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Boston Globe
12-05-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Boston's Vivien Li is feted for a lifetime of environmental work
Li's career as an environmentalist essentially spans the length of the modern environmental movement: She got started 55 years ago, around the same time as the first Earth Day, when Richard Nixon was president. As a teenager, she helped organize 'nocturnal ecologists' to surreptitiously clean up litter at night around her New Jersey community, and stayed engaged while attending Barnard College in the 1970s. Advertisement Now, Li's contributions are being recognized through the publication of UC Berkeley , and by the awarding of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy . Li is on a speaking tour of sorts, tied into the Bancroft Library project and Earth Day 2025 (April 22), that includes stops at the Boston Public Library and Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce . Li led The Boston Harbor Association (now Boston Harbor Now ) for more than 20 years, taking over the nonprofit in 1991 and helping it out of a financial crisis. Her most visible claim to fame could be the 40-plus mile Harborwalk along Boston's waterfront. At the chamber event last month, she talked about how early help from waterfront developers such as John Drew and the late Norman Leventhal turned out to prove crucial to its completion. Her first decade with the association also coincided with the multibillion-dollar cleanup of the harbor. Advertisement Li left Boston in 2015 to take on a similar role with Riverlife in Pittsburgh, and returned to Boston nearly three years later to help with older family members who had health issues. She's retired now, though busy with several nonprofit boards and commissions — and with sharing advice for the next generation of advocates. 'Even in these difficult times, I'm optimistic,' Li said. 'Who knows? Maybe we'll bring back 'nocturnal ecologists.'' Senate President Karen Spilka, seen here with Governor Maura Healey (at right), wants to offer a tax break to help get multifamily residential projects off the ground. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Giving 'em a break Could a sales tax break help reignite stalled housing construction? Senate President Karen Spilka sure hopes so. Speaking at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, Spilka announced the Senate will explore removing the sales tax on construction materials for multifamily projects. Spilka mentioned it in the context of how Trump administration Chamber chief executive Jim Rooney praised the sales tax idea in a Q&A with Spilka after her speech. Housing production right now, he said, is flat at best, and Governor Maura Healey has said the Senator Julian Cyr , Spilka's point person on housing issues, said he'll push an amendment to the Senate's proposed state budget that calls for studying the issue; the legislation would then need to be approved by the House in upcoming negotiations. Advertisement The concept surfaced 'We need to be creative,' Spilka said told the chamber. 'Nothing is off the table here.' Warren Buffett and Eliot Tatelman both recently made retirement announcements. handout Not just a store As the omnipresent pitchman for Jordan's Furniture , Eliot Tatelman is a tough act to follow. But MullenLowe US chief executive Frank Cartagena sounds eager to try. No, we won't see Cartagena's face in Jordan's commercials. Instead, MullenLowe announced it will be the first ad agency of record for the Dedham-based chain, following several decades when its often-quirky advertising was handled largely in-house. MullenLowe's hiring comes as the Berkshire Hathaway -owned furniture chain girds for life without Tatelman at the forefront. Josh Tatelman and Michael Tatelman , took over but will not appear in ads like their dad. (Coincidentally, Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Warren Buffett just made It was an account that everyone in MullenLowe's Boston office wanted a part of, Cartagena said. Cartagena is based in New York, but he grew up in Bolton and is all too familiar with the Jordan's shtick: As a kid, his parents dragged him along for furniture shopping to a Jordan's store with the promise of watching an IMAX movie there. 'I knew that if we won this, everyone is going to go out to make sure it's a success,' Cartagena said. It's unclear how much longer Tatelman will appear in Jordan's ads. MullenLowe is still figuring out the best way to transition into the new era. Advertisement 'The last thing we want to do is just go dark on Eliot,' Cartagena said. 'I think you would have a mutiny in New England.' Mark Barrocas, chief executive of SharkNinja, has been on a mission to move his US-bound manufacturing work out of China. Jon Chomitz/via SharkNinja SharkNinja cleans up its China work In the consumer products industry, moving your supply chain out of China is all the rage — and for good reason, given the Trump administration's approach to tariffs Good thing for Investors responded, sending the stock up nearly 13 percent in one day. (Shares soared again on Monday after a tentative deal on China tariffs was announced, though they're still short of their levels in February.) All of SharkNinja's US-bound products were once made in China. Within two months, that will be down to 13 percent, and close to zero by year's end. The company began diversifying its supply chain in large part because of China tariffs under Trump 1.0. 