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San Francisco employees eat at work. City Hall wants to punish them

August 15, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

TWO MEMBERS of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors have come up with an idea to make their city great again: Ban company cafeterias in new commercial office buildings. Ahsha Safaí and Aaron Peskin are proposing a change in the zoning code that would end the practice, especially popular in the tech industry, of providing free or discounted food for employees at on-site cafeterias. Their goal: Force hungry employees to leave their workplaces and patronize nearby restaurants. Shutting down private cafeterias is an example of "forward looking legislation," Peskin told the San Francisco Examiner. "People will have to go out and eat lunch with the rest of us."

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Short live the Legislature!

August 12, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

WHEN ROGER WOLCOTT, the 39th governor of Massachusetts, delivered his inaugural address in 1897, he urged state legislators to stop spending so much time on Beacon Hill, trying to justify longer and longer sessions by introducing more and more bills.

"The volume of legislation is a poor criterion of its necessity and wisdom," he told the senators and representatives assembled before him. "It is difficult to believe that five months of legislative session and 700 printed pages of acts and resolves are annually necessary. A shorter session and [fewer bills] would not be unwelcome to our people."

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At Smith College, the racist incident that wasn't

August 8, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

Oumou Kanoute is a black student at Smith College with a summer job on campus. This is what happened after she ate lunch in a mostly empty dining hall one day last week:

A college employee saw her "laying on the couch" alone, mistook her for an unfamiliar male who "seem[ed] to be out of place," and phoned the campus police. An unarmed officer was sent to check things out. He spoke politely to Kanoute, saw that nothing was amiss, and left her in peace.

Here's what didn't happen:

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The insidious metaphor of trade as 'war'

July 29, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

OUR CIVIC AND political discourse is replete with metaphors.

We avoid having to swallow a bitter pill by instead kicking the can down the road. Desperate candidates throw a Hail Mary pass. Sensitive souls learn that if they can't take the heat, they should get out of the kitchen. A good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

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Trump doesn't care about Montenegro. He should.

July 25, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

FOR MORE THAN two years President Trump has made it clear that he begrudges America's commitment to NATO. But his disdain for America's preeminent alliance hit a dangerous new low last week.

In a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson shortly after his press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump was asked why the United States would ever want to come to the defense of Montenegro, a tiny Balkan nation that became a member of the alliance in 2017.

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