Chicago – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

More knowledge generally diffused

It’s a Sunday. Leaves are beginning to fall as Autumn closes in. It’s a good morning to do some reading, even if it’s just “more knowledge generally diffused.” So, settle in for some Sunday Morning Reading.

I too often fall into the trap of thinking one thing or the other might be inevitable. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m off base. When it comes to AI, what it might or might not be is still anybody’s guess. Matteo Wong thinks Nothing About This Was Inevitable. I agree when it comes to the technology. I strongly disagree when it comes to how humans inevitably do what humans inevitably do when they think they found the golden ticket.

In theatre rehearsals I often refer to “the little theatre in my mind” when giving direction to actors. It’s a place where the conscious and subconscious do battle when I’m directing a show. Mathew Ingram wonders What Makes Our Minds Different And Where Does It Come From? The mind may be an unchanging observer of whatever we do as Descartes says. But who pops the popcorn?

In a throwback post (so glad he does this), Neil Steinberg takes on James Boswell’s take on Samuel Johnson in Musings Of An 18th Century Giant Still Relevant Today. “It must be considered, that we have now more knowledge generally diffused.”

Kim Zetter explores The Secrets Of A US Spyware King The damn thing is there are no secrets really. Just pervasiveness.

A fascinating beginning to a series at The Intellectualist on The Great Fragmentation. Part II or How The Old Gatekeepers Made Themselves Easy To Kill Off is especially worth your while.

I often maintain we’re still fighting the American Civil War. I’ll go to my grave defending that position, primarily because it began long before 1861 in an era we do our best to ignore for fear of coming face to face with ourselves. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz delves into a bit of that ignored history with The True Story Of The Actual First Shot Fired In The Civil War.

On an Internet site called sheets.works there’s a fascinating piece, portrayed both visually and to a degree in text called The People Holding Up The Internet.

Chicago lost a legend this week with the passing of football legend Mike Ditka. Few of us pass without becoming synonymous with an era, a city, or a time. For better, or worse, Ditka defined this toddlin’ yet often troubled town of Chicago as much as the original Mayor Daley ever did. Brad Biggs pens a nice obituary that focuses on Ditka’s football career. Ditka had his critics, some of whom made their criticism known after his passing. In our world of more and more knowledge generally diffused, and thus I dare say confused, it’s frustrating how challenging it can be when all the parts of a life are summed up, beyond the moments and achievements which gives meaning to multitudes.

(Photo by Pramod Tiwari on Unsplash

Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you want. It’s free. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. This site does not use affilate links.

RIP Mike Ditka

A quick post to mark the passing of a Chicago legend, Mike Ditka who passed away today, October 9, 2026 at the age of 86.

Mike Ditka

Ditka, the only coach to lead the Chicago Bears to a Super Bowl victory in 1986, epitomized the Chicago Bears’ style of football, and also in many ways the toughness of Chicago itself. As a player he’s credited with basically reinventing the position of tight end. He carried his rough and tumble approach to the game into his coaching days.

As a youngster who lived no where near Chicago growing up, Ditka, along with Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers were players that made me a fan of the Monsters of the Midway. Of course once I moved to Chicago those early boyhood admirations became more entrenched.

Rest in peace, Coach.

Bear Down.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.

Sunday Morning Reading

Is reading, like writing, in danger?

Time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. But reader beware. Some think reading might be in danger. Read on. If you choose to.

Ben white 1MHU3zpTvro unsplash. A man sitting by a lake or river, reading a book.

Like a lot of folks who write I’ve been recently writing about writing in this AI age. But writing is only one side of the page writers want readers to turn. Readers don’t turn pages if they don’t like what they read. Bryan Cantrill thinks readers might be slowing their roll in his piece The Revolt of the Reader. I’d give it a read whether you write, or simply read the words of others.

Becky Ferreira takes a look at how The Remnants Of A Lost ‘Supercontinent’ Just Rewrote The History Of Life On Earth. Accepting that would require a global scale of editing and require quite a bit of new reading.

Roko’s Basilisk. Ever heard of it? Yes or no, you should check out Albert Buneko’s piece What If We Could Have A Future?

