On today’s Globe op-ed page, the best idea yet on what to do with the planned Rose Kennedy Greenway:
Let’s scrap for good the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Everybody is trying too hard to make something work that won’t. It is not a real urban open space opportunity. It is an after-thought resulting from the demolition […]
First time as tragedy, second time as farce.
That seems to be the narrative of the union movement these days, at least if the political theater of the Boston Police union’s pickets are any indication. Adrian Walker latches onto one of the most striking contradictions of the picket when he notes, “According to the union, Mayor […]
Over at Economic Principals, David Warsh has an uncanny knack for throwing off plausible, yet quite grand claims as if they were commonplace assertions. This week, he critiques the lack of attention that Clinton’s book pays to 1980 as a historical turning point.
To judge from Clinton’s account, the year 1980 holds no special significance […]
Perhaps nothing is so overdue as an intellectual correction to the excesses of critical theory’s hegemony in the humanities disciplines of the Anglo-American academy, with emphasis on American and literary studies. However, so many of the attacks - whether from the popular press or from non-humanities disciplines - are unsatisfactory screeds that puff up straw […]
Readers of this blog may notice that while my positions are pretty reliably (predictably?) liberal or even left-leaning, certain issues put me more in the company of conservatives or at least centrists than with fellow liberals. Trade policy, standardized school testing, and health care populism (i.e. blaming Big Pharma) all strike me as areas in […]
Those following the fate of the Chinatown bus should read Steve Bailey’s column this week:
What Southwest Airlines did to the economics of air fares, Liang’s little bus line, Fung Wah Bus, is now doing to the established order of the I-95 bus business. And in an era of overpaid chief executives, Liang, who speaks little […]
Matt Yglesias catches the press confusing real and nominal wages in their Kerry bashing:
Damn those lying, pessimistic Democrats. Except that as the Post had to concede yesterday, Kerry’s actually right:
On June 19 we wrote that wage increases had kept pace with inflation in the year to May, and criticized Sen. John F. Kerry for […]
I have to admit I really don’t feel all that much rush to read the new Bill Clinton book. For starters, it’s a genre (politician’s biography-policy-lite hybrid) that I studiously avoid in preference for nonfiction reading that takes a more distinctly analytical approach to its subject. Second of all, it’s a thousand pages - daunting […]
The ideas been floating around here and there, but from what Reuters reports, the Draft Bruce Springsteen movement seems to be picking up speed:
A New York concert promoter has mounted an online campaign to “draft” Bruce Springsteen to headline a rock ‘n roll show to upstage the Republican National Convention on the night it nominates […]
Via South Knox Bubba and some internet perusal, I’ve reacquainted myself with MetroPulse, weekly alternarag of my former stomping grounds, and noticed an interesting article by one Matt Edens, a guy who was in a number of my undergrad classes. A presumed real estate listing for an Old North Knoxville house, the piece is really […]
Mark my words: abstract expressionism will soon be the new sofa painting. That was the epiphany I had last night at a gallery exhibition of the works of a minor abstract expressionist, Henry Botkin. By minor, I don’t mean to disparage - I found the works quite wonderful, in fact - but rather to suggest […]
One of the most frustrating classes I took my freshman year in college was a Philosophy in Film course. Part of the problem was that I wasn’t really prepared not having had any philosophy training - I’m still not really very knowledgeable in the subject. But part of it was that as a new college […]
Why do we have only right-wing Bible films and Christian popular culture today? That’s the question posed by Amy Sullivan’s latest article in Washington Monthly.
This is a problem because when the only Christian-themed entertainment in the marketplace is laced with conservatism, Christianity itself will increasingly take on a conservative cast. The faith of Dorothy […]
Slate’s David Plotz has a sharp, withering critique of David Brooks. Trying to explain why liberals seem to be suddenly turning against Brooks, he comes up with a couple of reasons. First, there’s the war, for which Brooks has been cheerleader but strangely detached from the particulars. Second, Brooks’ comic sociology has tipped over into […]
I’ve often thought that writers who put homophobia in scare quotes don’t really deserve a further read. Having experienced our culture’s stigmatization of gays and gayness since I was aware of such things (about the age of 13), it seems evident to me that it’s systematic on the order of racism or sexism, even if […]