Melancholy anniversary of the Day Everything Changed

And an update on the state of the Sentinel

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3-10-2022 (issue No. 26)

First, a quick update on the state of the Picayune Sentinel six months after launch: I started with about 4,000 subscribers — readers who had responded to my “if you want to stay in touch, shoot me an email” notices on social media and in the Tribune during my final days. I’ve since doubled that number, and, with shares and click-throughs, I’ve been averaging somewhere around 16,000 views on each Thursday issue.

My “open rate” — the percentage of recipients who find and click on the email — hovers at 70%, which I’m told is very good but seems like a number that ought to be higher if recipients are finding value in what I’m offering. I know that some among the 30% of non-openers aren’t seeing the email because some email providers recognize bulk Substack emails as spam or promotions and shunt them away from the main inbox. Why Substack hasn’t successfully raised hell about this on behalf of writers and subscribers I don’t know.

Another mystery to me is why Substack doesn’t allow for writers to use anchor links as navigational tools. I’d love to have a clickable table of contents at the top of each issue that would not only allow readers to skip right to, say, Mary Schmich’s latest offering or the Tweet of the Week poll, but would also allow outside curators such as Charlie Meyerson of the daily Chicago Public Square newsletter to link directly to content items of particular interest to their readers.

Meyerson is among those who have urged me to shorten the Sentinel, perhaps by breaking it up into numerous issues each week. (“Sometimes it goes on too long,” wrote former Daily Herald editor John Lampinen in a very friendly Facebook post urging people to subscribe. “Actually, it usually does.”)

For now I’m sticking with one too-long issue a week (with a bonus issues on Tuesdays for paid subscribers), because my experience as a reader is that less is more when it comes to commentary emails. Daily delivery is best for vital tip sheets, such as Chicago Public Square, Axios Chicago and Illinois Playbook. I think of the Sentinel as more of a magazine.

Overall, though, I’m having more fun writing now than I ever had working at the paper (and making less money writing than I ever did there). The lack of space constraints and word-count requirements is very liberating, and the interactions with readers has been gratifying, though occasionally a bit vexing.

I’m looking forward to what the next six months will bring, and hope you’ll stick around for the ride.

Last week’s winning tweet

connectpoliticditto. @cpoliticditto

Bill Barr’s book is unique because the hardcover edition will be released without a spine, but will grow one several years later when it’s profitable to do so.

Social media has been boiling with angry commentary over former Atty. Gen. Bill Barr’s statement/admission that, despite all the contempt he has for Donald Trump, he will vote for him for president in 2024 if he is the Republican nominee.

Most of these critics, I suspect, are the same people who said they’d vote for a broken Roomba over Trump if that’s what the Democrats had nominated in 2020, given that presidential elections are nearly always binary choices. I have a hard time imagining a Democratic nominee so amoral, distasteful, odious and contemptible that I would prefer Trump to that person, so I do understand where Barr is coming from.

Scroll down to read the new Tweet of the Week nominees or simply click here to vote in the new poll.

Isolation and dread, two years on

Exactly two years ago Friday, the number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States was roughly 30 and the number of cases nationwide had just exceeded 1,000.

Though Illinois had seen just two dozen cases and no deaths, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced at a morning news conference the cancellation of both city St. Patrick’s Day parades.

That same morning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform that the worst was yet to come, and the World Health Organization tweeted that COVID-19 was officially a pandemic.

A few hours later, NCAA officials announced that the March Madness basketball tournaments would be played without fans (the following day they cancelled the tournaments altogether).

Tribune bosses sent out two all-staff memos that day outlining work-from-home options, so I packed up as much as I could in my computer satchel and a tote bag and headed for the train, thinking I might not be back for maybe even several months.

That evening, President Donald Trump delivered a stilted speech from the Oval Office in which he announced a temporary ban on travel from Europe. The NBA abruptly suspended all games when Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the infection caused by the coronavirus, and the famed acting couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced on social media that they’d been diagnosed with COVID-19.

All of that happened on March 11, 2020*, the Day Everything Changed.

