Obviously the mayor needs to take the needs of the suburbanites who use the city into account, but their top priority should be the residents of the city who voted for them, and when the interests of residents and non-residents are different, the mayor should side with residents.

Sadly, this hasn’t really ever been the case since I’ve lived in Boston. St. Thomas of Menino was primarily interested in serving real estate developers, which is why the soulless, sterile Seaport is Menino’s baby and also probably why he illegally shredded a bunch of his official records before he left office.

Marty Walsh was an easy mark for seemingly every con artist who wanted our money and spent his administration trying to give it away to GE, to the IOC, and to some shady dude who was supposedly organizing an Indy Car race in Boston. Thwarted in all these efforts, he then disengaged and started looking for other jobs.

Kim Janey…well who knows? Despite having 60 days notice that she was going to step in to the Mayor’s job when Walsh left to become Secretary of Labor, she was unable to put forward any plans or priorities and seemed utterly unprepared for the job and lost the election after only two months in office.

And then there’s Michelle Wu, who I really believed was going to focus on making Boston more livable, and who did some of that in her first term but now seems determined to do nothing at all until 2030 when she can run for Senator or Governor, and the suburbanites who vote in those elections won’t resent her for making their drive in from Canton a little less speedy.

I think running on a record of not doing much is not a great electoral strategy, but what do I know? I didn’t go to Harvard.

She’s given up on road safety for anyone but people in cars. We’re past day 500 of her 30-day pause in the safe streets program. The new Chief of Streets expects us to be happy about 5 miles of bike lanes being added in 2026. For comparison, that’s about the length of Dorchester Avenue. One street in a city of 10,000 streets. So calling 5 miles of bike lanes a drop in the bucket is really an insult to actual drops in buckets. Note that safe streets means safety for people on foot as well. Most people spend part of their commute walking to and from the T or to and from their parking places, but we still act like people walking are some weird niche market and that it’s okay to murder them with your car. Good luck out there, people!

But all of that is just for context. Let’s talk about another way in which the city is failing its residents: Franklin Park. Franklin Park is the largest park in Boston, the Olmsted-designed “jewel of the Emerald Necklace.” (Yes, emeralds are jewels, so the nickname is redundant. I dunno what to tell you. Just consider it charming and let it go.) It borders Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain. It’s not a tourist destination; it’s merely a beautiful, underutilized, neglected 527-acre park that is beloved by the communities that surround it.

And there are two big things going on in the park at the moment. The first and biggest is the reconstruction of White Stadium with a view to having Boston Legacy, our new NWSL team, play there. The second is the muli-year Franklin Park Action Plan.

Let’s begin with the stadium, a project I supported because the stadium has been a dump for 30 years and nobody ever did anything about it. My son played high school soccer there and it was gross and uncomfortable for fans and actively unsafe for players. Oh yeah, and half of the stadium couldn’t be used because it was structurally unsound after a fire.

I know some of the folks involved in anti-stadium-reconstruction activism. They have a deep suspicion of public-private partnerships, which is entirely fair, and also a desire to keep Franklin Park their little secret that is not widely used, which is entirely unfair. (There was also some racist grumbling at the beginning about the process—Michelle Wu rammed the project through and had some folks complaining she was running the city “like China.” And may I once again plead with bigots to do some research on the political implications of being from Taiwan, as Michelle Wu’s family is, versus being from mainland China. Thanks. But also stop being racist.)

I think anything that brings more people to the park is a good thing, and I supported the project with some reservations. Mostly that we already had an NWSL team in Boston called the Breakers. They played in Harvard Stadium, which was hard to access by public transportation and had inadequate parking, and they eventually went under. Though the new White Stadium will be nice, it is also hard to access by public transportation and has inadequate parking.

Still, I figured this would get the city to pay attention to the park and would ultimately be good for us in the neighborhoods surrounding the park. But as demolition and construction have gone on, I’ve noticed that none of the traffic stuff promised for the construction process (all still visible here) has actually happened:

Walnut Avenue: Closed to construction vehicles and reserved for local residents. Construction traffic will use designated access points to minimize congestion.

Neighborhood Traffic Calming Adjustments:

• Temporary shift of the center line between #435 Walnut Ave & Iffley Rd to create temporary, wider travel lanes for heavy duty trucks.
• Temporary one-way conversion of Peter Parley Road from Forest Hills St. to Walnut Ave.
• Local access only to Glen Rd and Sigourney St, Robeson St, Peter Parley Rd and Iffley Rd. Additional signage will be deployed to keep through traffic on Forest Hills Street and Washington Street.

