Books --Self-described philosopher-comedians Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein discuss Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington. Imagine Jon Stewart after he stops shouting "Whaaaa??" takes some time off for a philosophy PhD, and returns to TV. Brookline Booksmith, 7:00 pm, free. --Find out why Drew Gilpin Faust is the president of Harvard, and you're not. Faust will discuss her book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War at the Harvard Coop......

Carl Stanley McGee, a high-profile aide to Deval Patrick, is on an unpaid leave of absence after being accused of sexually assaulting a teenage boy at a Florida resort. Casey Ross at the Herald considers the political impact of McGee's departure. While Bostonist uses the term "high-profile" because McGee was one of the Globe's most stylish people, he was more than just a fashionable face who put off a strong Tim Gunn vibe (in this......

Former Massachusetts governor and presidential aspirant Romney is putting his New England Spanking behind him and focusing entirely on winning the Michigan primary. He has pulled advertising from South Carolina and Florida and is going whole hog. Michigan seems to be loving the attention, at least according to the AP. Writer Glen Johnson declared that Romney received a "Hero's Welcome." But it's still not the kind of welcome Romney was expecting only a few weeks......

Don Aucoin at the Globe landed an interview with Denise the Not-Quite-Lunch-Lady, the Survivor contestant from Douglas who said she had been demoted from lunch lady to janitor. Mark Burnett gave her $50,000 since she had it so rough, but the Douglas School Superintendent swiftly revealed that Denise had actually been promoted. So, why did Denise do it? In an interview Aucoin said took 90 minutes, Denise told him that she got nervous on......

Update: Deval Patrick can rest easy. Obama took 38% of the Iowa caucus vote. For some reason, Bostonist couldn't get Huey Lewis' "If This Is It … Please Let Me Know …" out of their head while watching the Iowa caucus returns on CNN. So many middle-tier candidates will get their rejections over with tonight. CNN and Fox News projected early that Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses with a come-from-behind victory that had little......

The space-saver war continues. Yesterday, Donovan Slack followed up on the city's attempts to get a few residents of South Boston to stop saving parking spaces after a snowstorm, even though they can keep the space for 48 hours. Apparently a few protesters feel that tradition trumps the law: But sending a special crew to South Boston angered some in the neighborhood. They interpreted the move as another offensive in the years-long battle between City......

After a brief flash of clarity in which City Councilor Marjorie Decker suggested things might be getting a bit out of hand, Cambridge has up and banned the leafblowers, for five months of the year, anyway. Here's the details from the Cambridge Chronicle: According to the ordinance, residents are permitted to use leaf blowers from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, from March 16 to June 14, and from Sept. 16 to Dec.......

Fox 25 sportscaster Butch Stearns was either plumb dumb exhausted after the Red Sox won the ALCS, or he lost his mind. Via Universal Hub, we learned that after the game he interviewed Julio Lugo. Post-game interviews are always awkward because the players so clearly want to go drink, have a sandwich, bathe in champagne, or dance if they're Jonathan Papelbon. Lugo was no exception--he was celebrating by puffing on a stogie. In the video......

Let's give a hand to WEEI caller Pauley, who aptly summed up Tuesday's Sox home game against the Detroit Tigers during the Planet Mikey Show with, "It was a drinking night tonight." It wasn't a pretty showing at Fenway on Tuesday, despite the presence of the brilliant-this-season Tim Wakefield on the mound. The Sox endured a 7-2 pounding that was led by Tiger pitcher and 2006 AL Rookie of the Year Justin Verlander (7 2/3......

Hockey players everywhere are thawing out in Dallas for the All-Star festivities, and several Bruins are making the most of it. While Bostonist was obsessing over the fancy new NHL uniforms, Iron Man Phil Kessel got the job done and scored three goals in the YoungStars game. The Bruins' Zdeno Chara won the hardest-shot competition as well, and he was a defenseman for the Eastern Conference in the All-Star game. That didn't work out as......

While Bostonist preferred the first gubenatorial debate in which Independent Christy Mihos and Republican Kerry Healey practically got into a knock-down, drag-out catfight, last night's debate at Faneuil Hall followed a more classic debate model, in which the candidates sent out messages that worked on an explicit and a subliminal level. Explicitly, the politicians appeared to focus on the needs of the people. Subliminally, Republican Kerry Healey's reputation as an animatronic aristocrat was sealed.......

While Bostonist loves the idea of brunch, we often get a little miffed when we see all the happy couples in love eyeing each other over their french toasts. Yet, when we heard about a breakfast place that has lots of happy families and a killer, cheap meal, we decided to go check it out. We ventured out to Union Square in Somerville to try the generically named Neighborhood Restaurant. Since it was a sunny,......

In case you didn’t hear the big news last week: Boston has once again risen to the top of a Forbes list and we’re not too sure this one is a good thing. It seems that Boston was rated fourth nationwide in America’s Drunkest Cities 2006 poll. While Bostonist often rolls out of bed with a headache, questioning why we decided to have that last Grey Goose at 1:30a.m., we assumed we were just......

While Bostonist constantly struggles to get you the latest news here in the city, we like to think that we’ve got our act together (somewhat)…that is until we read about someone much younger who has accomplished something that we some day hope to. Last week, we read an article from the A.P. Wire about a Harvard student, Kaavya Viswanathan, who at age 17, signed a two-book deal with publishing house Little, Brown for a reported......

“I am your father,” a motion-sensing robot told Bostonist the other day. That bot and the rest of the Star Wars exhibit makes the jump from the Museum of Science into hyperspace on April 30th. Sure the Storm Troopers marching through Southie last weekend were great, we thought a day at the MoS would be better - and really let us experience the movies. Beyond motion-sensing, talking robots were models and costumes from the prequel......

