This is a real pleasant surprise, via the BBJ. … It’s not a big increase, but over the past five years Greater Boston’s population growth has beat out Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Denver, as well as NY, LA, SF and Chicago. … Thank immigration and a diverse economy, though the high-cost-of-living here remains a huge economic challenge, as the BBJ rightly notes.
Month: March 2025
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Greater Boston’s population growth outpaces much of U.S.
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Newton’s Law: For every (Trump) action there is an opposite and equal (AOC) reaction
God help us if this is true. …
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After more than 80 years, Voice of America goes dark
Voice of America has operated for 83 years under approval of Congress and 15 presidents. But one day King Donald decides he doesn’t like it, so – poof – hundreds of VOA journalists and other employees are put on leave and the agency’s mission is effectively eliminated. … Wikipedia is already listing VOA as “dissolved.” …
Oh, well. Just another constitutionally questionable move that Republicans are refusing to acknowledge. … See my Humpty Dumpty downsizing post from the other day. This same scenario is going to keep repeating itself until Congress says stop.
Update — 3.19.25 — From the Globe’s Jeff Jacoby: “Dictators rejoice as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe are silenced.”
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The COVID response: What we got wrong, Part II
Besides getting some public-health matters wrong after the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, it now appears we may have been misinformed about the likelihood that that the pandemic was caused by a leak at China’s Wuhan Institute, as Zeynep Tufekci writes at the NYT. … She points to yet another NYT piece that has also raised past and present safety concerns at places like Wuhan. … A-not-so-random thought: A problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re occasionally right.
Btw – I missed this COVID-related piece by the Globe’s Joan Vennochi last week: “The chill on speech during COVID-19 hurt the country.”
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‘We Have Never Been Woke’
A friend alerted me to an interesting TED-like talk last month by Musa al Gharbi, author of the new book ‘We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.’ The event was hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance and co-sponsored by MIT’s Heterodox Academy Campus Community, MIT Concourse, and MIT Students for Open Discourse. …
I haven’t read Gharbi’s book nor viewed the entire YouTube video of the talk. But I’m generally sympathetic to criticisms of wokeness, as actually practiced by the left and not as portrayed by the right. As a moderate liberal, I think the heavy influence of the academic left’s identity-politics and wokeness has severely hurt the Democratic Party, alienating millions of moderate voters and creating political openings currently being exploited by MAGA reactionaries. So anything that politically weakens that academic left, I’m for. …
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Wu’s strong position (mostly)
The Globe’s Adrian Walker is right (mostly): Mayor Michelle Wu is in a strong position to win re-election this year against one rival, and possibly another rival, both with ties to the business community. … To be sure: Wu is no Tom Menino, her once-upon-a-time mayoral mentor. She’s no ‘urban mechanic,’ no Ms. Fix-It. She’s a mild disappointment precisely because she often chooses ideology over pragmaticism. She also has a sanctimonious streak that’s off-putting to many. But she’s not off-putting enough for most supporters to abandon her. She’s still an incumbent mayor who has run and won citywide elections. And her $650,000 performance in D.C. the other week certainly didn’t hurt her prospects.
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On responsible cuts vs irresponsible cuts
Sen. Chuck Schumer was right to reluctantly clear the way for passage of a GOP-crafted funding bill, arguing the alternative was a government shutdown that would have given the Trump-Musk tag team further excuses to slash government programs. The NYT has more. …
Just to emphasize: I support efforts to control and occasionally cut government spending. I don’t necessarily like it. But I know it’s often necessary. It’s necessary for private businesses to do the same. It’s necessary for households too if the numbers don’t add up. That’s why there’s a part of me that welcomes some of the spending cuts underway at the federal level. But there’s responsible spending cuts – and then there’s irresponsible spending cuts, as WSJ’s Peggy Noonan points out. What we’re seeing today is reckless, ideological-driven cuts at the federal level – and arguably unconstitutional cuts as well. There’s no need to make a bad situation even worse, as Schumer rightly notes, by shutting down the entire government.
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The Humpty Dumpty downsizing strategy: Deliberately breaking institutions beyond repair
One way to get around constitutional concerns about eliminating an entire federal agency without congressional approval is to claim you’re not really eliminating an agency – just reducing it in size and redistributing much of its functions to other agencies. That’s what the Trump administration has done with USAID and is currently doing with the Department of Education: They’re deliberately breaking the agencies beyond repair, leaving them mere shells of their old selves. It’s the Humpty Dumpty downsizing strategy, if you will:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together againWBUR reports that dozens of DOE positions in Massachusetts have already been eliminated.
Update – Speaking of kings, good for AG Campbell et gang, via the Globe: “‘The president is not a king’: Mass. joins nearly two dozen states suing Trump for dismantling US Education Department.”
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Blue State Dems’ high-cost-of-living problem
The Globe’s Rob Gavin has harped on it. Others have noted it too. Now the NYT’s Ezra Klein is pounding away at it, i.e. Blue States’ high-cost-of-living problem. And it is a problem. A major problem. … Klein piece via the inestimable Contrarian Boston.
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‘Faculty-on-Faculty War’: Humanities professors vs. Science, Engineer, Business professors etc.
The WSJ has an intriguing story about a “faculty-on-faculty war” underway at Columbia, pitting humanity and poly-sci types against science, engineering and business types. The divide is not as clear cut by studies as portrayed. There’s a Jewish-faculty component that’s tied to concerns over pro-Palestinian protests on campus, the WSJ reports. But the political divisions by schools are definitely there – basically far-left humanities professors versus more moderate professors in other fields. … And I strongly suspect there’s similar faculty divides on other campuses.…
Faculty members at colleges across the country will present a unified front against Donald Trump’s blunt-ax assaults on academia. But underneath the veneer of solidarity are some simmering hard feelings, much of it tied to the antics of radical far-left academics on campuses.
Hub Blog 