MASSAGE HERESY
10 years ago
April 3, 1998 | Sarah McNaught looked into why a local massage student was expelled from the Muscular Therapy Institute upon divulging that she was a professional dominatrix.
“Sheila, however, says there is nothing dangerous about her work, which involves various forms of erotic pain or domination. And she is adamant that she does not have sex with her clients.

“ ‘The idea is for me to establish my dominance over them in different ways,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes, for instance, putting a collar on them is enough to give them the sense of submission they seek.’ Whether the scenario involves forced cross-dressing or foot worship, she says, her profession relies on acting out other people’s fantasies. ‘Some people enjoy humiliation and being under my control as a way to escape their everyday lives for an hour,’ she says.

“But from [MTI’s executive director Mary Ann] DiRoberts’s point of view, what Sheila does is not so harmless. DiRoberts believes that potential clients’ opinion of massage therapy will suffer if the public finds out that MTI counts sex workers among its students. The consequence, she says, will be a decrease in clientele for the profession as a whole.”
 
SMACK ATTACK
20 years ago
April 1, 1988 | Ric Kahn reported on Gloucester’s serious heroin problem, finding that one out of 125 Gloucester residents was a junkie.
“Gloucester—Sir Smack blew in from Boston back in ’68...

“He was electric, charming the pants off both the guys and girlies. They’d lie and steal just to spend some time with him, their demigod, for he could stifle their pain. The outnumbered cops tried to bust up the all-night party, kick him out of their seafaring city. But he was hard to keep down. In waterfront barrooms, down on the boulevard near the famous bronze Man at the Wheel, in the bathrooms and basements of turn-of-the-century-double-deckers — he was being introduced all over town. Buddy to buddy, cousin to cousin, husband and wife, brother to sister, generation to generation, his influence spread from Gloucester and its industrial-strength family ties. The former big-city stranger became a downright Gloucester guy, a regular Jones.” Read Full Article

MEAN STREET
25 years ago
April 5, 1983 | William Bennett talked to the New England Athletics Congress chairman for “race walking” Steve Vaitones about his peculiar sport and those who heckle him for it.
“Even more discouraging than automobiles are their drivers — at least for a race walker. Race walkers do look odd, and drivers don’t let them forget it. Vaitones, who is currently spending three hours a day practicing his arm-swinging, straight-legged lope, has plenty of opportunity to collect insults. One of the standard routines goes like this; driver puts beer can in right hand, cranks down window with left. ‘Whatsa matta — your jockstrap too tight?’ Swigs. Guns accelerator.

“Occasionally, though, Vaitones overhears an onlooker reprimand a heckler: ‘Hey that’s hard work. I read about it in an airline magazine.’ “

COMING TO LIGHT
30 years ago
April 4, 1978 | Howard Litwak sifted through Franz Kafka’s Letters To Friends, Family, And Editors.
“Had Franz Kafka’s wishes been carried out, this volume of his letters would never have been published. Kafka asked Max Brod, his longtime friend...to burn his correspondence...after his death. Fortunately for us, Brod chose to ignore those instructions...

“The letters...reveal other aspects of his personality: his forthright and perceptive criticism of the works-in-progress of his friends,... his dissatisfaction with his own writing (to Brod: ‘I am not enclosing the novels (referring to The Trial and Amerika.) Why stir up the old struggles? Only because I haven’t burned them yet?’), his self-loathing (to Klopstock: ‘Must you always be reproving me? Don’t I do that enough myself?’ and later ‘You must simply keep in mind that you are writing to a wretched little person possessed by all sorts of evil spirits.’) Yet he never lost the biting wit also evident in his works. Writing to Brod of trying to housebreak a cat:
 
“How hard it is to arrive at an understanding with an animal on this question. There seem to be only misunderstandings, for the cat knows, through blows and other explanation, that there is something undesirable about taking care of her needs of nature, and that the place for it has to be carefully chosen. So what does she do? Well, for example she chooses a spot that is dark, that will in addition show me her affection...But from the human side this spot happens to be inside my bedroom slipper.”

