The concerns are real: Our businesses are struggling to survive. But the case for advocating for both small businesses and protected bicycle lanes is strong. 

While many African American women today wear their hair in afros, cornrows, locks, braids, Senegalese twists, wraps, or bald, our hair continues to be a battlefield in this country’s politics of hair and beauty aesthetics.

Five protesters were arrested Monday after scaling a Raytheon BBN Technologies facility in the Cambridge Highlands, saying they hoped to call attention to the company’s weapons sales and “record of human rights violations.”

In preserving some almost-lost pieces of Necco history, the founder of the Candy Wrapper Museum became convinced it should be shared with the world in a book – a piece of New England’s confectionery legacy composed of Necco candy wrappers and ephemera.

We and other civic organizations and individuals warned Harvard and other venues that giving Putin a platform through the arts made the venues complicit in supporting war crimes, but our pleas did not succeed in eliciting a change.

The Irish community’s first U.S. celebrations honoring St. Patrick were described in Cambridge papers as an excuse for drunkenness, violence and other unsavory behavior. It wasn’t long before the events were filled instead with breakfasts, lectures and concerts – all very publicly devoid of alcohol and on the path to mainstream acceptance.

City government was in an unusual position Monday as the city manager asked for support to break the law and city councillors responded in the affirmative – because a May 1 deadline for bicycle lanes can’t be achieved with new levels of community engagement and parking mitigation demanded by the councillors.

Russia’s Ukraine invasion helps the world see what our inhumanity toward each other looks like, and highlights the persistence of a global racist social order even in a humanitarian crisis.

There may not be many Filipinos in Cambridge, but it seems that the Philippines mattered enough to the community to place a woefully misguided monument to a war there on Arsenal Square, at Garden Street and Concord Avenue in Neighborhood 9.

Public meetings this week look at problems with rats and a change in preschool hours, missing a May 1 deadline on bike lane construction, turning a vacant lot in The Port into affordable homes, special education policies, an energy-use disclosure law, Alewife-area lab moratorium, city manager search, law against wage theft and much more.