It was frightening but novel — kind of exhilarating in the way that, say, paralyzing blizzards are exhilarating, especially since it seemed like the isolating, distancing and keeping our hands off our faces would last only a few months before the danger passed.

We followed the rules, took care not to waste toilet paper, learned about Zoom and worked from home, those of us who could. We celebrated front-line workers and rolled our eyes at Trump’s fatuous, feckless cheerleading.

But the novelty wore off along with our optimism as the domestic and international death tolls mounted. The new normal turned somewhat soul-crushing, even for those of us who avoided the virus and weren’t close to anyone who’d died.

COVID-19 disrupted or cancelled most of our rituals. As the months wore on, it drove an ugly wedge into our society, widening a cultural divide between conservatives — those who resisted public-health measures in the name of personal freedom — and liberals — those who embraced those same measures in the name of collective action for the common good.

Any hope that Americans would come together and set aside petty political differences to battle a common, outside enemy evaporated. This was a disappointment but should have come as no surprise to anyone who’d been following the debate over climate change.

The irony is that patriotism, a value that conservatives insist they hold dear, is about a love of country that exceeds a love of self. But when public health officials asked them to wear masks or get vaccinated to protect their neighbors and co-workers, their putative patriotism vanished in an indignant explosion of skepticism and insistence on rights over responsibilities.

Ed Yong has been writing brilliantly about COVID-19 in The Atlantic, and his latest, “How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?” ** posted Tuesday as the number of U.S. fatalities crept close to 1 million.

Many countries have been pummeled by the coronavirus, but few have fared as poorly as the U.S. Its death rate surpassed that of any other large, wealthy nation—especially during the recent Omicron surge. The Biden administration placed all its bets on a vaccine-focused strategy, rather than the multilayered protections that many experts called for, even as America lagged behind other wealthy countries in vaccinating (and boosting) its citizens—especially elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus. In a study of 29 high-income countries, the U.S. experienced the largest decline in life expectancy in 2020 and, unlike much of Europe, did not bounce back in 2021. It was also the only country whose lowered life span was driven mainly by deaths among people under 60. 

Yong writes,

Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. … As tragedy becomes routine, excess deaths feel less excessive. Levels of suffering that once felt like thunderclaps now resemble a metronome’s clicks—the background noise against which everyday life plays. …

Resolutions to turn the first Monday of March into a COVID-19 Victims and Survivors Memorial Day have stalled in the House and Senate. Instead, the U.S. is engaged in what [Richard Keller, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison] calls “an active process of forgetting.” If safety is now a matter of personal responsibility, then so is remembrance.

Will there be any permanent, positive changes from this pandemic? I’m hoping for an increased awareness of airborne pathogens that inspires more people to stay home or at least wear masks in public when they’re sick, more work-from-home opportunities for healthy people and better air filtration systems in stores and offices.

I’d like it if the fist bump replaced the handshake as a social greeting, but I’m not terribly optimistic, and I’d be very happy if movie studios continued and even expanded the practice of streaming new releases so we can watch them from the comfort of our couches. I realize that some of you prefer the group viewing experience and huge screens at the multiplex, but your desire to impose that preference on everyone is irritating. (The latest Harper’s Index says the “portion of moviegoers who say they are unlikely to return to theaters after the pandemic” is only 1 in 10.)

There will be no Day Everything Changed Back. But there will come a time when most of us will go days or even weeks without thinking of COVID-19 and the ghastly interval between March 11, 2020, and March 11, 2022.

*One of my college roommates had an unexplained obsession with the date of March 11. He put it on every paper he handed in and dropped references to it into conversations because, he said, he thought it was funny and because he thought it was a sure way to guarantee that we would always remember him at least once a year.

It was more than a little eerie, then, that his first child was born on March 11. And now the date belongs not to him but to the ages.

**I found it distracting and amusing to note that one of the experts Yong quotes is Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. You’d think she might have thought twice about adopting that particular hyphenated last name.