THE ROMNEY DIET
5 years ago
March 7, 2003 | Kristen Lombardi delved into Governor Romney’s fiscal budget to see who would be hurt most by his balancing act.
“Even before advocates can sort through Romney’s plan and decipher where, exactly, human-services spending has been cut, they’ve noted that, for all the talk of his ‘commitment’ to core services, the governor still manages to balance his FY ’04 budget on the backs of the state’s neediest citizens. For one thing, the governor’s proposal, known as ‘House 1,’ continues what advocates call the ‘reprehensible’ assault on small state agencies providing social services. It hammers away at the Disabled Persons Protection Commission, which investigates abuse in group homes...It slashes away $800,000 from vocational and home-care programs for residents grappling with brain injuries and other chronic disabilities...As MHLAC senior attorney Susan Fendell points out, ‘This is a terribly vulnerable population with great need for someone to go to bat for them and enforce their legal rights to mental-health care.’ ” Read Full Article

END OF AN ERA
10 years ago
March 6, 1998 | Jason Gay discussed the pacification of Cambridge, once Boston’s “Moscow-on-the-Charles.”
“...Cambridge’s progressive fireworks — it’s ‘People’s Republic’ rebelliousness — seem to be going the way of all those mom-and-pop stores on Mass Ave. The new Cambridge is rich and getting richer, less diverse, and (egad) more conservative. Likewise, the new Cantabrigian isn’t the activist type, and is less likely to pay attention to street-level city politics. Sure, people still care about issues like good schools, safe streets, and clean water, but when it comes to political life, Cambridge today has more in common with sleepier, more suburban-style cities like Brookline or Newton than with the Cambridge of old. There are different faces, different attitudes, and shifting priorities.” Read Full Article

FACING RACE
20 years ago
March 4, 1988 | Scott Lehigh observed how presidential candidate Jesse Jackson handled the race issue during a campaign stopover in Hazard, Kentucky.
“There is, of course, the asterisk that clings to Jackson like a shadow, an asterisk that says, in barely discernible subtext beneath the polite print, ‘Of course, though this man is one of the leaders in the polls right now, he can’t win because he is black.’ When a TV reporter asks him if he can win, Jackson is brusque. ‘Let’s concentrate on real substance, which is not race, but economic violence,’ he says. And in yet another Democratic debate in Williamstown, Virginia, he gets the biggest hand of the day with his dignified objection to the question of whether the other candidates let him off easy because he is black. But Jackson is too cagey a politician not to realize this is an issue he must address, and in Hazard he makes a not so subtle point: ‘When GE clears out, when they take away your job, when they take away your farm, they turn the lights out.’ A dramatic pause. ‘And all of us look just alike in the dark.’ ” Read Full Article

SHAME ON THE TRAIN 
25  years ago
March 8, 1983 | The Phoenix reported on a local pro-choice organization that battled the MBTA for the right to advertise on subway trains.
“Hemorrhoids, maybe. Dentures, no problem. But when ad requests for the MBTA trains and buses get ‘patently offensive,’ to quote T spokesman Paul DiNatale, they get rejected...

“The proposed advertising campaign, similar to the one run recently in Philadelphia, points out that, though women from every walk of life have had abortions, the right to abortion could be in jeopardy. According to Marjorie Heins, staff counsel for CLUM, the MBTA management was unhappy with the proposed ads because they didn’t want any advertising featuring the word ‘abortion.’...CLUM pointedly reminded T officials that the two had covered this ground in 1974, when the T refused an advertisement for Preterm, a clinic offering vasectomies, gynecological services, birth-control counseling, and abortions. Preterm promptly went to court...After Preterm won a preliminary injunction, the T backed down and posted the ads. When CLUM recalled that precedent, T officials reconsidered and accepted the latest abortion ads.”

