Funny that I should mention London’s congestion tax yesterday, because today I read that the city council is considering a similar idea for Boston:
Saying the half-million commuters who drive into Boston each day are major contributors to traffic and parking congestion, Councilor Paul J. Scapicchio wants the city to look into requiring passes costing […]
Negrophile points to an Indianapolis Star profile of a collector of black Americana. I’m not sure what Negrophile’s stance is (the weblog itself is primarily a news aggregator of sorts), but the news article does outline some of the positions on the worth of racist memorabilia (mammy jars, pickaninny dolls, etc.).
I have to say […]
If you think that Hillary Clinton or Howard Dean are a bit hard to believe when they suddenly get religion, you should see Esquire’s newfound attempt to be hip and edgy. The magazine was never my ideal of what a men’s magazine should be, but the fact that they weren’t FHM was once a big […]
MBTA head Michael Mulhern presented his plan to the legislature and, perhaps in a surprise only to me, says the authority plans to use the new fare cards to charge variable fares, higher for rush hour and lower for off-peak transit. From the Globe
‘’I’d like to think our next fare increase isn’t an across-the-board fare […]
Miguel Sanchez has an entertaining couple of posts up at Modern Kicks on an MIT conference called "Regarding Evil" and laments the excesses of High Theory:
Far more bothersome is the sense one gets from the materials that at least some of those involved find the topic of evil to be just another topos to be […]
If you’re interested in the politics and economics of ending Third World poverty (and we all should be more!), go read William Easterly’s Washington Post review of Jeffrey Sachs’ End of Poverty and Sachs’ reply. [thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer].
Not having read Sachs’ book nor having any real expertise in the field of […]
Lots of talk this weekend among Boston bloggers about a possible housing bubble. Derek at The Third Decade notes a couple of recent Globe and Times articles and wonders if there really is a bubble: “[W]hat’s the real likelihood that there’ll be an implosion or a bursting of the so-called bubble (famous last words, right)? […]
Quiet snowy morning here. What better time to serve up some links to material you may or may not have seen this week?
Mark Schmitt takes on “Miss America Conservatism,” the tendency to slice out narrow pet causes of personal interest to the detriment of a larger concern for health care or poverty-reduction. “Having a child […]
Digby has a useful response to those who treat the ideal of journalistic objectivity as a timeless phenomenon:
journalism reacted strongly to the new field of public relations in the 20’s and 30’s by developing this professional code of objectivity quite a while before the cold war. However, there is no doubt that there was […]
I’m hardly the only one to note the overlap between Million Dollar Baby’s narrative and the Terri Schiavo case Congress took up today. Just do a Google or Technorati search on those terms and you’ll get plenty of matches. Most that I’ve found, however, use the film as an intro to talking about the case […]
So I made it yesterday to the MFA, to see among other things the Ralph Lauren car exhibit. The place was crowded, and the museum’s apparent plan to bring in straight men by focusing on everything but art seems to be working. It was definitely packed enough to require counter-clockwise viewing. I’d complained about the […]
Kevin Drum lays out a mea culpa over women in the blogosphere and writes,
if men complain that women spend too much time blogging about “women’s issues” — and I know that some of them do — and if women complain that men spend too little time blogging about women’s issues — and some of […]
Last week, Kevin Drum offered evidence that the major liberal blogs do a poor job in linking to one another, while conservative ones are much readier to share links to new and smaller blogs. Now via Oliver Willis, I see the conversation is continuing. Lots of bloggers seem angry about the stinginess of established bloggers […]
I swear I used to have clairvoyance when it came it to the New York Times food section. I’d discover or rediscover some food or recipe, usually just by deciding that homemade mayonnaise, sour oranges or dry sherry were unfairly overlooked… then voila, next Wednesday it would appear in the Dining & Food section. Then […]
Doug Merrill at Fistful of Euros looks at the news of Paul Wolfowitz’s nomination to head the World Bank and wonders what the news means and what chill it will have on currently thawing US-European relations. Admittedly it’s a surprising pick on Bush’s part.
No expert myself, I immediately read the appointment as a) a raised […]