In the middle of Mark Jurkowitz’s meta-story on the Metro, the free daily newspaper, there’s this bit:
Anybody who takes public transportation in Boston will see that the tabloid of choice for straphangers these days is the Metro. And with the Herald having recently embarked on a series of major cuts and Purcell acknowledging that the […]
I always enjoy the Guardian’s tennis coverage. If American sports media had remotely as clever and humorous an approach to their coverage, I’d probably read them, even not being a sports fan. It’s something about the sardonic relationship to both athlete and fan-correspondents. And it helps that the readers writing in are funny, too. Sample […]
Via Brad DeLong, I see that Hal Varian has a piece in the Times on high housing prices that’s straightforward but one of the best short reads I’ve seen about the problem.
TO paraphrase Yogi Berra, it seems that houses are now so expensive that no one can afford to own one.
Of course, economists know […]
Quote of the day:
"I am begging the scriptwriters to consider making the factory more glamorous and successful."
This from a study claiming that Coronation Street has turned a generation of young Brits off factory work.
UPDATE: Now I’m confused. The very same Guardian is reporting that Hollywood’s glamorous and successful mathematicians, including the ones on crime […]
Last night, Greater Boston had on Patricia Aburdene, author of MegaTrends 2010. She came across as some strange cross between Suzie Orman and Hernando de Soto. At one point she said "I love the fact that Starbucks spends more on health care for its companies than it does on coffee." Which to me just indicates […]
John Holbo has an interesting discussion on the relevance of copyright law to humanities scholarship. Why, he asks, are cultural and literary studies scholars not up in arms over the latest moves to extend intellectual property further back in time and toward the interests of culture industry stakeholders over the general public?
Doesn’t the prospect of […]
Buried in a worthy Herald story on the impact of fuel costs on transit agencies is this tidbit:
The T’s next fare hike isn’t due until sometime late next year, and service cuts are even less palatable for Grabauskas — although he can’t rule them out if fuel prices don’t drop. He hopes to absorb some […]
Who gets taken out to lunch at Locke-Ober and doesn’t bother to finish half their meal? They can at least pretend for the sake of those of us for whom a nice meal out is a treat and not an imposition.
Matt Yglesias has been developing his critique of the liberal hawk "incompetence dodge" in his blogging, but he and Sam Rosenfeld have honed a trenchant critique up at American Prospect.
Liberalism has always been an idealistic doctrine, and should continue to be. But if high ideals become detached from basic questions of feasibility, they serve nothing […]
John catches the Boston Foundation in one doozy of an instance of press-release policy writing.
The Greater Boston Housing Report Card… put out by The Boston Foundation, would have you believe that there are people spending 80% (or more) of their income on rent. The report’s authors misuse data to draw inaccurate conclusions.
He […]
Worth remembering:
Of course the flipside of this is that blaming greedy owners only gets you so far. People mostly wouldn’t be running businesses if they weren’t greedy; they’d be in the Peace Corps or some such thing. And without greedy owners, nobody could find a job. Greed isn’t good, but it’s what we have to […]
I’ve been busy with writing and work and such lately, so fewer posts and less substantive material. More pop culture musings.
Anyway, today Francine, fresh off the New Pornographers’ concert we attended, wonders about power pop:
The suggestion is that "power pop" stems first from bands like Big Star, and had more recent appearances in the work […]
As if to follow up on the quandry of how to define independent cinema, Edward Jay Epstein comes to the rescue and offers an industrial definition I hadn’t thought about:
Independent films are a totally different enterprise than studio films. They are typically made before they have U.S. distribution and with independent financing. Therefore, the […]
Please, God, no…
I’m optimistic enough to think that tourists want to visit Boston because it’s not Planet Hollywood.
Francine looks at rising gas prices and wonders what it will take to get people to commute by bicycle. She suggests better facilities for cycling commuters and improvements to the bicycles themselves. To which I’d add that there really needs to be some bike routes into major office areas. Downtown’s the trickiest, but until you […]