Meaty thoughts on Lightfoot’s alleged ‘dick’ claims

“I have the biggest dick in Chicago,” said Mayor Lori Lightfoot according to a lawsuit filed last week by a former Chicago Park District attorney.

The context, according to the suit, is that Lightfoot was wroth with (now former) Chicago Park District deputy general counsel George Smyrniotis over a deal he had helped broker with the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans that would have allowed the group to display in a Columbus Day parade the statue of Christopher Columbus that the city had removed.

Here, according to the suit, is the rant directed toward Smyrniotis and other park officials in a Zoom call:

You dicks, what the fuck were you thinking? You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians, what you are doing, you are out there measuring your dicks with the Italians seeing who’s got the biggest dick, you are out there stroking your dicks over the Columbus statue. I am trying to keep Chicago Police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot. My dick is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest dick in Chicago. Where did you go to law school? Did you even go to law school? Do you even have a law license? You have to submit any pleadings to John Hendricks for approval before filing. John told you not to do a fucking thing with that statue without my approval. Get that fucking statue back before noon tomorrow or I am going to have you fired.

Very specific, no? It contains so little in the way of partial quotes and paraphrases that it suggests the plaintiffs have a recording of the tirade ready to produce should Lightfoot categorically deny talking about her dick.

She has offered no such categorical denial. Read carefully Lightfoot’s remonstration in a radio interview that aired over the weekend:

I am deeply offended by the ridiculous and outrageous allegations in that lawsuit and the suggestion that, somehow, I hold animus towards Italians and Italian Americans. Nothing could ever be further from the truth.

What? The suit doesn’t accuse of her of animus toward Italian Americans — her assertion that she has a bigger dick than “the Italians” is simply a metaphorical assertion of the obvious truth that she has more power than an ethnic civic organization.

The suit accuses her of defaming Smyrniotis, who is of Greek descent and resigned from the Park District last month. And, honestly, his claim that the chewing out harmed him does seem fairly ridiculous and outrageous.

If Lightfoot raged about the size of her dick, she should own it. She was justifiably angry because she hadn’t signed off on the statue deal and, smartly, didn’t want to make that deal. Allowing the Italian Americans to show off the controversial statue would have been a finger in her eye, figuratively speaking. She used amusingly raw language to express her fury in what she thought was a private conversation among adults.

All she should apologize for is the use of expressions that advance the notion that masculinity is associated with fortitude, power and moral courage.

Privately, though, she ought to regret giving the public another example of her crispy, splenetic nature. Profane, unhinged rants are signs of weakness in political leaders, not strength.

But can we talk “dick” for a moment? Most news accounts referred to it as “an obscenity” and redacted all but the first letter. Yet it’s an awfully mild and very common term that’s used as a straight-up insult (“What a dick!”) as well as anatomical slang roughly as offensive as “ass” or “boobs.”

Still, its use as a vulgarism has apparently ruined the once-common nickname for Richard.

Quick, think of some Dicks.

Van Dyke, Gregory, Motta, Clark, Cheney, Cavett, Vitale, Butkus, Wolf, Button, Smothers, Durbin, York, Van Patten. These and all the other Dicks I can think of are either dead or at least in their 70s. 

Is there anyone under 60 who goes by "Dick" anymore? Now that would be … ballsy.

Petty annoyances during wartime

NurseBrianRN @rn_murse

i know the world is going to end and everything, but why do baby carrots have to be so wet?

Every problem seems insignificant in the face of the perilous horrors in Ukraine — not only the widespread human suffering and death, but also the looming threat of World War III and nuclear weapons. Nearly every story, every complaint, every annoyance feels trivial, a notion emphasized and satirized by Nurse Brian’s wry tweet above.

I was thinking of writing a Picayune Sentinel item griping about the way some websites refuse to allow you to use your email address as your username, while others require it. Don’t we have enough to keep track of? And what’s with these news sites that continually force you to log in? Can’t they just freakin’ remember your device?

Then I thought, “Hey, Andy Rooney breath, I’m sure the hearts of the besieged, starving, freezing, terrified citizens of Mariupol go out to you regarding your username problem.”

