#boston year book

[so-much-for-subtlety]

I found this 100 year old book today, which was published by the City of Boston and contains a bunch of information and statistics about the previous year (this volume was printed in 1924 and is a review of the year 1923).

It's kind of weird that it's a 100 years old, but at the same time just feels like a regular book. When I see '1923' I get confused and makes we think that it's a book from and 1990s or something.

There are some eerie references in the introduction that it's been 5 years since 'the world war' (WW2 was still 15 years in the future), but for context in 1924 these are some things that were happening:

Hitler was sentenced to 5 years in prison for his participation in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch (he serves less than 9 months).

Fascists win the Italian general elections with a two-thirds majority.

U.S. President Calvin Coolidge grants citizenship to all Native Americans.

The Zeppelin made its first transatlantic crossing from Germany to land in New Jersey.

United States occupation of the Dominican Republic ends.

The last known sighting of a California grizzly bear is recorded.

Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that Andromeda, previously believed to be a nebula, is actually another galaxy, and that the Milky Way is only one of many such galaxies in the universe.

[firelise]

ONLY FRIENDS | one year anniversary text memes August 12 - October 28, 2023

[petrovna-zamo]

So sweet to see Katya with Avi’s daughter 🥹

[britneyshakespeare]

barnes and noble has been raising the prices of everything and further pushing for their premium membership option (which they raised the price of by 60 percent this year!) and then when they have big sales events, they're less than what they used to be.

last year at this time you could get one of their leather-bound book annex tomes for $12.50 (without a member discount) because of the 50 percent off all hardcover sales. but they raised the price of those tomes from 25 bucks to 30, and they decreased the sale from 50 percent off all hardcovers to 1/3rd off. so that same book that was $12.50 at last year's end-of-year sale is now 20 bucks. and that's supposed to be savings enough to induce me to walk into one of their stores this week?

i'm sorry but b&n has just gotten so greedy, even though their business has only been doing better and better in previous years. they do not have to be raising prices like they have been, and they can damn well afford to have the same savings events they used to. if you went to one of those hardcover sales a year or two ago, even if you lived in a less populated area like i do, you had never seen a b&n so busy in your life. things were flying off the shelves. they WERE making bank.

and as a company they've only been growing and growing (as much as the publishing industry has been, in recent years). but there are so many other ways to buy books. CHEAPER ways to buy books. MORE SUSTAINABLE ways to buy books. and since books and booksellers are doing really well right now, i don't see why barnes and noble is getting so greedy when they don't have to be. i dont like new shiny books that much. people buy books for the content, ultimately. sometimes we as consumers might make the choice that a new shiny book is worth paying a bit more for, but not that much. barnes and noble has just been demanding more and more of their customers' money for less and less benefit.

[ricky-mortis]

Happy anniversary to the Great Boston Molasses flood of 1919! Thinking of you!

[wanderingmind867]

I think Boston Brand was around 34-35 when he died. His first comic appearance showed his tombstone, and it said 1933-1967. So like... that's i guess around the age i should've been expecting. I personally assumed he was younger (like 29-30 or so), but 34 or 35 makes sense. Still, that's pretty young. But i guess I'm more just impressed they even bothered giving him a birthdate. Cool effort on (i'm guessing) the artist's part. So props to Carmine Infantino for that one.

[biromanticwritergal]

2023 Pinterest 50 Book Reading Challenge

50. A Book You Started but Never Finished

Surpassing the Love of Men by Lillian Faderman

[drscribblesmusic]

Nightwing: Year One, Chapter Three: Deadman Talking

[thethirdman8]

[bostonbakedbean90]

🤩📚🏒🐻💯

[finallymyescape]

SHIPPIN' UP TO BOSTON WOOOOAHHHHH

so yeah i'm going up to Boston this whole week to meet up with some friends near and far! (the farthest one coming from Australia) There's a HUGE bath in the Airbnb house we're staying in and I brought TWO bath bombs I'm so excited to take a bath there and read~

[so-much-for-subtlety]

There's also a few pages that summarizes the manufacturing industries in Boston. It's really amazing to see just how many there were, and how varied the industries were (5 companies alone for the manufacture of artificial limbs! There were almost 50 companies making tobacco products!)

Obviously policies around globalization moved manufacturing out of the United States, but I guess I never imagined how busy the city must have been with so many different companies making things.

The other thing that strikes me is that if I tried to look up similar information today that I imagine that I would struggle to find the equivalent.

The internet has supposed to make information for easily available (the 'information super highway') but I get a hunch that probably there are not even people who work for the City of Boston today that would be easily be able to collate this type of data.

Amazing that 100 years ago citizens probably had more access to civic data than we do today.

[aizenat]

There is this girl I went to hs with and the nicest way I can say this is this girl was smart but not particularly so, and had a high sense of self despite being remarkably average. Again, that's the nicest way I can say that. She also got very triggered whenever I was better at her than something (in all fairness, she was like that with anyone better than her, but my friend caught her shit talking me once when I was the only person in my English class to get an A on my Catcher in the Rye essay--something I expected simply because I'm a writer, was then, and I never once got anything less than A on an essay my entire hs career--and that pissed me off particularly because my writing is the ONE thing in this world I can truly say I do better than most people).

Anyway, I learned a while ago that she moved to Boston, and she was associated with Harvard in some way. Without getting too into it, she works there in the weirdest and most random department (not as a professor or anything meaningful or prestigious, which will make sense in a second), doing basically admin shit it seems. I was curious because she's still listed on their site and it says she's been there for like eleven years. I was wondering if she ended up going there as a student in something, but without a linkden or something, I couldn't see. But every time I googled her name and the school, the only thing that came up was her staffing position. No information to indicate she was a student.

Which is funny. I looked up to see if you can go to Harvard for free if you work there, and the do have a reimbursement program, but you'd only get like 75% of fees back, so you'd still have to come out of pocket. And this is an IVY, so that's going to be pretty. And considering what she does, I can't imagine it paying that much where she could easily afford it. Maybe she does take classes and is slowly working her way to some kinda degree, but I doubt it. I feel like she'd at least be able to brag by now given how long she's been there (the site fucking says when she started lol).

Either way, the reason this is funny to me is because she was never even close or talented or impressive enough to anyone let alone college admissions to get into a school like Harvard (I know for a fact she didn't get in in hs lol), and transferring into schools is typically easier, she didn't get her degrees from there according to the site. So I just lowkey find it funny because the closest she'd ever get to Harvard is not as a student or even as someone brought in to teach, but by getting some admin job and sticking around long enough to get her picture on the school's site. She looks so proud in her Harvard shirt, thinking she finally "made it" but never in a way that would actually impress everyone.

It just all feels very fitting for her. In the right spaces to be around more impressive people while being overwhelmingly mediocre her own damn self lol.

[dostoyevsky-official]

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

[...] Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. [...] Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

[...] Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. [...] The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

[...] But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

[...] For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

[arinzechukwuture]

She was called Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that brought her, and Wheatley, which was the name of the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal.

In Boston, the slave traders put her up for sale: “She's 7 years old! She will be a good mare!”

At thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At the age of twenty, Phillis was questioned by a court of eighteen enlightened men in robes and wigs.

She had to recite passages from Virgil and Milton and some verses from the Bible, and she also had to vow that the poems she had composed were not copied. From a chair, she underwent her lengthy examination, until the court approved her: she was a woman, she was Black, she was enslaved, but she was a poet.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.

✍🏾: Black History Studies

[ooliviakate]

my boyfriend went to a u-pick farm and brought me a huge sunflower, strawberries, green and purple beans, cucumbers, and zucchini 🥹