Slowing market, stubborn prices | Another day, another T disaster | Crossing a line at The New York Times? | Quick Hits | About Contrarian Boston |
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Tempest in a teapot or a line crossed? New York Times opinion columnist apologizes after incendiary twitter attack on head of BU’s antiracism center
That would be John McWhorter, a prominent Columbia University professor and linguist who writes a bi-weekly opinion column for The New York Times and who has carved out a niche for himself as a fierce critic of wokeism.
McWhorter issued an apology Sunday afternoon after firing off a pair of tweets over the weekend in which he mocked Ibram X. Kendi, head of BU’s Center for Antiracist Research and author of the best-selling book, “How to be an Antiracist.”
In the tweets, McWhorter, author of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,” ridiculed Kendi, putting quotation marks around “Dr.” and “scholarship” in reference to the BU professor’s academic work.
McWhorter, also a prominent Black academic, then added an even more inflammatory line: “You must consider arguing your points, rather than thinking you have made them by using buzzwords, skin tone, and your hair.”
McWhorter did not go into detail in the rather generic apology he issued later on Twitter.
“Folks - my tweets about Kendi yesterday were too much. I shouldn't have gone there. Sincere apologies,” McWhorter wrote.
BU antiracism center chief Ibram X. Kendi (photo by Stephen Voss by Oregon State University)
McWhorter also appears to have deleted the original tweets. (Here’s a link to a reposting of the originals.)
No word yet from Kendi. However, the rising academic star has had harsh words in the past for McWhorter, as in this tweet back on Aug. 30, when he called the Columbia prof and Times columnist a “embarrassment.”
“The same McWhorter merry-go-round of denial. He offers readers an escape from the discomfort of antiracism for the pleasure of demeaning Black folk as they deny they are demeaning Black folk. McWhorter has reduced himself to a popular amusement ride. He's an embarrassment.”
It will be interesting to see whether The New York Times says or does anything here, or whether the leading critic of cancel culture gets cancelled himself.
Nearing the peak: Home prices are poised to fall, but the question is when
Home sales in Greater Boston and across Massachusetts have been falling for months now, but prices have kept on rising.
That can’t go on forever, with a similar pattern having played out in the mid-2000s, before the last major real estate market downturn. Eventually prices began falling along with sales, but not for some months.
We’ll get a better idea whether prices have peaked later this month when The Warren Group and the Massachusetts Association of Realtors release sale and price numbers for September.
The Fed’s decision to jack up rates quickly, combined with already inflated prices, has knocked a lot of potential buyers right out of the market.
Sales fell 11.3 percent through the first eight months of 2022 compared to the same period last year.
And there’s anecdotal evidence that sellers here and in other markets across the country are starting to relent a bit on pricing.
Yet the median price statewide still managed to jump 7.8 percent to $555,000 in August.
Homeowners will do everything they can to avoid selling their home at a price lower than what they think it is truly worth.
And we are also grappling with the consequences of a now decades-long housing shortage, with far too few single-family homes and even condos built to keep up with demand.
In fact, there has been relatively so little new construction that even a drop in the number of buyers in the market is not going to have an instantaneous or major impact.
Home prices went up fast during the pandemic. But they are going to take their sweet time coming down.
Another day, another disaster at the T
This time it’s the MBTA’s $214 million overhaul of a South Boston rail yard.
The project is now eight months late and faces a $100 million overrun, with the T now entangled in a web of litigation with the job’s contractors, Universal Hub reports.
But at least the blown deadline may not matter in the end. The point of modernizing the Cabot Yard was to prepare the maintenance depot for the arrival of a new fleet of 252 Red Line cars.
But as Contrarian Boston has noted, the Chinese rail giant manufacturing the Red Line cars has pushed out delivery until 2025. CRRC taken a hit to its bottom line, having lost out on bids for some rail car contracts while struggling to deliver on others, including a major one in India.
Quick Hits:
From hero to zero already? Guregian: “Bailey Zappe has put Mac Jones on notice” Boston Herald
File under: Life imitating B-movie art? “NASA Spacecraft Accomplishes Mission and Smashes Asteroid Into New Orbit” New York Times
Big Dig II: “Stop repairing Tobin Bridge, replace it with a tunnel” CommonWealth Magazine
About Contrarian Boston
I have fielded emails over the past couple of months asking what Contrarian Boston is about.
Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.
For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.
An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.
Our focus is:
· Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;
· Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;
· The media and why it does what it does;
· Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;
· And whatever else catches our fancy.