Le Parisien reports that French authorities have apprehended two individuals suspected of stealing the Napoleonic crown jewels from the Louvre:

Sous le feu des projecteurs internationaux, l’enquête judiciaire sur le casse du siècle au Louvre s’accélère. Selon nos informations, deux suspects ont été interpellés ce samedi soir et placés en garde à vue dans le cadre des investigations ouvertes pour « vol en bande organisée » et « association de malfaiteurs en vue de la commission d’un crime », pilotées par la brigade de répression du banditisme de Paris (BRB) et l’Office central de lutte contre le trafic des biens culturels (OCBC).

Translated:

Under the glare of international attention, the judicial investigation into the “heist of the century” at the Louvre is speeding up. According to our information, two suspects were arrested Saturday evening and placed in police custody as part of an investigation opened for “theft by an organized gang” and “criminal conspiracy with intent to commit a crime,” led by the Paris anti-gang brigade (BRB) and the Central Office for the Fight Against Trafficking in Cultural Property (OCBC).

They further report that the two apprehended lived in Seine-Saint-Denis. That’s one of the largest suburbs in metropolitan Paris. Two-thirds of those living there are “immigrants” in the French sense, mostly from North Africa. That means non-French citizens, likely in France illegally.

Given the political situation in France at present

if immigrants are determined to be responsible for robbing the Louvre, that will provide additional fuel for the anti-immigrant Rassemblement National (National Rally) and its allies.

Here are some examples. Today I used ChatGPT to use a font in one of my blog posts different from the default font. I asked the question, asked a few more questions to refine what my intention was, copied the code, and edited my post.

Yesterday I devoted a considerable amount of time to creating a complete storyboard for a hypothetical movie. I was very satisfied with the results. Maybe I’ll go ahead and create the movie itself (using a different AI tool) or maybe I won’t.

I don’t read for pleasure as much as I used to. Once upon a time I read a book every day. Nowadays it’s too fatiguing especially considering how much else I read (for work—when I was working, news reports, editorials, opinion pieces, etc.).

Not long ago at my wife’s urging I read Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir. She’s very much into reading celebrity biographies. Over the last couple of months she’s read biographies and/or autobiographies of Mary Astor, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Kay Francis, Gloria Swanson, Myrna Loy, and Louise Brooks). Talk about degrees of separation! I’ve never met any of those people but I was acquainted with people who did. Three degrees, sometimes two.

The book consists of three sections. The first consists of brief bios of Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor and actresses who created the great characters of film noir from 1945 to 1955 drawn from interviews with them over a number of years, sixteen in all. The second consists of updates on their later lives. The final section is some observations from Mr. Muller.

In case you’re not familiar with him Eddie Muller is one of the hosts on Turner Classic Movies. He’s a very insightful guy, much more insightful than you might gather from his remarks on TCM. I learned things of which I had been unaware not just about the actresses he interviewed but about Hollywood and current events in 1945-1955.

Highly recommended.

Here’s an example of the absence of reporting I mentioned in my last post. Do you recall the story of the bounties being placed on the heads of federal agents by criminal gangs?

Since the story came out I have devoted a significant amount of time researching the topic and have come up with …nothing. There seems to be no public corroboration or denial of the story other than what’s in Department of Justice press releases, statements, and court filings. That doesn’t mean that the DoJ is lying; it just means there’s neither a public corroboration or denial.

Isn’t this an important story? I don’t think that either the Journalists who support Democrats or those who support Republicans are interested in reporting it. Are they afraid of what they might discover? It would interfere with their preconceived notions? Is such down-and-dirty reporting beneath them? Do they know how?

I want to know. I don’t need context or explanations. I don’t want to know what to think about the facts. I need the facts.

David Lauder may not realize but his piece in today’s Tribune illustrates nicely why newspapers are folding. Here’s a snippet from his piece:

Some 136 newspapers in the United States have closed in the past year, news deserts are expanding and web traffic to the nation’s top newspapers has dropped markedly this decade, according to a report issued Monday that struggles to find hope for the beleaguered news industry.
struggles to find hope for the beleaguered news industry.

While entrepreneurs are launching digital news sites, often backed by philanthropies, they haven’t sprouted at a rate that makes up for the losses, the report from Northwestern University said. the report from Northwestern University said.

Taking a step back for an even broader look at the industry is even more troubling. Since 2005, the numbers of newspapers published in the United States has dropped from 7,325 in 2005 to 4,490 now, said the Medill State of Local News report. Daily newspaper circulation that averaged between 50 and 60 million people at the turn of the century now stands at just over 15 million.

