Illustration by John Ueland

It could be awhile before casinos are actually operating in Massachusetts, but just in case, Lasell College wants to get students ready for the emerging industry opportunities.

Starting in the fall, the school will add a new degree specifically geared towards Resort and Casino Management, strictly based on the “current competition among developers” for gaming licenses to build casino projects in the state. The degree will be the first of its kind, as no other colleges or universities in Massachusetts offer the option to study the field. “The Resort and Casino Management major will allow present and future students to study a field that is about to dramatically increase in Massachusetts. We believe that this additional major will attract student from within and beyond the region,” according to a statement from Lasell’s vice president of public affairs, Jim Ostrow.

The new bachelor of science degree option comes at a time when developers are trying their hardest to win over Bay State residents in three different sections of the state so that they can set up massive gaming sites in various cities and towns under the state’s 2011 expanded gambling law.

In the Boston area alone, three casino moguls are competing to win a bid to open up a gaming resort. Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn made a pitch before residents in Everett this month, eyeing a plot along the Mystic River where he could build a $1.2 billion facility. Meanwhile, the Mayor Tom Menino-supported proposal for a Caesar’s resort lingers in East Boston, and Foxwoods continues to poke its nose in the Milford market. Each proposal has promised to bring thousands of both construction and permanent jobs to each region, not to mention a slew of tourists and customers.

Once the chips fall where they may—and the slot machines start popping up—coeds will be ready to set foot in a gaming complex and roll the dice on a new career.

As part of Newton-based private school’s new major, courses will include studies in Regulatory Legal Security Aspects of Casino Operations, Technology in Casino Operations, Advanced Resort and Casino Management and Legal Issues and Ethics in the Hospitality Industry.

The post Lasell College Wants to Teach Students How to Run a Casino appeared first on Boston Magazine.

Professor Jeffrey Schnapp is an actual Harvard Dante scholar who probably never expected someone might twist his career into a mystery/thriller, so we called him up to chat about what happens when your life gets Dan Brown’ed and find out the extent to which his own life resembles a bestselling thriller. (Spoiler alert: Not much.)

So how familiar are you with your fictional Harvard colleague Robert Langdon?

Not through direct experience, but the books are so much part of the pop culture air we breathe that it’s hard not to hear about them, particularly given that I’m an Italianist.

Brown’s protagonist Langdon is familiar with Dante and The Inferno mostly because of the Renaissance art the poem inspired, so, like in The DaVinci Code, many of the clues he has to decipher involve artwork. But you’re more interested in the text of the Divine Comedy itself, right? 

Well, I’ve been since the beginning of my career as a medievalist very interested in the very tight coupling between visual culture and textual culture. In fact, the manuscripts of Dante’s own era are really— we would call them multimedia works of art in the sense that they very intensively weave together language-based forms of artistic practice with all sorts of visual intervention.

Writers were fascinated by the notion of magic words or anagrams or integrating visual tricks or tools or techniques into forms of literary expression. Dante most famously in a couple of places in The Purgatory uses anagram type structures for instance that are encoded secondary messages in the poem itself. That’s not an unusual practice.

Wait embedded visual codes … you’re making Dante sound a lot like Dan Brown.            

Dante is maybe the first author in the western canon to insist on the active role of his readers to seek out clues and to read between the lines. In Dante’s time it was still by far the dominant convention to treat readers as if they were in a live audience, but Dante alters that pattern in the Comedy and very specifically calls on his readers as readers to perform interpretive actions that include those acts of decipherment.

Wherever Dante creates a puzzle, it’s not an easy puzzle. In the scholarly community sometimes referred to as Dantologists—kind of a horrible word, but there it is—those puzzles are favorite topics of analysis. I’ll give you a couple examples because they’re kind of to the point and maybe they’re missed opportunities for a future Dan Brown to take up. There’s an anagram in Canto 19, a famous prophecy that’s decrying the decline of the royal houses throughout Europe and the general feeling of political crisis that Dante attributed to his own time. We have nine tercets where we have the letters of the word lue (or lve in Roman letters) [appearing at the beginning of each line] and that is the word for pestilence or plague. If Brown were playing with this text you’d think he’d want to have some fun with things like that.

