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Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
State's law on sidewalk injuries a relic of the ‘60s
And while Boston's sidewalk issues may be a rather Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up The law is as cruel to victims as it is outdated, but more than that it is simply bad public policy, providing no incentive for public officials to either keep sidewalks in a state of good repair or make repairs in a timely fashion. That loose chunk of cement on East Broadway today remains as it was four years ago when that accident happened. Advertisement Alison Evans, a freelance photographer, broke her arm in a fall on Newbury Street in the summer of 2022, and brought her tale of justice denied to Boston Globe consumer advocacy reporter That low payout cap effectively prevents people from obtaining legal representation. Personal injury lawyers usually get a third of any settlement or jury award, but a third of $5,000 — that's $1,666 — isn't worth their time. 'I went to every lawyer in my building after my fall,' Rosanne Mercer told the editorial board, 'and couldn't find anyone to take the case.' Mercer, who was running a public relations agency on the waterfront when she had her accident, suffered a broken foot and a concussion from a fall over a newly reconfigured curb. When the complaint was filed, it was day 31. There ought to be law, right? Or more properly a better law. And, yes, there could be. Advertisement The legislation, filed by Democratic Representative Jay Livingstone of Boston, would increase the current 30-day limit to two years and the $5,000 limit to $100,000 — essentially treating injuries on public sidewalks like any other injuries caused by a government agency covered by the But for those injured on faulty sidewalks it at least would provide a fairer timeline and far better financial relief. Among those supporting the legislation in written testimony was Bonnie Donohue, who told the committee she was hospitalized and incurred some $30,000 in dental bills from a fall over a corrugated barrier on Summer Street near her apartment (And for clumsy people who think every stumble will lead to an easy payday: Sorry, but filing a claim doesn't mean you'll actually get paid, or that you'll get paid the maximum amount. People seeking compensation still need to demonstrate negligence on the city's part.) This isn't only a Boston problem. Where there are sidewalks and aging infrastructure, there will be accidents. Northampton, now in the process of Advertisement No one wants to see a city or town bankrupted by specious claims or frivolous lawsuits. But a law where the financial penalties haven't been updated in 60 years — even as medical costs have soared for everything from tending to skinned knees to fixing broken bones — does a grave disservice to those injured through no fault of their own. It imposes virtually no penalty for communities to take better care of their infrastructure, from sidewalks to curbs to potholes, and that's plain wrong. Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
AI will bring back old boys' clubs
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up When the ability to expediently undertake honest evaluation eludes us, we intuitively default to a next-best shortcut: pedigree. Expect a resurgence of reliance on status symbols we may have thought the world was beginning to leave behind — elite diplomas, warm intros, old-fashioned references, a person's ZIP code, race, gender, and maybe even their given and family names. One of the early, wide-scale effects that generative AI will have on labor and capital markets is the return of velvet ropes. Advertisement The logic dates way back. If an artifact's authenticity is in question, validate the artisan by their tribe. We'll see these changes all over. Foundations such as Wellcome Trust are accepting applications for grants from 'established researchers.' It'll go unsaid, but universities will rely more heavily on PhD program rankings when they recruit faculty. Admissions officers who had begun to move away from standardized test scores may now grasp onto any numerical indicators that still seem to justifiably sort applicants, even if only by a hair's breadth. Law firms that started to lean toward 'school-agnostic' hiring policies will reverse course. Advertisement This is cognitive triage rather than malice. AI already is doing many wonderful things for us, but it has massively diluted our ability to assess talent and verify authenticity. So gatekeepers everywhere are going to look for logos. In the near term, that will tilt the playing field further away from anyone who lacks status markers. It'll be no surprise if a first-generation college applicant from Fresno whose personal essay might be AI assisted faces more doubt than a legacy or Andover kid who is presumptively the better writer. Likewise, a midcareer coder in Belgrade whose work shows well on GitHub will meet greater suspicion than an MIT grad with a referral, even if both their code repositories were mostly