want us to understand reading as a bodily experience, one which can transmit an author’s state of mind, or set of emotions, to our own. Menand considers the strange power of, among other things, punctuation: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/UV…
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We have today’s winner in the NPR Reporter Pronunciation Freestyle: ‘maritime’ is now “merry-time”
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Well, that explains the goddamn jet noise over the Brassy End this afternoon.
It wasn't just the helicopter, there were a lot of aircraft intercepted.
nbcchicago.com/news/local/ch…
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Oh, man!
In 1964, a 13-year-old student at London's Barbara Speake Stage School was hired as an extra for the Beatles' first movie, A Hard Day's Night.
He was sent to the Scala Theatre and placed in the audience while the Beatles filmed their concert sequence.
His job was simple: be one of the screaming young Beatles fans.
When the movie came out, he looked for himself but couldn't find the footage.
Thirty years later, producer Walter Shenson gave him the unused film from that day. He went through it until he finally found his 13-year-old self in the audience.
The performance was "You Can't Do That," which had been cut from the finished film.
The kid in the middle of this photo went on to have quite a music career of his own.
That 13-year-old was Phil Collins.
ALT Phil Collins in Beathles movie
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Everybody who supports or opposes Trump should read this, the thoughts of prominent factchecker Daniel Dale on the context and proliferation of Trump's lies.
I started fact-checking Donald Trump 10 years ago this month. Here are 15 thoughts on the nature of his lying, how it is received by the public and how it is covered by the media: cnn.com/2026/09/27/politics/…
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They called it perfectly on this.
The Chicago skyline is looking great from the Harrison-Dever Crib this morning!
It's shaping up to be a beautiful late September day with highs in the upper 60s to lower 70s, a light breeze from the east, and a gradual increase in upper-level clouds.
Enjoy the day, everyone!
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MC Pastoret retweeted
The @nytimes has made some mistakes over its 175-year history. Says who? Says the @nytimes. The great @adamnagourney recounts some of the paper's most bruising screwups -- and its commitment to correcting the record when we do get it wrong. nytimes.com/2026/09/20/busin…
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Tufted Duck coming in, legs and wings akimbo! 😁
Taken at Radipole Lake in Weymouth, Dorset. 😊🦆
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Pour one out for the building that housed Frank’s Bar in Lincoln Park… the wrecking ball came for it Thursday. 1/2
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MC Pastoret retweeted
It's important to learn math not because you may need to do long division as an adult, but because it promotes rigorous thinking. IMO, history and causal inference are among the most important subjects a young person can study — math being central to the second.
A significant problem in public discourse right now is people's inability to critically evaluate causal claims (e.g., vaccines cause autism, deporting immigrants will solve the housing crisis, etc.). The less able people are to critically evaluate causal claims, the worse our democracy functions because people can be preyed upon for votes. You should promote anything that improves rigorous thinking, even if it doesn't have market value. In fact, we should stop thinking of education only in the context of what improves the economy.
IMO, this is distinct from knowing your own address (which Huang can avoid because he's wealthy). Memorizing facts like this may or may not be important, but it's distinct from rigorous thinking.
HUANG: “.. Try getting a kid to do long division right now. Multiplication tables are starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots? My goodness. ..
.. Does it matter? .. I don’t think it does.”
@ezraklein @JensenHuang
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“throne-sniffing weasel”
A descriptor for the ages.
There is no better example I can think of how Trump isn’t a steward of America or remotely patriotic or even nationalistic. He is simply a partisan of his own ego. This is just gross. He’s trying to suck up to a dictator and adversary by mocking another American president. And, btw, the anonymous functionary running this account will be remembered as a tiny little throne-sniffing weasel.
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I have obvi devoured ALL of the Last Ditch discourse, but this @helenlewis piece, imho, is among the best: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…
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Early voting begins Thursday in collar counties but not until Oct. 1 in Chicago and Oct. 7 in suburban Cook @rap30
chicagotribune.com/2026/09/2…
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