'It was not fully understood by investors the competitive advantage we were building by [moving] outside of China,' Barrocas said in an interview Thursday. 'It wasn't like we just woke up on April 2 and said, 'We have to move out of China.' ' Julie Kim, pictured in this 2023 photo, will take over as CEO of Takeda in mid-2026. Barry Chin/Globe Staff Heads down in crazy times Julie Kim is due to be promoted to chief executive of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. next year. First, though, the head of the Japanese drugmaker's US operations had some business advice to share with the hometown crowd. Advertisement Speaking on Thursday at the Associated Industries of Massachusetts annual meeting, Kim offered tips and tactics for navigating uncertain times. Judging from recent surveys of AIM members, the crowd could use some cheering up: Kim said several biopharma-specific executive orders have added to the general apprehensiveness around her industry, along with the broader 'global uncertainty.' (Earlier in the day, for example, Kim spoke on an earnings call about the anticipated impact from one order Trump ended up signing on Monday, The key, Kim said, is to stay focused on your own personal mission, as well as your company's. 'We're in a moment where [the] landscape is shifting at such a dizzying pace due to both positive and negative forces,' Kim said. 'Some days, at least for me, it feels hard to steady ourselves.' She said executives have managed through disruption before. They can do it again. She likened the need to stay focused to the act of putting on noise-canceling earbuds when traveling. 'It may feel like we're on that noisy plane right now,' Kim said. 'There are distractions coming from every direction. [But] we can't be a pinball in a pinball machine being whacked around responding to every single stimulus.' Jon Chesto can be reached at
New Statesman
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Mark Twain and the limits of biography
Photo by Circa Images / Bridgeman Images What makes a person who they are? This is the greatest and simplest mystery of all our lives; it is a ceaseless puzzle, tormenting, and intriguing, one that we'll never solve for ourselves, nor for those closest to us. But for those we'll never meet, there is biography, that form that purports to offer a method by which to puzzle out motive and character, to reveal the soul of the subject. But there are a couple of problems with this method, with this whole idea, which can make even thinking about the genre uncomfortable. First, the issue of evidence. In his life of Mark Twain, Ron Chernow – best known now, perhaps, for the biography of Alexander Hamilton that led to Hamilton the musical – lists the vast amount of material available to anyone interested in the most famous and influential writer in the history of the United States. To trace the adventures of the man born in Missouri as Samuel Clemens in 1835, one may read of course his 30 books and 'several thousand' magazine articles; then, in the archive housed at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, there are 30,000 letters (from Twain and his family and written to them), 46 notebooks and no fewer than 600 manuscripts left unpublished at his death. 'Perhaps no other American author can boast such a richly documented record,' Chernow notes. If you've ever written a letter or kept a notebook yourself, you'll know how little of our lives makes it into what might be called a record. We are heartbeats and breath, and most of what builds us vanishes forever, whoever we are. And fame casts a long shadow. As Chernow writes, when Jane Clemens was asked what distinguished her brilliant son Sam from other children, she said that 'when he had gone anywhere, if only downtown, when he came home all the children would gather around to hear what he had to tell. He knew even then how to make things interesting. She also said that when she saw a crowd running, she didn't ask what was the matter, but 'What has Sam done now?'