generated with the help of Copilot. The same technology that promises to democratize education, enlarge the circle of creators and productive workers, and equalize talent in the workplace will, ironically, refeudalize selection and recognition in the near term. Whether we end up in a world of more distributed opportunity or more unexamined pedigree may depend on our appetite for doing the harder work of verification or on our willingness to treat outputs of artificial or of human creators as one and the same. Until we acknowledge the latter or we develop new methods to assess and authenticate human capability in an AI-saturated world, the democratic potential of these technologies will be overshadowed by the hierarchies they otherwise might have helped to dissolve. Advertisement
Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
No, Mr. President, race is not a biological reality
But the fight over race in education is not confined to the classroom, and the embrace of perverse and offensive narratives is by no means restricted to the progressive left. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up In March, President Trump issued an executive order titled ' Some of what Trump objects to is indeed troubling. It is appropriate to be concerned about ideological litmus tests, Advertisement Yet buried in the executive order is a statement so wrongheaded that it should have set off alarms. In a section excoriating the Smithsonian Institution, the document condemns the museum because it 'promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct' and because it states 'Race is a human invention.' But race is a human invention, not a biological truth. For any educated person to claim otherwise is on par with claiming that diseases can be cured through bloodletting or that astrology is a reliable guide to the future. That the president of the United States would make such a claim in an official statement of policy is appalling. By now it is a firmly established scientific truth that race has within populations commonly categorized as racial groups. The differences between such groups are so few as to make them genetically indistinguishable. For all intents and purposes, in other words, the DNA of white people is impossible to differentiate from the DNA of Black people, Asian people, or Native American people. Of course there are physical variations among populations that originated at points far apart on the globe. But the idea that those variations are racial is a relatively recent fiction. It was not until the late 17th century that the notion that mankind could be sorted into distinct biological races first made its appearance. In Advertisement Today such taxonomies seem absurd. So does the view, If the president truly believes that race is a fixed biological reality, he is endorsing a view long discredited by science and rejected by Americans across the political spectrum. 'Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life,' asserted Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. ' Marshall was speaking as a constitutional lawyer, but modern genetics has confirmed what scientists in the 1950s could only have surmised: Racial categories have no objective biological basis. That doesn't mean that race is meaningless, but that its meaning is social, not biological. It is a product of historical, cultural, and political forces. The concept of race was invented to categorize and rank human beings, often for purposes of domination and exclusion. Over time, those categories may have come to feel 'natural' or self-evident, but they are anything but. They are constructs, not codes etched in our genes. Advertisement It is deeply unsettling to see the White House resurrecting the idea that race is a fixed, objective, biological reality. Such thinking has an ugly pedigree. It undergirded slavery, segregation, and eugenics. It lent scientific respectability to white supremacy. It's the reason 'one-drop' rules existed and why anti-miscegenation laws once barred people from marrying across racial lines. It is not the language of truth and sanity — it is the language of race science and racial hierarchy. Trump may imagine that he is striking a blow against leftist dogma, but this isn't a left-vs.-right issue. The point has been underscored across the political spectrum — including by the Supreme Court's most conservative jurist. 'Race is a social construct,' Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his 2023 concurrence in the landmark case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. 'We may each identify as members of particular races for any number of reasons, having to do with our skin color, our heritage, or our cultural identity.' But that doesn't change reality, he continued. 