Wait… I don’t remember that appearing in the book, which seems like a missed opportunity for Brown because his plot is very much focused [mild spoiler alerts ahead so skip ahead if you must] on plague and the threat that one will be released into modern society to address the problem of overpopulation.

In each of the cases, it sounds like there’s a kind of distortion that’s happened, or an interpretation. Dante was in an era when there were actual plagues. Certainly a direct experience of the plague was a feature of 13th and 14th century life and there were certainly deep fears. But what dominates rather than the naturalistic medical notion of the plague is really moral plagues that plague him, so to speak. It’s a moral malady that interests Dante first and foremost.

On the question of overpopulation, there Brown is drawing from something that’s present in the Paradiso. It is one of the embracing themes of the poem as a whole— Dante wrote The Divine Comedy largely as an act of protest or revenge you might say against the city of his birth, Florence, that exiled him unjustly in 1304. Right at the center of the Paradiso, Dante the Pilgrim meets his great, great grandfather who was a crusader according to the poem and traces a history of the city of Florence in which he essentially tells the story of how Florence went from becoming a kind of paradise on earth to becoming a hell on earth … And it’s quite, I think, explicit in the description of the Florence of today that overpopulation is linked to this theme of the mixing of social classes. I think the notion of overpopulation is certainly there but again with a more moralizing cast.

So this is all fascinating, but it doesn’t sound like your life is nearly as suited as Professor Langdon’s to a thriller novel.

Well, it would not be an understatement to say that if any Dante scholar like myself or for that matter any medievalist was able to track down an autographed manuscript or any page of a manuscript [of Dante's work] they would probably give up a limb, because we don’t have any examples of Dante’s own writing. So I’ve gone on many wild goose chases trying to look at manuscripts that were suspects, but I wouldn’t say that it quite rises to the level of life and death struggles.

So you’ve never woken up in a hospital bed in Florence with a gunshot wound and no memory of how you left Cambridge?

Not as a result of my philological efforts, no … I’ve gotten myself into other tight squeezes but not as a result of my work as a medievalist.

What was the reaction when you and your colleagues learned that Dante was about to get the Dan Brown treatment? Eye rolls? Excitement?

That announcement came just at the moment when there was when the conversation about MOOCs [massive online open courses] was exploding, and so it did not just raise eyebrows but got the curiosity of people who are in the community of teaching traditional lecture courses — and I’m one of them. I teach a Dante course every year at Harvard. You see these enrollments of 100,000 people taking artificial intelligence or robotics, so the notion of teaching a Dante course to these legions of Dan Brown readers inspired to find out more about The Inferno was a prospect that the Dante community at least looked at with curiosity.

The anecdote I would add to that is literally within about two hours of the announcement that Inferno would come out three or four months later, I received two inquiries from literary agents asking if I had anything in the can, which I’m sorry to say I didn’t. I hadn’t prepared! They then asked if I could lead them to somebody in the community of experts who might be ready to quickly dash off a piggy-back book, or a companion guide. I haven’t seen any such literary artifacts so I suspect they were unable to turn around a quick book.

The post Q&A: A Real Harvard Dante Scholar Talks Dan Brown’s New Book appeared first on Boston Magazine.

Filming a movie photo via Shutterstock.com

Boston—and Massachusetts as a whole—have become a hotbed for making everything from blockbuster films to independent movies, and the Motion Picture Association of America is giving the Bay State a big incentive to keep the cameras rolling.

In findings from a report highlighting the beneficial economic impact of the Massachusetts Film Tax Program released by the association this week, officials said the state generated $375 million in total economic output through the $38 million in tax incentives awarded to the film industry in 2011, or around $10 in local spending for every $1 awarded to moviemakers through the program.

The study claimed that from all of the Jennifer Lawrence sightings, the Ben Affleck appearances, and the Bradley Cooper cameos, the tax breaks that brought the stars to the state led to the creation of 2,220 full-time equivalent jobs across all industries in Massachusetts in 2011.

