few books have generated as much anticipation here in the CommonWealth office as Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift. In terms of addressing themes we keep coming back to in this magazine, the only equivalent that comes to mind is Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (see “Picking up the Spare,” CW, Summer ’00), the book-length expansion […]
Robert Keough
Posted inEnvironment
Climate change
By now, it is old news that MassINC president and CEO Ian Bowles has left to become Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs in the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick. But it is by no means too late to give the publisher of this magazine a proper send-off. Ian Bowles’s arrival on the MassINC scene […]
Posted inUncategorized
A fading Dream
All summer and fall, we at CommonWealth, in tandem with our MassINC colleagues, have been at work on a series of background papers on key issues and trends in Massachusetts, including national comparisons and town-by-town data. Taken together, the eight CommonWealth Agenda 2006 essays sketch out the state of the American Dream in Massachusetts on […]
Posted inPolitics, Transportation
Second-Guesswork
> technically, there was a Big Dig before Fred Salvucci. The idea of putting the elevated Central Artery underground first surfaced, as it were, in the Boston Transportation Planning Review—Gov. Frank Sargent’s process of rethinking transportation priorities after pulling the plug on the Inner Belt and other new highways, led by Alan Altshuler—in 1972. But […]
Posted inArts and Culture, Economy
Anthony Flints This Land takes a whack at suburban sprawl
This Land:The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of AmericaBy Anthony FlintBaltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 310 pages with gov. mitt Romney a self-declared lame duck, it is by no means too soon to begin discussing his legacy. Among the chattering classes, that topic is already inviting smirks of derision. As Romney engages in the […]
Posted inPolitics
Rereading CommonWealth
Spring 2006 ORIGINALLY, I PLANNED to treat the 10th anniversary of the magazine as an excuse to re-read – and, I must confess, when it comes to some older issues and articles, read for the first time – the collected works of CommonWealth. But as deadline approached, it became evident that wasn’t going to happen. […]
Posted inEconomy
Historian Thomas O’Connor on making Boston the Athens of America
Thomas O’Connor has been telling Boston’s story for more than three decades. His 1976 book, Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses, based on a series of lectures delivered at the Boston Public Library the year before, established the South Boston native as the dean of Boston historians, an informal title no one has challenged since. O’Connor began […]
Posted inEconomy
“Strapped” author Tamara Draut explains why young adults arent getting ahead
In her new book, Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, Tamara Draut crunches numbers and interviews young adults across the country to show how, for the generations following the Baby Boomers, the transition to full-fledged adulthood—living on your own, launching a career, starting a family—has become difficult to accomplish without going broke. […]
Posted inUncategorized
Is the home we long for within our reach or beyond it?
Growth & Development Extra 2006 There is quite possibly no word in the English language more evocative than “home.” The very sound of it is rich, warm, comforting; the word lends itself to no end of aphorisms that are, well, homely: There’s no place like home. Home is where the heart is. My home is […]
Posted inUncategorized
Development expert Joel Kotkin on suburban life: Mend it, don’t try to end it
Growth & Development Extra 2006 His latest book is The City: A Global History, but it is as America’s leading defender of suburbia that Joel Kotkin has made a mark. On one level, it’s hard to see why suburbia would need defending. As Kotkin regularly points out, more than 90 percent of the growth in […]