Some of the coolest stuff at South By Southwest Interactive takes place after the convention center's shut tight. One of the most interesting things this week was 20x2, an annual get-together where 20 speakers, from all corners of the Web and the tech world, get two minutes each to answer one very open-ended question. This year, "What's The Secret?" The answers were as varied and off-the-wall as you could expect. Some took the question very......

When we heard the MBTA was going to bring Charlie and all his accompanying fancy kiosks and turnstiles to our morning destination stop of South Station, we thought..."eh." In defense, this less-than-enthusiastic response to the T's announcement of actual(?) service improvement was based solely on past experiences with 1) Porter Square stop's escalators and 2) South Station's "bomb containing" garbage cans, the lids of which are always sitting neatly on the nearby ground. "Ah,......

So Bostonist has never claimed to be the most intellectual of the bunch, especially when it comes to television. We’ve been tuning in these past couple weeks to Fox’s harshest reality television show (no, not Skating With Celebrities) to see just how mean the judges on American Idol can get. As we’ve seen in the last few seasons of this spinoff of the British show, Pop Idol, the best part of Idol is the......

When Bostonist received an e-mail notifying us that the results were in, we were expecting news about a new M&M color being introduced. It turns out the e-mail was referring to the latest survey from Men's Fitness magazine, which once again ranked the Fittest/Fattest Cities in the U.S. While Bostonist’s own fitness routine has dropped off in the last few months, it seems that our city has actually improved in health, moving from the......

While Bostonist is stuck in the office this week with our co-workers on vacation, we’ve noticed that things are not only quiet at work, but in the news arena too. We’ve kept ourselves occupied with this SNL skit floating around the web and now we’re rounding up the latest news stories from the past couple days so you can read them and then keep on eating those leftover holiday chocolates next to the copy machine.......

Located on Mass Ave. in Cambridge between Harvard Square and Porter Square, Cambridge Common is a pub-grub beer-bar that caters perfectly to its college-aged crowd. This isn't an upscale place, but Charlie Christopher, owner of Christopher's, Toad, and West Side Lounge, has been keeping his Red Line crowd happy for years with high-quality, low-priced food. Busy almost any night of the week Cambridge Common's patrons range from music geeks waiting to enter the Lizard's Lounge......

In the wake of recent shootings, Mayor Menino called a meeting of top public safety folks to figure out what could be done (short of spending more money, of course). Despite numerous suggestions and resulting proposals, the Herald homed in on Menino's absurd plan to confiscate "Stop Snitchin'" t-shirts from stores. While Bostonist would like to take the Globe's more measured approach and talk about everything that came out of the meeting, we know our......

While Bostonist was happily ensconced in the warm embrace of family, turkey, and red wine yesterday, those America-hating scofflaws at Super 88 Markets (some of them just a few blocks down Washington street from our law-abiding gathering) were undermining everything we hold dear in this Commonwealth by being open for business. Despite Attorney General Reilly's stern warnings to Whole Foods and others, the Globe reports that the Asian foodstuffs chain was welcoming customers in many......

While Bostonist hasn't actually ever tackled making a Thanksgiving dinner, we are always up for tackling the traffic home to our parents' house. Perhaps some day, we'll decide to make our own Turkey Day meal, but for now, we'll just enjoy mom Linda Lou's good home cooking. She makes some damn good sweet potatoes each year and according to her, it's quite a simple recipe that any novice cook can master. Below is the gospel......

The Museum of Fine Arts dug its shovels into the Fenway today, marking the groundbreaking of its $500 million expansion project, which is scheduled to be completed by 2010. The MFA has been working toward this new wing since 2001 and has already raised $316 million of the half billion dollar price tag, the largest fundraising campaign in the city's cultural history. Designed by the British firm Foster and Partners of London, the addition......

Last night PBS premiered “RX for Survival - A Global Health Challenge,” a three-part, six-hour series on worldwide public health. Focusing on innovations in the last century, including vaccines and antibiotics, the series highlights efforts to eradicate disease around the world and comes at a timely moment: The Massachusetts State Legislature is debating a bill that would change healthcare coverage in the state and the White House just yesterday, released a plan to address the......

While Bostonist and, we imagine, most of the rest of the Commonwealth's population, are thinking about Theo Epstein's departure, our legislature is considering a matter that may well affect us more (and Theo not at all): expanding healthcare coverage. You may recall that back in July, the Governor proposed a healthcare plan that would make purchasing health insurance mandatory for everyone. This idea was roundly panned by commentators, but yesterday, Speaker of the House Sal......

Tedy Bruschi announced yesterday at a press conference that he will be returning to the Patriots' practice tomorrow after getting the okay from numerous doctors. After consulting with many specialists about his physical condition and whether or not he should ever play football again, Bruschi says that he has decided to come back. This past February, #54 suffered from a stroke caused by a small hole in his heart, leaving him blind and unable to......

Located in the normally grimy section of town outside the shadow of the TD Banknorth Garden, Anthem is the replacement to "The Commonwealth", which succeeds where its predecessor failed. Breathing a little life into the North Station area, Anthem offers a trendy feel with floor to ceiling windows giving view to the Courthouse and Haymarket Parking Station. The restaurant has fun with itself throughout the menu description and choice of meals. Despite the humor,......

While Bostonist sits and takes in the Sox taking a beating from the Blue Jays, the entertaining website, SmokingGun.com, has brought up an interesting little glich in the MLB online store. It seems that the MLB believes that the Yankees will be taking the AL East title this season, despite the fact that the tight pennant race doesn't conclude until Sunday afternoon. T-shirts proclaiming their eighth straight division win were available for $19.95 as of......