Boston

Wednesday

Kelly Chapman

The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order. We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

san francisco

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

The un-American revolution 

The riots raging in Los Angeles are an unwelcome present ahead of America’s birthday, which is less than a month away. But they’re also a timely reminder of just what that birthday, the Fourth of July, is about. After all, American independence was conceived in rioting and brazen defiance of law enforcement.  Some 250 years ago, Boston was aflame with the spirit of resistance. Then, too, as in LA today, soldiers had to be called out to quell the mobs. In 1770, that led to an incident known to history as the Boston massacre. Violently harassed by hundreds of protesters, seven British soldiers fired into the crowd, killing three people on the spot and wounding several more, two of whom later died.

revolution

Sunday

Grace Curley

Why Trump made inroads in the Democrats’ urban strongholds

Cities never sleep, but neither does Donald J. Trump. That might explain why he managed to make inroads in the most unlikely of places.  Trump’s gains in the Big Apple were able to do some damage to the Democrats’ star candidate and helped contribute to his popular vote win. “Kamala Harris won New York City by a thirty-seven-point margin, far shy of the nearly fifty-four-point margin of victory that President Biden held over Donald J. Trump in 2020,” Dana Rubinstein and Stefanos Chen wrote in the Times.  So how did he do it? It depends on who you ask.

donald trump inroads

Thursday

Hannah Moore

How to do St. Patrick’s Day like an Irish American

For a country like Ireland, as devoted to its faith as to a good party, the fact that St. Patrick’s Day falls during Lent poses a problem. The saint himself is said to have broken his fast during Lent, eating meat instead of fish, for which he was so apologetic that an angel came to give him comfort. Put your meat into a dish of water, the angel said, and it will turn to fish. This Patrick did and was very pleased to see that the angel was right. The meat had turned to fish, and he could partake of it without guilt. The Irish call this miracle “St. Patrick’s Fish,” and feel no qualms about eating a pork roast to celebrate the day. You can also keep a holy day and drink to excess, if you’re drinking for the right reasons. St.

St. Patrick's

Friday

Amy Rose Everett

A Boston tea party and Christmas time on Cape Cod

Boston Harbor Hotel, 6:42 a.m. I tossed on a robe, had a fight with an unfamiliar coffee machine, then threw back my bedroom curtains to soak up the best part of chronic jet lag. Fuschia skies intensified before a beautifully fat, gold sun peeped above the horizon. Some hours later, a three-tier stand stacked with PB&J sandwiches, smoked salmon, vanilla bean scones and fig jam obscured the same uninterrupted view, from the Rowes Wharf Sea Grille downstairs. Proffered a frankly overwhelming selection of colorful loose leaf teas, the irony wasn’t lost on me, a Brit, as I raised a pinky. “Green Sparkling… Tropical Oolong… Organic Big Ben English Breakfast… Chai Imperial? How about L’Herboriste?

cape cod boston christmas

Thursday

Michael Warren Davis

The Satanic Temple comes to Boston

The Satanic Temple is petitioning the City of Boston to fly their newly designed Satanic flag over City Hall. After a court ruled that the city had to fly a Christian group’s flag, the Temple insisted that it also had the right to display its banner during “Satanic Appreciation Week” from July 23 to 29. According to Lucien Greaves, the Temple’s founder, “A public forum that allows for religious expression can either announce a dedication to religious pluralism or it can signal a decline into theocracy by allowing public representatives to dictate limits on the civic capacities of some religious identities by exercising exclusive preference for others.” If Mr.

Sunday

Franklin Einspruch

Going Greco-Roman in Boston

In a way it felt like a walk around campus on graduation day: one last stroll through the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston before the mayor’s medically nonsensical, legally dubious, morally atrocious mandates force museums, restaurants, gyms and more to oblige entrants to prove that they’re vaccinated against Covid-19. I could comply, but I will not. “There’s nothing more American than coming together to ensure we’re taking care of each other,” said our unctuous new mayor in her typical passive-aggressive fashion. Perhaps, but there’s nothing less American than commanding such sentiments from City Hall and punishing us who see through the ruses of power. The commencement, then, was that of a new relationship between your reporter and his adopted city’s art holdings.

