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Town of Brookline's Latest Ban Is Truly a Coup de Foie Gras

The hardworking staff has been a (mostly) proud resident of the People’s Republic of Brookline for a (mostly) good 45 years, so we were understandably drawn to this item in Steph Solis and Mike Deehan’s always informative Axios Boston yesterday. It’s actually even more draconian than that, as Vivi Smilgius and Sam Mintz report in Brookline.News. On Wednesday, the town’s legislative body approved…

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C.J. Chivers Tracked Ukraine's Drone Warfare First - Up Close

The hardworking staff has long admired the journalistic work of New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers  (rhymes with shivers) during his years as a relentlessless war correspondent (Afghanistan, Libya, Syria), a tireless champion of military veterans, and – most recently – a firsthand witness to the drone war in Ukraine. That last topic is much in the news lately in the wake of this week’s stunning…

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Guess Who (Both?) Won the 2024 NYT 'Year in Pictures' Bakeoff

Among the many holiday traditions here at the Global Worldwide Headquarters of Campaign Outsider (duck the malls; do not bring me some figgy pudding), one of our favorites is the annual Running of the Photographers – that is, tallying the various photojournalists’ work in the New York Times special section, The Year in Pictures. In keeping with our Holiday Bakeoff tradition, the hardcounting…

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Xavier University Says 'We're Number . . . 500something!'

As I’ve mentioned previously in this space, I did seven years in Ohio from the late ’60s to the mid-’70s: A four-year stretch at Xavier University in Cincinnati, followed by an extended rehab stint after eight long years of Jesuit education. (Many of the gory details can be found here, but definitely not for the faint of heart.) Regardless, as a semi-proud Musketeer, back in 2020 I recorded…

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Is Babe Ruth's 'Called Shot' Jersey Really Worth $30 Million?

From our kissin’ cousin (Frog Division) at Ask Doctor Ads Well the Doc opened up the old mailbag today and here’s what poured out. Dear Dr. Ads, There I was, minding my own business and leafing through the Weekend Wall Street Journal, when I came across an ad for a New York auction house offering “the Babe Ruth jersey worn during one of the most iconic moments in sports history” – the home run he…

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Dead Blogging 'Songs for Modern Japan' at MFABoston

Well the Missus and I trundled over to The Fens the other day to check out Songs for Modern Japan: Popular Music and Graphic Design, 1900–1950 (through September 2) and say, it was swell. “Songs for Modern Japan: Popular Music and Graphic Design, 1900–1950” explores how sheet music covers provide a window into Japanese society and culture during this period of immense transformation. Visitors…

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Dead Blogging 'The Lost Generation' at the McMullen Museum

Well the Missus and I trundled out to Chestnut Hill the other day for a second look at The Lost Generation: Women Ceramicists and the Cuban Avant-Garde (through June 2) at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art and say, it was just as swell this time. The Lost Generation: Women Ceramicists and the Cuban Avant-Garde examines the participants and artistic output from 1949 to 1959 of the Taller de…

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I Survived the Great Cincinnati CicadaPalooza of 1970

To borrow a phrase from former President Barack Obama, the news media is currently getting all wee-weed up about the coming cicada apocalypse this spring. Here’s how Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs defined the term to NPR’s Robert Siegel at the time (August of 2009, for those of you keeping score at home). SIEGEL: Gibbs defined getting wee-weed up as when people, and I quote, “get all nervous for no…

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Bill Belichick to Herald: We're on to Boston Globe

From our Local Dailies DisADvantage desk Former football coach Bill Belichick got lots of press coverage today for running this full-page ad on A3 of the Boston Sunday Globe. Here’s the text, for those of you keeping score at home. Nowhere in America are pro sports fans as passionate as in New England and for 24 years, I was blessed to feel your passion and power. The Patriots are the only NFL…

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'Images From a Weary World' Dominate NYT's Year in Pictures

As you splendid readers no doubt recall, an annual tradition at the Global Worldwide Headquarters is the Counting of the Photogs in the New York Times “Year in Pictures” special section published at the end of every December (previous photo finishes here). The Year in Pictures 2023 comes literally wrapped in human tragedy, with this image spanning the front and back  covers. “This woman was…

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Dead Blogging 'Fabricating Modernism' at the Currier Museum

Well the Missus and I trundled up to the Granite State over the weekend to check out the newly installed exhibits at Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art and say, they were swell. We started at Fabricating Modernism: Prints from the School of Paris (through January 7), which features artworks that “constitute a small portion of an extensive collection of prints committed to the Currier Museum of…

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Dead Blogging 'Mondrian: Foundations' at MFABoston

Well the Missus and I trundled over to The Fens the other day to catch Mondrian: Foundations at the Museum of Fine Arts (through April 28) and say, it was swell. In the years around 1900, before Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) created some of the most recognizable abstract canvases of the last century, he turned his eye to the characteristic sights of the Dutch landscape: canals, windmills, fields,…

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NYT Gets Burned by Sports Betting's 'Axis of Wheedle'

Ever since sports gambling became legal in 2018 (SCOTUS: You bet!), the hardworking staff has laid plenty of 8 to 5 that the sports book-industrial complex would go sideways in no time flat. Cue Jared Diamond’s piece in today’s Wall Street Journal under the headline, “A Reporter’s Tweet Moved NBA Draft Odds. He Also Works for a Gambling Company.” The story revolves around this pre-draft tweet…

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Dead Blogging the New Cy Twombly Exhibit at MFABoston

Well the Missus and I trundled over to The Fens yesterday to catch Making Past Present: Cy Twombly (through May 7) at the Museum of Fine Arts and say, it was swell except for the parts that were head-scratching. More on that later. Here’s how the MFA’s overview of the exhibit begins Unique among his peers at the vanguard of postwar American art, Cy Twombly (1928–2011) sought inspiration from…

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MFABoston's Romance With NFTs: Not Fiscally Tangible, Maybe?

MFABoston’s Romance With NFTs: Not Fiscally Tangible, Maybe?

The other day the hardworking staff received this email from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Not to get technical about it, but we don’t have a digital collection of NFTs, mostly because they’re the pet rocks of the art world. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Last year the Boston Globe’s Malcolm Gay reported on the origins of the MFA’s NFT fling. ‘Someone had to move first’: MFA plans sale…

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No Joke: More Strip-Mining of Boston Globe Comics

No Joke: More Strip-Mining of Boston Globe Comics

For the past handful of years, the hardreading staff has diligently chronicled the Boston Globe’s chuckleheaded handling of its comics pages. Beset by a chronic case of schlimmbesserung (making something worse by trying to make it better), the Globeniks are forever replacing decent strips with inferior ones. Representative reaction from us after a 2019 Globe reader survey led to wholesale changes…

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David Guttenfelder Wins NYT 'Year in Pictures' Bakeoff

David Guttenfelder Wins NYT ‘Year in Pictures’ Bakeoff

For the past decade, the hardworking staff has been the Shutterbug Boswell of New York Times photographers, annually tallying who shot what in the paper’s Year in Pictures Special Section. This year’s section is especially fraught, given the violence and wanton destruction that characterized 2022, as Times editor Dana Jennings addresses in his introduction to the website version of The Year in…