“[The] study reconfirms that incentivizing productions creates jobs and generates enormous economic return for local and state economies,” said MPAA Chairman and CEO Senator Chris Dodd. “Massachusetts is the latest example of a state that is benefiting tremendously from a thriving local film industry. The steady stream of Massachusetts productions means more jobs for entertainment industry workers.”

The study, titled “Economic Impacts of the Massachusetts Film Tax Incentive Program,” found that since the tax breaks came to the state in 2006, total production employment has increased by 46-percent, from 1,630 jobs in 2006 to 2,380 jobs in five years later.

The study also noted that, “upon its completion, the construction of New England Studios will have supported 440 full-time equivalent jobs across all industries, generating $35.6 million in personal income and $62.3 in economic output for the Commonwealth.”

In a report released by the state’s Department of Revenue in March, which highlighted the tax incentive program, officials said “not all production spending benefits the Massachusetts economy” or its residents, however, and some spending “‘leaks’ out of the Commonwealth’s economy if spent on imports of goods or services, or employment of non-residents,” the report said.

Information in the DOR’s findings showed that less than 40 percent of the millions spent in the state actually went back to local filmmakers and businesses, and Hollywood honchos made the most gains. The findings came out two months after Governor Deval Patrick recommended a capped budget for the incentives, which he called “inflated bonuses” given to top brass actors.

One thing the report failed to recognize, however, was the “impact of potential increased economic activity” resulting from “greater exposure of the Commonwealth through films and other productions that are made in Massachusetts,” along with the fact that having a few famous faces floating around the city for a few months “might be tantamount to advertising.”

The post Study: Film Tax Created Thousands of Jobs, Millions in Economic Output appeared first on Boston Magazine.

In a recent blog post on the City of Somerville’s Archives page, employees posted a letter written to the Board of Rail Road Commissioners by former Mayor Charles Burns, bemoaning the overly crowded terminal at “Sullivan Square,” which locals have come to know as Sullivan Station along the Orange Line.

The letter begged the board to address the fact that riders couldn’t find a seat to relax in during the “rush hour” times in both the morning and evening commutes. Burns was a former Somerville Aldermen, and the 15th mayor of the city.

While the problem still exists for some, as the MBTA has continuously hit record numbers of riders over the course of the last year, the archivists write that “transit issues 100 years ago looked a little different,” since the current battle between board members and elected officials is more focused on budgetary problems and funding.

What’s also interesting in the letter is the mayor’s reference to “protests” filed by constituents. Even today, hundreds of people continue to gather and call for changes to the T’s service by gathering in large crowds outside of the State House, and in the Transportation Building in Downtown Boston.

The archived letter is so old that it clearly states “gentlemen” when the mayor addresses the board, indicating it was a time when women likely didn’t have the option of being part of the public process. And while the rights of people have come a long way, it seems the habits of riders have not.

Here is the letter, written in 1913, around 100 years ago to date:

Photo via Somerville Archives

The post People Have Complained About the MBTA for At Least 100 Years appeared first on Boston Magazine.

Later today Rob Consalvo fires his salvo in this battle. I have learned that he will announce that local legend Tad Devine, among others, is joining his team.

“It’s a great opportunity to work in an exciting race,” Devine tells me. “These Boston mayoral races seem to come along once in a generation.”

Devine, proud son of Providence, R.I., has been an advisor to the stars, including Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry. (Yes, yes, I realize that none of them became President. It’s still a BFD.)

Devine and his consulting partner Mark Longabaugh will be senior advisors to the Consalvo campaign. Jeff Knochin, a young BC alum late of the Elizabeth Warren and Suzanne Bump campaigns, will be named field director, and out-of-staters LA Harris & Associates will be the finance director.

Just yesterday, Devine and Longabaugh’s underdog candidate for mayor in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Eric Papenfuse, won his Democratic primary, essentially guaranteeing his election.

Devine says he was impressed in meetings with Consalvo over the past month. He says that along with the ground game, voter contacts, and energizing of Consalvo’s voting base, the campaign will use mass communications and media — probably targeted cable television ads — as well as social media.

And he disputes the common perception that Consalvo lacks a broad vision for the city, that voters might be looking for in their next mayor. “I think people want a mayor who will do the principle job of the office — take care of the city,” Devine says. “People want mayors to work on the problems that affect their lives. To me, that is a vision. That is a real important vision.”

