Columnist joins The New York Times, then writes how the newspaper's power might be bad news.

Point #1:  Ben Smith used to work at BuzzFeed when it was a startup company.

Point #2:  The New York Times has more digital subscribers than the COMBINED subscribers of The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Point #3:  Ben Smith left BuzzFeed, joined The New York Times as a columnist, and on Sunday wrote his first piece about how his now-employer's consolidation of media power might not be so good.

He joined the very problem he fears.

The New York Times has become such a monopoly of information that it can hire people to criticize the company, publish it, play it as self-aware, and simply laugh as they watch more money roll in.

Quitting college and hanging with Nazis isn't helping anyone's brand.

Nick Fuentes, an 18-year old student from the suburbs of Chicago who was about to start his sophomore year at Boston University, has decided to abruptly quit the school before the new semester starts. Why? Because he swung on down to Charlottesville and protested alongside KKK members and Nazis, and apparently folks back in the Boston area haven't been too thrilled with him.

"Massachusetts, and Boston in particular, are among the most left wing states and cities," Fuentes told the Boston Globe. "Probably anywhere I would go would be safer than Boston."

I'm sure some people in Barcelona and Syria might note the hyperbole from Fuentes, but I digress.

Fuentes claims he's received a number of death threats, telling the Globe the area is very dangerous. In a video with Time Magazine, Fuentes explained why quitting Boston University was for the best:





His brand? His brand? I'm fairly certain sometime in Marketing 101 at college they don't suggest the Neo-Nazi or KKK association as a good idea for branding. OHHH, but Fuentes is quitting college, so he might miss that class.

According to the Globe, though:

Fuentes said he thought the event was intended as a demonstration against “immigration, multiculturalism, and post-modernism.”

“The rally was about not replacing white people,” he said.

Public officials handled the event poorly, he said. The police were not allowed to do their jobs properly, making the rally “a total disaster from start to finish,” he said.

That seems to contrast mightily with how Fuentes felt while actually at the rally itself, when he let his thumbs do the talking on Facebook:




Ahh, those "incredible" "disasters."

The same thing could be said of Fuentes' decision-making as of late.

Did you know when nurses strike that patient care might suffer?

Consider me shocked and alarmed as well.*

Nurses at Boston's Tufts Medical Center (which is affiliated as a teaching hospital with Tufts University) went on a one day strike earlier this week. Miffed, executives at Tufts Medical Center decided to lock the nurses out for four extra days as punishment. In the meantime, nurses from temp agencies have been filling in.

As a surprise to apparently some, studies show not having experienced nurses on hand leads to worse patient care. According to the Boston Globe:

"MIT economist Jonathan Gruber and Samuel Kleiner of Cornell University analyzed 50 strikes in New York between 1983 and 2004. They calculated that mortality rose to 2.22 percent on average during strikes, compared to 1.86 percent in the periods before and after the job actions — a 19.4 percent jump. Readmissions increased by an average of 6.5 percent, according to their 2010 paper.

'We found consistent evidence that patient outcomes worsened,' Gruber said in an interview."

Even the world's cheapest amusement park tarot card reader saw that one coming, but I'm glad folks at MIT and Cornell confirm what we all knew.

For now, the lockout continues.


*Not shocked

The battle over where the lyrics to 'Jingle Bells' were written still rages on.

That's right--strangely the debate for once is where, not who.

James Lord Pierpont was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian pastor and abolitionist, and worked as a songwriter. His most noted composition was "The One Horse Open Sleigh," which would later gain worldwide fame entitled "Jingle Bells"--that holiday earworm beloved by kindergarteners worldwide hopped up on candy and caffeine and sung until their parents' ears bleed.

This means largely nothing except to local boards and chambers of commerce that are looking for any angle to promote their small towns and make a buck off a hapless tourist.

Enter Medford, MA, and Savannah, GA.

Savannah dances around the actual "where" part on their plaque.

Both locales have commemorative plaques honoring Pierpont, and both are damned if they're going to claim otherwise about their histories. If you're going to hang your hat on anything, it's a generic holiday song about sled races.

Are we going to call Mrs. Otis Waterman a liar?

Kyna Hamill, a theater historian at Boston University (and volunteer at the Medford Historical Society) decided to do the grunt work to figure out where, exactly, Pierpont penned the words. Her verdict? As she told BU Today and the Boston Globe, there's no proof he wrote the song in either town.

