(1) New Blog Look!: Many thanks to Angie Brandt, WordPress expert, for sprucing up our blog! Longtime readers of this blog may know that we switched from Blogger to WordPress a while back, and were unable to keep the template that made the blog look like the rest of the site. Angie helped us rectify this. Thanks!
(2) One Milk Street: We are pretty much settled in in our new office space, after a couple of weeks camping out in an office elsewhere in our new building. The space is great, with four huge windows overlooking the Old South Meeting House. The building at One Milk Street is on the site of the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin, and the facade features a bust of Franklin between the second and third floors (see photo above).
(3) Good News, for Once, from SCOTUS: As we hear about the Supreme Court reaffirming Citizens United by ruling a century-old Montana law unconstitutional, and upholding one of the more noxious parts of Arizona's anti-immigrant law (but rejecting other parts of it), and as we brace for it to reject all or part of Obamacare (but would it be such a bad thing if the court rejected the individual mandate?), finally a great ruling: the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Maryland law against prison gerrymandering. Read all about it from Prisoners of the Census. Our pals at the Prison Policy Project contributed to an amicus brief in the case.
(4) Boston Globe on Interest Rate Swaps and MBTA: Today's Boston Globe has an editorial calling on the MBTA, the Boston area's public transit system, to renegotiate the interest rate swap deals it has with a bunch of the big banks. Good reading alongside our current cover story, and evidence that the Globe has been influenced by Occupy Boston and Occupy the MBTA, which have pushed the MBTA's debt, and details like the bad interest rate swap deals, into public view.
(5) More soon! I've been negligent about blogging, but I hope to post more regularly and more frequently this summer.
--Chris Sturr