The post Rob Consalvo Gets The Big Guns appeared first on Boston Magazine.

Elizabeth Warren has turned in another dramatic Banking Committee hearing performance by aggressively questioning an Obama Administration official—this time newly minted Treasury Secretary Jack Lew—in public. This is becoming something of a trademark move for Warren, who has, at this point, sent enough videos of Senate panel hearings viral, she threatens to turn CSPAN  3 into Buzzfeed.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew appeared at a Senate banking committee hearing on Tuesday and Warren questioned him on whether it’s time to cap the size of the banks deemed “too big to fail” during the 2008 financial crisis. She began by pointing out that these institutions have only grown in size since 2008. “How big do the biggest banks have to get before we consider breaking them up? Do they have to double in size? Triple in size? Quadruple in size?” Lew cautioned against implementing any measures before the Dodd-Frank financial reform law is fully enacted, but agreed, as did Ben Bernanke when she questioned him on the same issue, that the problem of “too big to fail” hadn’t been resolved.

As we said, this is by no means the first time Warren has gotten aggressive with officials from her own party. She’s used Banking Committee hearings to question Bernanke, Treasury and Comptroller employees, an SEC nominee … she’s accused Attorney General Eric Holder of taking an approach to financial institutions she calls “too big for trial.” It’d all be a bit brazen for a new Senator if Warren’s celebrity didn’t give her an independent power base of sorts … the one that gleefully sends her soundbites viral whenever they appear online. As David Bernstein wrote in the Boston Phoenix:

This is not the head-down, limelight-avoiding playbook typically followed by Senate freshmen — especially celebrities, such as Hillary Clinton in 2001 or Barack Obama in 2005.

In fact, it is the kind of behavior that would get a lot of new lawmakers smacked down hard, or marginalized into ineffectiveness….

But Warren has an independence and authority that frees her to be outspoken without getting alienated. She can embarrass the Barack Obama administration for failing to send bankers to jail without fear.

File this away as further evidence.

The post Elizabeth Warren Questions Treasury Secretary Jack Lew appeared first on Boston Magazine.

Photo via HubSpot

If you don’t already have a friend who is a software developer, it’s time to start looking for one. Cambridge-based HubSpot announced this week that it is willing to pay $30,000—triple what it usually pays—to anyone that helps them recruit, as they put it, “awesome” talent for their company.

In a blog post called “Refer a Software Developer,” HubSpot is asking people to play “matchmaker” and refer a developer that will do such a good job as an employee that it will lead to “heart-pounding, chest-thumping, breathless love.”

The person who successfully shoots a cupid-like arrow into the company’s heart by connecting them with a supreme software developer will get “a big, fat check for $30,000” for their efforts. Of course, there is a catch, however. The “friend” that is introduced to HubSpot for the position has to hold it down for at least 120 days. After that, the person behind the referral gets paid. In addition to the bonus for their referring friend, all HubSpot employees receive tuition reimbursement and unlimited vacation time.

Katie Burke, a media relations specialist for the company, says the offer goes out to anyone, not just company employees, and there are roughly 15 spots available, meaning there is more than one opportunity to reap the rewards. “It can really be anyone, but the people you refer you have to actually know,” she says. “People can’t just be scraping the Internet to find folks.”

HubSpot says they are looking for somebody that will “push their own projects forward” and likes to “make their own vacation schedules” by pushing out code all day long while at work, freeing up their time later. “Our one overriding rule is ‘use good judgment,’ the company wrote. ”Our goal is to build the best engineering team in the world, so we view the $30,000 bonus as a remarkable way to get the best and brightest referrals for developer talent from around the world,” says HubSpot’s Chief Product Officer, David Cancel. “To us, this is an investment in our software, in our team, and in our customers because finding top engineers and developers means that we’ll solve even more problems on behalf of the customer every day here at HubSpot.”

Here are some other requirements for potential recruits. Rhose interested in going after the money need to submit their referrals by July 31, and they can’t recommend themselves:

Love Shipping Code: The pace we maintain on the product team is incredibly high. We deploy code more than 100 times every day, and that’s just on an average day.