What's fact is the Pierpont's song was published in 1857 by Oliver Diston's publishing group out of Boston. Yet, throughout the 1850s, Pierpont moved back and forth between both Medford and Savannah. He moved down south to work with his brother, also a Unitarian pastor, and perform at the church as the organist and music director. He would also marry Savannah's mayor's daughter, and later fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

According to Hamill, Medford's claim that Pierpont wrote the song in 1850 is probably an editing screw-up based on a 1946 Boston Globe article that said the song was written in the 1850s, and the "s" simply was misplaced.

Yet, Hamill believes the most concrete evidence is that Pierpont actually wrote the song in Boston--not Medford or Savannah at all. Hamill discovered an 1857 playbill of a show in Boston where "Jingle Bells" was performed by actors in blackface as part of a minstrel show.

This would clash with The Songwriters Hall of Fame--which inducted Pierpont in 1970 (no rush or anything, folks)--as their biography of Pierpont simply says he wrote the song for a Thanksgiving church service in Savannah in 1857, and children loved it. Sure, Savannah doesn't get much snow ever, but he was channeling his inner New Englander apparently.

I'm feeling jngly all of a sudden.

Medford's mayor, Stephanie Burke, is having none of that. As she told the Globe, "It was written here, in the tavern. We take full ownership of it. It’s got a long history, and we’re proud of it."

She also noted the city would go out caroling and that "Jingle Bells will be sung repeatedly."

So you might want to avoid Medford for the time being to protect your ears.

Poor school and rich school are not the same school.

The Commonwealth School, founded in 1957, is a tony private institution in Boston. With a yearly tuition of $40,000, it typically sends students off to MIT and Ivy League universities.

The Commonwealth Academy, founded in 2011, is a small private school 90-miles away in Springfield, MA. With a yearly tuition of under $1,200, it typically does not see students attend the elite educational colleges of America.

This hasn't stopped the School from filing a $2 million lawsuit against the Academy claiming "irreparable harm" and financial loss that is "presently incalculable" has occurred. Why? Because both facilities use the word "Commonwealth" in their name.

While the School claims they didn't even know the Academy existed until 2015, School headmaster William Wharton tells the Boston Globe that the word is "a part of our identity, and it’s something that we ultimately have to protect." Nothing like stopping confusion among things by creating confusion in the first place.

One major sticking point is that Massachusetts officially goes by the title of Commonwealth of Massachusetts. (As do Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.) With both institutions located in the same state, and thousands of different locations and buildings in the state all labeled with the word, it's a tricky argument by the School.

Then there's one other minor issue, if this isn't already too much commonwealth for you to handle in one sitting: There's already a separate Commonwealth Academy, located in Virginia, who says they're perfectly content with the similarly named school in Massachusetts.

A hearing on the matter is expected to be held on July 12th.

In the meantime, no common sense or common good can apparently come from "Commonwealth."

Oh, the Boston Globe headline wasn't really that interesting at all.

Never mind.

The Boston Globe tweeted days ago they were going to reveal today the one headline they never wanted to publish. Some people wondered. Was the paper folding? Going solely online? The moon landings were all fake? What was it?

Instead, the Globe decided to try their best impersonation of The Onion and do a satirical front page.

Strike up the Yakety Sax music, because things just became rib-tickling here!

Dated one year from now, April 9, 2017, it creates a grim view of the nation and the world under a then-President Trump. Curfews, deportations, trade wars. Let the hilarity ensue!

This is the satirical equivalent of having Chips Ahoy! say they make chocolate chip cookies just like grandma makes. Sure, it sounds fine, but we all know grandma's cookies can't be beat.

Which is why satire is left to The Onion. Leave it alone.

And leave the cookies to grandma, too.

The Boston Globe teases, leaves people guessing.

Like much of the newspaper world, the Boston Globe has seen better days. But when they tweeted out a teaser the other day they received more attention since they broke open the Catholic church sex abuse scandal.

The front page we hope to never publish, unveiled this Sunday. Via @GlobeOpinion pic.twitter.com/EluP0GHi5T

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) April 8, 2016

This has led to half of Massachusetts and at least three Whalbergs and an Affleck to question what it might be.

ALL DUNKIN' DONUTS TO CLOSE

TOM BRADY RETIRES

LAST KNOWN LOBSTER PLUCKED FROM THE SEA

CLAM CHOWDER OUTLAWED

TRUMP PURCHASES GLOBE

It's probably going to be the Globe announcing its demise or going entirely online. Whatever it turns out to be, one thing is for certain. It can't be worse than CNN holding onto a one minute video they hope to never play.