An estimated 365,460 people worked at newspapers in 2005, and now that number is down to 91,550, the report said. Two decades ago, 71% of journalists worked at newspapers and now just 29% of the nearly 42,000 working journalists are at newspapers.

He’s just regurgitating Northwestern’s press release. There is no reporting here and precious little value-added.

What use are newspapers that are just passing along press releases or rephrased articles from wire services? The “news deserts” he laments are being created have been mirages for years.

And you don’t need a Medill School of Journalism to teach repeating press releases and adding opinion. It can be done by ChatGPT.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune via Yahoo urge corporate leaders to intercede with the mayor to negotiate a more sensible budget for the city:

What counts as “savings and efficiencies” in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s government?

In the 2026 budget the mayor presented last week, the two biggest items in that category were a $118 million reduction in how much the city planned to contribute to its woefully underfunded pension plans and a cap on how much overtime the Chicago Police Department could accrue.

That’s akin to an individual or household saying they’re tightening their belts by paying the minimum on their credit cards.

After explaining why we can’t expect any relief from the City Council, they continue:

So business community, if you are reading us, this is a dire moment.

Deals and investments that have been in the works in parts of the city still attractive to business are teetering, we hear. “Capital is fleeing,” one alderman tells us.

It’s a time now for high-profile corporate leaders to make clear to the mayor and council members what the stakes are. That could well mean that some household names threaten to close Chicago offices or reduce their city workforces. If that’s something these corporate leaders are contemplating behind closed doors — and we’ve little doubt it is — now’s the time to make those plans public.

The mayor has made it quite clear that he sees businesses as cows to be milked or slaughtered to feed the ravening maw of city services. There’s scarcely a sign of cutting expenses in the budget and a host of new pet projects.

I think they’re pleading in vain. Business leaders have an option they’re more likely to take than playing hardball with City Hall: get out of Dodge.

My question remains as it has been for nearly two years. What did people expect? The Chicago Teachers Union “brung” Brandon Johnson. He’s maintained what little popularity he retains by funneling more money to public employee union members. The solutions the editors envision, economic and population growth, play hardly any role in the mayor’s thinking.

This post is the first in a series considering costs in healthcare. I plan to reflect on the roles that insurance companies, Medicare, healthcare providers, and any other factor that comes to mind play. This first post in the series will be about the role of healthcare insurance companies in increasing the cost of healthcare. All of my figures are drawn from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

To my eye the remarkable thing about the insurance component of healthcare costs is how consistent they’ve been since 2017. That’s true whether you’re looking at healthcare insurance company profit margins (net income divided by net earned premium):

Year	Profit Margin (%)
2010	3.9
2011	3.4
2012	2.7
2013	2.2
2014	1.1
2015	0.6
2016	1.1
2017	2.4
2018	3.2
2019	3.0
2020	3.8
2021	2.0
2022	2.4
2023	2.2
2024	0.8

or as a percentage of total healthcare spending:

Year	Insurance Costs (% of Total Health Spending)
2010	6.4
2011	6.5
2012	6.7
2013	6.8
2014	6.7
2015	6.8
2016	6.9
2017	6.7
2018	6.6
2019	6.8
2020	6.9
2021	6.7
2022	6.6

Profit margins soared during the reduction in utilization that took place but they have averaged around 3%. As a percentage of GDP insurance costs have varied from 6.4% to 6.9%. That’s so consistent my conclusion is that they are artifacts.

My tentative conclusion from that is that healthcare insurance costs are not driving cost increases; they’re following them.

Please don’t construe this as support for healthcare insurance companies. I don’t think that healthcare insurance should exist, at least not in its present form. Too many things presently covered are not insurable risks.

The story of the day is the “No Kings” rallies going on around the country. Chicago has been the site of one of the largest. It probably won’t be as large today because of the rain.

I don’t object to them so long as they remain non-violent but I don’t see much point to them, either. I don’t believe in kings (probably less than most Americans since I hale from a particularly Anglophobe part of the country). I don’t even watch Downton Abbey. I do believe in democracy (probably more than most Americans since I hale from a particularly populist part of the country).

But I don’t think they do much good or mean much, either. That may be colored by my living in Chicago, a remarkably oligarchic even hereditary oligarchic place. Here we are governed by lawless oligarchs and have been for most of the last century. Oh, yes, we have elections. Those are mostly pro forma.

Update

I want to agree with something that Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy has been quoted as saying at the DC “No Kings” rally:

We are not on the verge of an authoritarian takeover; we are in the midst of an authoritarian takeover.

My recommendation would be to vote against every incumbent politician.

On Friday night my wife and I attended a performance of Cherubini’s opera, Medea, at Lyric Opera, the first of our 2025-2026 season.

