What's Good: Feb. 7, 2020
Board games, more than a few clusterfucks, and electrocuted hot dogs.
Hello, good morning, happy Friday. I think I got so stressed this week that I made my body mad at me, so I would like to take this opportunity to say that Ibuprofen is a miracle and I love it.
In the next few weeks I am looking forward to the opening of the Chicago Board Game Cafe, a new project by a bunch of my friends that I’m very excited about. Look how cool it is:
You can see, peeking through the doorway there, the bank vault full of board games. (Here are some more pictures.) I think I heard that there are at least 300 games that they’ll have available for you to play, and of course there is a full menu, which “features traditional and home-style Vietnamese and Spanish cuisine from executive chef Aaron McKay (Schwa, NoMi, LeLan) and Chef de Cuisine Evan Behmer (Mercat a la Planxa, North Pond).”
Also cocktails, etc. To all of this I say: Hell yeah.
If you live in or near Chicago and would like to go there with me, slide into my DMs.
What the fuck is happening in politics
I am just overwhelmed by this week.
The Iowa Caucus debacle. (Bernie won.) A Sinclair-owned Charleston news network ran a mugshot of a shoplifting suspect for a segment about Jaime Harrison, the good and cool challenger to Lindsey Graham. China is censoring a free-speech hashtag that went viral (ugh) after the doctor who reported coronavirus died. I am also, obviously, leaving a lot out.
Everything feels uniquely and monumentally awful, and it has just been a never-ending rush of this kind of stuff for the last few weeks. And the Iowa thing in particular is so maddening because the errors are so glaringly obvious:
Also caucusing is like an inherently exclusionary way of holding a primary, it’s awful:
The picture, in case you don’t want to click through, is of a young girl laying on the ground at a caucus location, watching something on a phone.
The bright side of all of this is that Bernie very obviously won and that letftist movements are growing so substantially in power and influence that institutions are trying - and failing - to stop them. I like both Bernie and Warren (although I prefer Warren), and I will be happy if either of them wins. Things are certainly trending in that direction. Register to vote and make it so.
Oh and one more bit of good news, The FBI Just Put White Nationalists and Neo-Nazis on the Same Threat Level as ISIS. So maybe now we’ll start actually crushing the Nazis.
Electrocute some hot dogs, what could go wrong
It’s high time we electrocute some hot dogs and see what happens, writes John Carruthers for The Takeout. And, by God, he’s right.
From Doug Sohn of Hot Doug’s:
“We had one on display at [Hot Doug’s] and I remember, as a kid, when things like this were introduced,” he told me via text. “My favorite part was the molten hot razor-sharp spikes that impale the hot dog. I guess Presto didn’t have very good lawyers back then.”
Don’t you want to see what happens? Sure you do, click and find out.
I love The Takeout. Where else are you going to find this kind of quality food writing? Here is a great recipe.
It is morally impermissible to be an anti-vaxxer
I mean, Jesus:
You should read the article and/or Brandy’s thread, this is good and important reporting about an actual public health crisis. Also, Instagram is promoting anti-vaxxer accounts in search results for vaccines.
Law stuff
An incredible thread about modernist courthouses - I love this courthouse, I want more like it:
What is especially significant to me about this thread, and this courthouse, is that the architects made extreme efforts to design it in a way that met the needs of the people working in it. Have you been in older courthouses? They are kind of a clusterfuck! I love them, sure, but they are absolutely not the result of needs-based design. They are the result of a strict adherence to tradition, or whatever, over all else. Surely we can take the last century or so worth of design knowledge and put it to good use without people getting up in arms, right? Apparently not. Sigh.
Here is a prosecutor doing the bare minimum of reporting inappropriate comments:
I don’t really have any qualms at all about praising people for doing the bare minimum, or at least right now. Of course it’s exactly right that reporting inappropriate commentary is the bare minimum, but you don’t even see that happen as much as it should, so. People who do the bare minimum can have a little praise, as a treat.
Something vaguely resembling justice:
I’m not like, proud, or whatever, of the fact that I find this amusing. People should not have their nude bodies put on display for others without their consent. But, also, this is Harvey Weinstein, we all know what he did. An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind, yes, but maybe if you are extremely rich and powerful and you use that money and power to abuse women for years and years and years and hire basically private spy companies to harass and suppress them, well, maybe you can get a little bit of public embarrassment in return while you’re being prosecuted for all of the awful things you did. Probably that will not ruin the social contract or corrupt the broadly-held social morals.
This week saw a really great edition of Money Stuff wherein Matt Levine discusses the apparent trend of executives trading when the SEC informs them that they’re being investigated, which is probably insider trading, but doesn’t seem to get prosecuted. There is a lot of other good stuff in there too.
A lawyer was banned from a bar and decided the best way to handle that situation was smashing all its windows. The bar and its patrons, of course, remained unfazed. If I were banned from a bar, I would probably just find another bar? There are so many in Chicago. Also how, as a lawyer, do you get so shitty so often that the bar ends up banning you? We have ethical standards and shit! Lord.
The editors of the Law Reviews at the 16 top law schools in the United States are all women this year. Hell yeah. However:
But women make up less than a quarter of law firm equity partners, a quarter of tenured and tenure-track law professors, and about a third of all active federal district and appeals court judges.
“There is certainly more glass yet to be shattered,” Duke Law professor Marin Levy told the crowd after ticking off the statistics. “But I see a whole lot of hammers out there.”
Life is full of risks
My friend Don Schaffner - or as we like to call him, Dr. Don - has a great new podcast out called “Risky or Not?”
Dr. Don is a food safety scientist, and he and Ben Chapman also host Food Safety Talk, which is also very good. I have learned so much from listening to Food Safety Talk, and I am extremely excited about this new venture. There have been a number of occasions where Dr. Don has gone on Do By Friday and Max has peppered him with questions, and all of them have been extremely entertaining. There are questions answered on Food Safety Talk, too, but a separate podcast entirely dedicated to answering questions (and especially questions about whether something is risky or not) is a tremendous idea that I am fully in support of.
This week in LCS
BROXAH IS COMING TO NA, BABY!!!
Also another 1-1 week for Team Liquid playing with Shernfire, which, again, I will totally take. They lost to Dignitas and beat FlyQuest. The DIG match was hard to watch, they were doing such a great job staying in the game but just kept losing big advantages despite their unwavering resolve. Gotta get those dragons, man.
Broxah won’t play until next week, so here’s hoping Shern can bring home a 2-0.
You deserve some good animal content
Good job making it through the week. I’m proud of you. Keep going, Animal Crossing is getting released in 42 days.