With the advent of adult coloring books, you had to know that adult playgrounds wouldn’t be far behind. Continue reading Playdate on D Street
All this talk of sea-level rise and 100-year floods…. If you’re a Bostonian, you can talk in terms of 30-day floods. Continue reading Boston from the Ground Floor
In the opening scene of the first episode of Mr. Selfridge, an American businessman, Harry Selfridge, tries on a pair of kid gloves in a proper Edwardian department store. When he decides he wants to try something else, the clerk asks what he would like to see. “Well, maybe I don’t know until I see it,” he answers. “Why don’t we get a whole lot of them on the counter and then we can see what we like?” The clerk explains that’s not how things are done. “Come on,” he cajoles, “let’s have a little bit of fun”—and soon a drawerful of gloves is heaped on the counter. Continue reading Competitions: What’s the Real Prize?
At 10:30 on a July morning, an east wind brings a damp chill off the harbor and gray clouds hang overhead like sodden hammocks. Continue reading An Alternate Park Universe
Can Boston take action—enough action—to protect itself from rising waters before the next big storm? Or will the city tragically require its own Katrina or Sandy in order to muster the will to protect itself against repeated catastrophe? Continue reading Boston Faces the Rising Sea
Brick, beans, and cod—you know we’re talking about Boston. But nobody bakes beans anymore, and the feds have clamped down on cod fishing. Now, even brick is under siege. In the country’s most famous walking city, the dominance of the venerable paving material has been challenged by the decidedly more pedestrian concrete and asphalt. Continue reading The Trouble with Brick