The U.S. Army Band playing "Nearer My God To Thee" when the world is coming to an end:





Did CNN record that on Betamax? Did someone smear a cut potato and Vaseline on the lens? The Zapruder film is more crisp than this.

You'll never look at a Walgreens the same way again.

Researchers claim they have identified the site where the accused from the Salem Witch Trials were hanged. It overlooks a modern-day Walgreens.

The story popularized in Arthur Miller's fictionalized play The Crucible has long been in the consciousness of American history, but no one knew for certainty where the hangings occurred.

Using "advanced mapping techniques" and cross-researching eyewitness accounts with stories of the events surrounding the hangings, historians believe with without a doubt that those executed for being witches were killed on top of a wooded hill in Salem, MA, which today is called Proctor's Ledge, where a small monument will be erected. And, yes, the hillside looks down upon a Walgreens.

But I think we all kind of look down on Walgreens. It's no CVS.

Boston Public Library offers a free yoga class.

Over 50 people filled up the historic Abbey Room at the Boston Public Library to participate in the first of six free yoga classes.

Because when I think of society's athletically inclined individuals, I think of people half-asleep in a library.

Boston Public Library rare book collection has a mold outbreak

After librarians at the Boston Public Library noticed mold spores on a medieval manuscript, they have decided to shut down access to their rare book collection for five to ten weeks as they assess the situation.

The collection is located in the McKim Building (seen above), built in 1895, which is now undergoing major construction. The rare manuscripts and holdings affected are usually climate controlled through air conditioning and carefully placed dehumidifiers--but being the summertime, humidity levels have been high. If humidity isn't giving you a bad hair day, it's doing its damndest to ruin our historic books.

As Fine Books Magazine reports through the Boston Globe, Laura Irmscher, chief of collections strategy at the Boston Public Library, claims it was a perfect storm of construction and seasonal humidity merging together to cause the chaos.

As a result, over 500,000 holdings in the rare collection will need to be hand-examined for mold damage.

And you thought you had a bad day at work.

What do you call nasty, leftover snow?

'Snow' doesn't do it justice. It's no longer snow, just like a french fry is no longer just a potato.

But that gunk, that black mass of vileness that builds up on street corners and sidewalks as winter progresses, needs a name because it isn't just snow any longer.

Boston Globe correspondent Michael Andor Brodeur raised the question in his column this week, and he has some ideas what word or phrase to use for the blob of nastiness left behind by Mother Nature, including:

Snoffal
Frostblight
Flurryslurry
Thawmit
Cambridge Crude
Springslop
Guttermulch
Streetloam
Blizcharge
Pure Evil

Brodeur is still looking for suggestions at his Twitter.

After this winter, I'm partial to something that is decidedly not family friendly to say.



Photo: Scruss.com

School superintendent steps down amid claims of plagiarism.

Mansfield, MA, school superintendent Brenda Hodges has stepped down from her post after allegations that her four minute commencement speech at last month's high school graduation was plagiarized from Navy Admiral William McRaven's commencement speech a month earlier at the University of Texas, Austin.

As The Boston Globe reports:

In his speech in May, available on YouTube, McRaven told a University of Texas at Austin audience that “if every one of you changed the lives of just 10 people, and each one of those folks changed the lives of another 10 people, just 10, then in five generations, 125 years, the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 800 million people.”

In her speech, Hodges said that if “every one of you changed the lives of just five people, just five, then in five generations, 125 years, the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 400 million people.’’

Well, hey, might as well lower everyone's expectations by half and hope it makes things more realistic. Bonus points to Hodges.

Despite resigning, Hodges still claims she didn't plagiarize, stating that McRaven's speech was "a hundred times better," and that the admiral's speech wasn't really her inspiration, but instead that she largely borrowed passages from a pastor's talk in her native Oklahoma a year earlier. For not citing her pastor, Hodges apologized.

If you're desperately confused as to who is allegedly plagiarizing from whom at this point, you're not alone.

Boston Globe columnist asks: Why do writers hate Amazon?

Because it's a giant conglomerate with financial interests to slowly monopolize the publishing industry, with the reach and wherewithal to smush a small, up-and-coming writer hoping for fairness like a mosquito under the thumb of Jeff Bezos at a cocktail party in the Hamptons.

