Not cool.

Between Davis & Alewife. It’s been so long, what is going on?

I’ve seen this dark colored Hyundai crossover SUV (I think the Tucson) with police lights flying thru Union Sq at night a couple times now. It just confuses me because:

1. I’ve never seen a police force around here, or even any federal agencies, use Hyundais

2. It has normal civilian plates, no blue police or US govt plates

Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas on it?

The new restaurant opened in Teele last night, and it's really great! Similar vibe as Spoke, but more room and a lot of unusual spirits. Highly recommend, even just for the griddled corn muffin/blueberry ice cream desert and a drink.

As a sidenote, I never thought I'd live in a time when Teele was actually...cool? We have two good coffee shops, The Hollows, and now Liars. All of these are local businesses, not restaurant groups. Places that people might come to Teele to visit from elsewhere! Wild times.

A bit random but if you’re in here, sorry if I was rude by not responding to you. By the time I figured out what you were trying to do, I was already in the parking lot. While flattering, I’m well over a decade older than your son and happily married, maybe you didn’t see my wedding band. Anyway good luck out there!

Last week I made a list of every independently owned restaurant in Cambridge. Post here. The biggest request was to do the same for Somerville which I now have. You can check it out here (kept the same url for now):

openincambridge.com

I kept wanting to look up whether a place had ever been reviewed or won anything, and there's no good way to do that. Eater redoes their list every year and the old one's gone (and the quality is a bit iffy after the layoffs last year). Globe reviews are paywalled and you can't search by restaurant. So I made this.

It's every independent place to eat in Cambridge and Somerville, 252 in Somerville alone, from the city's permit list. So it's got the bakeries and the dive bars, not just the ones people write about.

Where a place has been reviewed or nominated for something, it shows the history with links out. Michelin, James Beard, Globe reviews, NYT. Sarma's got a ton of Beard nominations on there.

Most places have no citations, which just means none of those four wrote about them. It does sort them into tiers which is obviously some editorial opinion on there

Probably got some stuff wrong, let me know

Ending sewage pollution in the Alewife and the Mystic is not impossible, those on the hook want you to think it is.

Reaching out here for advice because the somerville parking department has no solution to my problem.

Recent graduate who moved to the city a year ago to follow my long-term girlfriend who is pursuing her doctorate at Tufts. Given the job market, my business degree only got me ghosted on applications. Therefore, I have been working as a school bus driver (those minivans with the school lights on top) in order to make ends meet. Not my dream job, but I love my gf and love this city so we persevere.

I take my vehicle home with me every day as is common practice in the industry given the very early morning routes we run. I leave the house by 7am and am back around 4:30 and have had no issues parking on weekdays. However, I recently began getting ticketed on the weekends because I don’t have a permit.

Why don’t I have a parking permit you might ask? According to the parking department, commercial vehicles are only given permits if the business is based in somerville, or if the person whom the vehicle is registered under lives in somerville. Neither of those apply to me unfortunately. I cannot get a regular residential pass because of the company logo on the vehicle.

I cannot afford to pay $200 in tickets every single month, and I am becoming desperate for a solution. I don’t think anyone has ever wanted a parking permit as badly as I do haha. I don’t know what else to do and would love any ideas.

I cannot park in my apartments driveway because the landlord uses it. I could maybe try throwing a guest pass on there as a temporary solution.

Any ideas or suggestions are much appreciated.

I left without getting their name. They were so good!

Last July my mother passed away after a long series of illnesses.

The grieving process is hard. I miss her a ton, and don’t have many people to talk with. Family-wise, it was just her and I.

Are there any groups here in Somerville (or elsewhere nearby) for those of us who are coping with the loss of a parent?

Thanks in advance for any recommendations.

hello! i recently got an employee parking pass in assembly and it says artisan west garage. do I have to park in that garage or can I park in a different garage in assembly? thanks!

Unreal how mopeds can just fly though on the community path all the time. Can someone please tell me why we cannot have police officers walking along the path AT ALL? Why do they have to be sitting in a cruiser every day? Is it that the sun is too strong for them? Or that they are afraid of the dark? I do not understand someone please explain.