Boston

Saturday

Chadwick Moore

Goodbye Bill de Blasio, New York-hating communist

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, Bill de Blasio — New York’s bumbling, mildly sinister but profoundly incompetent mayor — got laughed out of office as his second term came to an end. Don’t let the door hit ya, the city collectively sneered...despite voting for the man twice. The new administration couldn’t even wait until morning to flip the official @NYCMayor Twitter account. One minute after midnight, it changed all its pictures over to ones of Eric Adams, before the man had even been officially sworn in. An image of the smiling new mayor loomed over de Blasio’s final message: a photo of he and his wife walking in shadow down a long hallway with their backs turned on a city they abandoned long ago.

bill de blasio

Thursday

Melissa Chen

The player exposing the NBA’s hypocrisy on China

Remember when “Free Tibet” was a mainstay of the cool, hippie subculture that dominated the Nineties? Back when Hollywood cared about the fate of Buddhism’s Holy Land? Few will even remember that Disney — yes, the same Disney that recently filmed parts of the live-action Mulan in Xinjiang — produced a film, Kundun, about the early life of the Dalai Lama. China then retaliated by banning Disney films, causing the company to backtrack and attempt to bury the Scorsese-directed biopic. Disney's then-CEO even traveled to China to apologize. This series of events should sound familiar by now in the age of Western capitulation to China. Less commonplace these days is the sight of a celebrity sporting imagery of the Dalai Lama and any quaint talk of “freeing Tibet.

enes kanter

Monday

Martin Gayford

Titian meets Isabella Stewart Gardner

In 1576 Venice was gripped by plague. The island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio, on which the afflicted were crammed three to a bed, was compared to hell itself. In the midst of this horror Tiziano Vecellio, the greatest painter in Europe, died — apparently of something else. He was in his eighties and working, it seems, almost to the end. Titian: Women, Myth & Power, now on view at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, contains several of the greatest masterpieces of his old age — and also of European art. It comprised just six canvases (a seventh was unable to travel to Boston), all done for Philip II of Spain — a villain of English history, the man who launched the Armada but, as far as Titian was concerned, his most discerning patron.

titian

Monday

The Spectator

The haunting beauty of empty cities

COVID-19 has a horrid ability to turn fiction into fact. Deserted modern cities are usually the realm of post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies. Now, many of us live in them. The world's greatest streets are dramatically empty; suspended suddenly in a dream-like quiet. It's eerie and also very beautiful. We usually often don't notice how remarkable our cities are the commotion. We are distracted by the crowds, the commotion and the congestion. Now it is hard for urbanites to notice anything else. The Spectator has looked around the world, and asked various writers in various places to describe where they live in lockdown.

empty cities london

Tuesday

Dominic Green

In Massachusetts, Warren fails to pull rabbit from hat

BostonElizabeth Warren has all the answers, a plan for every disaster and the hectoring manner of a professor whose class are dozing off after lunch. Unfortunately, the voters don’t believe any of it.‘I'm in this race because I believe I will make the best president of the United States of America,’ Warren insisted at a rally in Detroit, Michigan on the afternoon of Super Tuesday. Meanwhile the voters of Massachusetts went to the polls and disagreed.How could Warren have seriously believed this? She’d already been immolated in Iowa, handily neutralized in New Hampshire and sourly creamed in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders was always going to win Vermont, but the Vermont exit polls showed Warren being beaten into fourth place and single figures by Michael Bloomberg.

massachusetts

Tuesday

Dominic Green

Toulouse-Lautrec, poster child of Bohemia

Every circus needs a midget. This particular law of show business was established by the Victorians. It was P.T. Barnum who popularized the word ‘midget’. Harriet Beecher Stowe had used it in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to describe both children and a small adult, but it was Barnum, as great and merciless as master of the levers of sentiment as Dickens, who popularized the m-word when advertising the outsized talents of Colonel Tom Thumb, Commodore George Washington Nutt, and Lavinia Warren. Commodore Nutt, who was not a naval officer, wore a naval uniform. He loved Lavinia Warren, whose real name was Mercy Lavinia Bump. But she married the bill-topping Tom Thumb, who was originally Charles Stratton.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec