Elizabeth Warren was right to call out Larry Summers
Exhibit A why Elizabeth Warren was right to call out Larry Summers over his emails with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein: This Harvard Crimson story. Check it out. Summers was basically asking a known sex predator how to seduce a “mentee,” i.e. a younger woman he was effectively mentoring. Epstein’s advice is chilling. … Warren is right: Summers doesn’t belong in a classroom after this – even though the “mentee” in question was probably not a student. Just an ex-student. … Harvard Crimson piece via the WSJ.
Update – 11.19.25 – The Globe’s Adrian Walker thinks Summers’s emails were “sub-juvenile” and the least of his career-long offenses.
Update II –– 11.20.25 — Summers is taking leave from teaching, GBH reports. … The Globe’s Joan Vennochi thinks the focus on Summers is distracting from Trump’s own ties to Epstein.
Debunking democratic socialism with caustic humor
Bill Maher was on a roll Saturday night, caustically pointing out the obvious flaws of democratic socialism if you take its anti-capitalist rhetoric seriously. … I’ve harped on this general issue before and won’t do so again now. I’d just add that Maher is right when he suggests the real problem with democratic socialism is that its extremism merely empowers extremism on the right. They feed off each other. I guess you can call it a form of dialecticalism. Am I using that word right? I’m trying to remember from my very long-ago history and poli-sci courses
Update — Fareed Zakaria was a guest on Maher’s show last night. Here’s his most recent common-sense advice for Dems, via the Post.
Headline shorts: Accelerating college closures … The Putin Youth … Costly coastal buyouts? … Wu’s big pay day … ‘Goldberg v. O’Brien, Round 2’
Endangered species: The middle-class in Massachusetts
If you have time, definitely check out the Globe’s excellent “Squeezed” package of stories on the plight of the middle class in Massachusetts, starting with the apparent mainbar (“Why the middle class is disappearing in Massachusetts”) and moving on to the second article that I’ve read so far (“One job, three generations, 30 years of inflation: A story from Massachusetts’ shrinking middle class”). The latter piece really hits home, looking at a Dorchester grandmother whose lifestyle trajectory is completely different from those of her daughter, who works in the same family child-care business as her mother, and her granddaughter. One generation could afford to buy a home and live in relative comfort. The younger generations, well, you know the answer.
Btw – As the Globe notes, the definition of “middle class” is tricky these days in Massachusetts. Most sources measure it by income, in this case around $70,000 to $200,000, give or take ten grand or so. Obviously, there are a lot of people in that category. But if you define the middle class as people who can somewhat comfortably afford the American Dream of buying a modest home, you’re talking about a much smaller number of middle-class residents today in Massachusetts – and it’s even worse in Greater Boston, where the median price of a single-family home is now more than $1 million. … And we’re not even talking about the skyrocketing costs of health care and higher education, two other big-ticket items increasingly burdening middle-class and other non-wealthy residents …
Btw II — Coincidently, the Globe series came out the same week as the Boston Foundation’s latest devastating look at the regional housing market, as GBH reports.
Btw III — Think affordable opportunities increase the farther west you move in Massachusetts? Think again. This NYT piece makes clear that the housing crisis has hit the Berkshires full force, with the same fundamental problem confronting the region: lack of new housing construction.
Threefer: Markey vs Moulton vs Pressley?
So U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley is indeed considering a Senate run in Massachusetts, calling up allies to see what they think of a challenge to fellow progressive Ed Markey, the soon-to-be octogenarian incumbent, as Politico reports. … The NYT’s Jess Bidgood has a good piece on all the young-and-restless Dems, including U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, who would love to replace Markey. … So what happens if Pressley gets into the race? The possibilities are fascinating: A.) Pressley galvanizes the left and beats out the two white males to win the Dem nomination B.) The two progressives, Pressley and Markey, cancel each other out, handing the nomination to the more moderate Moulton C.) Markey is forced under pressure to withdraw, setting up a Pressley vs. Moulton showdown, something the MSM will instantly frame as representative of the ongoing ‘civil war’ within the Democratic Party (while providing Pressley with fawning coverage) and D.) Markey beats the two insolent whippersnappers. …
… As a moderate, I’d obviously love to see Scenario B. unfold. Can you imagine the progressive outcry and the demand for ranked-choice voting, something they support whenever one of their own doesn’t win a crowded primary race? …
But first Pressley has to declare she’s running. And don’t discount the chances of Republican John Deaton, particularly if Pressley or Moulton win the Dem race and the general election comes down to a battle of newcomers.
Update – 11.13.25 – The Herald’s Joe Battenfeld has his doubts about whether Pressley will run and whether she can win. … Btw: I hadn’t heard of the UMass poll Joe cites in his column, which shows Pressley running third behind Moulton and Markey in a three-way race. I tend to agree with Joe that the poll actually shows Markey is vulnerable, with Pressley and Moulton’s combined numbers higher than Markey’s.
MTA kiss of death? Part II: Not necessarily
Damn. It turns out school committee candidates backed by local affiliates of the Massachusetts Teachers Association did much better in last week’s elections than previously thought, as Contrarian Boston’s Scott Van Voorhis reports. Sure, MTA-backed candidates in Newton got their clocks cleaned last Tuesday. But school committee candidates backed bya teachers’ union nabbed seats in Watertown, Cambridge, Beverly, Quincy, Waltham, and Gloucester, according to Scott. … Think about it: a union whose members’ revenues come 100 percent from taxpayers now have their favored candidates sitting on boards deciding how to spend taxpayer money. … And let’s not get into what this means for the radical curriculum agenda of the MTA.
iRobot: The one-hit wonder
It was once the pride and joy of the emerging robotics industry in Massachusetts. But now it’s facing bankruptcy, unable to find a suitor after its failed hook up with Amazon, as theBBJ reports. How did Bedford’s iRobot go from techno star to bankrupt has-been? There are many reasons, as the NYT’s Liam McCabe lists. But I’d argue that iRobot’s ultimate problem is that it’s been a one-hit wonder in a very limited consumer robotics market. Beyond its famous Roomba vacuum cleaner, iRobot just hasn’t developed other hit products. And those that came close to being hits (at least in terms of techno coolness) weren’t within the narrow confines of the consumer robotics market, such as PackBot, which was part of iRobot’s defense and security business before the firm sold it off in 2016 to focus on home robots – even though the industrial robotics market is far bigger and more lucrative than the home robotics market. …
Meanwhile, Roomba is losing market share by the day, due to a “glut of cheap, decent competitors” that offer “largely indistinguishable” product quality, McCabe writes.
How much longer can a company survive with only one primary product in a narrow, highly competitive consumer market? My guess is not much longer.
Update — 11.14.25 –– Sounds pretty lame. But who knows? From the BBJ: “Robot manicure machine starts global rollout with Braintree Ulta.”
The Boston premiere: ‘Something to Tell You’
The Herald’s Jed Gotlieb has the scoop: Sarah Silverman may be performing “Something to Tell You,” perhaps the most moving ballad ever sung, at tonight’s Comics Come Home 29 at TD Garden. … The song definitely ranks up there with Cups and Cake.
Headline Shorts: Moulton packpedals … Wu for president? … Jay Peak sold … Cannabis shop closings … Pied-à-terre-ville … Dietrich’s Daughter, RIP
Now that Tuesday’s off-year elections are ancient history, it’s time to turn our attention to 2026. And the Herald’s Peter Lucas has it right: Gov. Maura Healey’s administration is definitely showing cracks these days (the Lamar Cook fiasco, Tibbits-Nutt turmoil, Plaza-gate, cabinet turnover etc.) but combined they’re probably not enough to seriously endanger her re-election chances. Yet, she is making her re-election more difficult than maybe it should be, especially if her general-election foe turns out to be GOP megadonor Mike Minogue, who’s already pumped $1.5 million of his own money into his campaign and launched TV ads a full year before the 2026 election, as the Globe reports. … Not to discount the other two GOP candidates (Brian Shortsleeve and Mike Keneally) but it sure looks like Minogue, a businessman and Army veteran, is the early odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination, based mostly on the wads of cash at his disposal. … Minogue’s greatest liability if he ever goes one-on-one against Healey: Donald Trump, as more than a few readers have noted in the Globe’s comments section.
Btw: WBUR reports Healey was recently in Miami raising funds from, among others, Florida-based lawyers at Morgan & Morgan, the personal injury law firm headed by the billionaire old guy you can’t miss on TV. Does Barry Feinstein know about this?
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