Just because I haven’t been posting anything doesn’t mean I’m dead, but I sure was not feeling well for a while, and my voice is only halfway recovered. There are 20 partially written posts I never finished, and most of them are too outdated to bother finishing.
I’m reading a think piece on Slate written by some guy from Massachusetts, extolling the virtues of the state — excuse me, Commonwealth — that I’ve lived in for the past 44 years. Click here. Something to keep in mind is that the wealth in Massachusetts is not distributed evenly geographically. Most of it is in the eastern quarter of the state, and it’s not a big state. Like other New England states, Massachusetts has a lot of struggling former mill towns, whose heyday ended in the 1920’s, when the textile industry moved south because water power was no longer needed.