Latest news with #BostonLatinSchool
Boston Globe
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Students put on big performances at City Hall festival
'Our teachers work really hard at our schools every day — practicing with their students, teaching them skills," said Amy Wedge, executive director for the Arts of BPS. 'This is an opportunity for them to be able to perform.' Advertisement On Tuesday, students and teachers from the Warren-Prescott School, Boston Latin School, Thomas J. Kenny Elementary, and more brought a lively, albeit chaotic, energy to the plaza. Students, finished with their performances, took pictures in their costumes — some in pirate-like green garbs and pointy hats — while others took to the hot concrete to create colorful chalk drawings as the next school took to the stage. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Boston Latin School Gospel Choir Director Koriana Lewis Bradford looked out onto the scene fondly. 'It's the highlight of the year,' she said about her students' yearly field trip to City Hall. 'It's the one time that we get to all be together, all these different Boston Public Schools.' Advertisement Bradford teaches seventh- and eighth-graders who performed 'oldies, but goodies of Gospel music,' including 'This Is The Day' by Fred Hammond and 'You Are Good' by Israel Houghton. 'These kids are my heart,' Bradford said. 'It's a joy to be able to share everything that I've poured into them. To see it come to life on stage takes everything to another level.' Bradford, eyes welling with prideful tears, said she felt inspired by the sight of the talent her students displayed. 'This is an opportunity to really showcase what they've been doing [in the classroom], but on a wider scale,' Wedge said. 'I think it's important for our students to share their voice, an opportunity for them to tell their own stories and see themselves as artists, as part of the community.' While Tuesday brought theatrical scenes to Downtown Boston with the 'Arts Extravaganza,' the coming days will offer a variety of experiences for attendees. Wednesday's 'Music: Wired' will fill the Plaza with modern tunes of jazz, pop, rock, and R&B from upbeat student ensembles, as well as a special performance from GBH Music's Quartet in Residence, the Ulysses Quartet. The next day, musicians from several groups will bring a rawer energy to the scene and amps will be unplugged in favor of acoustic and concert bands and choirs for Thursday's 'Music: Unplugged.' Friday's 'Dance and Theatre Finale' clears the way for young dancers from various companies to hit the makeshift dance floor, courtesy of the Boston Dance Alliance. Boston's own Naheem Garcia, an actor and performing arts educator, will reprise his role as festival host once again. Advertisement Students from the Eliot K-8 Innovation School Band performed on Boston City Hall Plaza as part of the Boston Public Schools Citywide Arts Festival May 27, 2025. Annielly Camargo Marianna Orozco can be reached at
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Boston built America's innovation engine. Now it's under attack by Trump
It's a strange time to be marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. Back then, some of the main flashpoints related to Britain's tight grip on commerce in the colonies and taxation without representation. When the King got angry about the boisterous Boston Tea Party, he shut down Boston's port so that merchants couldn't import or export goods. That knee-capped the local economy, leading to business closures, high unemployment, shortages of food and other essentials and soaring prices. And it led the colonists to organize the First Continental Congress to plan their response. Now, the danger to our economy comes not from abroad, but from a president who gleefully uses phrases like 'long live the king' to refer to himself. His administration is attacking the foundations of what we have been building here since the 1630s, when Boston Latin School and Harvard College got started. That foundation tightly integrates education, smart students and professors from around the world, research and development activities, funding from the federal government and private philanthropists and experienced entrepreneurs and investors who form companies around the research projects that look most promising. What we have built on top of that foundation has been significant both societally and financially. We have cured deadly diseases in children and adults, developed surgical anesthesia, performed the first human organ transplant, helped sequence the human genome, created the field of proton therapy for cancer treatment, and we also did some of the earliest work on the GLP-1 drugs now widely prescribed for diabetes and weight loss. We developed radar systems that helped the Allies win World War II, and also the guidance computers that enabled Apollo spacecraft to land humans on the surface of the moon. We built some of the earliest hardware and software that allowed the ARPANET — the Internet's forerunner — to link computers together in the 1960s, sent the first email and ensured that the web has remained an open standard that everyone can benefit from. We created the first videogame, booting up an industry that now spins off revenues of more than $180 billion globally each year. An entrepreneur educated at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and working in Cambridge co-founded a startup called Android, now owned by Google, and is the world's most popular mobile operating system. Before that, we invented the telephone. (The Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell was a Boston University professor — but not yet a U.S. citizen — when he made the earliest phone calls.) In 2025, we're trying to do things like edit or silence the malfunctioning genes that cause diseases; help our military develop hypersonic missiles; and build a functional nuclear fusion reactor, with no carbon emissions or long-lived radioactive waste. You get the idea; this list could go on for a whiiiiiile. Just one industry that our university labs helped incubate here in the late 1970s, biotechnology, last year created more than $600 billion in economic activity in the U.S., and employed more than 300,000 people. Some of its early pioneers and current leaders — people like the late Henri Termeer of Genzyme and Noubar Afeyan of Flagship Pioneering — were foreigners who came to this country to advance their education. For its part, the Trump administration asserts that it aims to cut government research funding to help bring the deficit under control — a key mission of the Department of Government Efficiency. And the administration believes that it can get universities to address antisemitism on campuses, or increase ideological diversity on faculties, only with high-pressure tactics like withholding federal funding, rescinding their ability to enroll foreign students or revoking their tax-exempt status. Supporters of the administration may want to play out this hand of cards and see if those aims can be achieved. But I'd make the case that what we're seeing right now is a federal government that is jackhammering away at the foundations of what makes Boston work — not to mention similar ecosystems such as Seattle, New York and Silicon Valley. It seems they are rooting for the towers atop that foundation to tumble, without truly understanding the impact that that would have on America's competitiveness. They have demolition equipment, but I'm not convinced they have a blueprint or construction equipment. (As they wrangle with our great institutions, create anxiety around visas, and deny funding to cutting-edge researchers, you can already watch savvy countries swinging into action to attract those people.) There is also one possible impact of the Trump administration's war on Ivy League schools that few people understand, and it has to do with the universities' nest eggs — their endowments. If federal funding gets yanked or cut, universities may tap their endowments to fill the gap. There are also proposals in Congress to potentially increase the tax rate on wealthy universities' endowments from 1.4% to as much as 21%. Why does that matter? Endowment money often gets handed to venture capital firms so that they can fund startup companies — the next Moderna, HubSpot, Wayfair or Vertex. So increasing the pressure on university endowments could reduce the money venture capitalists have to support new company formation — a key ingredient of the U.S.' economic vitality. The 'acute issue,' says Boston venture capitalist Michael Greeley, 'is simply not knowing what endowments will be called on to fund' at universities, which could suck money out of the venture capital system. 'In 1775, the proud New Englanders stood strong, threw down their plowshares and confronted the totalitarian threat, even though they knew the battle would be long,' wrote Don Ingber, director of the Wyss Institute, a research lab at Harvard, in a recent blog post. This time, instead of taxation without representation, Ingber says one of the central issues is 'cessation [of government funding for university research] without justification.' To help highlight the role that academic research plays in the economy, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce this month rebooted a coalition of nearly fifty other chambers that it originally started during the first Trump administration, Business for Federal Research Funding. Research, says James Rooney, CEO of the Greater Boston Chamber, 'creates jobs — blue and white collar jobs — all over the country, in every state." But aside from elected officials like Gov. Maura Healey and Senate President Karen Spilka, and university leaders like Harvard's Alan Garber and Danielle Holley of Mount Holyoke College, it's hard to find evidence of private sector leaders using their megaphones to speak out, or organizing to defend the education, research and innovation-driven economy we have been building here over nearly 400 years. It's an engine of progress that has, quite literally, won wars, cured terrible diseases and shaped the technology we use and how we communicate. 'Too many leaders in the private sector are worried about retribution that could harm their businesses,' observes John Maraganore, a longtime biotech industry executive and co-founder of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. Understood. But in the two-and-a-half centuries since we helped spark the American Revolution, have we turned into a state populated by meek worriers? Or are we still willing to act to defend what we hold dear? This high-profile EV charging startup just left Massachusetts Mass. Gov. Healey says she's playing defense against an anti-innovation Trump administration How the CEO of CarGurus is playing the car market right now Mass. CEOs see tariffs creating 'maximum uncertainty'
Chicago Tribune
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: Smoking ban on domestic flights goes into effect