Of course, very few of the stories and vexations we encounter in daily life — the small stuff of punditry that inspired Paige Wiser’s memorable motto for columnists, “Let’s make too much of it, shall we?” — have ever been significant in the face of the mayhem, want, disease and death that have always been with us.

But if I don’t continue to fret over the small stuff, then Vladimir Putin will have won.

Speaking of the murderous, contemptible Russian leader, forgive me for not huffing indignantly at South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s suggestion that someone in Putin’s inner circle assassinate him. At Putin’s direction, the Russian military is killing hapless civilians by the hundreds as they bomb childrens’ hospitals and cut off vital supplies. And God knows how long the carnage will continue and how many innocents will be slain before it’s all over and the heartless despot is history.

How does Russia come back from this? How does it undo the horrors, clean off the blood and lay claim again to normal business and financial ties with the civilized world? Which American company or leader is going to reestablish ties with a country now identified with such atrocious war crimes?

If Putin ultimately takes Ukraine, he loses because his will be a pariah state thoroughly bogged down battling intractable insurgencies.

If he can’t take Ukraine, he loses.

So what does his off-ramp look like?

News & Views

News: Jeanne Ives endorses state Sen. Darren Bailey in the GOP gubernatorial primary.

View: Unlike most endorsements, this one could matter. Ives, a socially conservative former state representative from suburban Wheaton, got 48.5% of the statewide Republican vote in a 2018 run against extremely well-funded Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner.

She’ll lend some credibility and heft to Bailey, a Trumpish downstate farmer who’s hoping to consolidate the MAGA vote against the GOP establishment favorite, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin.

News: Florida’s 'don’t say gay’ bill advances.

View: Florida’s "Parental Rights in Education" bill, cleverly renamed into absurdity by opponents, bans “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” through third grade. It also prohibits all such teaching in public schools “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students,” whatever exactly that means.

The bill, now on the desk of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, seems rooted in the backward notion that being gay or trans is something learned, the result of indoctrination, and not an intrinsic state of being. Its aim is apparently to roll back the normalization of gay and trans identity and couch this retrograde agenda as a form of parental prerogative.

To be clear, no one is advocating schoolchildren be shown graphic descriptions of sexual mechanics, gay or straight. But even kindergarteners should be learning that tolerance and acceptance of others is necessary to being a decent human being in the modern world.

News: Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx reportedly says she will speak more openly about her handling of the Jussie Smollett case after Smollett is sentenced on Thursday.

View: I’ll believe it when I hear it. Foxx’s evasions and double-talk and homina-homina on just exactly how and why her office swung and missed on this fat prosecutorial pitch have been conspicuous.

The outstanding question at the televised sentencing Thursday will be whether Smollett’s lying on the witness stand — can we just say perjury? — will earn him a small but symbolic stint behind bars. I’m hoping it will but would bet against the proposition if judicial wagering were legal.

News: State high school boys basketball finals will be this weekend.

View: The Sun-Times sports section has done a very good job covering prep hoops this season, including this curtain-raising rundown of the coming matchups that will air on WCIU-Ch. 26. The games will feature some top college prospects, a few of whom you may even one day see in the NBA. The Tribune sports section has, meanwhile, all but abandoned covering high school action. That decision, as well as the decision to abandon the daily listing of sports on TV, both mystifies and annoys me.

Lefties explode with telltale indignation at a New York Times op-ed blasting campus orthodoxy.

University of Virginia senior Emma Camp, a self-styled liberal, published an op-ed in The New York Times on Monday under the headline “I came to college eager to debate. I found self-censorship instead.”

In the essay she decried the “strict ideological conformity” that effectively silences students and professors with views outside the progressive mainstream.

In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves. According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges. … 48% percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom.

Camp noted that “when criticism transforms into a public shaming, it stifles learning.”

And as if on cue to prove her point, the more-enlightened-than-thou crowd that declines to acknowledge the suffocating quality of liberal orthodoxy on many college campuses proceeded to attempt to shame her.

