Cambridge
Two stories about how a public process, because of politics, can make it very difficult, and costly, to connect two points.
As is the case with all public spaces, Magazine Beach reflects the sensibilities and desires of its users, who ruined, abandoned, embraced, and transformed the area.
By Kate Vander Wiede The Cantab, as the regulars called The Cantab Lounge, is like a quirky not-quite-speakeasy complete with a narrow stairwell leading below street level and smoke-perfumed attendees. This night, bass chords shake the ceiling, courtesy of the band headlining one floor up. Dim lights hardly illuminate the cramped room, which is lined…
Food was front and center in the here and hereafter. A sumptuous feast was in the offing. But what was for dinner in the afterlife? Chasing the whim of what food went with funerary art, after several blind alleys I landed at Oleana, the Inman Square restaurant invented by Ana Sortun, a Norwegian Seattle native.…
by Sally Steinberg American chef Steve Johnson knows what he’s doing. A rendezvous in Central Square is a rendezvous with well-being. What’s in a name? When it comes to the restaurant Rendezvous in Central Square, a lot. There’s location, the crossroads thing. There’s social resonance, the people thing. There’s the history of Steve Johnson, chef/owner…

Arts Commentary: The Distance Between Us and the Museum
By Mark Pawlak For a working-class kid from Buffalo who once saw museums as places for other people, a lifetime among Cambridge and Boston collections became an education in class, access, exclusion, and the complicated act of looking. Any Sunday when the weather turns—low gray clouds, steady rain, the threat of snow—my thoughts drift toward…
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