'All racial categories are little more than stereotypes, suggesting that immutable characteristics somehow conclusively determine a person's ideology, beliefs, and abilities. Of course, that is false.' Clearly there are some human groupings that are genetically determined and have clear physical and reproductive markers — blood type, biological sex, Advertisement That is why the stakes here are so high. A government that treats race as a biological certainty is a government that legitimizes inequality and division. It is not 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History' to claim that people's character, capabilities, or civic status can be inferred from inherited traits. It is doing the opposite. And it opens the door to even more alarming policies. If race is 'real' in a biological sense, what follows? Race-based restrictions? Genetic profiling? The lionizing of historical figures with The president often casts himself as a fighter against political correctness and progressive overreach. But in this case, he isn't fighting back — he's reaching back, to a time when science was bent to serve bigotry. The right answer to racial dogma from the left isn't racial pseudoscience from the right. It is fidelity to truth, and to the ideal that all men are created equal. Jeff Jacoby can be reached at
Boston Globe
4 days ago
- General
- Boston Globe
She was the bard of loneliness — who thrived on human connection
Having never read her letters before, despite my enduring fandom — it was Dickinson's wry humor that first turned me on to poetry — what struck me was how committed she was to the virtue of human fellowship, even as she pursued her famously solitary art. It wasn't just birds and irony that saved her from despair. It was the love she had for her family, friends, and fellow citizens. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up 'Love is its own rescue,' she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the writer and abolitionist — not a line you'd expect from a poet who encrypts her pain and longing into frosty hymns and riddles, and whose poems are some of the best descriptions of loneliness available. Yet there she is, year after year, mailing birthday messages, valentines, and kudos, sometimes enclosing pressed flowers or clutches of rowan tied with ribbon. She wrote letters consoling friends on the deaths of their young children. She mourned the loss of her Massachusetts neighbors during the Civil War. She seemed to believe that our caring for others constitutes the only paradise we should ever expect. In a letter to Elizabeth Holland in 1877, she asked: 'Is not the distinction, of Affection, almost Realm enough?' She wanted to be alone but to be known too I discovered Emily Dickinson when I was 16. That summer, I was visiting my grandmother in Ripon, Wis., home of Ripon College and birthplace of Abraham Lincoln's (and Samuel Bowles's) Republican Party in 1854. Dickinson's 'Complete Poems' was 700 pages long — a daunting but worthy reading project for a shy aspiring writer who was drawn more to literature than to the politics of his country. It was a wonderful, haunting experience. I liked her dark, obsessive mind, her wicked sense of humor. But it was the fierce longing her poems exuded that kept me reading into the night. 'It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness,' she writes in a poem from 1862. Elsewhere, she calls loneliness 'an Omen in the Bone' and 'the Horror not to be surveyed.' By 16, I had accepted the fact that I liked spending time by myself. And I found that poetry, like prayer, was a socially acceptable if quirky use of solitude. Writing was also a consolation for my frequent inability to communicate to family or friends exactly what I was feeling. Dickinson had this problem, too. Why else would she write a thousand poems and leave them all behind in a drawer? In Dickinson's letters, one can glean the artist's core paradox of desiring personal privacy and social recognition. I'd felt this paradox myself while cooped up in my dorm room writing poems I would never share. Was I going to be a hermit? Would the horror of loneliness swallow me up? Was the urge to write poetry a blessing or a symptom? What would a therapist say? In 'Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development,' the psychoanalyst Otto Rank makes a useful distinction between the neurotic and the artist, both of whom resist the crowd and run the risk of loneliness. A neurotic, he says, is a person whose neglected creative urges become corrosive to the self. An artist turns them into art. I didn't know how lonely I was in my 20s until I reached my 30s. After college, I gave up writing in order to find a proper career, which meant that I became one of Otto Rank's neurotics. It took me a long time to revive my creative urges — to borrow the bleak Freudian term — and part of the process involved reading Emily Dickinson's poems again. This time, it was clear to me she was writing about depression. 'There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons – / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.' There is indeed. And Pfizer could have used these lines for the opening of a Zoloft ad: 'I felt a funeral in my brain.' 