Andrew Brinker, ‘A housing market for almost no one’: Rising prices and interest rates have made home buying feel impossible:

Even to afford a house in the lowest-priced third of the Greater Boston market required about $138,000 a year in household income in 2022… A year prior, that figure was $96,000… Without a sustainable housing market… the region is at risk of losing the residents who make the place tick: Teachers, social workers, even people in lucrative industries like biotech, whose salaries in most other cities would be more than enough to buy a place.

Janelle Nanos, ‘People are leaving’: Massachusetts has lost 110,000 residents since COVID began. Is life better out there?:

After years of steady growth, and a peak of 7 million residents at the start of this decade, Massachusetts has seen its population shrink for the last three years, down about 50,000 people in all… Unquestionably, stratospheric housing costs are a major factor in why people leave Massachusetts, especially now. Before the pandemic, a family making $100,000 a year could afford to buy 37 percent of homes available in the state. Today that figure is just 12 percent. In metro Boston, it’s just 6 percent, compared with 34 percent nationally.

Rachel Silber Devlin, John Silber, my father, never caved:  He saw freedom of speech as vital to our understanding

For John Silber, being a liberal was related to being a philosopher. All knowledge comes from the scientific method, and its twin process the Socratic method. Both involve skeptical questioning in an attempt to arrive at the nearest approximation to the truth… As he said, “Whenever one uses a set of beliefs as a liberal litmus test, one has confused liberalism with dogmatism.”

Kat Rosenfield, The illusion of a frictionless existence

Whatever Gen Z is doing, it is born of what we did to them first, by bringing them into a world where quotidian annoyances were being increasingly eliminated for the comfort and convenience of people who had already had plenty of practice in dealing with them. Indeed, it is only because older generations had gotten used to dealing with friction that we could ever decide to dispense with it. Experiencing minor hardship will make you resilient, but first, it will make you uncomfortable…

Gregg Field, Frank Sinatra’s Drummer Tells the Story of His Final Concert

That night he opened with “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and it was the Frank of old. Didn’t miss a word or note. Then, he called another song. And then another song, and then another. By the time he left the stage we had done a mini-Sinatra concert with Frank performing six classics. And with mic and the audience in hand, he sang his final message: “The best is yet to come, come the day you’re mine . . . And I’m gonna make you mine!” It was perfect. Frank swinging on top, owning it, and then disappearing into the chilly desert night.