Perhaps you’ve heard that there’s a 10% chance AI will destroy humanity in the next decade? Over the weekend Anthropic’s Dario Amodei penned a large piece (or maybe he just had Claude generate it-who knows?) titled We Must Pace The Frontier. In the race he’s running he’s calling for things to slow down and governments to step in because there’s danger out there. It’s caused quite a stir. Fellow race participants, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, have quickly jumped in to agree. Either these guys are seeing the writing on the wall from folks who just aren’t buying their overhyped promises, or one of their AIs cracked into something we don’t know about yet. Or it could just be more hype. Or it could just be an attempt to push their agenda in upcoming talks the US is to have with China. Given that no one trusts anything they say, who knows? I’d say who cares, but there is that whole future thing that Albert Buneko was writing about.

Speaking of writing on the wall, apparently the gold rush for vibe coding apps isn’t what it looked like it might be. Paul Ford asks A.I. Was Supposed To Give Us Killer Apps. What Happened? The world only needs so many task management apps.

In the political realm folks are turning their attention to January 3, 2027 as a possible next January 6th coup. Michael Luttig lays it all out in The Final Battle For America’s Democracy. It’s a scary read. I think what he lays out is indeed possible. That said, if there is such a thing as a final battle, I think it was lost with the last presidential election.

With a hat tip to David Todd McCarty, I discovered Patrick Metzger’s piece What Canadians Won’t Admit About America. You should discover it as well.

And if you’re not going to be doing any reading this Sunday, perhaps go out and take a walk. Before you do, read David Todd McCarty’s Life On Goshen Landing Road.

Read well.

(Image from Ben White on Unsplash)

Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you want. It’s free. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. This site does not use affilate links.

Sunday Morning Reading

Reading and thinking on a rainy late-summer morning.

I have a love/hate relationship with late August in Chicago. Hints of Autumn, my favorite season, become stronger. The sun rises later, which I’m not a fan of. That’s where we are on this rainy Sunday morning in Chicago, so it’s time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. And thinking.

Ronit shaked ENNtoNUxhU unsplash. Transparent umbrellas appear to float in the sky.

I like to think I keep an open mind. I also like to think that the life we’re living currently will one day be better. Bottom line, I like to think. Daryl Van Tongeren says that Everyone Wants To Think They’re Open-Minded. Here’s Why Most People Aren’t. My mind is increasingly closing to the possibility of things getting better in my lifetime.

Natasha MH explores egos and gatekeepers in The Structural Shift Beneath Our Feet. I’d argue the shift is in our minds.

David Todd McCarty says that Engagement Might Be The Problem, Not The Solution. To my way of thinking, it never was the solution. Unless you were running one of the engagement platforms.

Davi Ottenheimer sees a similarity between the tech bros and plantation owners. He’s not wrong. Check out “AI Own” And The Techbro Dream of Plantation Life.

Zoe Williams tells us How To Spot A Psychopath, saying ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat.” Given that most probably haven’t encountered the latter, perhaps it’s no surprise that the real deal is often so difficult to spot.

Neil Steinberg continues to delve into his archives, this time with a piece from 2015 called Face Fear. When you look and think beneath the surface, there’s no wonder what wonders you’ll discover.

I’ve attended a number of wakes, visitations, memorials, and celebrations of life recently. “Wake” is my favorite term of art for masking grief. It just feels more appropriate to my way of thinking. Timing is everything, so Natasha MH’s piece While The Dead Was Sleeping struck a chord this week.

Speaking of those departed, this week we lost one of the good ones, Dolly Parton. Lots of things written about her extraordinary life and legacy. I particularly enjoyed this piece from Heather Cox Richardson.

It’s a dreary day and some of the links above are also are a bit dreary. So, to close on a cheerier note, Mastodon friend Ian Robinson linked to this piece called How To Talk To Comedy Writer from Andy Reilly. If you’ve ever paid attention to comedy, I bet you’ll recognize some of what you’ve seen, if not why you laughed at it.

(Image from Ronit Shaked on Unsplash)

Sunday Morning Reading

Where does it begin? Where does it end?

Origin stories. Crazy stuff sometimes. Living in a world when we can make up, massage, or hallucinate just about anything, it’s no wonder that origin stories captivate and often capture us in our quest for meaning. Perhaps so we can have disagreements over them. I wonder what the origin of that is all about? This week’s Sunday Morning Reading touches on origin stories as well as some of the usual topics that I find of interest and worth sharing.

A typewriter with a page inserted with the sentence "In The Beginning" Getty images c O6QssKbtI unsplash.

Ross Anderson tells us The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised. Even if we discovered that this is all a simulation, I’m sure it would be debated, monetized, summarized, and bastardized into meaninglessness somehow.