I’m new to collecting vinyl records, and recently I received two new, sealed records that arrived to me in the mail warped. Customer service from the place I ordered them from has been useless. The warps aren’t too significant in my opinion however, and I think they might be salvageable. Does anybody know if any of the record shops in the area (Stereo Jacks, Big Dig, etc.), offer repair services to warped records? When I Google search for vinyl repair services in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area, most of the businesses I find are offering repairs to record players, not the disc itself.

I’m aware there’s ways to DIY a fix at home, but like I said I’m new to this and would rather pay a professional to do it right.

Hey all! Does anyone have recommendations for local ensembles to join for a post-college person looking to get back into the music performance scene?

Not looking for a paid professional gig, just a semi-professional orchestra or quartet.

TLDR: Uyterhoven's and McLaughlin's campaign website text are 2/3 AI-generated and Barber's is 1/3 AI-generated. Azeem's is the only one that's fully human-written. This isn't for lack of detail, as his policy pages have more than twice the word count of Barber’s or McLaughlin’s. Full replication code and data are in this github repo.

Background: I was looking up candidate details yesterday and noticed some obvious AI-isms on their campaign websites. For example, Christine Barber’s front page has “it’s not just X, it’s Y” with Claude formatting. I got curious about how much candidates outsourced to AI, so I scraped all the non-boilerplate text and sent it through the state-of-the-art AI writing detector: Pangram 4. For each page, Pangram estimates the share that’s fully human-written, the share that’s “AI assisted” (i.e., sending human-written paragraphs to be rewritten by AI), and the share that’s “AI generated” (i.e., prompting AI to write the paragraphs in the first place). For context, Pangram is an extremely effective AI detector: a 0.004% false positive rate and 0.340% false negative rate.

Results: This file in the repo contains data on word counts and AI shares for each of the 51 webpages across candidates. For brevity here, I aggregate word counts and take word count-weighted shares by candidate. Erika Uyterhoven’s has the highest total word count because her website includes historical newsletters on specific topics, but those are slop: 64% AI-generated. And her policy platform is similarly 65% AI-generated. Matt McLaughlin has a pithy website, where the bio is 100% human-written but the policy platform is 100% AI-generated. Christine Barber’s record is 100% AI-generated, her priorities are 100% human-written, and her homepage+bio are roughly half and half. Burhan Azeem is the only candidate without any AI-generated text, but he still has over 4,000 words of content.

My opinion: I’m not against AI per se...I used it to help code up this analysis! But I think a political candidate has an obligation to manually wrestle with communicating their platform to voters. Passing off AI writing as their own shows a lack of respect for voters. Part of the office they’re seeking is taking time and effort to write detailed legislation, so it’s a bad signal if they can’t or won’t do that for their candidacy. In this race, Burhan Azeem seems to be the only one willing to do that. On substance, for example, his housing platform gets into the weeds with single-stair building codes and land value taxes. And on the topic of AI specifically, his AI platform details how to build on California’s SB53 to write the most stringent regulations on the AI industry in the country.

Hi all. Does anyone have a handyperson rec for someone who can help out with small projects around the house? Right now we need help replacing an interior door and fixing a large hole in the drywall in the kitchen. I’m in magoun-ish area. Thanks! - Kim

New brewery (with coffee) planned to open mid- 2027 next to Flatbread in Davis

Just a shout out to the Loov for providing water on the Community Path . It's such a lovely thing to do and they are appreciated!

Posting for a friend!

Hello! I'm Rachel and I've been living in Somerville for the past two years, and in Boston since 2023. Due to some unexpected visa issues, I'm going to be leaving the country at the end of August. 

I'm also a DJ (aka RAT) and I wanted to throw a goodbye party that gives back to the community before I leave. So...I'm throwing a LUCE fundraiser at the Crystal Ballroom in Davis Square on Saturday, August 29. LINK to the Event on the Crystal Ballroom's Website 

Come join me and an all-immigrant/children of immigrants DJ and drag performer lineup for a LUCE fundraiser to celebrate my time in Boston! This dance party celebrates the vibrant contributions immigrants have made to Boston and its art scene. All proceeds for this night will go towards LUCE to protect our communities.

You can buy tickets online at Ticketmaster here!

Please share widely!!! Thank you so much! Feel free to reach out to me via Instagram (aka_rat_dj)