No community meetings, no updates. They just never did it. Maybe there were good reasons for this. Maybe not. But I now have a lot more sympathy with my neighbors who opposed the project because they didn’t believe the city was capable of being honest about its intentions.

Which brings us to the Franklin Park Action Plan. This came about because a developer wanted to use the location of a dilapidated parking garage in Downtown Boston to build a luxury residential tower for the super wealthy to use as a tax dodge/money laundering scheme. I guess maybe some rich people actually live there as well, but that’s not what this kind of building is really for. The problem was that the new tower would cast a shadow on Boston Common, which is against the law in Boston, so Walsh negotiated a deal: we’ll let you throw literal shade on our public space if you give us 25 million dollars to use on a different public space.

So landscape architecture firms were hired, and the city paid them handsomely: Reed Hilderbrand got $925k of public money; Agency Landscape + Planning got $500k, and I can’t find out how much MASS Design Group got paid, but I think it’s safe to say the total cost of producing the plan was around 2 million bucks. I guess this includes the community meetings I endured, with lots of powerpoint slides and “taking our feedback into account.”

Okay, so the plan dropped in 2022, and all the work is supposed to be done by 2030.

Everything that follows I put at the doorstep of the Wu administration. Not only is the work not going to be completed by 2030; it seems like most of it is never getting done at all.

Halfway to 2030 from the release of the plan, let’s look at what’s been done! (All these are copied from the pdf of the Franklin Park Action Plan—my notes in bold)

Park-Wide Improvements

Lighting —no progress

Signage-no progress

Entrances-no progress

Stormwater Management—no progress

Heritage Tree Care—some progress: I have seen arborists at work in both The Wilderness and the Long Crouch Woods.

The Playstead

1. Restore the Bear Dens for multi-purpose use.—some progress has been made. The bear dens were closed off in May 2025, and a sign was posted saying the work should be completed by July 2025. It’s August 2026, and the work has not been completed. So we’re now 15 months into what was supposed to be a 2 month job.

2. Long Crouch Woods

• Perform invasive removals & add new planting, improved trails, & new nature play areas.—They’ve definitely been working on this. They made a cool labyrinth out of invasive plants that they removed. Trails are not improved.

3. White Stadium

• Make improvements for shared community & Boston Public Schools use, including new parking—in progress. Old stadium has been demolished, new stadium is under construction. Of course this is now its own project, separate from the Franklin Park Action Plan, and it’s got private money behind it, which may account for the speed of the project.

4. Restore The Overlook ruins and return The Elma Lewis Playhouse to its historic location with a new stage, restrooms, and seating—No progress.

5. The Playstead

• Upgrade the fields (including drainage/stormwater improvements), create the tailgate edge & improve parking, and establish a new Playstead Loop path for bikes and pedestrians (including seating, lighting, and planting).—No progress.

Peabody Circle & Refectory Hill

1. Establish a new ‘front porch’ pedestrian entrance and terrace along Blue Hill Avenue—no progress

2. Reinstate the historic pedestrian circulation and expand tree planting to create a new Peabody Circle Plaza for events & programming—no progress

3. Stepped Seating Grove—Create terraced outdoor seating with new canopy trees for outdoor education and programming—no progress

4. Integrate a new parking lot on Refectory Hill-no progress

American Legion

Abbottswood

• Perform invasive removals & add new planting;

introduce new trails.—IDK, haven’t been over there.

Integrate a new outdoor classroom adjacent to the

wet meadow—no progress

American Legion Playground

• Make playground improvements, including a new splashpad—no progress

Ellicottdale & Schoolmaster Hill

Restore the upper lawn with shaded picnic and BBQ areas, expand the tennis courts, and provide restrooms—no progress

Restore the lower lawn for flexible use, and provide a boardwalk and trails within the wet woodland—no progress

Ellicott Arch

• Restore the arch, and add lighting & new planting—no progressSchoolmaster Hill

• Restore the Schoolmaster Hill ruins & pergola, and introduce a flowering tree walk along the path leading from Ellicottdale—no progress

The Wilderness

The Wilderness Ecological Restoration

Perform invasive removals, add new planting, and make trail and wayfinding improvements—There are parks employees in overalls doing something in here. Haven’t seen much in the way of results other than some knotweed removal, but let’s say it’s in progress.

Circuit Drive & The Valley Gates

1. Circuit Loop

• Reconfigure vehicular circulation to provide a safe

multi-model circuit throughout the park—no progress

2. The Circuit Drive Parking Lot

• Improve and expand the parking lot with canopy

trees and stormwater management—no progress

3. The Valley Gates

• Clarify circulation & restore the Valley Gate

headhouses—no progress

I can’t find it in the action plan, but I have noticed that the Shattuck tennis courts are being redone. So there’s something happening there.

