Published September 29, 2010

You may not know his name, but you have seen his work for years — maybe five or 10 times a day, if you’re a real news hound.

David Beard

David Beard, the editor of Boston.com and a friend of WBUR, is leaving the Boston Globe to become the online editor at the National Journal in Washington, D.C.

“The city is diminished by his leaving, because he had a clear-eyed vision of what the ‘soul of the city’ is,” says my boss, John Davidow, the executive editor of wbur.org. Many of my colleagues have described Beard’s departure as another loss for the Globe — and for Boston.

Beard came to the Globe in 1998 and took the helm of Boston.com in 2004. Since then, Web traffic has grown to almost absurd numbers: 200 million page views a month, 13 million of them on mobile, according to the Globe. (His partnership with WBUR also helped our online audience grow.)

So why is Beard leaving? “I didn’t want to live my life managing decline,” he says of the ailing Globe, in an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab. Beard wants a career change, and the move to the National Journal is a chance to help bolster deep, watchdog journalism in the nation’s capital.

The National Journal is rebranding itself as a “digital-first” news operation, perhaps in response to the royal butt-kicking from Politico, the startup that came from nowhere. Beard is, as we say, a good get.

He is also a great guy. Good luck, Dave.

Published September 29, 2010

Remember how Martha Coakley lost to Scott Brown in January? How she barely campaigned while Brown was shaking hands at Fenway?

Coakley, McKenna (AP)

Now the attorney general faces a new challenger from out of nowhere, this time in her re-election bid. Millbury lawyer Jim McKenna, a Republican, scored an upset in his write-in campaign for the Sept. 14 primary election. It was the second time in Massachusetts history that a statewide write-in campaign succeeded.

McKenna formally launches his campaign today. On Tuesday, McKenna hired Brown’s old campaign staff. And they’re trying, again, to portray Coakley as part of the “boys and girls club.”

“Martha Coakley is wrong on illegal immigration and she has failed to prosecute the political corruption on Beacon Hill,” McKenna declares on his campaign website. “She has been more focused on prosecuting Garden Clubs than with the lawmakers stuffing bribes down their shirts.”

Coakley isn’t taking any chances. She’s campaigning. She strolled down Shrewsbury Street, Worcester’s main drag, chatting with “a car mechanic, baker, optician, nurses union officials and people on the street,” the Telegram & Gazette reported:

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Published September 29, 2010

Imagine traveling to New York at 220 miles per hour.

Those of us who have made the perilous journey on a Fung Wah bus to New York can appreciate this: Amtrak has unveiled plans for a high-speed Northeast line that can get you there in an hour and 15 minutes. (The drive takes about four and a half hours.)

Amtrak would have to build new tracks, and the $117 billion proposal isn’t funded yet. Construction would begin as early as 2015, with the project slated for completion in 2040. So yeah, I’ll be 55. (Commenter Mike captures it: “This is a great idea, but can they reduce the construction schedule. We are so behind with high speed rail, starting in 2015 and ending in 2040 is a little sad.”)

Here are some of the lofty details from the news release:

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Published September 29, 2010

What’s news on a mild Wednesday morning in Boston — untempered outrage as the city reels from a quadruple homicide in Mattapan:

Police Vow Arrests In Mattapan Massacre

Boston’s grisliest mass murder in nearly two decades — made all the more horrific by the senseless execution of a baby in his young mother’s final embrace — sent horror rippling yesterday throughout the city, from the most powerful seats of government to the child’s devastated family. (Herald)

Woolson Street Wonders If More Cops Would Help

Woolson Street is one block away from the bustle of Morton Street. It’s a neighborhood of triple deckers in vinyl siding or in need of paint. And early Monday morning it was the scene of a crime that left four people, including a toddler, dead. (WBUR)

District Attorney: Cuts Cost Crime-Fighting

Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley said plummeting budgets have led to crippling crime-fighting cuts, including layoffs to community liaisons instrumental in helping prevent violence such as yesterday’s Mattapan slayings. (Herald)

‘Forget The Miracle. That’s Old Rhetoric’

Rev. Eugene Rivers said the “Boston Miracle,” which pulled the city out of the murder spree of the 1990s, is “antiquity” now.  “We need a model that deploys faith-based workers, working with the police supporting them, and then providing seven-day-a-week wraparound care.” (WBUR)

We’ve Hit A New Low In Depravity

Residents across huge swaths of Boston haven’t felt this kind of fear and uncertainty since the crack-induced violence of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the combination of drugs, huge profits from dealing them, and guns fueled a surge in the homicide rate that seems unimaginable today. (Brian McGrory/Globe)

What else is news: Amtrak has unveiled plans for a high-speed train that would travel from Manhattan to Boston in 84 minutes. And Massachusetts appeared to weather the recession better than most, according to new census data.

