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Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard?

Simone Migliori — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:00:49 +0000

Photo by Ken Richardson

Steven Pinker is one of the most famous—and divisive—academics in America. A cognitive psychologist at Harvard, he’s spent five decades writing about how we think, picking fights with the left, and wading into culture wars that most professors avoid. Bill Gates calls him a favorite writer. His critics call him a cover for racists. He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories. He’s also, right now, one of the loudest voices pushing Harvard to change.

My introduction to him, though, was surprisingly gentle.

The past few years, Pinker has turned his attention to what’s happening at Harvard itself—a lack of academic freedom, the monoculture he sees taking over, and the groupthink undermining research and education. What first caught my eye was something he wrote for the Boston Globe in 2024, on how Harvard had been handling student protests over the war in Gaza. Pinker wrote about teaching Sunday school as a young man, leading students through moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer. Now, he said, he found himself “wishing that my august institution taught its students this skill.”

Which demands a pointed question: If Harvard isn’t teaching students to think through hard problems for themselves, what, exactly, is the mission of the university?

This struck me as bold, since Pinker draws a paycheck from Harvard, but even more to the point, it seemed quite reasonable. And calm. Also, right at the heart of what we need to figure out about higher education.

It gets immediately complicated, however, given that a lot of people, including President Donald Trump, have been asking the same questions in a much harsher way. Trump has had a great deal to say about our elite universities, especially Harvard, and none of it is good. This has put Pinker in a bind between the woke and Trump. Between indoctrination from the left and whatever the Trump administration is. So Pinker has written not just about the monoculture at Harvard, but, lately, about the fallout if the Trump administration is able to drastically cut the school’s federal funding.

Pinker has fashioned himself as a public intellectual—someone who takes on big issues and demands that we do, too. It’s tricky territory. Of course, he could make a left turn and simply shut up. But speaking out, having his say, is what he does and wants to do, and—though he can be shy about admitting it—enjoys doing.

Pinker is taking this moment on not by jumping up and down, but in the same clear-as-a-bell way I first discovered—by getting right to the problem. In “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” which ran in the New York Times last May, he argued that universities are obsessed with implicit racism and sexism but blind to a bigger problem: “my-side bias,” the tendency to believe whatever our political tribe believes. Universities, he wrote, should expect faculty to “leave their politics at the classroom door.” To that end, he even suggested “a bit of D.E.I. for conservatives.”

But Pinker’s critics—and there are many, especially in academia—argue that he’s guilty of exactly what he decries: my-side bias, ideological blinders, a willingness to engage with far-right figures in ways that give them legitimacy. He says he doesn’t set out to spark controversy—though he seems to welcome it when it comes. But it’s a double-edged sword in a dangerous time: Pinker has leaped into the fray of what ails Harvard—and higher education in general—starting with his own questions about our universities: What are they doing? Who are they for? Where are they going?

But there’s another question, one that goes to the core of what he’s all about, as Pinker tries to change the culture at Harvard: Is he the right guy for the job?

Something large was always at play for Pinker, who grew up in a Jewish community in Montreal. His kindergarten teacher told his mother he was the smartest kid she ever taught. His parents had bought a set of the World Book Encyclopedia—Pinker as a young boy devoured them. He loved science and math. His mother was a big reader, someone who knew everything. He asked her, at 17, “How do you get a job in a think tank?” She suggested he become a psychiatrist, but Pinker wasn’t interested in going to medical school. A college professor, then; this, they could agree on. They’d drive to McGill University together—Pinker lived at home all through college, “in the Canadian style,” he says—as his mother was working on a master’s in education. She brought home books on psycholinguistics that triggered an early interest—it was the era of Noam Chomsky getting famous in the revolution of cognitive science—and in his office in Cambridge, Pinker turns to look up at his books: “In fact, I have some on my shelves. I know exactly which ones they are.” Never mind that it was also the era of unemployed Ph.D.s; Pinker knew what he wanted. It took him all of three years to get a doctorate at Harvard in experimental psychology after graduating from McGill. He moves fast.