One person on Twitter created a fake Times headline: “Everyone thinks my ideas suck ass. Here’s why that’s an institutional problem.” “People not liking my thoughts is oppression,” sneered another. “It certainly sounds like Emma wants a safe space to say whatever and have no one disagree with her, or it’s censorship,” wrote another. Other slams: “It’s garbage.” “Cancel culture doesn’t exist, you … just say stupid stuff no one wants to hear.” “Everyone is laughing at you.” “Lying brat.” “You’re about as useful as a poopy flavored lollipop.”

Many participating in the dogpile mocked Camp for claiming to feel silenced while writing for the huge audience of the New York Times, which is just the sort of obtuse, context-free defensive denialism that infects my friends on the left when it come to the issue of “cancel culture.”

They claim it’s not real. They claim the harsh personal attacks and other attempts to silence and shame those with orthogonal political and social views are merely “consequence culture” and nothing to worry about. Those who are punished for their ideas richly deserve the opprobrium.

But Camp’s argument is not that she doesn’t have a voice and can’t find a platform. It’s that censorious ideology has stifled robust debate in the academy, a place where it ought to be flourishing. It’s that peer pressure and increasingly rigid norms have turned college classrooms into “monotonous echo chambers … mired in socially safe ideas.”

Is she wrong? Of course not. Examples are plentiful of crazed overreactions to minor deviations from “correct” speech or action.

Those who’ve been heaping contempt on Camp on social media all week are either oblivious to this truth or deliberately dishonest about it. And their expressions of fury and mockery merely underscore the validity of her main contention, which is that those who wish to challenge prevailing views on campus had better shut the hell up because the wrath of Twitter will descend upon them.

Did Camp tell the whole story? No. Her essay lacks the important context that the political left is far from the only faction promoting groupthink and attempting to squelch the expression of ideas. The right also avidly practices “cancellation” — think Colin Kaepernick, the Teletubbies, the Dixie Chicks and their attempts to muzzle teachers who want to discuss fraught racial issues — so their crowing about free speech must be taken with a dump truck full of salt.

Think of how Donald Trump called for the outright firing of, among others whose remarks piqued him, Bill Maher, Chris Matthews, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Katy Tur, Karl Rove, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, Paul Krugman, Chuck Todd, Kathleen Sebelius, Donna Brazile, Fox News pollsters and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

For Camp’s next submission, perhaps the Times will give her more space.

Land of Linkin’

• Chicago Newspapers Circa 1972 is an amazingly comprehensive look at what print journalism was like in our town in the wild and prosperous decade that preceded my arrival on the scene.

• Sun-Times City Hall reporter Fran Spielman takes “An early look at the race for mayor of Chicago” and offers thumbnail profiles of those she sees as top challengers to Mayor Lori Lightfoot next February: U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, City Clerk Anna Valencia (if she loses her bid for Illinois secretary of state), state Rep. Kam Buckner, former Cook County state’s attorney candidate Bill Conway, Gery Chico, Paul Vallas and U.S. Rep. Chuy Garcia.

• “What’s the Best Book of the Past 125 Years? We Asked Readers to Decide” from the New York Times. Spoiler: It’s Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a novel that some think should be cancelled as “dated and problematical” because of “the use of the N-word and the use of the white savior motif.”

• Lake Forest College is hosting the premiere of the documentary “Your Name is Juan Rivera,” on the evening of March 23. I wrote a number of columns about Rivera’s wrongful conviction in the 1992 rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan and was interviewed by the filmmakers. The trailer is here. Reserve your free tickets for the premiere here.

• Substack has launched the Substack Reader phone app. They say it “brings all your Substack subscriptions together in one venue, giving you a beautiful, focused place to read your favorite writers.”

• Good Question is Digg’s “weekly roundup of the best advice column questions from around the web,” some of which are evidently in more than one column. This reminds me that I’d like to see a crowdsourced advice column in which online voters choose between two contrasting responses, or among several contrasting responses.

