Charles Swift, local historian, is offering his first walking tour of Boston this next Wednesday, June 7. It will cover Beacon Hill, “from its earliest history to current development.” Kudos to Charles for coming up with the idea and offering these. His website is a fount of information, and I’m sure his tours will be […]
On the lookout for some good beach reading. Normally, for that me, that means fiction, light or medium-weight, that I never have time for during the rest of the year. But Lis Riba surveys some books on Britain and British culture. Certainly it’s my Anglophile streak that draws me to these, but also something else: […]
I find this Steve Bailey article bizarre. Set aside the fact that the U.S. is probably alone among democracies with a weak party system. (U.S. voters don’t belong to the Democratic party in the way a Brit can belong to the Labour party, or a German to the Christian Democrats, etc.) If we approached politics as […]
Though made in the postwar years, Louisiana Story seems like a capstone of American nonfiction filmmaking of the interwar years. It was as if father of documentary Robert Flaherty decided he could make a film in the mold of Pere Lorenz or the British documentariest - exalting man against Nature, man with Machine - and […]
The NewsHour had a bit on the congressional hearings over the compromised VA data. If people think that this is a fluke occurance and won’t be happening again in the future - at other public and private institutions, many other times - they’re sorely mistaken. Indeed, it’s the fiduciary responsibility of these institutions to keep sensitive […]
Dan and Dan weigh in on the comment-or-not-to-comment issue.
Let me propose a corrolary… it’s linking rather than opening to comments that makes a real blog. Rather than two-way communication, what blogging does most of the time is lateral conversation. It’s the lack of linking - not to other blogs, not even to news sources outside […]
Jon Keller is impressed.
American Footprints, however, has some reasonable doubts about McCain’s “Stop the Bullshit” doctrine.
By the way, to Keller’s point, I know he’s trying hard to tar the “left” at any opportunity he can get, but he’d be hard-pressed to find many on the American left who are crazy about a French or German-style guest […]
No, it’s not an MLA paper topic. But Negrophile points to an interesting economics paper on same-race voting preferences in American Idol. Short version: the number of black viewers rises with the number of black contestants, and voting behavior tends toward same-race recognition, with black viewers more likely to vote for black candidates, non-black viewers […]
Apparently, the bubble’s deflating, but that still doesn’t stop the Globe from calling marshy, strip-mall repository Seekonk, MA, a picturesque bedroom community.
Lots of discussion at Blue Mass Group on the subject of building more housing, after a Rappaport Institute report called for the drastic need of increased supply to improve the economy and stablize the […]
Agreed. It’s the not the comments or lack thereof that distinguishes a real blog from the proliferation of web content that newspapers are selling as “blogs.” But there does seem to be something stilted and artificial about a number of the Globe’s blogs (or the Times’, as Matt Yglesias points out), and a little more […]
Kieran Healy compares the United States’ incarceration rate with other nations’, developed and undeveloped. The result isn’t pretty.
At Blue Mass, Bob has some fun at the expense of the HubPolitics writer who mangles a bit of the English language himself in his statement, ”We can thank the overwhelmingly liberal legislature for the poor fluency amongst the non-native English speaking students, after all, it was the Democrats on Beacon Hill who gave the axe to the voter […]
In the comments, Luke asks the question
You mentioned the candidates brought up Silbert’s mention of economic development and how you are unsure of how valid it is at the state level.. can you expand on that? Specifically the Mass economy and the gubernatorial race?
Sure. There’s a commonplace, commonsense notion that if only some very local, […]
Hoss sees Silbert as the unambiguous “winner” in yesterday’s debate.
BMG reader Paul has reactions closer to mine.
I know my writing off Kelley as “leftfield” seems unduly dismissive, but as MassMarrier notes, his “Karl Rove playbook” admonition in his closing statement really was over the top.
I was a bit too blunt in my summary yesterday - though I’ll stick to the tenor of what I wrote - so let me stress, without exaggeration, how impressive all the candidates were in their seriousness and in the breadth and depth of their policy knowledge. Yes, candidates for Lieutenant Governor should show an […]