But most of the stuff in the plan is obviously never happening. Not only because so few of these projects have been started, but also because it’s been clear for years that the City doesn’t care about these projects. You know how I know? In addition to all the stuff named above, part of the plan was repaving the path that goes from the Glen Road entrance to the Overlook—a length of maybe 1000 feet. This took over a year. They paved it, then found out they’d done it wrong, then undid it, then re-did it—there may have been a few more iterations, but the bottom line is that what should have been the work of a week at most took over a year.

There was someone from the Parks department nominally overseeing the project. I think she came out to the site twice.

And then there’s the bear dens, above. What was listed as a two-month job has taken 14 months so far. For context, the old stadium was still standing when this modest project began. It seems likely the new one will be complete before this project finishes.

I gave input, I watched the slides, and I really believed that the city was at last going to pay some long overdue attention to this amazing park.

And it was all bullshit. And apparently a lot of people knew it was bullshit. Here’s the Franklin Park Coalition’s memo that came out at the time in which they ask for 2 Park Rangers to be included in the budget, though it would be much better to set that money on fire because at least then it could briefly provide some warmth and therefore be more useful than park rangers. They estimate that the cost of the stuff included in the action plan is 100 million dollars and ask for the city to earmark 20 million dollars per year to make sure the plan is going to happen.

I did not hear anything from the Franklin Park Coalition about how this plan was pie in the sky bullshit at the time. I haven’t seen any of the local media following up on the progress of the Franklin Park Action Plan. And the city seems to just be hoping the whole thing blows over, which seems like a pretty safe bet at this point.

Boston has a lot of problems, and I’m not suggesting that this is the most important one. It’s just a perfect example of how, yet again, we don’t have a city government that cares about improving the lives of Bostonians.

Here’s my frustration: it seems like every day I read the news and see that Mayor Mamdani in New York is working, in small and big ways, to improve the lives of people who live in his city. When I was knocking doors for Michelle Wu’s campaign, I thought she’d do the same for Boston.

But, as the absolutely pathetic progress on the Franklin Park Action Plan shows, our mayor has other priorities. Franklin Park abuts Dorchester and Roxbury, real neighborhoods where hundreds of thousands of Bostonians live, but what’s that against the opinion of the people who really matter? You know, the ones with money.

But, like seemingly everything, Sirius XM Radio has been getting worse and worse. There’s a channel called Soul Town which plays soul hits of the 60’s. It became Smokey’s Soul Town and remained Smokey’s Soul Town even after four former employees sued him for sexual harassment and sexual assault. The allegations haven’t been proven and likely can’t be, but whether you choose to have someone represent your brand is not a legal proceeding and doesn’t require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Apparently for Sirius XM management, being associated with someone accused of sexual assault is not a dealbreaker. Which is their choice, of course, but my subscription is also a choice.

On a less serious note, Marky Ramone’s Punk Rock Blitzkrieg, a channel that played classic punk interspersed with Marky’s thoughts and/or reminiscences about the bands, was replaced by Classic Punk, a DJ-less channel with occasional station IDs voiced by what sounds like a 22-year-old from a 90’s Mountain Dew commercial. I really keep expecting him to say it’s “totally extreme.” Again, it’s a choice.

But today really sent me over the edge. My favorite channel has always been Little Steven’s Underground Garage, the channel through which I discovered a lot of cool music in the early 2000s. They have mostly stopped playing new music,(more on this in a bit), but they still play a great mix of rock and soul songs and have a number of charismatic DJs who often drop cool knowledge about the songs and artists they play. I miss the new music, but I can live with this situation.

But then I started noticing that the few new songs they add to the rotation almost always involve Little Steven getting paid. So either they’re artists who record for his label, Wicked Cool Records (so he gets paid on both ends of the deal as both the guy who runs the channel and the guy who gets royalty payments for the label), or they’re artists who work behind the scenes at the Underground Garage, or they’re artists who are going to appear on the annual Underground Garage cruise. In short, the new music that this channel plays almost always involves Little Steven getting paid. On the public airwaves, this would be illegal as hell, but because it’s not on the public airwaves, they can be as openly corrupt as the Trump administration.

But even that wasn’t what finally made me pull the trigger on canceling. What made me pull the trigger was when Little Steven just announced this week’s Coolest Song in the World (a weekly designation granted to songs both old and new) is a song by New York band The Cyns— a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Neighborhood Bully.” For those unfamiliar, “Neighborhood Bully” is from Dylan’s 1983 Infidels album and is a song that asserts that Israel is always in the right when committing acts of violence and shouldn’t adhere to the rules other countries abide by. (You can check the lyrics if you don’t believe me.)