Published September 28, 2010

I’m always scanning the public radio universe and Boston blogosophere for tasty morsels…

Noam Chomsky says we should embrace, not marginalize, the Tea Party. He was on WBUR today. (On Point)

Massachusetts might lose a Congressional district. That would make the stakes even higher for the current election. (ElectionWire)

The United States is wiretapping Mahmoud Karzai, the owner of Cambridge’s Helmand restaurant. Also, Hamid Karzai’s brother lives in Cambridge?! (Wicked Local Cambridge)

Thomas Wright of Brookline could have met this tragic end if Boston police had not intervened. (A.Currell/Flickr)

Women suffer from pain more than men. But women have more pain to put up with. (Radio Boston)

Kitty Dukakis is taking on beer distributors. The former alcoholic opposes the repeal of a sales tax on liquor, which funds addiction recovery services. (Universal Hub)

Zipcar is telling Cambridge drivers not to “door” bicyclists. The company is putting stickers on every side-view mirror. (CommonHealth)

Boston Police arrested Thomas Wright, of Brookline, for cruising around in a stolen golf cart. He “found” it outside of City Hall. (BPD News)

The putter used by Jim Furyk to win $11.35 million at the Tour Championship this weekend was purchased for $39 in Easton. It had been traded in by Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Paul Szep. (ESPN)

Published September 28, 2010

Six New Englanders, four of them from Massachusetts, became 2010 MacArthur Fellows today.

From top-left, clockwise: Jessie Little Doe Baird, Matthew Carter, Nergis Mavalvala, Annette Gordon-Reed (Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Each one got a surprise phone call with the news that he or she will get $500,000, no strings attached, for being a genius. Pretty sweet.

The Bay Staters are Jessie Little Doe Baird, an indigenous language preservationist in Mashpee; Matthew Carter, a type designer from Cambridge; Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian at Harvard Law; and Nergis Mavalvala, a quantum astrophysicist at MIT.

Carter invented the ubiquitous Verdana (a font I hate) and Georgia (a font I love, which you’re looking at right now). He designed the body text for the New York Times (the newspaper chose from among 19 alternatives) and the Boston Globe.

“There aren’t a great many people around the world who do what I do. It’s a very small profession. We’re not very numerous,” Carter says in a MacArthur video. “My job is to make type that’s readable. Also, I want it to have some sort of quality that is mine.”

Gordon-Reed is the Harvard Law professor who exposed the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemmings relationship more than a decade ago — subsequently proved true by DNA tests. “It started as a fascination as a child with Jefferson and Monticello and slavery,” she told NPR’s Ari Shapiro today on Morning Edition.

Gordon-Reed argues that white written history has long been given priority over black oral history. Her next book takes the Hemmings family into the 19th century in an exploration of race.

Baird, of Mashpee, is working to resurrect the lost language of the Wampanoag nation in Massachusetts, a tongue that has not been spoken for 150 years. She has produced dictionaries, phrase books and grammars to help pass on the language to children.

Finally, Mavalvala is a physicist who studies gravitational waves — “fluctuations in space-time curvature that propagate as waves in a pond” — to see further back into the history of the universe than ever before.

Nicholas Benson, a stone carver in Newport, R.I., and Sebastian Ruth, a music educator in Providence, round out the New England representation.

We’ll be looking at the work of these geniuses in greater detail today at 3 on Radio Boston.

____

Update: In an earlier version of this post, I trashed Verdana in the same sentence I cooed in admiration for Matthew Carter — only to discover while listening to All Things Considered that Carter, in fact, designed Verdana.

Published September 27, 2010

If he did, the Republican gubernatorial candidate would know to skip this campaign stop:

Media Advisory
Public Events: Tuesday September 28th, 2010
12:15 P.M.        Charlie Baker will visit with voters
Coney Island Hot Dogs
158 Southbridge Street
Worcester, MA

As I learned just last week, Coney Island is closed on Tuesdays. And it doesn’t strike me as the kind of joint that would open specially for him.

9/28 update: The Baker campaign has sent out this revised schedule:

Media Advisory
Public Events: Tuesday September 28th, 2010
12:15 P.M.        Charlie Baker will visit with voters
The Boulevard Diner
155 Shrewsbury Street
Worcester, MA