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🌤️Clouds move in, with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 7:55 p.m.
The MBTA is going into overtime for the World Cup. For the inaugural June 13 game at Boston Stadium — we know it as Gillette Stadium Foxborough — trains will run as late as 4 a.m., ferrying spectators back to their homes and hotels.
That led GBH’s transportation reporter, Jeremy Siegel, to ask: if the MBTA can run late-night trains for the World Cup, could overnight service become more regular?
In short: No. “We have tried 24-hour overnight service over and over again,” said Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board. “And it’s failed every time, not because there’s not enough ridership, but because it’s too expensive.”
Kane also anticipates hearing from neighbors after the June 13 game. “I guarantee you the next day, my office will be flooded with phone calls of neighbors in these cities and towns who are woken up at 3 in the morning by a diesel train going by,” he told Siegel. “We have to think about this holistically before we start doing things like, ‘Let’s operate this 24/7.’ We’re just not there yet.” You can listen to the full conversation here. And remember: Some trains and buses still run until 2 a.m. on weekends.
Four Things to Know
1. Two people were critically injured in a shooting on Memorial Drive in Cambridge yesterday. Police arrested a man named Tyler Brown, who they say was walking down the road with a large rifle, firing at people. Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said two people stopped him: a State Police officer and a retired Marine, both of whom shot Brown with their own weapons. Brown was taken to a hospital in Boston.
Ryan said hundreds of people were near the shooting. “That does not begin to address the trauma experienced by everybody who is out there, those individuals on the river, walking, pushing baby carriages, riding by,” she said. “We know that that weapon had the capacity to have struck people on the other side of that river.”
2. A group of 66 Massachusetts organizations that help people leaving prisons and jails could lose their state funding. The groups receive about $15 million a year through Community Empowerment and Reinvestment Grants, which support people with job training, housing stability, addiction and mental health care and more. The Healey administration says people can turn to another state program, Community Workforce Partnership Grants, for job training services.
But advocates say not all programs focus on job training . Organizations that provide housing, food or mental health support may not qualify for Community Workforce Partnership Grants. “They may need transportation. They may need an ID that they don’t even have $35 for. They may need a pair of boots,” said Jamal Gooding, executive director of People Affecting Community Change in Brockton.
3. A group of parents is trying to buy the assets of the Croft School in the South End, hoping to keep the school open in some form beyond this school year. The school’s co-founder and executive director, Scott Given, is accused of misrepresenting the private, for-profit school’s finances and hiding $13 million in debt.
So far, the parents have raised $1.1 million and loaned $500,000 to the school for payroll and rent. That loan includes a contract they say gives their group the option to buy the school’s South End assets. However, the school’s board is seeking to sell assets in the South End, Jamaica Plain and Providence. “We are positioned to take the school forward under this new nonprofit,” parent Ming Min Hui said.
4. Hampshire College alumni are raising money in what they call a “Hail Mary” campaign to preserve the school’s mission of nontraditional education. “This is a really, really special place that has changed us and transformed us, and we want to preserve that, and be able to continue to steward Hampshire’s mission,” said Dani Slabaugh, who attended the school from 2005 to 2009.
The campaign’s first long-shot goal is to raise $10 million by Saturday, in an effort to persuade Hampshire’s Board of Trustees not to sell campus land to pay off debt. So far, the HampshireNEXT campaign has raised $1.3 million. “I’m hopeful that this is a way to prove that, even if we’re not able to raise $21 million, that we’re able to absolutely support the severance of workers and faculty who have been laid off without severance,” Slabaugh said. “We may be able to advocate to save a lot of the existing jobs if we’re able to purchase the campus or buy out its debt.”
Merriam-Webster publishes a new print dictionary in the digital age
Springfield’s own Merriam-Webster is publishing its 12th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the first new edition in 22 years.
NEPM’s John Voci spoke with Merriam-Webster employees about publishing a print product in a digital world.
“We were starting with a dictionary that was already up-to-date, and what we wanted to do was refocus it,” said Karen Wilkinson, Merriam-Webster’s director of defining. “We would have a group of editors focusing on one aspect of the book, such as cutting. We had another group of editors working on top 500. We had another group working on usage paragraphs and word history paragraphs, and so on and so forth.”
Editors relied on online data to determine which words people searched most frequently.
“Those are the words that people are looking up the most and that they clearly have questions about. People are looking for answers to usage doubts,” Wilkinson said. “A lot of these words tend to be abstract concepts. Paradox, for example, is a commonly looked up word. People are trying to figure out what these words mean, how they’re used, in what context they’re used. We wanted to answer those questions. That’s where the top 500 came from.”
You can read — and hear — Voci’s full piece here.
Dig deeper:
-Finding The Forgotten Creators Of The Oxford English Dictionary
-Newly published Cabo Verdean Creole dictionary formalizes the “people’s language”
-Adding Words To The Dictionary Has Always Been A Slow Process. Then COVID-19 Hit
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