There is no way to interpret covering this song in 2026 except as a full-throated endorsement of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Now, Jem Records is free to include this song on their upcoming Dylan tribute album (because the world simply doesn’t have enough Dylan covers), and the Cynz are free to record it, and Little Steven is free to play it, but I am not coming along for the genocide cheerleading ride.

Fuck the Cynz, fuck Jem Records, fuck Little Steven and fuck Sirius XM.

But there are some albums I like to listen to in their complete form. So I thought I’d share them with you not to show how cool I am (I mean, sure, that too) , but also because I’m always interested in music recommendations from real people, so maybe you will be too.

Caveat: I’m not representing this as the “best albums of all time” or anything like that because that’s entirely subjective, and also my affection for some of these albums is definitely colored by the associations I have with them. So your mileage may vary, but I’m confident there are no clunkers here.

I’m presenting them in chronological order by release date, and I’m stopping in 2012, mostly because I’m lazy and also I’m not sure which albums from the last 15 years I’ll still be listening to in 15 years.

1965- The Beatles, Rubber Soul

1966- The Beatles, Revolver

1967- The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico

1969-Creedence Clearwater Revival, Willy and the Poor Boys

1970- MC5, Back in the USA

1972- Donny Hathaway, Donny Hathaway Live

1975- Parliament, One Nation Under a Groove

1977- Ramones, Rocket to Russia

1978- Ramones, Road to Ruin

1978- Funkadelic, One Nation Under a Groove

1978- The Dictators, Bloodbrothers

1979- Graham Parker and the Rumour, Squeezing Out Sparks

1979- The Clash, The Clash (US Version. Yeah, I said it)

1979- Roky Erickson and the Aliens, The Evil One

1980- The Clash, London Calling

1980- Prince, Dirty Mind

1980- The Damned, The Black Album

1982- Utopia, Utopia

1982- X, Under the Big Black Sun

1984- Hüsker Dü, Zen Arcade

1984- Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime

1984- Ramones, Too Tough To Die

1984- The Go-Gos Talk Show

1985- The Velvet Underground, VU

1986- The Edge, From the Middle of Nowhere (Original Title: Johnny Cuba & The Edge)

1986- Human Zoo, Human Zoo

1986- Midnight Oil, Diesel and Dust

1986- Paul Simon, Graceland

1987- Prince, Sign O’ The Times

1987- John Mellencamp, The Lonesome Jubilee

1988- Billy Bragg, Workers Playtime

1994- Johny Cash, American Recordings

1995- Prince, The Gold Experience

1996- Belle and Sebastian, Tigermilk

1996- Belle and Sebastian If You’re Feeling Sinister

1997- Afro-Cuban All Stars, A Todo Cuba La Gusta

1998- Belle and Sebastian, The Boy With the Arab Strap

2002- Caesars, Love For the Streets

2002- Zombina and the Skeletones, Taste the Blood Of

2002- The Donnas, Spend the Night

2003- John Mellencamp, Trouble No More

2004- Hawaii Mud Bombers, Mondo Primo

2004- Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose

2004- Sahara Hotnights, Kiss & Tell

2007- Shonen Knife, Fun! Fun! Fun!

2008- Nada Surf, Lucky

2010- Harley Poe, Wretched, Filthy, Ugly.

2012- The Hives, Lex Hives

In my understanding, a one-hit wonder is not simply an artist who had one hit, but, rather, an artist who had one hit and then disappeared. I have, for example, seen people refer to Los Lobos as a one-hit wonder because they had one monster pop hit with their cover of “La Bamba” and never hit the charts again. But this is a band that’s been at it for 45 years and has released 14 studio albums since they topped the charts back in ‘86.

I posit that a one-hit wonder is an artist who had one hit and then disappeared, or released a follow up that sank like a stone and then disappeared.

But somebody like OMC, who had one hit in ‘95 with “How Bizarre,” and then disappeared, counts as a one-hit wonder.

We run into an interesting dilemma here based on nationality. So someone like Gotye, for example, certainly seems to be a one-hit wonder in the USA, but I guess had earlier hits in Australia? Or Right Said Fred, who were too sexy for their shirts and then disappeared from the USA, but continue to perform in their UK. Still, I’d classify both as one-hit wonders in the US.

Paul Hardcastle, of “19” fame. ? and the Mysterians of “96 Tears” fame. Young MC of “Bust a Move” fame. These, my friends, are one-hit wonders.

Am I wrong here? Is the definition of a one-hit wonder simply any artist who ever had only one chart hit? I’d ask you to weigh in in the comments, but I don’t have comments. Click on the “contact me” link above and let me know!

