I’ve mentioned before in this column that I grew up listening to hip-hop, which is something that characterizes my generational cohort. I remember hearing rap for the first time at summer camp in 1986 as an 11-year-old (“Girls Just Don’t Understand” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince) and getting hooked on the form at school a year later (Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back).
I’ve mentioned before in this column that I grew up listening to hip-hop, which is something that characterizes my generational cohort. I remember hearing rap for the first time at summer camp in 1986 as an 11-year-old (“Girls Just Don’t Understand” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince) and getting hooked on the form at school a year later (Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back).
“Well, pick up your feet, we’ve got a deadline to meet, and I’m gonna see you make it on time,” sings Roy Orbison in “Working for the Man,” one of those classic American inversion stories where a guy on the line has dreams of replacing his boss and winning his daughter. Americans and work go together like PB&J.
Those words are part of Marcel Proust’s famous description his encounter with a madeleine cookie from Remembrance of Things Past and crystallize his notion of ‘involuntary memory,’ a concept that made it all the way from his literature into the canon of modern psychology.
For the first time in weeks, my bike ride to work through Court Square didn’t take me past a row of satellite trucks. The Huguely trial is over and the verdict is in. In this week’s issue, J. Tobias Beard takes a crack at answering the question he set out to explore when he began his coverage: Why did we watch this particular tragedy so closely, when there are so many others playing out around us right now?
Is it Opposite Day? One entry in the Belmont Bridge Design Competition [“Bridge Builders,” February 14] took all the top awards. But, it designed no bridge. Here’s why.
The Belmont Bridge was falling down. We needed a solution.
I’m still relatively new to town. Most of the week I sit at a computer, like a carp sifting passively through a river of news and information, so I need weekends like this last one to remind me why I came here in the first place.
There’s a big trial happening up the street, a so-called media event, but life is still going on all around us. It makes you stop and think a little bit about what the news is. Should we write stories because we know people will read them or because they won’t ever get read unless we write them?
We were standing in the Boston Common by the Park Street subway stop on a Saturday, and my friend, an old hippie, looked out at the green hill sloping up towards the State House and said, “I remember when you’d look up there and see people getting it on under blankets.”
Brendan Fitzgerald’s article “Does anyone trust science anymore?” January 24, melds half-truths, undefined terminology, and under-critical reporting. The initial quote of Michael Mann, “hopefully every scientist…is a skeptic,” was hopeful. The next sentence has Mann revealing his own muddled bias as he elevates consensus to scientific fact, and then re-labels skepticism as denial.
I have a distinct memory of being a 14-year-old boy in 1989 watching an MTV video for the Public Enemy song “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and having my father sit down next to me. I didn’t change the channel, because for some reason I wanted him to see it. He grew up in north Alabama in the ‘50s and eventually worked as a press secretary for a prominent Democratic member of Congress. When the video was over, he looked at me like the ground had ripped open between us and said something like, “Tough stuff.”