In 2022, the PGA held the US Open Golf Championship (for the fourth time) at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. In the week before the tournament, Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts was unusually busy as the wealthier members of our society came to town in their private planes. I listened as they flew over my home,…
My daughter Terri arranged for us to talk about my mother Anna and her special way of caring for her kids on a Story Corps. Many thousands of these have been collected, and many thousands more will be collected. A very few will be broadcast. Most will be archived at the Library of Congress, and…
March 2021 How Pat McGovern built a billion-dollar publishing company while screwing up. In 2019, Glenn Rifkin wrote what amounts to an authorized biography of my former boss, Pat McGovern, founder of International Data Group. Rifkin explains how Pat got into the computer market; how he came to understand that computers would be changing the world;…
December 2020 According to the Urban Institute, the distribution of income and wealth in the United States has become distressingly imbalanced. Since 1963, the income of families in the top 10% has increased by roughly 90%; while the income of those in the middle has risen by only 20%. And the income of those in…
November 2020 It’s harvest time for cranberries on Cape Cod. The cranberry market is small as markets go, with total annual sales of roughly $1.5 billion. But if we look at it closely, we can see a clear demonstration of the boom and bust problem of the “laissez faire” economics of Adam Smith. The cranberry…