Beacon Hill on Halloween

Today is Halloween, which means that (1) You’re planning to go out trick or treating, either alone or with children [the first one is creepy, very creepy]; (2) You’re planning to stay home and give out candy to the kids who come to your door; (3) You’re planing to go on @BostonByFoot’s Beacon Hill with a Boo! tour; or (4) You’re going to a party, either with or without costume.

It also means that its’ time for the bi-monthly roundup of posts from The Next Phase blog.

If you have been too busy to read regularly, here’s your chance to catch up on the posts you’ve missed, I have included updates in the news for those posts that have them so you can — among other things — find out how Sherman tanks helped win WWII or see a picture of me presenting at the Bitnorth Conference.

Before you keep reading, put down that bag of Halloween candy. It’s for the kids tonight, not for you. Put it down right now!

Personal

• Personal Memories on the 9/11 Anniversary—Aline
• The To Do List—Susanne
• A Week in Sunny Montreal—Aline
• BRAT and Proud—Susanne
• Finding Spirituality in St. Joseph’s Oratory—Aline

Friends and Family

• The Power of Girlfriends
• When Child’s Play Meant Freedom to Grow
• A Place Called Spindleworks
• Family Traditions

Food and Cooking

• 

  The line outside Schwartz’s Deli

  Two Blueberry Cake Recipes

• Cooking from the Pantry
• Two Places to Eat Well in Montreal
  Update: This article in Slate by Jordan Weissmann is about Katz’s Deli in New York City’s Lower East Side but it also tells us that you can now get Montreal-style Smoked Meat in Brooklyn. Who knew?
• Coffee vs. Tea: The Most Precious Ingredient
  Update: I asked this question on Chef’s Feed but received no answer. I’ll have to try elsewhere. Maybe the Food Network.
• The Macaron Project—Part 2
• The Five Second Rule

Business and Technology

• Burger King’s Way Isn’t My Way
• Humanizing Human Resources
• Peak Scheduling Will Make Air Travel Worse
  Update: Scott McCartney in The Wall Street Journal tells us that “Skinnier Seats on More Crowded Planes” are about to make air travel even more unpleasant than the airlines have managed to do so far. Which is to say, pretty darned awful.
  “The lightweight seats—and even some new, skinnier bathrooms—improve airlines’ bottom line, with less fuel burned per passenger and more tickets sold per flight. But passengers can feel the pinch: Some complain about stiff padding and knee-knocking issues, and liken flying in the new seat to squeezing next to strangers on a crowded park bench.”
  Great. There’s nothing like flying on a park bench from Boston to San Francisco. Read it and weep.

Graphic by Alberto Cervantes / The Wall Street Journal

• Bitnorth: The Conference with a Difference
  Update: Alistair Croll has published a recap of September’s Bitnorth Conference on his Solve for Interesting blog. Check it out and you can see a picture of me presenting to the group on Boston’s Great Molasses Flood.
• The Robot Economy
• H1-B Visas, Youth, and Critical Thinking
  Update: In “Companies Find Out the Hard Way It’s Illegal to Pay $1.21 an Hour in America” Alexander C. Kaufman explains in The Huffington Post what companies would really like to do despite all their happy/slappy PR to the contrary. But they can’t. Thank goodness.
  Sometimes those “job-killing regulations” make sure that the people who have jobs actually get paid a living wage—even if they’re brought in from another country expressly to work for peanuts.

Lifestyle and Culture

• Ray Rice: Failure Isn’t “Getting Knocked Down”
• Mundanes vs. Fantastics: Which Are You?
• Resurgence of Train Travel
• Two Art Museums in Connecticut
• Building a Life List of Art Museums
  Update: Since this went up, my friend Alane reminded me of the The Addison Gallery of Art at Phillips Andover Academy in Andover MA so now the list comes to 32 museums.
• Halloween Should Be Kids’ Night Out
• Don’t Be That Guy—Women Don’t Like It
  Update: Although this post went up in July, Street Harassment has jumped back in the news. Amanda Hess wrote in @Slate on “A Hidden Camera Reveals How Women Are Constantly Harassed on the Street.”  The article and the video were picked up by major network outlets so you may have seen this story on the evening news.
  CBS This Morning did a segment on “Catcall Experiment: Hidden Camera Captures Street Harassment.”  They interviewed the actress who walked through the city with microphones in her hands while a hidden camera recorded the harassment. She has since received rape threats.
  If you’re a guy, please don’t do this.  It’s not a compliment. And we don’t care if you like our hair, our clothes, or our bodies. We definitely don’t care what you would like to do with them—especially when those “compliments” quickly turn to rape threats.

The crew of Fury

Movies and TV

• Gone Girl Gets Top Box Office
• The Maze Runner and Five YA Dystopian Themes
• Fury: The Movie with the Thousand-Yard Stare
  Update: This article from by Jeremy Hsu in Discover tells us how “Good Enough Tanks Won WWII.” One can argue the morality of putting a large volume of inferior tanks into the field to win by sheer numbers, even though you know most of the crews will be killed. But it’s a strategy that worked.