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch. His famously spectacular curly hair has been trimmed down a bit, though it’s still spectacular. He’s smaller than I anticipated, and I realize that he’s generally so good-looking in photographs that I was expecting a commanding presence, but that’s not Pinker’s style. He’s eager, almost, to please—and a little edgy. He shifts often in his chair as we talk for three and a half hours—as if he can’t quite get comfortable; Pinker, 71, sprained a tendon in his hip two years ago, which ended his running, but he’s still an avid bicyclist. In his book How the Mind Works, he wrote: “Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless…ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake.… But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.” His third wife, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, is a philosopher and novelist. He’s a professed liberal Democrat, though Pinker often gets accused of being a closet conservative. He takes on, with gusto, whatever I ask.

It quickly becomes obvious that the world comes alive for Pinker when it can be studied, understood, and explained. For a long time, he was mystified about why his father, who’d grown up dirt poor in Montreal after his parents emigrated from Poland in the 1920s, didn’t use his law degree, instead supporting his family by selling clothing in small Quebec towns; Pinker’s father himself never explained why. But then Pinker discovered the research of Thomas Sowell, a conservative economist and social theorist, on how ethnic groups often cultivate particular expertise over time and take it wherever they end up; for Pinker’s father, the Jewish cultural capital of commerce and finance—or, specifically, the garment industry—developed over centuries became the sure thing in order to move on from a childhood so destitute that a neighbor had to knit him mittens to survive a Montreal winter, since his parents couldn’t afford to buy them.

Sowell’s research, Pinker says, “actually helped me understand my own upbringing.” His research pushed against “the dominant mode of explanation that says the only differences among ethnic groups is how they’re treated from the outside, in terms of racism and prejudice. He argued that the traits within a culture matter as well.” With that, Pinker’s father wasn’t a victim of his circumstances, but part of a cultural tradition.

Pinker took his method of understanding, of needing to know and how he needed to know, into cognitive science. The Guardian once wrote of him, “No matter the topic of conversation, he will reach for a wider theory or study to explain it: the universality of facial expressions, the roots of physical attractiveness, the moral awe people feel for Noam Chomsky, why zebras have stripes.”

Pinker found more than a profession—he discovered a method. And the power of his books is in their insistence on going wherever the facts lead. After writing about language for academics, Pinker crossed over to a general audience with The Language Instinct in 1994, which made the case for the biological basis of language and hit big. In The Blank Slate, published in 2002, Pinker argued against a prevailing orthodoxy that we’re born without any innate characteristics, shaped entirely by environment and culture. Instead, he made the case that genetics plays a significant role in how our minds work and who we become. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) detailed the long-term historical decline in violence, and Enlightenment Now (2018) made the case for reason and science creating a world of well-being and possibility foreign to earlier epochs. Those last two got Pinker a lot of heat for putting a sunny spin on the way things are now, especially among left-leaning thinkers who have called him a cheerleader for Western capitalism, blind to the inequalities it produces. And The Blank Slate has gotten Pinker criticized over the idea that biology is destiny, which leads into dangerous territory: racial differences, eugenics, the question of who gets to define human nature and why.

Biology as destiny is not what Pinker seems to be up to in The Blank Slate. In a nutshell, he argues that there are genetic differences between people, and that acknowledging this is not inherently a bad or dangerous thing; rather, it’s something to be understood. When he made this argument nearly 25 years ago, it was highly controversial. It still is.

In The Blank Slate, Pinker had three central beefs with academic orthodoxy. First: that human nature does not exist. Second: that our minds and bodies exist apart from each other. Third: that we are born innately good. Instead, he had come to believe many traits are universally human; that our minds are an information processing system plugged in to the hardware of our brains (“I think that intellectuals are just kind of squirrelly about that,” Pinker says. “They’re squeamish about the idea that the mind is just the activity of the brain.”); and that, while we are quite capable of doing good, it is not the underlying state of humanity. Pinker takes the basic position of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who wrote that the condition of man is a war “of every man against every man.” In other words: The natural state of human beings is guided by self-interest and engaged in an ongoing struggle for power and resources.