No origin story is complete without some sort of religious or spiritual interpretation. Even Artificial Intelligence isn’t immune to that human phenomenon. Hayden Field explores How AI Bots Started A Religion — Humans Immediately Followed.

Everybody makes mistakes. Neil Steinberg suggests we might be getting too comfortable with that fact and a writer’s duty is to aim higher for accuracy, while admitting our flaws in To Write Is Too Err.

On a political front, everyone seems mired in a mud fight about how the Democrats might be unable to reconcile their progressive and moderate wings. Jay Caspian King takes a look at Subaru Socialists And The Great Disappointed, trying to figure out what’s behind some of the millennial thinking these days, as well as that of the generation that followed them, which he labels “The Great Disappointed.” Life is disappointment. Living is how you deal with it.

Meanwhile, David Todd McCarty asks What Does It Mean To Be A Moderate? I don’t have the answer to that. Frankly, given that everyone is so pissed off I don’t think it matters. That said, while how we insist on defining ourselves might help talk about political life, it sure isn’t helping cure what ails us.

Apparently the one thing that all flavors of the political spectrum can agree on is that data centers are not a good thing. Except those who make the policy and accept the bribes to allow data center construction in my backyard or yours. Molly Taft looks at How Data Centers Broke American Politics. I might argue that they revealed rather than broke. Because the bagmen got too clumsy.

I’ve been following the goings on at Google for most of the summer because the goings on are going to change things. In my view, not for the better. Like Donald Trump, Google hasn’t been shy about saying it’s going to screw things up. (My words, not theirs.) This week there was a shakeup among Google’s AI hierarchy that suggests the screws on the screw up are tightening down in what seems like a rush to productize too soon. Hayden Field gets into The Messy Politics Behind Google’s Big AI Shakeup.

Every origin story is one that also reaches an end. I commented on the passing of Om Malik several Sunday’s ago. Thanks to John Gruber for linking to Om’s final blog post, something I somehow missed. It’s about so much more than the headline suggests. But that’s what Om Malik was about. So much more. Check out The Myth, The Mythos and the Man. I’ll close with this quote from his post:

The sophist is selecting, sequencing, and presenting in ways that produce belief without requiring the audience to do the work. Mythos, for Plato, was the domain of poets and myth-makers. Useful for educating the young, dangerous when deployed as a substitute for rigorous argument among adults.

(Image licensed from Getty Images for Unsplash+)

A Bit Of Good News In Illinois About Digital Grocery Store Coupons

A nod to those less technically inclined

A bit of good news for Illinois residents in this follow up about Electronic Shelf Labels.

I wrote about Electronic Shelf Labels a bit ago, and the problems I had with not only reading them, but the problems I could foresee them being used for, including surge or dynamic pricing. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a law to take effect on January 1, 2027 that will at least require grocery store owners to honor promotions offered via digital means to those who may not have access to the technology to access the promotions.

Essentially the law means grocery stores have to make the discount available to all customers, regardless of whether or not they are using an app to access the promotions.

Based on the news coverage and the reading of the law I’m unclear how this will go into effect, but at least it will allow customers to take advantage of promotions without using an app.

In my experience this has caused numerous problems and delays at the checkout counter, especially for senior customers. Grocery store cashiers (when you shop at a store that still offers them) also complain.

I’m not sure what impact this may have on surge pricing, which is obviously a goal from the purveyors of digital coupons, but if stores have to make the same discount available to everyone it should at least slow down the momentum towards that type of marketing.

I doubt this solves the readability issue though.

Dry Throats and Smokey Sunset

Smoke gets in your everywhere

Out on an errand run, I grabbed this shot of an orange dot of a sun trying to burn through the smoke and haze blowing through the US from Canadian wildfires. A hazy street scene in Chicago looking down a road with cars. A tall street light pole with a green "N Laramie Av" sign stands in the foreground, with the prominent clock tower of the Copernicus Center visible on the right against a dim, glowing sun obscured by thick smoke from Canadian wildfires

Forgot to grab my mask as I headed out for the short trip, so traveling from two parking lots into two stores, my throat and sinuses dried up with that burning taste in a hurry.

Seeing very little in town traffic for this time of day, it sounds like most folks are heeding warnings and staying inside. Wish I had.

Stay careful out there.

We Survived The Window Install Adventure

Long hot day of work well done.

That was a day. We survived the adventure of having new windows installed in our two flat. 18 windows in total between the two units.

We actually had the easy part as we moved to the basement while the crew did the hard work.