.' This is taken, the notes tell us, from 'More Twain Recollections', in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 June 1944. Twain died in 1910. Here is a yarn that shows the boy who would become Twain as we (and his mother, and those readers in 1944) would wish to see him. This is not a criticism of Chernow or his method; it's just unavoidable when you apply any method in attempting to piece together a life. And Twain's was an extraordinary life. Born into a loveless marriage and precarious respectability – and into a family with a history of slaveholding – Clemens's determination to create himself has become, for good or ill, a measure of what it means to be an American. With his life as much as his writing, he 'impressed himself upon the world as a personality as much as an author, a singular, salty, colourful figure who was instantly recognisable, defining a new form of celebrity. He had elevated himself into a character superior to any of his creations.' Chernow shows us a boy addicted to narrative from an early age. As a printer's apprentice, or 'devil', at a local newspaper, he ('supposedly', the author qualifies) caught hold of a scrap of paper on the street, a fragment of a life of Joan of Arc. This 'betrayed his first spark of literary interest', Chernow writes, but his understanding of the power of the voice came from summers spent listening to tales spun by 'Old Uncle Dan'l', an enslaved man kept in bondage at his uncle's home. 'We would huddle close about the old man, & begin to shudder with the first familiar words; & under the spell of his impressive delivery we always fell a prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape in the twilight sprang at us with a shout,' Twain wrote in a letter decades later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would base the character of Jim in part on Old Uncle Dan'l, and Chernow traces thoughtfully the evolution of Twain in the matter of race. As a youth, during the Civil War, he briefly enlisted in a Confederate militia, but later in life would become a powerful advocate for the rights of black Americans. In the 1880s he put a young black man, Warner T McGuinn, through Yale Law School; McGuinn would go on to mentor a young lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who would argue Brown vs Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954, and who would become the high court's first African-American justice. Is it fair to call Twain an enlightened man? It would seem so, in Chernow's telling. He resisted the prejudices that could have sprung from his upbringing; in the early years of the 20th century, he deplored the imperialist tendencies of President Theodore Roosevelt. Yet Chernow's biography makes it challenging, at times, to consider the question, because it is so focused on Twain that the historical context in which he lived can recede into the background. Can a biography be too closely focused on its subject? But Twain is so much a part of the history of the United States, the 74 years of his life spanning the era in which the country became itself. I am willing to allow, certainly, that this may be a matter of personal taste. Chernow dives minutely into Twain's marriage to his beloved Livy, assesses his struggles as a parent and provides heart-rending detail, for instance, on the suffering of his youngest daughter, Jean, incapacitated by seizures. But when it comes to the wider framework around Twain's life, the deeper context of the political and financial standing and crises of the United States – a country nearly catastrophically divided in his lifetime, the legacy of which we all live with still – one wishes for more. It's eye-popping to read of Twain's almost comic inability to resist any huckster with a gleam in his eye; he married well, and made plenty of money from his writing, but he lost astonishing sums in speculation. A fiendishly complex typesetting machine, a contraption for printing carpets, a patent digestive nostrum: the very same fellow who wrote The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg fell for them all. Yet I would have read less about Jean's affliction and more about other chumps, great and small, who lost fortunes at the time, and what that said about Twain's native land. Twain was the publisher of the memoirs of General (later President) Ulysses S Grant: but most of what we hear about Grant is Twain's opinion of him. (Chernow is also the biographer of Grant. Maybe he'd had enough of him.) Strange to read a biography of Mark Twain – that most vibrantly entertaining of writers and personalities – and feel a little weary of him by page 900 or so. At the end of his life, his (apparently non-sexual) obsession with very young girls springs disturbingly to the fore: he called them his 'angelfish', and once they turned 16, he lost interest and dropped them (there really was a 'school' of angelfish) with stunning abruptness. Chernow doesn't excuse Twain but notes that his subject's apparent thirst for a kind of pure, uncorrupted adoration was bottomless. Despite his love for his wife, he never recovered from his boyhood crushes; and, as Chernow notes, his greatest works are marked by a distinct lack of rounded, adult female characters. And yet those works are not the lesser. They are the wellspring from which the American literary voice – colloquial, powerful, uninhibited, adventurous – sprang, and finally no biography can do that voice justice. Best, finally, to hear it for yourself. Mark Twain Ron Chernow Allen Lane, 1,200pp, £40 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Joan Didion without her style] Related
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Amy Tan Decided Not to Shred Her Archive