Medea premiered in 1797. Technically, it is an opéra comique meaning that as written it combines spoken dialogue with sung portions although the work is sometimes performed with recitatives composed later rather than spoken dialogue. There is nothing comic about it; it’s about as seria as you can get. In the final act Medea emerges from the temple covered in the blood of her children whom she has just murdered (pictured above). Take that, Jason.

It is a very difficult opera especially for the title character, Medea, who is onstage singing for all but the first 20 minutes. Because of that difficulty, the grim story, and the lack of recognizable melodies it is rarely performed. To the best of my ability to discover it has not been performed at all in Italy this year (operas by Italian composers are, reasonably enough, performed more frequently there) although it will be performed at La Scala later this year. It has been performed by a couple of companies in France this year in the original French language version.

To the extent that you can say the opera is “popular” it was popularized in the last century by Maria Callas who performed it many times. It has become sort of a Great White Whale for soprani.

This production is the first time the opera has been staged by Lyric Opera ever. I have never seen it before despite having been an opera buff for more than 50 years. Our soprano was the veteran Berwyn-native Radvanovsky who gave a bravura performance. The opera throughout was outstanding in singing and acting.

Sadly, Chicago is a Verdi-Puccini potboiler town so it did not have the audiences that such an excellent production deserved.

The staging and sets were particularly notable. The most significant feature was a large reflective surface upstage that reflected everything that happened downstage. Clouds, fire, etc. were also projected on the surface at times. I’m still trying to figure out how they accomplished that. I presume there were some downstage projectors.

This level of technical excellence and virtuosity bodes well for this year’s Lyric season.

It has received excellent reviews all-around.

Chicago Tribune

Chris Jones at the Tribune:

In the Euripides play that bears her name, Medea shows up at the start, wailing that her life has no purpose in the face of her mistreatment by Jason, after making one sacrifice after another, and she comes with a chorus of nervous sycophants. But the 1797 opera by Luigi Cherubini, which has a libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman and is also derived from the Pierre Corneille dramatic adaptation, events begin with Glauce, the younger, naturally, and better-connected woman whom Jason has chosen in his freeze-out of his first partner.

In director David McVicar’s unnerving production, now at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Elena Villalón is seen at a bouffant, rococo nuptial, her guests in celebrity Franco-Italinate attire but with ominous, glowing red eyes. She sings with fragility of her joy with Giasone (Matthew Polenzani), a happiness she worries will be short-lived. Soon, the doors of a vault-like apparatus close, Glauce and her crew are entombed and Sondra Radvanovsky’s Medea crawls
into view, as if from the gutter.

But Radvanovsky’s Medea is no snipe. She is a roaring force from the underworld, existing vocally, as Medea must, at the intersection of pain, pleading and panic at the strength and thus the potential consequences of her own emotions. For one who feels such agony at betrayal must feel the dangerous power of love herself.

What a performance from Radvanovsky!

Chicago Sun-Times

Kyle MacMillan at the Sun-Times:

Riveting, all-out, all-encompassing.

That’s the kind of towering performance Sondra Radvanovsky delivers in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s first-ever production of “Medea,” adding a memorable chapter to an already distinguished career and opening the company’s 2025-26 with a thunderclap.

Chicago Classical Review

Lawrence A. Johnson at Chicago Classical Review:

Lyric Opera has so often been content to coast on mediocrity (and worse) in recent years, that it felt almost foreign Saturday night to have two genuine stars in the opera’s major roles for this important company premiere.

Sondra Radvanovsky has sung the role of Medea to acclaim at the Met and elsewhere. The celebrated soprano brought the requisite vocal power as well as scary dramatic intensity to the role of the title sorceress who is abandoned by her husband Jason (Giasone) and vows to wreak havoc on all.

With her bedraggled hair, Radvanovsky’s Medea was often a pitiable figure in the first two acts, crawling on the ground in pleading supplication for Giasone to return to her. She sang with tenderness in her Act I duet with Jason and retrospective moments recalling their past happy times. Yet when Medea goes full sorceress, the soprano brought jarring intensity to her vows of vengeance.

The role of Medea is one of the great voice-shredders, yet Radvanovsky rose to the daunting challenge of the final act, which is essentially an unbroken 35-minute mad scene. The soprano tackled all the formidable challenges, flinging out the leaping top notes, handling the bursts of rapid vocalism and making Medea’s frenzied indecision about whether to not to murder her children to get revenge on Giasone nerve-wracking and harrowing. A memorable, genuinely great performance by a singer at the peak of her career.

It is an excellent review overall, one with which I concur. I recommend Mr. Johnson’s analysis of the issues in the work.