I’m not sure how the guys doing that hard work survived, but Daniel and his crew pulled it off like the professionals they are. Hot, sweaty work on a hot steamy day. They began unloading just after 7am and finished the job just before 5pm.

So, job well done. Kudos to the crew and kudos to Renewal By Anderson for every step along the way. We’re very pleased with the work.

Now that’s over, we’ll rehang some curtains and blinds, and then we’re on to new adventures for the rest of the summer.

Sunday Morning Reading

The art of dancing on the line that separates and defines humanity

It was a good week for reading good writing. It’s a better week for sharing what popped up. A variety of topics, spanning art and the making and selling of it, technology — which these days is more about the selling than the tech — the humanity, or lack thereof, behind it all, and…well to continue a list would sell it all short. Here’s hoping you enjoy the links shared in today’s Sunday Morning Reading as much as I enjoy sharing them. Yia Mas!

An overhead, first-person perspective shows a person lying on their back on a teal couch, holding open a large book to read. The person's head is closest to the foreground, with long, blonde-streaked hair spilling downward. They are wearing a deep maroon, long-sleeved sweater and light grey sweatpants. Image from Matias north v8DSLoY80Xk unsplash.

Om Malik wrote one of the best things I’ve read in quite some time. We Are Living In Pinocchio’s World is about lying. It’s about AI. It’s about a pen. But it’s about so much more.

Cory Doctorow’s Refining Humanity takes on our propensity for explanation, personhood for machines, and that line we seem to want to dance with defining just what makes us human in the midst of it all.

Meanwhile Martyn Berlin of Martyn’s Random Musings finds himself an outcast in To Have A Moral Stance On AI Is To Be An Outcast, And It Sucks.

At what cost art? Natasha MH wonders and writes about it in Sold At A Premium. At what cost, anything?

Mike Masnick thinks it’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. You could argue the same could be said about most aspects of human endeavor. But then that’s the point. Tech is just another in a long line. Check out Enshittification, Despotification, And The Open Internet.

“The only conviction worth having is the kind you could lose tomorrow and survive it.” JA Westenberg warns us not to take a pill, regardless of color in Be Thou Not Pilled.

Mathew Ingram wonders Have Investors In AI Companies Lost Their Minds? I’m not sure we can call them investors any more. As to their minds? No comment.

Two interesting takes on what’s going on the business of making movies in Hollywood that occasionally and almost accidentally is about making art. M.G. Siegler talks about how YouTube Beats AI To Disrupting Hollywood. Meanwhile Sonny Bunch takes a look at The Thoughtlessness of AI Filmmaking.

Word came down this week that a restaurant was finally going to fill one of the retail spaces in the Trump Tower in Chicago, after they had all sat empty for seventeen years. Neil Steinberg asks Will Chicago Happily Eat Dolmades And Drink Roditis In Trump Tower?

To close, click through the popover on John Gruber’s post This Is A Dickover, and give the post a read. You know what a Dickover is. Now you have a name for it.

(Image from Matias North on Unsplash)

Yikes! Chicago Bears Caleb Williams Will Be On The Cover of Madden NFL 27

Cursed or not?

Chicago Bears football fans are gasping with excitement and stocking up on antacid today after it was announced that the team’s quarterback, Caleb Williams, has been picked to grace the 2027 cover of the popular game Madden NFL.

Promotional cover art for the video game "Madden 27" features an action shot of Chicago Bears Quarterback Caleb Williams mid-air preparing to toss a pass against a deep blue sky.

It’s certainly great recognition for the quarterback who had some amazing moments on the field last year in a surprising Bears season. He’s an exciting, if sometimes erratic player who managed to pull out last minute victories with some spectacular plays more times than not. Of course the other side of that coin is that more consistent play by the quarterback and the team should theoretically lead to less of those hair raising/pulling moments. But a win is a win.

However, the cover recognition is also believed by quite a few to be a curse for the player chosen, presaging down seasons or possible injury. According to CBS Sports 14 or the 24 players chosen between 2001 and 2024 had less than spectacular seasons after being so anointed.

Whether or not it’s a curse, who knows. But it does just add another level of anxiety for Bears fans already on edge heading into a season where we should find out what this team is made of after a season that surprised most. With the upcoming season schedule rated as the toughest in the NFL and a number of players who led the way last year lost to free agency or retirement, it was already shaping up to be nerve wracking.

It’s not easy being a Chicago sports fan.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.