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☁️Cooler and cloudy, with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 8:04 p.m.
Team USA isn’t playing any first-round World Cup matches at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, but there are still plenty of local places to watch the games with other fans. Bonus: these watch parties are significantly less expensive than tickets to see a game in person.
“They’re not playing halfway around the world, they’re not playing in different time zones that you’ve gotta wake up at the crack of dawn, they’re playing [on] U.S. soil,” Mario David Zepeda, creative director of the fan group American Outlaws’ Boston chapter, told GBH’s Esteban Bustillos. “So, it does make it extra special.”
American Outlaws’ Boston home base is The Banshee in Dorchester. If that’s not near you, they’ll also be hosting watch parties at Parlor Sports in Somerville, Teddy’s on the Hill near Beacon Hill and Faces Brewing Co. in Malden.
Four Things to Know:
1. A group of parents and students is suing the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, arguing that disparities between public school districts are so vast that they have created a segregated system that denies Black and Latino students opportunities. A state council studied public schools two years ago and found that 63% met the standards to be defined as segregated.
One of the plaintiffs is Saudi Pelegrin-Gomez, a parent in Brockton. She went to school in Wakefield as part of METCO, the voluntary busing program, and said she sees huge differences in the opportunities that were available to her and what is now available to her kids in Brockton. “Ultimately, we shouldn’t have to leave our community to get a decent education; we should have options,” Pelegrin-Gomez said.
2. Harvard’s professors voted to approve a plan to cap the number of As they can give their students. Starting in the fall of 2027, only 20% plus four students in each class will be allowed to earn an A for the semester. The addition of four students is designed to give professors more leeway in small classes. Yale’s faculty members are also looking at the number of As they give students.
Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky said he supported the new grading system because under the current system, “students who do really good work — who work their tails off and really do outstanding work — get the same grade as students who are smart and know how to BS their way through an essay and do good, but not great, work.” History professor Alison Frank Johnson said she opposes the new system because “grades are an incentive to get students to do their very best work and to reflect on the work that they’ve done, not a way of ranking them against one another.”
3. Teenagers in Boston will have two or three free city-run events they’ll be able to attend every Friday night during their summer vacation as part of Boston After Dark, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said yesterday. In past years, Boston After Dark events have included \talent shows and sports tournaments.
City officials started the program in 2024 after realizing that young people involved in violence were often taking part in city programming during the day, but there wasn’t much available for them at night. The number of shootings is down 12% this year compared with last year.
4. Peter Wolf, frontman of the J. Geils Band, is getting an honorary degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design this afternoon. Wolf won’t be giving the commencement address — that would be Dr. Sarah Lewis, founder of Vision & Justice and a Harvard professor of humanities, African and African American Studies. But as some commencement speakers talk about AI (sometimes to the sound of boos), Wolf said that if he were giving the address, he would tell students that art prevails through changes in technology.
“Never give up,” he told GBH’s The Culture Show. “I always go back to the days of music pre-radio, and painting pre-photography. When photography came along, you figured, what do we need a portrait painting for? We can just take your picture. But it still prevails. Art still prevails, the human mind still prevails.”
Remembering Barney Frank
When GBH reporter Adam Reilly interviewed former Congressman Barney Frank in hospice earlier this month, he asked him about his role as the first person in Congress to willingly come out as gay.
Frank compared it to his husband Jim Ready’s surfing.
“If there are waves, he’s very good at taking advantage of them,” Frank told Reilly. “That’s how I feel about gay rights. I came along in American history when people were ready to deal with that.”
“I took office at the most propitious time to get fully involved in gay rights,” Frank said. “When I took office, there were no protections at the federal level [for] people because of their sexual orientation, and there were a couple of prohibitions. You couldn’t join the Army, couldn’t get a security clearance. And by the time we were through, those had all been reversed.”
Reilly has a deeper look at Frank’s career here.
Dig deeper:
-Barney Frank on representative adopting social media
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