Dear Dick I’ve been happily working at my current job. I’m an electrician. I love my co-workers. I look forward to coming to work every day. The employee benefits are good, particularly, the health care coverage for me and my family. Everything is fine. That is, until 5 pm last Friday. My supervisor called me into the conference room. I lost my job along with 20 other employees. The company needed to cut costs to remain profitable. Since then, […]
April’s nod to National Poetry Month is 30 days filled with recitations, incantations, slam poetry performances and spoken word gatherings that evoke the wonder of the 1950’s Beat Poetry gatherings once perceived as scandalous and impure. The fact that it fades away when May comes is less the calendar’s fault than it is our too short a love affair with poetry.. But as we impatiently wait for our flowers to blossom and for the world to stop hating, beautiful poetry […]
As we continue to move forward after the pandemic, the U.S. unemployment rate hit a two year low of 3.6% in March of 2022. The hospitality industry was the first to be devastated by COVID 19. Restaurants are gradually recovering due to easing COVID-19 restrictions allowing for higher (in some places, even 100%) indoor capacity. However, many restaurants and small businesses are still struggling with issues like inflation when it comes to hiring employees back from when they lost millions […]
Weeks after news that the Department of Justice’s four-year-old “China Initiative” would be dissolved, some experts now warn the program that largely targeted Chinese immigrants and visiting academics could be revived as easily as it was killed–and that its influence lingers on. “The pendulum could swing back the other way on that,” Mitch Ambrose, who heads science policy newsletters and tracking resources at the American Institute of Physics, told the Sampan. “There’s clearly interest among certain Republicans in bringing back […]
Dear Dick: I have two children attending two high priced Boston colleges. My son is a junior, and my daughter is a sophomore. So, I have two more years of tuition checks to write. Are there any tax writeoffs I can take to get some relief from the high cost of tuition expense? “Over-educated and Over-Taxed” —————————————————- Dear “Over-educated and Over-Taxed,” I agree, it costs a small ransom to send children to college these days. But you may benefit from […]
Chinatown continues to be one of Boston’s more vibrant communities. However, behind that curtain, the residents, workers, and businesses breathe the dirtiest air in Massachusetts. Joan didn’t know that Chinatown had the dirtiest air in Massachusetts when she moved here eight years ago. But when her two twin girls were diagnosed with asthma two years ago, she was shocked. She couldn’t understand why. No one in her own family had asthma and no one smoked at home. Then her children’s […]
The film version of Murakami’s 2020 short story “Drive My Car” is a three hour meditation on grief, forgiveness, and redemption. A stage actor and director named Yusuke Kafuku travels from Tokyo to Horshima to mount a performance of the Anton Chekhov play Uncle Vanya. As written by Murakami and interpreted for film by director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Kafuku comes off as stubborn, stoic, hiding his true self. Kafuku is a prototypical Murakami make. He curates a classical music collection on […]
Do you know Boston Chinatown has the worst air quality in the state? If you are a resident of Boston’s Chinatown, your good night’s sleep is being harmed by the car exhaust in the air. If you work in Chinatown, you are probably breathing polluted air for eight or more hours a day. Even if you are a visitor to Chinatown and enjoying a delicious Chinese meal with your friends, you are breathing in polluted air filled with high levels […]
A Trump-era Department of Justice initiative that critics say unfairly targets Chinese Americans is ending, but some say the damage has already been done. The “China Initiative” was launched in 2018 when the DOJ was run by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The program was intended to defend the United States against what officials believed to be intellectual property theft conducted by the Chinese government, but it has been criticized for unfairly targeting Chinese scientists in the U.S., and some say […]
You could say Dr. Eugene Chan, a local doctor and scientist, has made his mark in the world of scientific and medical innovation. But that wouldn’t be quite accurate. The Massachusetts resident has, in fact, made a mark in outer space, too. Literally. Chan in February saw his company’s blood analyzer that he invented launch on a rocket to the International Space Station. Here is the story of Chan, and how this son of immigrants from Hong Kong, ended up […]
