Easy being Green

By Mary Carey 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Before he stepped down to become clerk magistrate of Ware District Court in May after nearly 27 years in the State House, Democratic state Rep. William P. Nagle of Northampton hadn’t faced a serious challenger in 20 years. That made his 1st Hampshire District seat seem safe to hand down to his longtime aide, Peter(...)

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Billboards on school buses

By Michele Kurtz 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Students at the Fenway High School in Boston pound away on keyboards in the CVS Pharmacies Computer Lab and check out books from the Harcourt General Library without giving the “branding” a second thought. In an increasingly commercialized society, corporate labels show up on everything. Sure, the FleetCenter has replaced the Boston Garden. But naming(...)

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NotSo Green Acres

By B.J. Roche 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Every now and then I’ll be talking to my friend Jack, who works in Boston and lives in Newton, and he’ll say: “So, when are you moving back to civilization?” By “civilization,” of course, he means inside the Route 128 ring, where golf courses and cemeteries count as open space. Where buyers actually pay more(...)

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Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered

By Michael Jonas 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

When Bernice Speliotis downs the nine pills she takes each day or reaches for the inhaler she relies on to keep her asthma in check, the 72-year-old Lynn resident admits to some doubts about the blessings of retirement. “The golden years–they’re not that golden always,” she says ruefully. But if glaucoma, high blood pressure, and(...)

Politics

Keeping the customers ‘satisficed’

The barely contested mayoral election is a sign of the political times in Boston. But it's nothing to get excited about

By Robert David Sullivan 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

This year’s election campaign for mayor of Boston has hardly revved the city’s engines. But at least somebody is running against Tom Menino. Four years ago, Boston held a mayoral election with only one name on the ballot, an acute embarrassment in a city renowned for its politics. But the 2001 race is barely an(...)

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Small Business Climate

By CommonWealth Staff 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

High-tax, high-cost Massachusetts is often portrayed as hostile to the entrepreneurial spirit. But in the new Small Business Survival Index, compiled by a Washington, DC-based advocacy group, the Bay State scores just above the middle of the pack. The index is a quirky sum of measures that severely punishes states like Massachusetts for high personal(...)

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Bringing a practical science into the classroom

By Ted Smalley Bowen 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Nancy Cianchetta is moving back and forth between adjoining lab rooms, where about a dozen fifth-to-seventh-graders seem oblivious to the made-to-order July weather outside. At benches, students chatter as they rig wind-powered winches, tweaking the angles of the vanes. Cianchetta, an Everett High School biology teacher, strides confidently through the patches of minor turbulence, expertly(...)

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The long morning after

By Robert Keough 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

One of the challenges in publishing a quarterly magazine is trying to anticipate what’s going to be on readers’ minds three to six months down the line. But the grim drama of September 11 gave new meaning to the term “overtaken by events.” With the issue you hold in your hands three weeks away from(...)

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Bill Bennetts family values

By Alan Wolfe 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American FamilyBy William J. BennettDoubleday, New York, 199 pages William Bennett, perhaps the leading conservative voice in American public life today, turns his attention from Bill Clinton and his misdeeds, the subject of his previous book, The Death of Outrage, to the state of America’s families,(...)

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Farmland returns to the wild

By Jane Brox 0 Comments Dec 1, 2001

Without farmers, farmland returns to the wild To live in a town that still counts thousands of undeveloped acres among its assets is to live with a lot of talk about land use, development, and saving open space. When such talk comes up I always think about what a nebulous term “open space” really is,(...)


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Fall 2001

The barely contested mayoral election is a sign of the political times in Boston. But it's nothing to get excited about

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