I think that after last summer’s bright and cheery Superman, folks were expecting more of the same. But that’s not what the filmmakers were aiming at. The idea here, which I think is cool and actually justifies having 2 identically-powered heroes, is that Clark is open hearted and optimistic because he was raised from infancy by loving parents, whereas Kara grew to adolescence with loving parents and had to essentially watch them die. So she’s angry. And she drinks too much—this is a gag in Superman, where she stumbles in at the end, a party girl who goes off-planet to get wasted, but in this movie its clear that she’s burying her grief under alcohol.

So, yeah, this is a darker movie than Superman, but not the grimdark of some earlier DC movies. It’s also a science fiction movie that takes place entirely on other planets and in space, so that’s a very different vibe from the Metropolis of Superman.

I have rarely seen a movie that tells the truth that grief makes you angry. You see it in revenge movies, but what’s touching about Kara’s story is that there’s no revenge to be had. Her parents weren’t killed by some evildoer—she’s angry, but she’s got nowhere to put this anger, so she channels it into self destruction, which is tough when you’re invulnerable, at least under the light of a yellow sun.

Also? Yes, the costume is kind of dumb with the high boots and the short skirt but at no point in this movie does the camera ogle Milly Alcock the way, for example, the camera ogled Scarlett Johansen in the Avengers movies, especially the first one where her character is introduced with some soft bondage porn.

I suspect this may be driving some of the negative responses to the movie—some people—fine, fine, men—think women probably shouldn’t be superheroes, but if they are, they need to be filmed as objects of desire rather than people.

Eve Ridley also gives a brilliant performance, and Jason Momoa is delightful, although it was never fully clear to me exactly why Lobo was in this movie at all.

I did not like the fact that Krypto being in mortal peril is the plot driver because a)Krypto was so fun in Superman and I was looking forward to more of him and b) DON’T HURT THE DOG, DAMMIT!

So, yeah. It’s probably gone from theaters by now, but when it pops up on HBO Max or whatever, I recommend giving it a watch, unless you’ve got dead parent or injured pet trauma, in which case it might be a tough watch. (Mileage may vary of course—I have dead parent

Taylor was walked down the aisle by her lawyer, her accountant, and her business manager for the ceremonial signing of the pre-nup. (We all got copies—Travis gets nothing.) Then a disembodied voice came over the PA and told us to proceed to the rear of the chapel.

We did, and young acolytes handed us red-trimmed black, hooded robes. And none of this costume store satin shit, either: pure imported silk, baby! Mine had an Apple Watch in one pocket and an entire Biologique Recherche skin care kit in the other. “It’s dry-clean only,” the acolyte whispered as I took and then donned the robe.

We were led into a dark chamber bedecked with graven images so horrifying to the mind—yea, to the soul!—that I refuse to burden my readers with a description of them. Adam Sandler sang the ceremony in an alien and disturbing tongue, though this was not helped by him doing it as Operaman.

Selena Gomez pricked her finger with a ceremonial dagger and drew sigils on the altar with her blood. Taylor and Travis then mounted the altar for their ceremonial first coupling, with Boomer Esiason doing play by play and Terry Bradshaw doing color commentary. (I wasn’t sure all the stats were necessary, but to each their own, I suppose.)

Then Noah Kahan came out and sang a melancholy song about the difficulty of being a white man in Vermont. “Let us remember, friends, that marriage, like life, is not only sweet…but also bitter.” Catering staff appeared with shot glasses for all, and we all downed a glass of an unbearably bitter, unholy beverage whose very existence shattered my illusion of living in a world presided over by a loving God. I believe it was called Malört.

The rest of the evening was a blur. At one point a man whose very countenance seemed to bespeak aquatic ancestry—was he a man turning into a fish, or a fish turning into a man? And which possibility is more horrifying?—approached me and whispered in my ear, “Cthulhu F’tagn! Iä! Iä!”

I looked at him, trying to refocus my eyes that had glazed over due to the horrors I had already witnessed. “Don Knotts?” I said. “They brought you back from the dead for this?”

He got right up in my face and whispered, “Anything you desire can be had…FOR A PRICE!” My last memory was of his maniacal laughter.

I awakened this morning in a dumpster in Ho-Ho-Kus New Jersey with no memory of how I’d gotten there.

Overall, I give it two thumbs up!

The city of Boston has 18 cooling centers open. Good for them. The city also has a partnership with five museums, so the Museum of Science, the ICA, the JFK Library and the Edward Kennedy Museum of Sexual Harassment—sorry, Edward Kennedy Institute for the US Senate (tomato tomahto) are all open for free so people can get cool.

