Schedule adjustment

By Marc Levy

Published: August 20, 2004

Why does the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority have schedules? I notice on my “Axonometric Projections of Harvard Square, Central Cambridge, Central Square, Cambridge Center & M.I.T. Areas” map — if it isn’t redundant to say “map” after saying “axonometric projections” — that someone has humorously given creator Tom Kane frequencies for buses and the T. [...]

Back to square one

By Marc Levy

Published: August 17, 2004

There is progress, however small, on the plan to revamp the blighted Lafayette Square, named in honor of a French nobleman who probably thought he’d get a little more than a shuttered gas station as an emblem for risking his life in the the colonies’ Revolutionary War. There will be work on the project within [...]

Porter progress

By Marc Levy

Published: August 13, 2004

Weary disappointment kept me from noting that the retail space at Massachusetts Avenue and Creighton Street in Porter Square will become a Big Picture Framing shop. Distant sadness kept me from reporting that the square’s Sasuga Japanese Bookstore has become a Century 21 real estate office. And a reeling sense of injustice has kept me [...]

Unfree market

By Marc Levy

Published: August 3, 2004

The United States is essentially a captive market for drug makers, which sell drugs at dramatically lower costs everywhere else and rely on profits here to make up the difference. We pay the industry’s research and development costs, and a change, drug makers say, would end innovation. So it worries the industry that there’s a [...]

One-two post-mortem

By Marc Levy

Published: August 2, 2004

Boston officials were vague on whether the end of the Democratic National Convention meant the end of random searches on our mass transit system. It looks as though it does. The police presence caused a lot of general fear for civil rights and specific anxiety over getting to work on time, but the real problem [...]