If I were Jarred Barrios, I’d be worried… Steve Grossman hasn’t backed a winner in a while.
In all seriousness, the Globe has an overview of the Middlesex DA race, and Andy, Lynne and sco have their rundowns (from when Mike Festa was still in the running). I’ve refrained til now from saying much about […]
David Eisenthal questions Wayne Woodlief’s math ability (subs. req.) and offers his own odds for the Governor’s race:
Deval Patrick 45% probability (60% primary)Tom Reilly 22% (40% primary)Kerry Healey 2% (100% primary)Christy Mihos 30%(Percentages don’t add up to 100 due to rounding.)
David’s assessment sounds mostly reasonable to me, at least given the race right now. […]
I’m not sure exactly what Jay’s gripe is, other than blasting the sin of having unclear academic writing style in a newspaper, but the point of the Times review of the Fogg/Sackler Museum’s new Frank Stella exhibit doesn’t seem to me all that obscure: Stella’s minimalist "Black paintings" were seen as a sensation when they […]
People often complain about the behind-the-scenes politics of the Oscars - people voting for directors overlooked before, or ignoring actresses who won too recently- but I’ll take that in a heartbeat over the The Recording Academy, which thinks it’s OK to give a Grammy not only to the same artist year after year, but to […]
Joan Venocchi criticizes the business community’s skirting of its responsibility on health care, with all the moral critique that Charley and others have been bringing to the health care legislation debate.
In her op-ed, though, this seemingly innocent line stuck out: "As business walks away, so, too, does the federal government." She’s talking specifically about the […]
I’m glad I’m not the only one skeptical about the mayor’s wi-fi dreams. It strikes me as a bourgeois wishlist item dressed in populist garb. Besides, do we even know if wi-fi is going to be a standard five or ten, much less twenty years from now? Computer technology changes rapidly.
Adam Gaffin brings up the […]
As I’ve been hinting, I finally got around to my goal of reading Walter Lippmann. I still haven’t finished the seminal Public Opinion, but can heartily recommend the frequently overlooked Phantom Public, a quicker, easier read that still encapsulates several of Lippmann’s key ideas about public opinion and democratic legitimation. In fact, it’s hard to […]
John Keith asks why he should care about Jane Jacobs. "If you must," he writes, "go to a library and check out The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I gotta tell you, I couldn’t get through it, but maybe that’s just me."
I couldn’t disagree more. Not only did the book strike me as […]
It was just after reading Paul Harrill’s thoughts on the differences between high-definition video and film that Hal Hartley’s latest film, Girl From Monday, popped up in my Netflix queue. More than anything I’ve seen so far (admittedly limited in scope), it suggests both the expressive highs and the potential to annoy of small-scale HD […]
Since the details of party machinations and caucusing can get a little overwhelming and step back with some off-the-cuff analysis, for what it’s worth, of what happened this last weekend in state politics. Here are the winners and losers.
Winner: Deval PatrickHis supporters should be commended. Undoubtedly the news cycle worked in their favor, but Patrick’s […]
Ray Davis at the Valve calls the debt-heavy funding of higher ed a pernicious social policy, and Brad DeLong replies:
As an economist, I have to look at student loans differently. College educations are expensive things–colleges are expensive to run. A generation ago your average college-educated American earned an average salary 30% more than that of […]
Judging from the reactions posted over at Blue
Mass Group, the Deval Patrick revolutionaries came to yesterday’s
Democratic Party caucuses expecting to be shut out of the primary
process, like Reich had been in 2002, only to find the battiments
already crumbling down.
Meanwhile, over at Ward 10 in Mission Hill, I felt like a French
peasant in the provinces while […]
Adam receives the news of Barney’s Boston opening with a deserved raised eyebrow. How could you not, when the article so uncritically quotes beaming with Boutique Boosterism:
"I have a sense that Boston is coming of age, and Barneys is the big fat engagement ring that’s going to seal the deal," says Lisa Pierpont, a producer […]
Funny, I’ve seen little reaction so far to news that the South End BioLab has gotten another green light. Expect ribbon cutting in the next month. At the very least, the article paints political opposition as pretty beleagered. Which makes sense to me: the 2005 mayor and city council elections may have been the last […]
Tomorrow and over the next week, a number of the state Democratic Party caucuses will meet to select delegates for the state’s nominating convention. Here’s a list of caucus meetings by town/ward; if you’re in Boston and are like me, unable to remember which Ward you’re in, the city has a handy searchable database or […]