'I heard a fly buzz when I died.' 'Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me.' These are the poems that helped establish Dickinson's reputation as a sly gothic eminence, her distressed meters and slant rhymes striking a fatally minor chord. And it's true that she often 'thought of the Grave,' as she puts it, apologetically, in one of her early letters. But Emily Dickinson died of heart failure, not suicide. This fact was very important to me, and also — not to be macabre — a little bit surprising. She was always so at odds with herself, after all, gnawing at psychic wounds or diving back into the wreck, as the poet Adrienne Rich would say. The question is, what sustained her? I think it was other people. To read Dickinson's letters is to witness just how deeply embedded she was in the social world of her day, despite her famous reclusiveness. With editors, she was coy, ironic, and self-mythologizing. 'You ask of my Companions,' she writes to Higginson during their first exchange. 'Hills — Sir — and the Sundown.' But she also wrote long, gossipy letters to her brother, Austin, when he was away, and she corresponded frequently with the far more adventurous writer Helen Hunt Jackson, who scolded Dickinson for her reticence. Her notes to prominent religious men, including Edward Everett Hale and the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, crackle with wit and genuine theological curiosity. And of course, this latest volume of her correspondence also includes her hundreds of 'letter-poems,' many of which she sent to Susan Gilbert, her friend and sister-in-law, for amusement and commentary. ('Is this frostier?' she asks Gilbert when sending a newly revised draft.) Her humor never flags. At age 50, she wrote: 'We have had two hurricanes within as many hours, one of which came near enough to untie my apron.' She sends honey to a friend with this note: 'Lest any bee should boast.' Still, that longing one feels in her poems gusted through her entire life. 'There is an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world never can fill,' she writes to her friend Abiah Root at the age of 16, half in response to a religious revival sweeping through her hometown of Amherst. She's pleased for those who were saved by God, but she herself demurs. The whole idea of Eternity, she writes, appears 'dreadful' to her. She assumes that she is 'wicked.' And yet she consistently honors her friends' belief in the Christian afterlife. Heaven was an abstraction, but the people she loved were real to her, and letter-writing offered her a way to remain in communion with them, to express her otherwise wholly Christian kindness and devotion. 'A Letter is a joy of Earth,' she wrote in 1885, less than a year before her death. 'It is denied the Gods.' Elsewhere, she compares a letter to 'immortality.' It was in the realm of her mind where she and her friends could coexist forever. As the late scholar and Harvard professor Helen Vendler puts it: 'The thought that on the Last Day she would be reunited with those she had loved was so moving to Dickinson that she wrote some of her most gripping poems about that imagined reunion.' She made her friends immortal One reason Dickinson's correspondence seems heroic to me is that there are 30,000 unread emails in my inbox. Many of these are spam, but a truly unacceptable percentage of them are not. I am so behind on email that I fantasize about changing my name and creating a new email address to achieve the illusion of a fresh start. My grandmother wasn't like this. She wrote and received letters all the time. She was active in her community — the college, the church, the golf course. She played gin rummy once a week. She babysat the kid next door. She helped me join a baseball team so that I could stand in center field and sniff my glove while mulling over Emily Dickinson's imagery. In contrast, I find social life mysteriously exhausting. Especially the digital version. I just cannot seem to keep up with all the requests, notifications, invitations to follow, and so on. Part of my struggle has to do with a garden-variety case of the blues. But if Emily Dickinson, whose blue periods often lasted for weeks at a time, could remember to wish her cousin a happy birthday, why can't I? One possible answer is that there's something wrong with me. Maybe I never recovered from my early preference for solitude. Maybe I, too, have an 'aching void' in my heart that the world can never fill. Or maybe — this is my most recent hypothesis — we all do. In her 1963 essay 'On the Sense of Loneliness,' the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein argues that loneliness results from the ego's desire for wholeness, what she calls 'an unattainable perfect internal state.' Poetry is one way of pursuing that unattainable state. Perhaps that's why Dickinson wrote the same poem again and again with slight variations. She never achieved wholeness. 