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🌤️Clouds rolling in today, with highs in the 60s. Sunset at 7:57 p.m.

GBH’s Magdiela Matta has a beautiful eulogy for a restaurant in Lawrence that closed its doors after 10 years. El Taller on Essex Street hosted everything from book launches to open mic nights to quinceañeras and a 24-hour movie marathon.

Owner Mary Guerrero said she opened the space to give people a place to gather and be creative. She’s now closing because of trouble keeping up with payroll and family health issues.

“If a city doesn’t have a café, does that mean there aren’t any writers around? Does that mean we don’t have filmmakers? Does that mean we don’t have artists?” she said. “I really don’t want it to close, but it has to.”

Four Things to Know

Brian Shortsleeve — a venture capitalist, Marine veteran who worked as chief administrator of the MBTA from 2015-17 under Gov. Charlie Baker — is running for governor in 2026. Among the issues his campaign will focus on: promises to audit every state agency and reduce spending, cut taxes and fees, and repeal the MBTA Communities Act, a Baker-era law requiring denser zoning near transit stations.

Shortsleeve, who now lives in Barnstable, is running against former Housing and Economic Development Secretary Mike Kennealy in the Republican primary. Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, is seeking reelection; Andrea James, founder of The National Council For Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and a former criminal defense attorney, has filed paperwork to challenge Healy and is exploring a run.

Strike one at Fenway: About 1,000 workers who cook ballpark food, work warehouse jobs, ring up purchases and sell concessions and souvenirs at Fenway Park voted in favor of a potential strike June 13-15 — the dates of a Red Sox-New York Yankees home series. Think of the vote as a first at-bat: it signals an intention to strike if the union and the employer, food service giant Aramark, can’t come to an agreement, but there’s still time left in the inning to avert it.

Workers are concerned about self-service automations affecting wages. Some of the workers currently make less than $20 an hour.

Smogs of ocean plastics: Prof. Aron Stubbins, who teaches marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern, co-authored a paper demonstrating that plastic waste is not only floating on the oceans’ surface or sinking to the bottom. “They can move around the ocean in the same way as dust moves around the atmosphere,” Stubbins said.

That plastic can interfere with natural processes. For instance, phytoplankton capture carbon dioxide as they die and fall to the ocean floor, much like trees do on land. Studies have found, however, that microplastics in the water can slow that process.

GBH is laying off 10 employees who work at WORLD Channel (also known as GBH WORLD) and moving away from original documentaries on the channel in response to a funding cut from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This cut is separate from President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to stop funding the CPB entirely. Their last day will be June 30.

WORLD will still show daily international newscasts and programs like Stories from the Stage, Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week, North South East West and A French Village. Station fees and philanthropic donations “were not sufficient to sustain the channel, as previously anticipated,” a spokesperson for CPB said.

As global attitudes toward the U.S. sour, Boston braces for drop in tourism

Meet Boston, the city’s tourism agency, had been projecting a 4 or 5% increase in international tourism this year. Now they’ve lowered those expectations significantly, saying they expect a 10% drop in international visitors for the rest of the year.

Reasons vary, but overall “the feelings of international travelers toward the U.S. have really turned sour,” said Adam Sacks, president of the global travel forecasting company Tourism Economics.

And fewer tourists mean fewer dollars for locals. Boston’s hospitality sector has 56,000 jobs, making up 6.4% of the workforce. International tourists spent $2.9 billion in Massachusetts in 2023.

Detentions of people with valid visas or green cards have some travelers worried.

“I think a lot of people thought, like, ‘okay, we obviously don’t agree with what the administration is doing, but that’s a political thing. It has nothing to do with life on the ground in the U.S. for me as a tourist,’” said Elizabeth Schumacher, a journalist born in America who now lives in Germany. “Now, people are definitely reconsidering that.”

Broader anti-immigrant sentiment also plays a role, Meet Boston CEO Martha Sheridan said.

“Certainly the ICE action around the city of Boston and Massachusetts is of big concern to us, because it does impact people’s perceptions of being safe,” she said.

But the biggest share of international tourists to Boston — about a quarter of visitors from abroad, or 800,000 people — come from Canada. 

Tourism Economics estimates that border crossings from Canada fell by about a third this March compared with last year, and that air travel from Canada to the U.S. is down 13%.

Curtis Allen, who lives in British Colombia, said he was planning a road trip in Oregon this summer but decided to cancel because of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about making his home country America’s 51st state.

“It became very clear that the president was not joking about annexing Canada,” Allen said. “So we’re going to be defending our country by not supporting another economy.”

Read Jeremy Siegel’s full reporting here. 

Read more: 

-Aggressive immigration enforcement makes musicians rethink U.S. tours