Pinker says the book was not meant to stoke controversy, but explore what already existed. “I thought that the moral emotions had crept into the science, distorting the way scientists could do and report their research,” Pinker says. “And so the major goal of the book was to drive a wedge between them, so that if, for example, you thought that there were differences between men and women, that did not imply that you were against equal rights for women or condoning prejudice and harassment of women.”

Pinker’s frustration comes through in The Blank Slate—a sense that we’ve gotten human nature wrong. I read a passage to him from the book:

“The blank slate has also served as a sacred scripture for political and ethical beliefs. According to the doctrine, any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their innate constitution, but from differences in their experiences. Change the experiences—by reforming parenting, education, the media, and social rewards—and you can change the person.”

I say to Pinker: “You’re close to take-no-prisoners territory there, don’t you think?”

“It’s provocative,” he says, and thinks for a moment. “I am after, just relentlessly after, clarity. I just want the idea to be as identifiable, visible, clear, understandable as possible.”

In the preface of The Blank Slate, Pinker quotes Anton Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” I ask him whether that underpins what, when all is said and done, he believes he’s really about.

“I probably should have used that as an epigraph,” he says, pleased that we land on something so direct and simple. “If there’s a kind of moral passion behind my work, that would capture it.”

And now, Pinker says, The Blank Slate feels newly relevant:

“The idea that political and moral equality require sameness, which is one of the fallacies that I tried to expose, has come back with a vengeance in wokeness,” he says. And that winds him up a bit: “The idea that there is no such thing as biological sex, that sex is an arbitrary label assigned at birth, like a first name, or the bad biology that would say sex is a continuum—these are meant as ways to safeguard, but weren’t something I conceived of when writing The Blank Slate. If they were, I would have put them in there.”

“I am after, just relentlessly after, clarity,” says Pinker, shown here in his Cambridge home. / Photo by Ken Richardson

But why take this sort of thing on, given the risk?

The Blank Slate was much praised for opening up the nature-nurture debate—it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, but it also garnered some now-wait-a-minute reviews that sometimes attacked Pinker for oversimplifying things. Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club, a Pulitzer-winning intellectual and cultural history of late-19th- and early-20th-century America, reviewed the book skeptically in the New Yorker. Pinker’s villains, Menand wrote, were “social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists.” His heroes were cognitive scientists and ordinary folks. “I wish I could say that Pinker’s view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this,” Menand wrote.

It isn’t just Pinker’s conclusions that have drawn fire—it’s his method. “By far the nastiest and most aggressive academic responses I have seen come from humanities professors when there are ideas from the sciences that they see as encroaching on their territories,” Pinker told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. “That’s when you get rage and withering condescension.” It’s not hard to find.

Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, reviewed Enlightenment Now for the New Republic, arguing that Pinker’s conclusions were too narrow. “Behind this self-styled posture as a man of evidence and science,” Moyn tells me, “I think he’s a man of faith who won’t confront the evidence that doesn’t go his way. I think there’s so much that he’s sweeping under the carpet that it’s hard not to wonder what could lead him to extrapolate from a few data points to a big theory that’s so simple-minded.”

And Daniel Smail, a Harvard history professor, wrote a withering takedown of The Better Angels of Our Nature for an academic journal, dismissing Pinker’s optimism about civilization as naive. His verdict: “Better Angels is not a work of history. It is best understood as a work of moral and historical theology.”

Pinker, as is his way, calmly rejects the Moyn and Smail appraisals, though he admits this sort of thing makes him angry, and small wonder why: The accusations that Pinker is “a man of faith” or that he was writing “historical theology” strike at the most basic underpinning of his approach: Chasing the facts as he finds them, on the way to making his case for the way things really are. The charge, essentially, is that Pinker is guilty of his own my-side bias. “Those reactions of both Moyn and Smail, I think, are outrageously false,” Pinker says.

Pinker has his defenders in academia, too. David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas, calls Better Angels “extremely accurate. People have criticized that work, and I think unfairly, because it just violates all of our intuitions.” And even Moyn gives Pinker credit for “advancing the public conversation” in writing “accessibly” for a broad audience.