'Full and permanent integration is never possible,' Klein writes, 'for some polarity between the life and death instincts always persists.' I think that's what I responded to in Dickinson — that 'polarity,' the tension between a desire for connection and an equally strong desire for isolation. I wonder, because I'm a teacher now, what that tension feels like to young people today, who report being lonelier and more depressed than ever. There are thousands of mental health and wellness apps for teens, including a growing number of AI chatbots designed to teach coping skills or simply offer companionship (the psychologist Paul Bloom calls this ' Recently, I've begun to consider assigning Dickinson's letters instead. At the very least, they model how to weather a bout of depression without forgetting to send buttercups to neighbors for the centennial. More important, they demonstrate that community is the work of imagination to a surprising degree. The author Marilynne Robinson makes this point in one of her essays. 'Community,' she writes, 'consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.' In that same essay, she refers to this love as the 'essence and genius' of democracy. To overcome our loneliness, we do not need to join a church or a bowling league, as Robert Putnam suggests in his landmark book on civic decay, 'Bowling Alone . ' But we do need to find ways to exercise compassion. Compassion feels in short supply these days, and it's tempting to blame our digital culture for exacerbating our epidemic of loneliness. But Kristen Radtke, author of 'Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, ' is skeptical of the claim that the internet is the primary cause of social isolation. People made this claim about the telephone and the radio, too. Yet there is clearly something unique about 'the portal,' as Patricia Lockwood calls the internet in 'No One Is Talking About This,' her novel about the absurdity of life on social media. 'Why did the portal feel so private,' the narrator asks at one point, 'when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?' In an interview, Lockwood confessed that what attracted her to Twitter was the chance to become 'a spirit in a void.' A Dickinsonian sentiment, and maybe a universal one. But the lesson of Dickinson's letters is that she wasn't just a spirit in a void. 'I know I love my friends,' she writes to Louisa and Frances Norcross in 1873, adding: ''tis love for them that sets the blister in my throat, many a time of day.' These bonds were important to Dickinson, especially in seasons of grief. Wherever else her friends had gone, they lived on in her memory, a verifiable afterlife, and remained eternal companions. As she writes in a letter to Mary Hills: 'To be remembered is next to being loved, and to be loved is heaven.'
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
School vouchers: an issue that unites and divides
Advertisement The issue of school vouchers is primarily one of wealthy people who want the government to bear the cost for their private school tuition vs. most Americans, who know that this policy choice is only going to worsen the education they depend on. This oligarchic reality is true in every state, regardless of which party is in charge of that state. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Ellery Klein Medford GOP's nod to the private market would undermine our sense of community Nothing binds a community together more than public schools. In our increasingly divided country this institution remains essential. Countless families with children know the experience of school involvement leading to a familiarity with neighbors and the community. Parents' interest in ensuring the best for their children prompts their participation in school affairs and municipal government. Advertisement Raising a family encourages all of us to care about what is going on where we live. In once again promoting the private market approach of school vouchers, Republicans undermine our public voice and sense of community. They wish for a diminished public sphere replaced by the marketplace. Expanding the use of publicly funded vouchers to support private elementary and secondary education would not only seriously harm our public schools. It would also further widen our national divisions. Perry Cottrelle Malden My taxes shouldn't go toward promoting another parent's values Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute, argues for using public funds for private education ( Stergios cites Kendra Espinoza, the lead plaintiff in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and a single mother, who explained in a 2020 Reuters interview, 'At the public school, there's a lot of disrespect and not enough of those values that I wanted them to learn.' I'm a childless atheist who eagerly supports public schools. Public secular education serves me by giving my fellow citizens the intellectual tools to meaningfully participate in our democracy. It's not my responsibility to promote parents' values. I don't want to contribute to parochial schools that promote parochial values or viewpoints. Citizens who are antiabortion don't want a dime of their tax money to support abortion, even indirectly. I feel the same way about spreading religious myths of any stripe. Parents, pass on your values as you see fit, but don't insist I have to pay for it. Advertisement Jim Mesthene Waltham
