ETHNOGRAPHY IN AND AROUND CAMBRIDGE.

Philip Greenspun is of the Harvard faculty but refreshingly not of the canonical Cambridge mindset.  Check out a recent travelog, "Maskachusetts trip report."

The unpleasant highways might be by design.

Traffic delays slowed all of my excursions around the Boston suburbs. The eight-lane I-95 ring highway was jammed at midday on Saturday. The main road that goes to Wayland would be four or six lanes in Florida, plus dedicated left and right turn lanes at intersections, but in Maskachusetts it is only two lanes and a single car wanting to turn left can create a mile-long backup.

The Florida stroads are as often unpleasant as those local roads in the Commonwealth.  I wonder if that Harvard affiliation is worth the aggro, though, to keep reading.

The locals nearly all profess faith in population growth via mass low-skill immigration. Yet the transportation infrastructure of Boston plainly cannot support even the current population. The road network is jammed and the locals who eagerly cowered in place are unwilling to ride public transit due to COVID risk.

Thus he chooses, the weather outside being frightful, to nip into a few bookstores, which are about as one might expect.  Then it was time for a snack.  "How about the new higher minimum wage? Shake Shack in Harvard Square has responded by eliminating the order-taker jobs. You order and pay at a touchscreen. How’s the labor quality now that higher wages are being paid? Some of my fries were still frozen."

The inclusive ethos at those Cambridge parties doesn't encourage, either.

In conversations with white native-born progressives, none seem to have adapted to the fact that 85 million Americans are either immigrants or children of immigrants. The dominant conflict between groups in the U.S. is white vs. Black and if this conflict can be solved, e.g., via reparations or Black Lives Matter banners, Americans will all live together in harmony. They can’t understand why recent immigrants from India, China, or Honduras don’t share their enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter, allocating places in colleges or in jobs to those who identify as Black, etc. At a dinner event where most of the guests were either from India or were children of Indian immigrants, the current American race-based system was decried. “We’re ‘brown’ if we try to get into country clubs,” one professor said, “but we’re considered ‘off-white’ when we apply for jobs or to college.”

Maybe that's why new thinking about the Pythagorean Theorem comes from St. Mary's in New Orleans rather than Cambridge Rindge and Latin.