In my contributor’s blurb in this month’s Boston Magazine, I lob a tomato at the City of Boston for cracking down on hair salons serving free drinks to customers without a license. The popular stereotype of Boston in the world at large is that we’re stodgy, uptight, schoolmarmish, anti-fun, and usually dressed to match. The… [Read more…]
November 1, 2011
After seven years in the tall grass, my byline returns to the city in grand style. Locals, be sure to check out the print edition for the AWESOME two-page art by Miguel Navarro.
October 6, 2011
Yours truly, three months ago: That being said, fuck the Post Office, or as I call it, the garbage delivery service…. I receive virtually nothing in the mail other than Boston Globe coupon circulars, offers for high-interest credit cards, and Fingerhut catalogs. Every day, a pound or so of mail goes straight from the mailbox… [Read more…]
October 2, 2011
When the Occupy Boston protest crested last night in front of the Federal Reserve building downtown, they were only a few blocks from where most historians think an earlier generation of hooligans boarded British merchant ships and tossed their cargoes of tea overboard. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find two movements which would instinctively… [Read more…]
September 9, 2011
When I think of, and back to 9/11, I have many swirling thoughts, but what sticks with me still is a sense of lingering bitterness over the many unsettled bills left on the table that day. Most of all, 9/11 represents the single greatest institutional failure in the history of our government to perform its… [Read more…]
August 21, 2011
In this NYT story, Second Recession in U.S. Could Be Worse Than First, readers are treated to this astonishing bit of rhetorical whiplash: Even those Americans who are working are generally working less; the typical private sector worker has a shorter workweek today than four years ago. Employers shed all the extra work shifts and… [Read more…]
August 19, 2011
Am I the only person utterly perplexed by Hubway? My long-standing feelings about bicycles aside, I just don’t get the point. The one bona fide use case would seem to be a trip where you take the subway as close to your destination as you can, then pick up a bike for the remainder. I… [Read more…]
August 14, 2011
“Livability” is one of those very popular concepts in urban planning, a discipline which, on the whole, has probably done almost as much damage to American cities as crack cocaine. No amount of government inattention has ever done for a neighborhood in Boston what the wise progressives of the 50s and 60s did to the… [Read more…]
August 7, 2011
China’s present crowing about the US debt downgrade (and our debt situation in particular) could be very instructive, provided one chooses to actually consider the deeper strategic situation. First, the enormity of US debt held by the Chinese government is hardly a coincidence: the Chinese government actively manipulates the value of the Yuan versus the… [Read more…]
August 1, 2011
It is obvious to any marginally-sober individual over the age of 30 that a large, perhaps majority portion of the population under 25, are cretins. Because this point is in no serious dispute, I shall refrain from unnecessary equine sadism and proceed instead to one of the panoply of causes for this crisis: ZIPCAR. For… [Read more…]
 | Keohane on Sweating the Small Beer |
| Don’t Say I Di… on Post Haste | |
| Charlie on the Hubwa… on On the Bicycle Menace | |
 | The Snob on Why I Don’t Care About S… |
| Keohane on Why I Don’t Care About S… |
November 2, 2011
1