• Hilarious item in Shia Kapos’ indispensable Illinois Playbook Wednesday: “Ashley Gott, treasurer of Williamson County in southern Illinois, faces a primary from … Ashley Gott. … But get this. Challenger Ashley Gott was known as Erin Perry until she changed her name on Jan. 6, according to the Williamson County Clerk’s office. … Election Day the ballots will offer clarity with a line next to challenger Gott’s name saying she changed her name in January.” Rich Miller quotes state law on that.

• YouTube has a one-hour version of “Spiegel im Spiegel,” that meditative composition I touted last week.

• The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Mondays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

A comedian for president! Seriously.

The Court Jester, Thomas Davidson (1863-1903)

It’s with gentle but patronizing amusement that many have noted that, before he was elected president of his country, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comedian.

As though that made or makes him an inherently frivolous and shallow person, a mere jester.

But funny people tend to be — almost have to be — very smart and insightful, quick, incisive and keenly attuned to absurdities. I know intelligent people who aren’t funny, but I don’t know any funny people who aren’t intelligent.

As quick thinkers, motivators and analysts of complicated situations, I’ll wager comedians are at least as capable as lawyers and business leaders, whom we elect by the hundreds to offices great and small.

Jon Stewart, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Wanda Sykes, Hasan Minhaj … I’d trust them and other comedians to lead the country more than I’d trust most of the earnest, striving glad-handers who put themselves forward for our consideration. Before his #MeToo moment, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken was looking like a plausible president.

Mary Schmich: Everyday Russians

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts column-like thoughts most Tuesdays on Facebook. Here is last week’s offering, which came too late for the PS deadline because Mary was vacationing in Savannah, just like my wife and I were:

I heard the phrase “everyday Russians” on the news the other day, as in “Everyday Russians are also at the mercy of Vladimir Putin.”

I think many Americans know this. They know that in Putin’s deranged war against Ukraine, Russians are among the victims--not victims of the war's violence but victims of a government that spreads lies and suppresses, sometimes violently, a free media that could tell them the truth.

Some people I love live in Russia. One of them wrote me this recently: “Left and right, livelihoods are being lost, and it's probably just the start. It takes years to build a world, seconds to destroy it. Obviously my sympathy goes first to the Ukrainians, but things here are likely to be bad for a very long time.”

My 26-year-old niece is also among those everyday Russians. Yesterday she posted some thoughts on her Facebook page, along with the photo you see here.

It’s a picture taken during World War II of Russians hiding from attack in a Moscow subway station. She drew the connection from that photo, that time to what we’re seeing in Ukraine today.

I asked her if I could share her post. She said yes.

Russian is her everyday language but she’s fluent in several others, including, as you’ll see, English. The words that follow are all hers.

I feel that what speaks to people the most in this difficult and confusing time, truly moves them, is not footage of the death and destruction that war inevitably brings, but the seemingly more humane and serene images of citizens hiding in the subway - singing together, holding their pets, comforting each other.

Bombed-out buildings, burning cars, mutilated bodies — these are horrors that look the same in any conflict on the globe, and thus their images from the Ukraine have a similar impact to those taken in Yemen or Afghanistan or other such places that Westerners have come to see as perpetually war-torn and destitute, beyond the hope of being perceived as inhabited by actual human beings and therefore not cared about.

But the pictures from the subway will unfailingly and immediately conjure up eerie parallels in the mind of anyone who has grown up in the countries of the (former) Soviet Union. People hiding from shelling in lofty stations, all columns and arches and intricate gilding - we have seen this before, and we know where and why. We've seen it in every selection of photos depicting Soviet civilian life in the Second World War. Compared to each other the stations are unique, but on the whole the old central metro stations of Moscow look like those of Kyiv or Kharkiv. Sure, today's photos are colored and peppered with smartphones, but the connection is unmistakable.