All of this is good. But today is a holiday, so public libraries are closed. Which means vital, possibly lifesaving cooling is unavailable to a lot of people. Check out the City’s own map and look at the huge chunk of densely-populated Dorchester that doesn’t have an indoor cooling center open (City cooling centers are represented by snowflakes):

Also note that there are five libraries in the map area (they’re represented by the little “book with a roof over it” icon) with no other free indoor cooling facilities. The spray icons are for spray decks and splash pools, which are good, but maybe not great for an 80 year old or someone in an electric wheelchair.

The city could have opened libraries today. This would have involved paying overtime to a lot of library employees. So the city chose not to do it. Presumably there’s no room in the budget for it.

But remember, budgets don’t just grow organically—they are the result of choices made by the people who make the budgets.

I live near the construction of the new White Stadium, which desperately needed renovation, but make no mistake: the City of Boston is building a stadium instead of helping residents stay cool today.

At this construction site, there are usually two or three Boston Police officers making at least 75 dollars an hour to do nothing. They literally stand there for eight hours doing nothing. Actually sometimes they sit in their cars doing nothing. This is the Boston Police overtime budget at “work.” You’ll see similar scenes all over the city wherever construction or utility work is going on. The police overtime budget was level funded even as the school budget was cut this year because the people who make decisions in our city think that it’s more important to have cops standing idle outside of construction sites than teachers in classrooms. And that it’s more important to have cops standing idle than to open libraries during a heat wave.

But maybe churches are open today. Certainly the mayor could be calling on the city’s faith community to help serve the community at large. After all, they leech off city services without contributing anything to the city’s tax base. The least they could do is throw open their doors to help their neighbors stay cool. Maybe some are doing that—I checked the websites of some prominent churches and found nothing.

This isn’t our first potentially deadly heat wave and it won’t be our last. Hell, it probably won’t be the last one this summer. Our local and state governments have a responsibility to their citizens, and they are failing to meet it. They’re failing to recognize the seriousness of the climate emergency (Yes, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts still operates Hanscom Field, an airport for private jets, lest John Fish have to fly commercial) and they’re failing to prioritize the needs of broke, hot citizens over the needs of Weymouth-dwelling cops with boat payments.

Boston and Massachusetts are villainized nationally by fascists, who talk about our extreme left-wing government. I wish it were true, but I’d settle for even slightly left-wing at this point.

So I’ve seen Ayo Edebiri perform live on stage many times, though, before Sunday, it was only in high school improv shows. I joked before we went to see Proof that the fact that we’d seen her in so many high school improv shows surely meant that Ayo should comp us some tickets to her broadway debut.

(I should point out that she and my daughter were friendly but not close, and I think Ms. Edebiri could probably pick my daughter out in a crowd but certainly not me or my wife.)

Anyway, so we were excited to see Proof, and I knew very little about it except that Ayo (because we’re all on a parasocial first name basis with her in our house) and Don Cheadle were in it.

There are summaries in other places, but this is a play about family and mental illness and what we owe each other. It’s got a lot of funny moments but is ultimately serious, and folks, Ayo Edibiri’s performance is absolutely stunning.

Because there are a few flashback scenes, we see what the character of Catherine was like before spending four years tending to a father with serious mental illness. And so the actor playing Catherine has to whip back and forth between hopeful and enthusiastic and beaten down and nearly broken, and Ayo pulled this off brilliantly. It really was a breathtaking performance. Awards of course don’t mean anything, and the only other show I’ve seen in New York in the last year was Bigfoot the Musical (which was utterly delightful but of course very different) but I am incredulous that she hasn’t been recognized for this performance.

Except of course by the audience, which absolutely roared at her curtain call. All the actors (Cheadle, Jin Ha, and Kara Young) gave good performances, but the play asks much more of the actor playing Catherine, and Ayo absolutely killed it.

(I’m trying to work on not being mean, but I did go to YouTube to look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance in the movie. And it’s…a lot of yelling. Without being too mean to Her Goopness, let me just say it’s a performance that’s not even in the same league as the one I saw on Sunday. And she presumably had multiple takes!)

The only quibble I had was with the play itself because “character seeing and talking to a dead loved one” was a hoary cliché when the play premiered in 2000, and it’s fundamentally a lie about grief because the hard thing about grief is the dead person’s sudden and complete absence from your life.

But that’s not the fault of this production, which is fantastic.

The family at the center of the story is played by Black actors, and this didn’t really have an impact on my interpretation of the story, but you know what it did affect? The composition of the audience. I don’t go to a ton of Broadway shows, but I know that the conventional “wisdom” is that people of color don’t really go to high-profile Broadway plays like this. Well, they certainly do if you cast fantastic actors of color in lead roles! I’m just sayin’!

