John Winthrop Sears would have been 84 years old last Thursday. He died November 4th. As far as I can tell, he was the last of a breed. Family and friends gathered the evening of his birthday at Christ Church Longwood in Brookline. The event was a musical remembrance, a magnificent program he had planned …
Continue reading John Winthrop Sears – they don’t make ’em that way any more
Hmm, the country has an authoritarian regime, a Communist credo, a record of human rights violations, no open elections or free press, and we're liberalizing relations with it? How can we do that? Well, it worked with China, Richard Nixon's legacy foreign policy initiative. And Vietnam too. Why not with Cuba? To paraphrase President Obama, …
It's hard for millennials to imagine that not so long ago, blacks, who Constitutionally had the right to vote since 1870, were routinely blocked from exercising that right. But antagonistic county commissioners and viciously contrived regulatory barriers in the South routinely denied even the ability to register. In Selma, Alabama, a majority of the people were black, …
Mark Wahlberg, star of box office hits Boogie Nights, The Perfect Storm, The Departed, Lone Surivor and more, and executive producer of Entourage and Boardwalk Empire, was one vicious dude in his teens. His rap sheet from the 1980's reads like a series of scripts from brother Donnie's NYPD series Blue Bloods. Of particular relevance today …
It's as if we learned that Mr. Rogers was a pedophile, or Marcus Welby had sexually assaulted patients in his exam room. This week we learned that Bill Cosby, the apogee of middle class respectability both in character (as Cliff Huxtable on The Cosby Show) and in person (universally honored, including locally a few years ago by …
Two trumpets, a horn, a euphonium and a tuba, a brass quintet performing the music for Saturday’s memorial for the late Boston Globe food writer and editor Gail Perrin. The music was loud, bold, brassy and confident: how very Gail Perrin. Gail was remembered for her warmth, her whimsy, her hospitality, her lust for international …
Continue reading Globe food editor Gail Perrin and her link to Peter Frates
The best baseball book of 2002 was Boston Herald reporter Howard Bryant's Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. Even growing up with the Red Sox, until reading the book years ago at the insistence of my non-Red-Sox-fan husband, I was never fully aware of the deep-rooted racial intolerance of the team …
I'm with Karl Rove, at least on this: Condoleezza Rice should replace Roger Goodell as head of the National Football League. Goodell has been a toady for the owners, who get fat profits from leaving the game just where it is. Despite lip service to the contrary, they have accepted barbaric behavior from the players …
Who would have thought that so much of Boston would be abuzz about the new music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra? The arrival of director (designate until September) Andris Nelsons at the BSO's Tanglewood Music Center (TMC), the world's leading summer classical musical festival, in Lenox, MA this past weekend has generated enough electricity to …
Continue reading Andris Nelsons brings new electricity to Boston Symphony
For real escape through summer reading, there's no substitute for fiction. Here are a few books worth sharing. My top read this past year was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. A 13-year-old boy in Manhattan survives a terrorist bomb in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His mother is killed. They had been visiting her favorite painting, a goldfinch …
Continue reading Books to escape from Benghazi, Boko Haram, Boehner, biz cycle etc, pt. 2
Marjorie Arons-Barron 