A Home in the Digital World
More working journalists, less elite institutes Chris Faraone,* John Loftus,** and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to rebuild American journalism. Pretty much from the ground up, since so many news outlets and jobs in the field have been destroyed in the last quarter century. And a growing number of […]
This week, a reminder that politics is not a spectator sport. I was listening to a recent Noam Chomsky appearance on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. And the two giants of the American left sparred a bit on particulars but agreed that humanity faces two existential threats: global warming and a revival of the […]
AG Healey should form independent commission to investigate the failed agreement Last week in the first installment of this two-part column, I ran through the many problems with the January 2016 deal between General Electric, the city of Boston, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that has now collapsed for all intents and purposes. […]
The official narrative and the real story Readers might feel that this should be a time for me to take a victory lap. The GE Boston deal that I criticized from the moment it was made public in January 2016 has crashed to Earth a bit over three years later. The now-failing multinational […]
Over the last several days, the Boston Herald has had its knives out in no less than three articles and two editorials against MassHousing—an independent, quasi-public agency created in 1966 and charged with providing financing for affordable housing in Massachusetts. Readers can be forgiven for assuming that such lavish attention from a publication […]
Like pretty much every journalist, I think about who I am writing for* from time to time. Most writers aren’t just sending messages into the ether, after all. Unless they are writing for therapeutic reasons. Or they are diarists. But even diarists are typically writing for some future audience they have in mind. Be […]
No corporation should own most newspapers in a region In last week’s Apparent Horizon, “GateHouse Editorial Flacks for Mass Retailers,” I dissected an editorial, “The benefits of a teen minimum wage,” calling for a subminimum wage for Bay State teenage workers that turned out to have run in over two dozen eastern Mass […]
Calls for undermining the rising statewide minimum wage with a subminimum wage for teens A couple of days back I picked up a Cambridge Chronicle newspaper at a takeout joint I frequent. Opened it up. Skimmed the top story, and the week’s arrests. Then moved on to the editorial. And was stopped cold […]
Rep. Mike Connolly’s blog offers a critical look behind the curtain of Mass politics The Massachusetts State House is not a bastion of democracy. I think a growing number of people in the Commonwealth are pretty clear on that fact. Dominated for decades by a series of imperial House speakers, and to a […]
In last week’s column looking back at “2018: The Year in Global Warming,” I reviewed the dire threat posed to humanity and our environment by climate change, and concluded with the following: The big question for Bostonians and anyone else reading this: How do we go from this grim state of affairs to […]