In other words, the debate over Pinker’s work has never really been settled—it’s ongoing, and it’s personal.

This isn’t for the faint-hearted, being a lightning rod, especially given the past decade’s atmosphere. In late 2017, for instance, during a panel discussion at Harvard about free speech, Pinker said, “Political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be—I wouldn’t want to say ‘persuadable,’ but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs. The often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right: Internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way.” Pinker was actually arguing that by shutting down debate, the left was pushing smart, contrarian people toward the alt-right—not because the alt-right was correct, but because it was the only place willing to engage certain questions.

Still, the right had a field day. Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer ran a headline that read, in part: “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” The left hammered Pinker for giving ammunition to extremists, regardless of his intent.

And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.

Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve in 1994, which linked IQ differences among races to genetics, has since cited The Blank Slate to support his views. Last year, Pinker appeared on the Aporia Podcast, an outlet that supports a revival of race science. In 2024, the Guardian reported that one of Aporia’s cofounders, Matthew Frost, once said that he’d been recruiting mainstream writers to give the podcast “legitimacy via association.” Pinker gave them an hour. After the Guardian chastised him for appearing on Aporia, Pinker told the newspaper he only agreed to be interviewed after the outlet “attacked” his views on human progress. He also said he believes it is vital to persuade audiences one disagrees with, which is why he appears in media with diverse political orientations.

Pinker likes to say he manages his “controversy portfolio carefully.” But that means the trouble he might get into—not the trouble he creates for others by lending his credibility to people like Murray, with whom he engages rather than dismisses. Late last year, he and Murray had a back-and-forth in the Wall Street Journal about Murray’s views on “terminal lucidity” proving the existence of the soul; Pinker, ever skeptical of faith, chastised Murray for reaching beyond the data. But the debate itself was the point: Whether Pinker won the argument didn’t really matter—Murray got the platform, a serious intellectual exchange with a Harvard cognitive scientist.

Nicolas Guilhot, a professor of intellectual history at the European University Institute, has long tracked Pinker’s thinking and writing (including a tough review of Enlightenment Now in 2018 for a diplomacy and foreign policy journal). I asked him whether Pinker bears any responsibility for how his work gets used.

“Of course he can’t prevent people from running with his ideas,” Guilhot told me in an email. “But he is at the very least cavalier about what he knows are the possible—and probable—implications of the views he peddles. This is all the more problematic because there are no progressive policies to point to that would latch on to his view of human nature, while there is a plethora of right-wing and reactionary agendas that are based on it. None of this is an accident, and Pinker is very much a participant of the recent restoration of a deterministic idea of ‘nature’ that has seamlessly connected neoliberal projects (of which he is definitely a representative) to reactionary ones.”

I put this to Pinker directly: You insist on following evidence wherever it leads. Do you take any responsibility for who has followed your work—and where they’ve taken it?

“If I have been misleading or unclear in a way that would egg on deplorable actors, I would take responsibility for that,” Pinker says. “But if I express things perfectly clearly—there’s a huge world out there. I can’t take responsibility for how some random person out on Twitter interprets a paper or an interview if there’s no content in the interview that would actually egg on or encourage them. And I can’t boycott every forum whose members hold some opinion that some third party finds repugnant.”

Then, of course, there is Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein collected heavyweight intellectuals, and in terms of funding and gifts seemed to have a particular affinity for Harvard. Pinker attended a few gatherings where he was present, but claims he never liked Epstein.

In 2008, Pinker’s friend and Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz defended Epstein, who had been charged with soliciting prostitution from a minor. Dershowitz had consulted Pinker for help interpreting the wording of a statute concerning the use of the mail to solicit minors to engage in prostitution or sexual activity. For that crime, Epstein pleaded guilty and served 13 months in prison.

Pinker says he doesn’t blame Dershowitz for defending Epstein, nor does he believe he did anything wrong by helping interpret the law. “I believe in the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of legal representation of the accused,” Pinker says. “If I had known then what I know now about the extent of Epstein’s crimes, and that it would be used in his defense, I might have second thoughts.”