Kate Harding — “a Chicago-based writer, editor, crazy dog person, humorless feminist, aspiring yoga teacher, recovering grad student, and blonde,” according to her blog — has ingeniously skewered the standards imposed by the Body Mass Index (BMI). What she has done is to post to Flickr a slideshow showcasing women (well mostly, anyway, there's a few men as well as a cat up there) of all sizes. Atop these photos she simply categorizes them according to the index’s calculator. The results are maddening and staggering. Have a look.

                 Laurie is "overweight."

When I first heard about the idea of “leaf peeping,” I thought it was a joke. It was in an episode of Family Guy, as I recall, and as I had never spent an autumn in New England, I could only assume that the “hoards” of tourists who descend like Hellfire on the Northeast “to watch the leaves change color” was some kind of hyperbolic mockery of people with a severely bastardized concept of both nature and vacations…

So it is with incredulity that I look at the Boston Globe and see that Columbus Day was Maine’s 2nd biggest tourism weekend because of the some 700,000 carloads of people, apparently eager to take their three-day weekend and go peep some leaves.  Similarly, Eileen Ognitz at CNN International offers some ideas on how to keep the kids entertained on your leaf-peeping trip, and the Aspen Times sadly reports to it’s citizenry that the 2007 Leaf Peeping season is past it’s peak.

Where’s the jocular ridicule? Gentle scorn? A stray facetious compliment or an underhanded jab? Far be it from me to condemn someone’s fetish, dendrophelic or otherwise, but has leaf-peeping moved so far into the mainstream that journalists can’t mock it publicly? Seriously: leaf-peeping? Yes, it's pretty, but that's a perk, not a reason. That's like paying $2200 to stay at the Ritz Carlton because they put mints on your pillow.

Holy Shit.

I get nature. It’s splendid, and I readily concede that a picture of the Grand Canyon cannot begin to substitute for being there, toeing the precipice, wind in face, sun on back, etc. But there is a sense of grandeur involved in such things, and I have a hard time imagining that a red leaf is that much better than a picture of a red leaf, so much so that it would be worth a 3-day weekend that could be spent watching baseball or… you know… doing nearly anything else.

-- Jason O’Bryan

One of the traditions at The New Yorker that has continued unabated by tables of contents, photographs, bylined Talks of the Town, and other heady incursions of late-20th-century magazining is the "newsbreak" -- the wry, lightly condescending filler blurbs at the tail end of select New Yorker stories in which the magazine's copy-editing staff, having plowed through its 3,000-word feature for the afternoon and availed of no better way to entertain itself, takes to excerpting the copy-editing malapropisms of lesser publications. E.B. White once said, "I still regard newsbreaks as the thing I came to earth for." White even edited a book-length collection of newsbreaks; in later years, the tradition spawned an entire genre of shitty late-night comedy bits (see "Jaywalking").

The newsbreak is such a New Yorker hallmark that, when we came across page 63 of frequent New Yorker contributor Jeffrey Toobin's Supreme Court tome The Nine, we wondered whether Toobin hadn't edited in a newsbreak just to get another mention of the book wedged into his magazine's hallowed pages. If so, it would be the meta-est newsbreak of all time: a New Yorker writer caught in a malaprop involving The New Yorker. (Remember, all, that italics are reserved for publication names, albums, and the titles of creative works.) In the style, then, of a New Yorker newsbreak, we give you the Newsbreak of the Century:

HOOPLA DEPT.

"[In picking a list of potential Supreme Court nominees] the names of several nonjudges came up, but it quickly became clear that [Bill] Clinton was most interested in one of them -- Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York.

Clinton and Cuomo had a complicated relationship. Clinton admired The New Yorker's way with words but found his indecisiveness maddening."

We never liked him either, Bill.

For all you bookworms, Toobin discusses The Nine on Wednesday evening at the Brattle Theater, in conversation with local lega-eagle Alan Dershowitz. Tickets available through Harvard Book Store.