Which got me on a panel on a local TV show with a former secretary of transportation and a guy from The Pioneer Institute, a pernicious bunch of losers who don’t believe in the public good. They were the pro- and anti- public transportation guys, and I was the regular Joe T rider. Before the show, these two guys talked cordially about things happening in their social circle. I could not be civil to the Pioneer Institute guy because he had the ear of our then-governor and his influence was making my already stressful work life even worse. But the former secretary of transportation had no such difficulty.

I wrote something snarky about this at the time that conveyed my anger but also made me look like an asshole. (Sadly, I have a real talent for this kind of writing.) But what I was trying to say was that the whole debate was a game to these guys. It didn’t affect them like it affected me. And if it did, they’d probably have a harder time making banal small talk with each other.

Which brings me to Peter Thiel. You know, the Bond villain who runs the surveillance company and owns J.D. Vance? The guy who’s obsessed with the apocalypse and the antichrist? Who moved his family to Argentina because he’s afraid of the plebes rising up in the US? Well, turns out Mr. Tech genius was holding some kind of conference for powerful people, and the agenda and attendees were visible in plain text by looking at the code for the website. Oops!. As The Nation puts it: Session titles include “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and, somewhat randomly, “How’s Your Sex Life?” “Other talks include ‘Build-a-Cult,’ moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com,” write Wired correspondents Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova, “and ‘Build-a-Party,’ run by a former White House national security official.”

Yikes. So there are a lot of unsurprising names going to this thing: Ted Cruz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, and Grover Norquist.

But also? Democrats Preet Bahara, Cory Booker, Robert Rubin, Jim O’Neill, Lisa Monaco, Margaret Hamburg, Atul Gawande, Wes Moore, and centrist podcaster and self-styled expert on what Democrats need to do to win Ezra Klein. (Also, weirdly: Joseph Gordon Leavitt?)

And a bunch of other corporate shitbirds as well as Epstein pal Steven Pinker.

About a year ago I wrote a thing about the ignorant, classist take that was going around that pro wrestling somehow explained the Trump presidency. It’s a good piece—you should read it.

Reading about Thiel’s little party, I started thinking about kayfabe again (for the uninitiated, that’s the wrestling-specific term for the show of wrestling—the characters, the feuds, the stories that make the matches more exciting. Actually it covers the matches too. It’s basically everything about wrestling that’s a performance. So, like, the whole thing.). And I realized that though I’d framed my snarky piece about the MBTA TV panel as being about civility, it was really about kayfabe—putting on a show for the marks.

Looking at Thiel’s list of attendees, I think I can be forgiven for concluding that much of American politics is kayfabe. Corey Booker is great at thundering on the mic in committee meetings for YouTube clips that the perpetually unkempt Meidas Touch guy will report breathlessly. But apparently Booker is just cutting promos like Macho Man Randy Savage. (Actually, he just wishes his mic game was as strong as Macho Man’s. But I digress.)

Ezra Klein will probably come out with some think piece about how Democrats need to embrace bigotry and Peter Thiel’s crazy eschatology in order to win in November, which is horrible, but even his assertion that he cares about Democrats winning is kayfabe. He’s fine either way!

With this many establishment Democrats going to bend the knee to an unhinged, power-mad personification of evil, I don’t see how the Democratic establishment can be mad at voters for thinking the game is rigged. To put it another way: if ostensible opponents Cruz and Booker are both working for Thiel (and, more broadly, the Epstein class), who’s working for us?

The thrust of those pieces about how wrestling explains Trump was “ha ha, the rubes love a good show, that’s why they fell for Trump.”

Except here’s an important thing to understand about wrestling: everyone is in on the joke. Wrestlers, broadcasters, refs, fans—we all understand perfectly well what’s going on. So perhaps people are more sophisticated at spotting bullshit when they see it than folks inside the beltway think, which could explain why even voters who hate the Republican party are not excited about the Democratic party.

We know what it’s like when people who are genial co-workers pretend to have vicious feuds and insult each other ruthlessly. We understand that Peter Thiel and his ilk are setting the agenda no matter which party controls government. Yes, there will be some non-trivial differences in how the parties govern. But the bottom line is that the interests of the Thiel/Epstein class are always going to take precedence over ours.

When all these people are hanging out together, when all our politicians are bending the knee to the same big money people, American politics is strictly kayfabe. And the sad thing is, it’s not even a good show.

“You just don’t understand. It’s complicated,” say people, like, for example, Massachusetts legislators, who know damn well it’s not complicated—they just don’t actually want to do anything.

Let’s take Boston traffic, for example. Right now Boston simply doesn’t work for cars. I’ve recently spent time in Cincinnati and Philadelphia—in both cities you can get around in a car relatively easily. As everyone knows, that’s simply not the case in Boston.