But Pinker got an early clue about just who Epstein was, and it didn’t stop him from showing up.

In the Epstein document trove released by the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 430 results mention Pinker—often emails about events Epstein buddies John Brockman, Pinker’s literary agent, and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss wanted Pinker to attend (many emails are included several times). The only one from Pinker himself—to an Epstein assistant in March 2012, four years after the conviction—said he’d be “delighted to meet with him” when Epstein visited Harvard. “I probably shouldn’t have said yes,” Pinker says now, “but I was being polite—he was a donor to Harvard.” (Pinker says they didn’t ultimately meet up.)

In 2014, as part of a project he was working on, Krauss invited Pinker to help organize a conference at Arizona State University on the origins of violence after the publication of Better Angels. At the end of the event, Krauss asked Pinker to allow Epstein to come say hello, Pinker says. Someone snapped a picture, which now lives online.

“I would not have agreed to do anything that was associated with Epstein or branded with him,” Pinker says. “If I was perhaps more assertive, maybe less polite and Canadian, when Krauss said, ‘Will you let Epstein come over to your table and sit down with you?’ I could have said no. Probably I should have said no. I didn’t say no.” He also didn’t say no to organizing a conference largely funded by Epstein.

Pinker dismisses criticism of his connections as guilt by association—whether it’s Murray or Epstein, he insists that proximity isn’t endorsement. But the pattern is visible: years of polite yeses, a willingness to lend his credibility to people and platforms that most academics would avoid. At some point, the accumulation starts to speak for itself.

Which brings us back to Harvard—and whether Pinker is the right person to lead the university out of its current trouble.

Pinker, part of the Council on Academic Freedom that has been shaping policies at Harvard, has both critics and defenders in the world of academia. / Photo by Ken Richardson

The most important piece that Pinker has written about Harvard—and, really, higher education in general—was “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” last year for the New York Times, as the Trump administration’s threats on funding and problems within the university coalesced. It was a cry for sanity and a path forward. He prefaced it with: “I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged.”

Pinker pointed out that he had written “The Trouble With Harvard” for the New Republic back in 2014, which called for an admissions policy based on merit and took on the idea that professors should be engaged in their students’ self-discovery: “Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that’s wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get students to build a self or become a soul.” In 2023, he wrote a five-point plan for the Globe on how Harvard could save itself, and “How I Wish Harvard Taught Students to Talk About Israel,” the piece that first caught my eye, along with others on problems at the school.

In “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” Pinker made the case for proportionality. Yes, Harvard has serious problems—he’d been saying so for years. The appropriate treatment, Pinker argued, was to diagnose which parts need which remedies—not to “cut its carotid and watch it bleed out,” as he believed Trump and his allies were attempting to do. The school’s core mission was at risk, Pinker argued: If there’s fear of asking certain questions, then research is crippled, just as it would be by the government slashing funds to conduct it. And that funding is not a privilege for Harvard, but necessary to help us advance our understanding in any number of big ways.

Pinker ended his piece with a sort of call to arms, quoting physicist David Deutsch: “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.” To cripple the institutions that acquire and transmit knowledge, Pinker wrote, “is a tragic blunder and a crime against future generations.”

But writing op-eds is one thing. Could Pinker actually change anything?

In 2023, Pinker and five copresidents, along with dozens of other Harvard faculty, formed the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, made up now of some 200 members, which regularly challenges university policies and pushes for change. For Pinker and others on the Council, evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven essentially getting driven out of Harvard as a lecturer was a turning point—she had said in an interview in 2021 that the biological definitions of male and female are essential to science, then was summarily accused of transphobia, the fallout of which continued into 2023. “That’s kind of what DEI officers are empowered to do,” Pinker says: “The fact is, there is very little racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia on modern university campuses, especially in a Northeastern elite university like Harvard. So there’s actually nothing to root out—they’re going to have to be increasingly ingenious and energetic in interpreting things as transphobic so that they’ve got something to do.” Hooven had been Pinker’s teaching assistant as a graduate student, and he ended up bringing her back as an associate in his lab at Harvard.