And I sincerely hope that if anyone in my homeland has doubts about who's on the right side of history here, they too will find this connection and be rid of those doubts. Because not only does it ring the historical bell, but it's also something they can easily imagine happening with them - on the very same marble-covered stations that they walk across every day. Excursion guides always refer to them as "palaces" — but these are palaces that nobody should live in now —

Posted by Mary Schmich

Minced Words

On this week’s “The Mincing Rascals” podcast, host John Williams, panelist Austin Berg and I discuss high gas prices, the crisis in Ukraine, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s colorful rant, safety on public transit, the battle in Chicago over mask mandates in schools and more. Both my streaming video recommendations begin with “After.”

Austin Berg fans will want to check out his interview podcast, America’s Talking.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can now hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

This week’s nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Ordered a burritx from Chipotle because I’m tired of having my lunch gendered. — @HushJared

• Money can't buy you love but it can definitely get you a spouse who will pretend to love you and you probably won't notice the difference. — @MelvinofYork

• I took Werner Herzog’s “Which Golden Girl Are You?” quiz, and it turns out I’m an amalgam of the darkest aspects of each woman, distilling out only humankind’s disgust with itself and its open embrace of the grave to come — @batkaren 

• One reason I still have trouble believing cryptocurrency is money is that there aren’t commercials for money. — @NoahGarfinkel

• ME: I keep thinking I'm a hotel. DOCTOR: Do you mind if I examine you? ME: Be my guest. — @kiel_phillips

• I told my psychiatrist that I always have songs stuck in my head and he wrote something down. Probably that I’m cool. — @tigersgoroooar

• A priest, a rabbit and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender asks the rabbit, “What’ll ya have?” The rabbit says, “I dunno, I’m only here because of auto-correct.” — various sources

• Things that interrupt sex: In your 20s, drunk roommate walks in on you. In your 30s, kids walk in on you. In your 40s, spouse walks in on you. In your 50s, foot cramp. — @UnFitz

• I will call you “carrot top” only if your hair is green, as I am a stickler for detail. — @sofarrsogud

• Bittersweet announcement, but after an amazing two years as an infectious disease expert I am moving on. I am now an expert in no-fly zones and Eastern European affairs. Excited to make the most of this new opportunity. — @RobbySlowik

Click here to vote in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Cheer chat

We Cheerios — members of the cast of the annual Songs of Good Cheer winter holiday singalong concerts at the Old Town School of Folk Music — never really stop thinking about Christmas music that might work at the show.

This week I got it in mind that we should probably have some sort of salute to Ukraine in the programs that will run Dec. 7 through Dec. 11 this year. In poking around to see what might work I found that the answer just might be the song from which we cribbed the title of our show.

“Carol of the Bells” is a Ukrainian American carol. The melody is taken from a Ukrainian folk chant, known since the 20th century as “Shchedryk.” And the lyrics are by American composer Peter Wilhousky.

“Shchedryk” translates as “The Little Swallow,” and before the Christmas lyrics were set, it was originally sung for the new year. It was arranged to tell the story of this little swallow by Ukrainian composer and teacher Mykola Leontovych in 1914.

Slate has more of the history:

The Ukrainian version has nothing to do with bells or Christmas. The lyrics tell the tale of a swallow summoning the master of the house to look at his livestock and the bounty the coming spring season will bring as well as to look at his beautiful dark-eyebrowed wife. In pre-Christian times, the coming of the new year and spring were celebrated in March. …

Wilhousky‘s version, with new lyrics and a new title—“Carol of the Bells”—was published and copyrighted in 1936 by Carl Fischer Music in New York.

It won’t be until August, at least, that we begin to finalize this year’s set list, and tickets won’t go on sale until September. Watch this space for updates.

Today’s Tunes

I give you 30 tunes today played in succession and evidently by ear to demonstrate 30 fiddle styles. The instrumentalist here is Michael Burnyeat of Vancouver, British Columbia.

I play the American Old Time style (at 2:30 on the video) and a bit of Cajun (7:18). Lately I’ve been plugging away at the more challenging New England style (11:46). The rest of these subgenres are either on my to-do list or way beyond my skill level. I have half a mind to try to learn this Ukrainian tune in solidarity, but worry that my initial attempts might be heard as a cultural insult, something the Ukrainian people do not need right now.

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