Love Big Projects: Our team is fully empowered to solve for the needs of our customers, so you don’t have to wade through red tape or permission slips to get things done. We just figure out what’s the right thing to do, and then we do it.

The post HubSpot Will Pay You $30k For Referring ‘Awesome’ Software Developers appeared first on Boston Magazine.

After I contacted WRKO program director Jason Wolfe on Tuesday to ask about it, however, all parties involved say today that there is no partnership. It appears that Robichaud may have gone off a little half-cocked.

The announcement, which I obtained earlier this week, implies that Cooksey would be paid to produce radio ads for Robichaud clients:

Holly Robichaud, founder of Tuesday Associates, is pleased to announce a partnership with Bill Cooksey! …

Tuesday Associates will now be offering as one of our services the writing and producing of radio ads.
During the last campaign cycle Cooksey produced some standout ads for legislative candidates. We now plan to offer these services to all Republican candidates. They will be both high quality and reasonably priced …

If you want an ad that will produce results, then please call us …

“We’re not going to do it,” Robichaud told me this morning. “You made some phone calls, and it turns out that Cooksey had a contractual obligation and won’t be able to do it.”

In fact, as Cooksey and Wolfe describe it, there was no deal to call off.

It seems that at some point in the past, Cooksey did Robichaud a favor by recording an ad that her client was placing on the station; he says he never wrote or produced anything, nor agreed to do so in the future. “I hit record, the candidate reads the spot, I put it into the system,” he says. “I’ve never done any spots for her.”

Although he may have agreed informally to do the same if she was in a pinch again in the future, he says there was no partnership and no payment.

“There’s no business association or partnership between Bill and Holly’s company. She’s a guest from time to time on WRKO, but that’s the extent of his relationship with her,” Wolfe says.

The post Holly Robichaud Announces Nonexistent Deal With WRKO’s Bill Cooksey appeared first on Boston Magazine.

Even before Murray announced he wouldn’t run, his gubernatorial hopes seemed complicated by his connection to the Chelsea Housing Authority scandal and a strange late-night, high-speed car accident. WBZ reports that Murray’s new gig as head of the Worcester Chamber of Commerce will pay him over $200,000 a year. Nice work if you can get it.

The post Lt. Gov. Tim Murray Is Resigning Early appeared first on Boston Magazine.

Update 12:29 p.m.: The Boston Globe reports that the FBI was questioning Todashev in connection with the triple murder of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friends in Waltham on Sept. 11, 2011, a crime for which investigators have lately also begun to suspect Tamerlan.

Update 11:35 a.m.: The FBI has expanded on its initial statement to say that two Massachusetts State Police troopers were with the FBI special agent when he shot the suspect, apparently because the suspect started to get violent:

The agent, two Massachusetts State Police troopers, and other law enforcement personnel were interviewing an individual in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation when a violent confrontation was initiated by the individual. During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries.

Original: An FBI special agent shot and killed an acquaintance of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Orlando early Wednesday morning apparently while interviewing him in connection with the Boston Marathon attacks.

A friend whom the FBI also questioned identified the man as Ibragim Todashev, 27, an MMA fighter and a fellow Chechan Muslim who knew Tsarnaev when he lived in Boston. Details on the confrontation between Todashev and the FBI agent are slim. The FBI itself only confirmed that the agent “encountered the suspect while conducting official duties,” and that “The suspect is deceased. We do not have any further details at this time.” But an anonymous law enforcement official told ABC News that, “There was some sort of aggressive movement that led the FBI agent to believe he was under threat and he opened fire.”

Todashev’s friend, Khusen Taramov, spoke to several local news stations Wednesday, saying the FBI had questioned him and Todashev for three hours on Tuesday and that the FBI had followed both of them more than once since the marathon bombing. The questioning seems like part of the FBI’s broader effort to track down other Chechan immigrants who knew the Tsarnaevs to test the theory that they grew radical on their own and without influence from fellow U.S. residents.

The post An FBI Agent Shot and Killed a Tamerlan Tsarnaev Acquaintance appeared first on Boston Magazine.