Photo: Wilshire Boulevard Temple, interior. Credit: Jim Winstead

On the 140th anniversary of the Chicago fire, it’s a time to celebrate the city’s libraries. Rick Kogan explains in the Tribune’s Sidewalks blog.

Jay Jones, writing for the Los Angeles Times, recalls the Peshtigo, Wis., fire, the same night as the Chicago fire, which killed 1,200 people.

Mary Mallory notes that restoration of the Hugo Ballin murals is part of the work being done during renovations of the sanctuary at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Times colleague Martha Groves has the story.

Wilshire Boulevard Temple, by the way, began as Congregation B’nai B’rith on Broadway between 2nd and 3rd streets and is marked by a plaque in the sidewalk. Portions of it were discovered during excavation for The Times parking structure. (The temple’s website says incorrectly that Congregation B’nai B’rith used to be at Temple and Broadway).

Will the footnote be killed by electronic books, which often convert them to nearly invisible end notes? Alexandra Horowitz shares her thoughts with the New York Times.

The footnotes are among the first things I look at when I pull a book from a store shelf. My editor gamely tolerated my inclusion of many in my own book (though we removed more than we left in). I would be proud to be a footnote in someone else’s work.

… But I champion another species of footnote: the wandering footnote. These digressive notes, seeing a sentence that some might consider complete, determine to hijack it with a new set of ever more tangential facts. In the wayward note, the bumps and curves of the author’s mind seem to be laid plain on the paper. I came of intellectual age hearing the author’s sotto voce asides in the philosophy essays I loved. I still recall footnotes that begin, enticingly, “Imagine that . . . ”; “Consider . . . ”; or even, in one of J. L. Austin’s famous thought experiments, “You have a donkey. . . . ” I had the feeling of being taken into confidence by a wise fellow during an erudite lecture, and being told something even more clever and lucid.

The L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat curated from only the finest Twitter feeds by the tireless bots at paper.li. I wish the bots would get over their thing for the Tupac sex tape.

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