Or, you know, you can read an opinion column in this week's Boston Globe with a headline asking about the strained relationship between writers and Amazon, one that also avoids really explaining anything. "Of course I love bookstores. But it behooves me to love Amazon, too," says the piece's author, Alex Beam. (Beam has a newly published book. So, you know.)

Cover all your bases, Beam. You don't want to irk Bezos.

The SAT is getting a makeover.

The last time the SAT was given a face lift was in 2005. Out went the perfect score of 1600, in came a required essay portion.

Now, the College Board, which constructs and administers the SAT, is bringing back the perfect score of 1600 and doing away with the essay (or at least making it optional), starting with tests in 2016. Likewise, obscure vocabulary words will be dismissed in favor of more commonplace choices, and test takers will no longer be penalized for guessing. Only correct answers will count toward grading.

David Coleman, president of the College Board, claims the change is for very good reasons, namely that SAT preparation courses offered by the likes of Kaplan and Princeton Review give wealthier students an advantage.

"The College Board cannot stand by while some test-prep providers intimidate parents at all levels of income into the belief that the only way they can secure their child’s success is to pay for costly test preparation and coaching,” said Coleman at an event in Austin, TX, announcing the changes.

As part of equalizing test preparation for all students, the nonprofit Khan Academy will offer free online SAT prep courses available to everyone.

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, a relatively glowing, in-depth feature examines Coleman's motivations as purely noble in trying to help those financially less fortunate. Says the Times:

And what’s at stake, he often makes clear, is not just the fairness and usefulness of an exam but our nation’s ability to deliver opportunity for all, which, really, is about the soul of the country. 

You heard it, folks. The new SAT = the soul of our country. Eat your heart out, Thomas Jefferson.

Statue of sleepwalking man in underwear causing panic at Wellesley College.

More than 100 students at the all-female Wellesley College have petitioned the school and its Davis Museum, asking administrators to remove the art, entitled Sleepwalker, which they feel is uncomfortable, a mere 24 hours after the statue's installation.

The petition on change.org--started by student Zoe Magid and written by Lauren Walsh--states, "[T]his highly lifelike sculpture has, within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for many members of our campus community."

Continuing with the appeal, Walsh writes that "we ask that in the future, the Davis Museum and the College notify us before displaying public art, especially if it is of a particularly shocking or sensitive nature."

The artist, Tony Matelli, is still mum on the issue, but Davis Museum director Lisa Fischman wrote on the college's website that "I love the idea of art escaping the museum and muddling the line between what we expect to be inside (art) and what we expect to be outside (life). [...] As the best art does, Tony Matelli’s work provokes dialogue, and discourse is at the core of education."

For now, Sleepwalker remains walking.



photo: David L. Ryan, Boston Globe

Old South Church in Boston decides to sell extremely rare book.

How rare?

Published in Cambridge, MA, in 1640, the psalm book was the first book published in British North America. It became a standard bearer for all other psalm books used throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Eleven copies remain in existence today, yet all are held by major institutions, and no copy has been sold since 1947.

The Old South Church's congregation voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to sell one of the two copies they possess as a means to make money for potential repairs for the church, which was built in 1873 and in need of $7 million in repairs.

Early estimates suggest the psalm book might fetch $10 to $20 million at auction.

In other words, if we pool our money together we might be able to afford half a page.





photo: WBUR

Boston.com tries to find the humor in a situation.

Fitchburg, Massachusetts--which this blog has an association with--is less than desirable as a place to live.

Boston.com--and, by association, The Boston Globe--ranked the 20 richest and 20 poorest cities and towns out of Massachusetts' 351 total incorporated areas.

And it turns out that Fitchburg, despite being poor and trashy, has a literary reference, which the Globe proudly detailed during an examination of the city's poverty:

Fun Fact: Who knew that Fitchburg had a large wizarding population? The book "Quidditch Through the Ages" from the Harry Potter universe lists a team called the Fitchburg Finches as one of two representing the United States.

Harry Potter doesn't just kill off evil wizards, he even makes poverty fun and exciting! Hooooooray!






Photo: Aram Boghosian, The Boston Globe...of a commuter rail station. The happeningest place in all of Fitchburg.

Boston Globe writer wants you to stop saying something is "literally" this or that.

According to the July 19th Boston Globe (eh, we're slow here) headline:

Misuse of the word has spread to Stanley Cup celebrations and even a sitcom character.

No--not a sitcom character!!

Now my faith in the linguistic stylings of Hollywood is truly ruined.