Today is Wednesday, April 23, the 113th day of 2025. There are 252 days left in the year. Today in history: On April 23, 1988, a federal ban on smoking during domestic airline flights of two hours or less (accounting for 80% of all U.S. flights) went into effect. Also on this date: In 1635, the Boston Latin School, the first public school in what would become the United States, was established. In 1898, Spain declared war on the United States, which responded in kind two days later. In 1940, over 200 people trapped inside a dance hall died in the Rhythm Club Fire in Natchez, Mississippi, one of the deadliest nightclub fires in U.S. history. In 1971, hundreds of Vietnam War veterans opposed to the conflict protested by tossing their medals and ribbons over a wire fence constructed in front of the U.S. Capitol. In 1993, labor leader Cesar Chavez died in San Luis, Arizona, at age 66. In 2005, the recently created video-sharing website YouTube uploaded its first clip, 'Me at the Zoo,' which showed YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. In 2007, Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first popularly elected president, died in Moscow at age 76. In 2018, a man plowed a rental van into crowds of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 people and leaving 16 others hurt. (Alek Minassian was later convicted of 10 counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison.) Today's Birthdays: Actor Lee Majors is 86. Actor Blair Brown is 79. Actor Joyce DeWitt is 76. Filmmaker-author Michael Moore is 71. Actor Judy Davis is 70. Actor Valerie Bertinelli is 65. Actor-comedian George Lopez is 64. Actor Melina Kanakaredes is 58. Actor-wrestler John Cena is 48. Retired MLB All-Star Andruw Jones is 48. Comedian-TV host John Oliver is 48. Actor Kal Penn is 48. Actor-model Jaime King is 46. Singer Taio Cruz is 45. Actor Dev Patel is 35. Model Gigi Hadid is 30. Olympic snowboarding gold medalist Chloe Kim is 25. Prince Louis of Wales is 7.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
On This Day, April 23: Senate confirms Loretta Lynch as attorney general
April 23 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1635, the first public school in America, the Boston Latin School, was opened. In 1898, the first movie theater opened at the Koster and Bials Music Hall in New York City. In 1914, Chicago's Wrigley Field, then known as Weeghman Park, hosts its first baseball game when the Chicago Chi-Feds beat the Kansas City Packers 9-1. In 1940, a fire at the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Miss., claimed the lives of 209 people, all Black patrons, in what is now ranked as the fourth-deadliest building fire in U.S. history. In 1965, more than 200 U.S. planes struck North Vietnam in one of the heaviest raids of the Vietnam War. In 1985, former U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin died at age 88. The North Carolina Democrat directed the Senate Watergate investigation that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation. In 1993, United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez died at age 66. In 2007, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who faced down army tanks during the fall of the Soviet Union, died of cardiac arrest at the age of 76. In 2008, the U.S. Defense Department announced that Army Gen. David Petraeus, top American military official in Iraq, was chosen to head the Central Command, overseeing military affairs in the Middle East and Central Asia, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2015, the Senate confirmed Loretta Lynch as attorney general more than five months after President Barack Obama nominated her. She was the first Black woman to hold the title. In 2020, the NFL held its first-ever virtual draft amid social distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Cincinnati Bengals chose quarterback Joe Burrow as the No. 1 overall pick.
Boston Globe
21-04-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
New HBR editor in chief Amy Bernstein looks to grow the publication in AI age
Now, as editor in chief, she'll oversee all of the content that the HBR staff produces, digital and in print. Ignatius is staying on board, as editor at large, in part to help launch a new premium product offering additional insights, videos, and classes to C-suite types. Advertisement Bernstein's goals will include growing HBR's paid circulation of 343,000 while developing new ways to present and integrate all its various channels, including books, newsletters, podcasts, and social media posts. Despite HBR's access to top experts in the fields of business management, she said HBR faces competition on a number of fronts including the low- or no-cost 'just good enough' advice that's widely available online in part because of AI. Advertisement 'What I want to try to do differently is update the playbook for an audience that is 100 percent digital,' Bernstein said. 'I want to make sure we are not just staying abreast of [trends] but anticipating how our audience behavior is going to evolve. . . . I don't think any media brand covers management and leadership the way we do.' Chamber members head back to school From left to right: Jason Gallagher, head of school at Boston Latin School, Katherine Craven, chief administrative and financial officer at Babson College, her daughter Fianna, and James E. Rooney. president and CEO at Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, talk with teacher Noah Finegan during his Spanish class at Boston Latin School on April 17. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Mary Skipper now owes Jim Rooney a dinner. The two civic leaders — Boston's schools superintendent and the chief executive of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce — made a lighthearted bet in advance of the Principal Partners event on Thursday that brought business leaders together to shadow school superintendents. Rooney told Skipper: You line up the school principals, and I'll find the businesspeople. Skipper said she thought she would end up with more principals than chamber members. Rooney bet her a dinner that he would win. Time to pay up? The final count, per a chamber spokesperson: 93 business leaders were matched with 87 principals across 86 schools. (One school has two principals.) Rooney wound up at his alma mater, Boston Latin School, shadowing Babson College executive vice president Katherine Craven , another BLS alum. Ever since Rooney became the chamber's chief executive a decade ago, he has tried to better integrate the business community and Boston Public Schools. Some companies, such as Advertisement Then came Skipper, who was tapped by Mayor Michelle Wu in 2022 to lead BPS. Skipper and Rooney already knew each other; they live on the same street in Dorchester. So they hit it off quite easily. Among the fruits of those discussions: an agreement to help On Thursday, the business leaders shadowed principals throughout the morning, then came together at Bank of America 's offices on Federal Street to debrief. Rooney, Skipper, and Wu all spoke, as did B of A executive Miceal Chamberlain . 'Historically, the School Department has been hard to help,' Rooney said. 'In the past, they defined 'partnership' as 'write me a check.' [Businesses] will do that as a matter of goodwill. But I wanted to do something deeper than that.' Kraft Group gets high-tech upgrade NWN has been hired by the Kraft Group to bring artificial intelligence throughout the Krafts' holdings. Photo courtesy of NWN There's a new corporate name beaming from the Gillette Stadium jumbotron: NWN . The Boston IT provider last week announced a five-year partnership with The Kraft Group that involves overhauling the tech systems throughout the Krafts' businesses, including its packaging manufacturing and sports operations. Terms of the deal aren't being disclosed, but it comes with signage rights at Gillette in Foxborough. The work started earlier this year, with a replacement of the Krafts' communications systems. With NWN's artificial intelligence expertise, the potential for this deal goes well beyond making phone calls. Among other things, Kraft Group chief information officer Mike Israel sees efficiency savings at a Rand-Whitney factory in Montville, by tracking how long trucks sit in loading docks, and a more fun experience at Gillette, by giving fans the opportunity to use facial recognition to access their digital wallets and 'unlock' their game tickets or buy concessions. The AI tech can also be used to spot when someone climbs a fence, or when a stadium bathroom needs to be restocked. Advertisement Israel said Robert Kraft and son Jonathan Kraft , the company's top two executives, are pushing the Kraft Group to be more creative and entrepreneurial. 'There's that drive to move fast and be adaptive,' Israel added. 'That comes right now from the top. That pushes us forward at lightning speed in terms of innovation.' The Kraft Group represents a high-profile customer for NWN, which cleared about $1 billion in sales last year. The Kraft Group, NWN chief executive Jim Sullivan noted, is one of the largest private companies in the country. 'It's a great fit,' Sullivan said. 'We're incredibly appreciative of the opportunity.' P&G Gillette looks sharp in Andover Dignitaries gather for a groundbreaking to kick-start an expansion at the Andover campus of P&G Gillette. Photo courtesy of P&G Gillette After unveiling P&G Gillette on Thursday turned their focus to their other local campus. The company gathered a crowd under a tent at its Andover site, where it currently makes shaving gels and foams, for a groundbreaking to celebrate the start of a 200,000-square-foot building where much of the blade manufacturing work in South Boston will end up. About 200 people work in Andover now, at a roughly 600,000-square-foot complex on the 150-acre property; the Andover workforce will more than double once Gillette moves its manufacturing out of Boston. The corporate, design, and engineering functions will remain in South Boston. The transition is expected to begin in the next year or two, though it will take a decade or more to redevelop the South Boston campus. Advertisement Gary Coombe , chief executive of P&G's grooming division, said the Andover project proves that the company is investing not just in its blades and razor business but also in the future of US manufacturing and in the future of Greater Boston. For Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll , the Andover expansion shows the importance of ensuring Massachusetts remains competitive for advanced manufacturing. With the 250th anniversary of the battles against the British troops in Lexington and Concord being celebrated in both towns last week, Driscoll made sure to drop a few Revolution references in her speech, along with a joking apology to Coombe, for going to war against his home country. (Coombe is a UK native.) 'We want to make sure that revolutionary spirit that guided us 250 years ago continues,' Driscoll said. 'Guess what? It will, on this site.' Senator Barry Finegold of Andover also joked with Coombe, thanking him for making his favorite razor. 'I've got to take a point of personal privilege, as we say: I want to personally thank you,' the clean-shaven Finegold said. 'I'm a Fusion5 guy. Every morning, I get the blades, and also the shaving cream. So thank you for keeping me clean for all these years. I appreciate that.' Jon Chesto can be reached at
