Daniel Knowles

Today marks five years that I have lived in Chicago. What that means, thanks to the vagaries of American immigration law, is that it is almost time to go home to London, where I will be covering Europe. It's been a time. I have learned a lot. I figured I'd write a bunch of it down:

Well I suppose you can’t claim that sponsoring one journalism awards category affects the judges in the category before it.

This isn't hyperbole or a joke. Parents actually called the cops and got the black boy and his family removed and the league claimed they were trespassing because he was "putting on a show" and wasn't playing "fair."

Kavanaugh stops in action: ICE tackled a non-verbal kid near his school, left him with injuries requiring surgery, and then left the scene when they realized he wasn't the person they were looking for www.independent.com/2026/10/23/i...

In August, the Trump administration flew 12 Somali immigrants to an ICE facility at Guantanamo Bay. “Nobody tell us that we’re going to Guantanamo Bay,” Sakariye Abdi Mohamed told journalist Amanda Moore in a phone call from the detention facility. “Just like kidnapping.”

Quite want to go without a TV when we get back to London but if we do buy one, think I might buy a nice computer monitor instead

Never been to a Cheesecake factory. Or a Denny's or an Applebees or an Olive Garden or a Red Lobster or a Cracker Barrel or a BJ's or a Texas Roadhouse or... literally any of these chains you seem to only get next to highways or Times Square

I was just looking at these Census stats. Workforce participation among Somali-American adults in Minnesota is actually higher than the rest of the population.

A fun coincidence: that $100/ton of CO2 is roughly $1/gallon of gasoline. So this calculation shows the optimal carbon tax would be equivalent to $1.90/gal at the pump which...seems completely fine and doable

Politics! A Prime Minister making an argument. Trying to persuade people of something. Again.

Great thread for the Chicago transport nerds among us

holy moly openai.com/index/securi...

The 2000s (including first-term Obama) saw the identification and removal of a lot of people who did have involvement with the CJ system but wouldn’t have been identified as removable immigrants until then. It was lower-hanging fruit both politically and logistically.

Fwiw this includes me (a British citizen but born abroad), my Norwegian midwife partner, and two of my three children. Nice to know that The Times thinks we are undesirable but has watched “helplessly” as we lived in London.

This is one of the most holy sh*t stories I’ve ever read in my life. www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-...

Quest Diagnostics hacked, patient records exposed The next year is going to be unlike any other in the history of the internet. We are going to see so many high profile hacks. www.questdiagnostics.com/links/quanum...

It is also the case that the revenue from speed cameras tends to drop pretty quickly as people work out this simple trick and stop speeding. Which keeps catching out Chicago because they keep budgeting for cash that doesn't come in, because their cameras actually work really well

@hugorifkind.bsky.social great column. Everything you describe is 10x worse in the US though

This week I did something with AI that would truly annoy me if I were another shopper. I told Muse to add new items on The RealReal to my cart, putting them on hold for 20 mins. I told Muse to do it again and again as soon as the hold was up. This went on for hours, blocking anyone else from buying.

I’ve found shopping with agents to be a bit tedious, especially if you’re someone with lots of preferences. But it’s not hard to see how the shopping experience could quickly degrade for humans when agents are mass deployed. www.theverge.com/report/10158...

ICE causes man to wreck while his children are in the car, then tries to pry his kids from his arms. They got the wrong guy. Toward the end of the video, an ICE officer says law requires the person recording to back up 25 feet and threatens with pepper spray. (There is no 25-foot law.)

A question I have not been able to answer - the $3,000 (or $2,600) supposedly available from the federal government for self-deporting. Who actually qualifies? My status expires December 11th. If I overstay a day can I uh, get it? (I am obviously not going to try) DHS have no response

The South Dakota polling is fun (derogatory)