A week before Christmas in 2023, two members of the Harvard Corporation, Paul Finnegan and Tracy Palandjian, asked members of the Council to join them for a private dinner at Bar Enza in Cambridge. It was a shocking invite: The Corporation runs Harvard, and they’re notoriously secretive. “It’s almost like the Politburo-watchers in the era of the Soviet Union,” Pinker says. “But this was at the moment of the university’s deepest crisis.” Then-president Claudine Gay was getting hammered for her handling of demonstrations over the October 7 Hamas attacks on Jews in Israel; she had testified before Congress two weeks earlier, and in early January, she would resign. “In a rare moment of openness, the Corporation was actually soliciting some faculty opinions,” Pinker says. Like a principal calling the mouthiest students down to the office to ask: How do I run this place?

The meeting was cordial, but Pinker and three other Council members were direct: “Large sectors of the country hold Harvard in contempt,” Pinker says he told Finnegan and Palandjian. “This is the Corporation’s problem.”

The meeting warranted an article in the New York Times a couple of days later, which didn’t please the Corporation; Pinker says the Council didn’t reach out to the paper. But he didn’t mind the exposure, writing to his Council colleagues (and sharing the emails with me): “They’re a legitimate target of reporting by the national media—the days when they could run Harvard like a private blue-blood Bostonian club are gone.” And this: “The public has a legitimate interest in knowing what led to this mess, and the Corporation is part of the story. To be honest, they screwed up in picking Claudine, they probably screwed up in keeping her, they screwed up in their plagiarism investigation [of her], including threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit, and they screwed up in their public pronouncements.”

It was clearly go time, with Pinker leading the charge. His involvement and directness have given other faculty the courage to take public stands. Eric Maskin, the Nobel-winning economist and a copresident of the Council, puts it this way: “Steve has been effective within the Harvard community in emboldening people who were inclined in that direction not to shut up.” An interesting admission: that a Nobel laureate would think twice about the risk before speaking out.

The Council had only the one direct meeting with the Corporation. But they were just getting started. Pinker and former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier kept writing occasional opinion pieces and worked back channels, especially through private conversations with Alan Garber, the president who replaced Gay; he proved much more open to their initiatives. The Council pushed for applicants to faculty jobs in arts and sciences to no longer be required to write diversity statements, “which pretty clearly,” Pinker says, “eliminated anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar.” The Council also pushed for institutional neutrality on issues that don’t directly affect the university, given how Harvard got into trouble, in particular, for Gay’s waffling rhetoric on demonstrations over the war in Gaza.

Both initiatives were adopted by Harvard.

Within Garber’s first few months as interim president after Gay resigned, he formed a working group on open inquiry and constructive dialogue at Harvard. It’s impossible to say how much the Council’s pressure—the op-eds, the behind-the-scenes meetings with Garber—got the ball rolling, but the working group’s report that October was clear in concluding that the lack of open inquiry is a crisis for higher education.

For Harvard to officially admit that, Flier says, is a big deal, and he is enthused: “Every time I write an article or an op-ed, I wonder ‘Will someone try to cancel me or destroy me now?’” Flier says. “That is less common today because there’s more awareness of this and there’s more opposition to it, and the people who used to do it are more afraid of doing it now. That is a huge change. And unless you lived through it, you wouldn’t see the change.”

Pinker is more cautiously optimistic. “I see green shoots,” he says. In his “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” piece, Pinker wrote, “Young people are shaped by peers more than most people realize.… In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.” What can you do about that? Yet at least both the Corporation and Garber are speaking the Council’s language now, in public statements on academic freedom when Garber’s tenure was extended beyond 2027. “I think he was always on board,” Pinker says, “but he would not have prioritized it if not for our pressure.”

