October 2002 Issue

Restaurants

Nine Zero's restaurant, Spire, aims to impress. But is the ethereal luxury worth the lofty prices?

Spire 90 Tremont Street, Boston 617-867-0707 Chef: Jeffrey Everts Spire wants to be something Boston doesn't have yet. Just what, might be hazy. It certainly […]

Boston has always loved its beer. This month, the party really begins.

A highly capricious poll I conducted recently on the meaning of Oktoberfest yielded the following answers from contemporaries: a “theme” party with people dressed like […]

Other

The Fall of My Memory

Ah, fall, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as Keats put it before heading off to Rome to cough his life out in a pensione […]

Love and Hate

I know that it's considered beautiful. I've even considered it beautiful myself sometimes. I know that it brings in millions of leaf-peeping dollars to New […]

Out of Season

Unless you've seen it year after year, the arrival of the autumn forest is one of those unimaginable events, as weird as the nice neighbor […]

Traces of Gold

An afternoon in early November and I was sawing beech and ash logs into 18-inch billets, then splitting them with a maul. I'd been at […]

Where I Live

Now and again, the earth begins to desire rest. And in the weeks of autumn, especially, it shows its disposition to calm, to what feels […]

Exploitation. Coercion. Poverty wages. New England has its own Grapes of Wrath, and it's happening now. Inside the hidden world of the migrant farm workers who put food on your table.

You've seen these images before. In Steinbeck novels, Dust Bowl documentaries, Dorothea Lange photographs. School buses rattling through the late afternoon heat, kicking up barn-sized […]

Think the Massachusetts media shapes the gubernatorial election? Here’s how the candidates manipulate the media.

When Steve Grossman pulled the plug on his campaign during the summer, well before last month’s primary election for governor, there was blame enough to […]

Corporate scandals have turned America against Wall Street. Could Boston's all-important mutual fund industry be next?

Dan Geraci sits in his 18th-floor corner office in the heart of the Financial District, looking every bit the part of a successful CEO in […]

Every night — and every October, damn it — Fenway Park closes down. But it's not empty.

Eighty-one days out of each year, Fenway Park becomes a small city of 34,000. Red Sox fans, of course, always hope for 9 or 10 […]

She was a vibrant, young innocent. He was a sexual predator unleashed by the state. When Alexandra Zapp stopped one night at a highway rest area, Paul Leahy was ready to explode.

That's the thing about time bombs. You never know when they'll go off. Alexandra “Ally” Zapp was always up for an adventure. And this night […]

Don't need a lawyer? You will — if not to defend you, then to help you buy a house, write a will, or start a business. Here are this town's best — and worst.

Wyoming has its Gerry Spence; Los Angeles, its Johnnie Cochran. But Boston is the indisputable birthplace of the Celebrity Lawyer. F. Lee Bailey. Alan Dershowitz. […]