Many authors dream of having their notes, drafts and scraps preserved forever in a prestigious literary archive. But not Amy Tan. Until recently, she had left written instructions for everything except photographs to be shredded after her death, lest she be subjected to the posthumous ordeal of scholars 'going through the equivalent of my underwear drawer.' Now, she's changed her mind. The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, has acquired her archive — 62 boxes of photographs, notebooks, letters and literary manuscripts, from childhood writing to drafts of best-selling novels like 'The Joy Luck Club.' So why the change of heart? In a recent telephone conversation, Tan listed acceptance of 'posterity,' coaxing by her longtime editor, and, well, the need to clear out space in her garage. 'I do consider it a great honor to have my archive there,' she said of the Bancroft, which also holds papers from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joan Didion and other prominent California writers. 'My 22-year-old mind is thrilled: Accepted into Berkeley!' Tan, born in Oakland in 1952 to Chinese immigrant parents, shot to literary fame in 1989 with 'The Joy Luck Club,' an intergenerational tale inspired in part by the discovery that her mother had left three previous children behind in China. At the time, Tan — a former graduate student in linguistics at Berkeley — was working as a business writer, publishing short stories here and there. The book, which became a 1993 Hollywood movie, sold nearly six million copies in the United States. It was followed by six other novels, including 'The Kitchen God's Wife' and 'The Bonesetter's Daughter.' Tan, who lives in Marin County, said that early in her career, she was wary of being pigeonholed as a 'hyphenated Chinese American writer,' discussed in terms of themes — immigration, mothers and daughters — rather than her art. Today, she said, she's more accepting of her role as a boundary expander. 'The fact is, I was among the first of Asian American writers to be published and widely read, and also eventually lifted out of the ethnic literature pile and placed under the rubric of American literature,' she said. The archive also includes photos, documents and other material relating to her family history, including some datebooks kept by her father, an engineer and Baptist minister who left China in the late 1940s. 'There are a lot of family photos documenting the Chinese American community of the 1940s and '50s,' Kate Donovan, the Bancroft's director, said. 'To me, it's an archive that feels very grounded in place.' The archive was acquired partly through purchase, partly through donation, Donovan said. The purchase price, which is not being disclosed, was paid for with endowment funds, not state money. Before the acquisition, Tan had intense conversations with Donovan about her concern that the archive would inadvertently expose the intimate thoughts and business of friends and colleagues. ('I wanted to be protective of other people's privacy,' she said.) Donovan said that there were no access restrictions on any material. But some could be added for future material as Tan, who held some journals and other material back, adds to the collection. But at the same time, the collection, like Tan's fiction, is enriched by private stories shaken loose from other sources. The collection includes material recently uncovered by researchers for the PBS series 'Finding Your Roots,' including love letters Tan's father had written to her mother while they were having an affair in China. Tan had known that her mother, who was married to another man, had been tried for adultery, a charge which carried a possible prison sentence. But she had never seen the letters, which were preserved in the court files. 'That to me was thrilling,' she said. 'It was him talking about how much he loves her.' While researching her 2017 memoir, 'Where the Past Begins,' Tan found old letters from American government officials, warning her parents that they had overstayed their student visas. 'I never knew until they died that they were under the specter of deportation,' she said. 'If that had happened, we would have had to leave with them, and then I never would have become a, quote unquote, American writer.' The archive also testifies to the more whimsical side of Tan's career. There are sketches and notebooks from 'The Backyard Bird Chronicles,' her recent collection of essays and drawings about nature. (As a child, Tan had wanted to be an artist, but was discouraged by her parents.) And then there is material relating to the Rock Bottom Remainders, a now-defunct literary-world supergroup featuring Stephen King, Matt Groening, Barbara Kingsolver and others. Tan — who once described the band as 'a contest of sorts to say how bad you were and then to blow people away with how semi-good you really were' — was a backup singer and 'lead rhythm dominatrix.' 'She said, 'I don't' supposed you'd want my whip later?'' Donovan said. 'I said, 'I would absolutely want your whip later.''
