When Dan Falvey, teaching assistant and journeyman Halifax bar server, died far too young last June, an exceptional outpouring of grief and affection marked the event. I never saw Dan in a school setting, but he served me many times. He was simply superb at a job that is too often under-appreciated for both difficulty and impact. Writing in the Coast, Tim Bousquet described him as "hands-down the most energetic server imaginable." Dan carried out all the basics with exemplary grace, and he was also wickedly funny. You looked forward to his visits to your table, because his dry, dead-pan humor, coupled with...

14 April, 2013

Contrarian's friend Gus writes: In my younger days I used to live in Concord, where the Contrarian spirit runs deep (and perhaps was born). Bronson Alcott, who would not wear wool because it was stolen from sheep, would have recruited Louisa May to the cause. I remain interested in the bruising local politics of these places - it would have been fun to listen to the arguments about P.E.T. bottles at town meeting. Since half the town are M.I.T professors, the lines would have been sharply drawn. The other half, Harvard professors, would have spoken at length and contributed nothing to...

04 January, 2013

Harvard's prestigious Nieman Foundation for Journalism has cast its discerning eye on a Nova Scotia online journal that succeeds while disdaining all the internet rules: How a tightly paywalled, social-media-ignoring, anti-copy-paste, gossipy news site became a dominant force in Nova Scotia Every morning, the business and political elite in the biggest province on Canada’s East Coast turns to an unlikely source of information about their own world. Among all the online news organizations trying to find a way to profitability, consider AllNovaScotia.com, which has just celebrated 10 years online and now challenges its historic print rival for the attention of the province’s leaders. It’s done that by not...

24 January, 2012

Yale University has banned all sexual relationships between faculty and students. According to the Yale Alumni Magazine, the new rule extends a previous ban that applied only when the faculty member had "direct pedagogical or supervisory responsibilities" over the student. Now all undergrads are off limits. Yale is a bit slow clambering aboard the sex panic bandwagon. When Dean Henry Rosovsky sought to impose a similar rule at Harvard in 1983, Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith reacted with a confession: [caption id="attachment_4928" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Kitty and Ken Galbraith, wayward couple"][/caption] Just over forty-five years ago, already a well-fledged member of the...

08 April, 2010