But first, here’s what else is going on: Good morning. Today we’re explaining the mixed legacy Pope Francis leaves behind on the church’s problem of sexual abuse by clergy. Send questions or suggestions to the Starting Point team at [email protected]. If you’d like the newsletter sent to your inbox, sign up here. Pope Francis, who died yesterday at 88, never visited Boston. But he was a presence in the city throughout his 12-year papacy in part because of how he approached the problem of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy —...

The ADL, which began tracking antisemitic activity in 1979, said 2024 marked the fifth year in a row that such incidents increased and broke the previous record for the region. The group said New England has seen a 213-percent increase in antisemitic incidents since 2022. Antisemitic incidents continued to occur at record numbers in New England last year, following a dramatic spike in 2023 in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League. In 2024, a total of 638 incidents...

It was in the middle of lockdown in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when Brian Cauti purchased a Detroit-style pizza pan. While he pressed his fingertips down into the dough to remove large air bubbles during those first few pies, Cauti never thought it would become a full-fledged business. A touring musician for nearly two decades, he had a job working as an audio engineer for MIT at the time. But after posting a few pictures of his new hobby on Instagram , a friend reached out and...

So has “Eileen,” who joins the Love Letters podcast to tell a story about how aging changed the course of her relationships for the better. This is a story about how an evolving older body … isn’t so bad. Sometimes the best love stories come later. Join Meredith and Eileen for a story about marriage, divorce, droughts, long-distance dating, and happiness in unexpected places. After the episode, call Love Letters and leave your thoughts or a question. The number is 401-484-0590. Get Meredith’s newsletter for behind-the-scenes information about the column,...

826 Boston, which offers free writing and tutoring programs to 3,700 students at its Roxbury headquarters and inside six Boston Public Schools, had five days to decide whether to change its mission or withdraw its application. The grant — which the nonprofit has received annually for more than a decade — pays for 11 tutors. On Feb. 14, the agency overseeing the Boston nonprofit’s federal grants flagged an annual application from 826 as problematic for featuring the words: “diversity, equity, and DEI.” New rules from the Trump administration required grant...

She was visiting from Canada with her daughter and granddaughter on a recent weekday. They elected to wait for the elevator to take them up to Atlantic Avenue. Many other Blue Line riders did the same, including nannies with small children in tow on their way to the New England Aquarium. “I don’t wanna do them,” said Taylor, who has problems with her knees. After walking through the turnstile at Aquarium Station, 85-year-old Joan Taylor glanced up at the seemingly never-ending flight of stairs, and the neighboring defunct escalators cordoned...

There is no such thing as a perfect Boston Marathon. Clear skies, a cool breeze. History celebrated, history made. The clanging cowbells, the hollering college kids, and the boisterous crowds at their loudest and proudest. It was a day to make the most of their meteorological good luck (temperatures hit the low 60s) for the estimated more than half million who cheered the 30,000 runners on, at the 129th Boston Marathon. It was a day of firsts. Kenya’s Sharon Lokedi obliterated the record for fastest time among the women’s elite...

Bernstein came to HBR in 2011 as a top editor after a long media career in New York, Washington, and San Francisco and then working on “thought leadership” for consultancy Booz Allen and then for Manpower , the staffing and recruitment firm. In the latter role, she noticed that top executives all had copies of Harvard Business Review on coffee tables in their offices. Impressed by HBR’s influence, she started subscribing (though she confesses to borrowing ideas from HBR for years before that point). So when she got the call...

But the NLRB came down on the side of the clinicians. It found that most of the contested locations — spanning practices from Downtown Boston to Revere to Norwood — were not part of acute-care hospitals and therefore should be represented in the bargaining unit. The board also found that handful of facilities adjoining MGB’s acute-care hospitals were eligible to be included under “extraordinary circumstances.” The health system, the state’s largest, had tried to pare down the size of the bargaining unit vying to join the Doctors Council, an affiliate...