There is only one solution to Boston’s traffic problem: we have to have fewer cars on the road. Duh. Fucking duh.

But because a lot of people inexplicably love to drive, they freak out every time anyone proposes anything to try to get fewer cars on the road.

Sorry if you don’t like it, but there is literally only one solution. You can’t cure traffic congestion by widening roads or building new ones. The only solution is to have fewer cars on the road.

Okay, so how do we get there?

1. Let people know about the T’s improvements. I get it—when Orange Line trains are catching on fire, it’s newsworthy. When they zip downtown with no slow zones and come at regular intervals, as they’re now doing for the first time in 10+ years, it’s not headline news. But (and credit to the otherwise lackluster Healey administration for getting this done) the T works really well now, and we have an entire generation of Bostonians who have never known fully functional MBTA service. Let ‘em know that we have it! I don’t know how much of Boston traffic is people taking Ubers and Lyfts because they don’t think the T is a reliable way to get anywhere. Even getting those cars off the road will help.

2. Free public transportation. Free, I say! Just like driving on the roads! Yes, even the commuter rail! Seriously, this is such a freaking no-brainer. All you have to do is look at the evaluations the city has done on the free 23, 28, and 29 buses. Eliminating fares increases ridership. Increased ridership means fewer cars on the road. For buses, it also means faster transit times because they can open all doors and people can board without the slowdown of paying. And faster transit times make buses more efficient. Which helps not only with traffic, but also with the fact that we’re in a freaking climate emergency.

3. Bus rapid transit wherever possible. For a couple of years I took the 22 bus down Columbus ave from Walnut Street to Prentiss street. The center lane busway from Walnut to Centre made this a viable alternative to taking the train. Even though MBTA train service has improved a lot, there are still large swaths of Boston that are pretty underserved by rail. People who live there deserve decent public transportation too, and center-lane busways are a way to achieve this, especially on big, wide roads like Blue Hill Ave, Columbia Road, Washington Street, and Centre Street. It’s maddening to me that Miniard Culpepper and other Boston City Councilors are advocating against this, like their own constituents don’t deserve decent public transportation.

4. Separate bike infrastructure. Everybody hates bike lanes. Drivers hate them, and bikers aren’t too crazy about them either, unless they’re significantly separated from traffic. Painting a bike lane on the pavement is a nice reminder to drivers that bikes exist, but these bike lanes still make people feel vulnerable as bigger, heavier cars go past them with no physical barrier, and they’re frequently blocked by delivery vehicles, cop cars, rideshare vehicles, and people double parking “just for a minute.” But let me tell you as someone who bikes on the Southwest Corridor (a paved path completely separated from traffic), it gets used year round. People (not everyone, but a lot of people) like to bike. If you build the infrastructure, they’ll use it.

Now let’s address some common objections:

1. But what about people with disabilities and mobility challenges! Not everyone can bike or even walk to the bus stop! True! And such people deserve to be able to get around the city in a car. See above—everybody knows Boston currently doesn’t work for cars, and the only solution is fewer cars. But that doesn’t have to mean no cars. The idea is to get people who can bike and use public transportation to favor those options over driving, not to get every single human out of a car.

2. Think of the emergency vehicles! I am! They currently have a hard time getting through traffic because Boston doesn’t work for car traffic. And the only way to improve this situation is to have fewer cars on the road. Road diets, center lane busways, bike paths and free transit will only help emergency vehicles because they’ll have fewer cars to get around.

3. Great pie in the sky utopian vision, but how are you gonna pay for it? Just imagine it’s a war, or paying GE to not move their headquarters to Boston. We can find the money. We can always find the money if the will is there. But more specifically, I have two common-sense, transportation-related proposals.

The first is congestion pricing, which has done wonders in New York City. There’s no reason to believe it couldn’t do the same here. Or, failing that, tolls on 93. People who drive into the city on the Pike or Route 1 have long complained that it’s not fair that they have to pay tolls and nobody else does. I completely agree! Tolls for all!

Also, it’s time to close Hanscom field. It’s actually embarrassing that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts operates a whole-ass facility at taxpayer expense so John Fish doesn’t have to fly commercial. We are, as I noted above, in a climate emergency, and it’s nothing short of ridiculous to be subsidizing private aviation at the expense of transportation that 99.99% of people can actually use. Shut this facility down immediately.

These are bold proposals, but they’re not radical. They’re things that have been done elsewhere and proven successful. Here in Boston, we’re in a traffic crisis and a climate crisis, and we desperately need leadership willing to take bold action to actually address these problems. Where is it?