Brian Boyer

Social sucks now. What if we just stopped? dansinker.com/posts/2026-0...

architecture is finally good again. I’ve waited my entire career for this

Who’s making the Free Bonnie Slotnick tshirts bc I urgently need one evgrieve.com/2026/09/line...

Tomato alert! Tried some pickled (lacto-fermented, I think?) tomatoes from Ukraine in this week’s bean soup and wow! They’re awesome!

Hot dog stand, Dearborn Street near Randolph Street, Chicago (ca. 1960s) Stephen Deutch, Chicago History Museum

This week's @newsproduct.org newsletter, written by @donohoe.dev about the @restofworld.org registration wall, is a damn fine read on data-driven decision making. mailchi.mp/newsproduct/...

That time of year when the sunrise and my alarm line up for a bit.

If you need further incentive to (re-)read this series, the back/letter pages are excellent and I got to write a short essay on gender schemas which was paired with the narrative of a promising young engineer for issue #6.

Nice to see the old Archeworks ship still sailing.

Today’s thrift store score.

Thank you to everyone sharing this story. We can only presume this agent will return to Chicago soon. Quite a lot that had to be left out for brevity's sake, but of note: he has repeatedly called the agents working with him "my guys," definitely indicating he's some kind of team lead.

Two Black mayors took cities that the country loves to write off and made them measurably safer. That’s not a fluke. That’s a blueprint. Chicago and Baltimore just posted numbers that should be front-page news. They’re not. We need to talk about why. 🧵 www.theroot.com/opinion-blac...

Huh!

I wrote about the Obama Presidential Center for @thenation.com www.thenation.com/article/cult...

as a journalist who has been writing about surveillance and alprs for years, i’m glad to see concerns about flock have finally broken into the mainstream. but i think many folks are missing the bigger picture: the ways various tech works together to surveil us. chicagoreader.com/news/reader-...

Trib Ed board deciding how to react to young people downtown

This is a joke, but also not a joke. Everything in this post used to be in or on a Chicago building, but now sits in the City Museum. And I'm not even getting into their Louis Sullivan collection, which is beyond belief.

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful

This approach to a data commons could extend to so many typically shared things. For businesses to easily and authoritatively publish things like open hours or product catalogs, discographies, every kind of -ography... creative appmakers could do so much with all that

I would like to bring more of the fruits of the AT Protocol to the people who don't care about protocols, which is most people. www.wrecka.ge/launching-a-...

<a post in the genre of recognizing the undiagnosed neurodiversity of your aging parents>

I ask bc it seems to me that we're not going to stabilize democracy without pulling our info ecosystem out of its death spiral, which won't happen if the big platforms retain their monopoly control of social connections. But this appears to be the furthest thing from US leftist and liberal concerns.

This. And I’m really hoping they don’t fuck it up

Somebody raise your hand so I don’t have to

Should be working, found some good rocks.

I got a nice write-up from KQED! “Colored drips pour down the sides of his panels, but the surfaces are carved smooth with razor blades. The effect is gauzy, dreamy, even as the images he depicts and the language he deploys evoke violence—state sanctioned and otherwise.” YUM.

Good news, and I love a FOIA story, but if we lived in New York it’d be on the cool mayor’s Tik Tok

For the hundredth year anniversary of the Aragon I’d recommend listening to this Studs Terkel interview with the son of the man who built it. Wherein they opine on its place in Chicago history when the ballroom was not yet even 40 years old in 1963 studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/and...

CPD Internal Affairs referred Carlos Baker to a program for troubled cops in May 2025. IA never answered an email about the referral; Baker wasn't enrolled. Could have led to duty change or firing. Baker fatally shot his partner (accidental, acc to authorities) couple weeks later. #chicago

The air tastes even worse than the map suggests.

Hell yeah 70+ year-old glowing analog street corner data viz restoration