The Council will keep looking into graduate student education on academic freedom, Pinker says (given that many undergrads spend more time being taught by grad students than professors), and intellectual diversity of the faculty (affirmative action for conservatives, as Pinker half-jokingly puts it). They also plan to study—per Pinker’s obsession with data—how universities actually work. “Universities are surprisingly ignorant of how universities work,” he says. Pinker insists he’s gotten no pushback at Harvard for any of his public criticisms, or his push now for change.

But the greatest threat to Harvard, Pinker says, is from the outside: “that the Trump administration will attempt to cripple it using every means at its disposal. That with a compliant Supreme Court, it may not even matter if Harvard has the law on its side, which I think it does.”

It’s tough to predict where that will end, or how open to different points of view the university will really become. But something does feel different. The university is on notice. Pinker and the Council will keep pushing—as if taking a page from the wokeness playbook in keeping everybody on high alert. We’re watching.

Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications.

As always, Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications—the associations, the bad actors who cite his work, the questions about what doors he’s opened and for whom.

Whether that makes him the right person to lead Harvard out of its current troubles is a question the university will have to answer for itself. Pinker, for his part, shows no signs of slowing down. He carries on as if he is certain his work and beliefs deserve whatever airing he decides to give them.

It brings to mind the line Pinker quotes in The Blank Slate, from Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

The question now is whether Pinker applies that same scrutiny to himself and the way he operates. Harvard may be waiting on the answer.

This article was first published in the print edition of the April 2026 issue, with the headline,“Man of Reason.”

The Engagement Ring Is Having an Identity Crisis

Simone Migliori — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:00:07 +0000

Photo illustration by Benjamen Purvis / Getty Images

The old script went like this: A lovestruck fellow would save his paycheck—for months, maybe years—to afford an engagement ring. Or a lucky heir would receive a rare bauble handed down across generations, the same one that glittered at a great-grandmother’s cocktail party.

These were natural diamonds: formed more than a hundred miles beneath the Earth’s surface under intense pressure and heat over billions of years, no two exactly alike, and eventually gleaming behind glass in jewelry cases. Romantic, rare, and—let’s be honest—ruthlessly expensive.

But when Spencer’s Mikaela Smith got engaged, she had something else in mind: a lab-grown diamond. Produced in a controlled setting with less labor and less environmental disruption, the stone has the same chemical and physical properties as a mined diamond, at just a fraction of the cost, and even the most experienced jeweler can’t tell the difference by sight alone.

A salon manager planning a June wedding at the Beauport Hotel in Gloucester, Smith says price was the primary driver for her and her fiancé, a high school English teacher. “We talked about it and just looked at the cost,” she says. “We could get a lot more for the value with a lab diamond.”

Smith worked with Wright Jewelry & Design Company in Hudson to customize a 2-carat, oval lab-grown diamond with side stones. The ring cost around $7,000, she says—far less than a comparable natural version. “I didn’t really care about the heirloom aspect,” Smith says. “What mattered was how it looked. And it was really cool to support a local business and get a custom design.”

A $7,000 stone that passes for a $70,000 one would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Today, it’s transforming the diamond industry, with even local jewelers at the highest end selling pieces made with lab-grown stones. “Lab-grown diamonds tend to resonate because they allow [buyers] to invest in something that’s still certified and has a quality design,” says Alyson Iarrusso, who runs New England–based Cove Fine Jewelry. “It’s really gone from ‘What can I afford?’ to ‘What do I want?’” Which, if you think about it, is a pretty big shift in a business that has always depended on the distance between those two questions.

For many Boston couples, lab-grown is more than just a budget-friendly choice: It’s a way to signal values—sustainability, ethical sourcing, smart spending. As Iarrusso puts it: “People buy lab-grown and are proud: They love the sustainability and the accessibility, and nobody is hiding it.”

Woburn’s Melissa Gutierrez Cronin sought out a lab-grown stone from the South End’s Laura Preshong, known for eco-friendly rings. “I had ethical concerns related to mining,” Cronin says. “We also really like the store we bought it at: It’s a small business, women-owned, and they only sell ethically sourced diamonds. That’s so important to me.”

Cronin says she’s never been asked about her ring’s pedigree. In Boston, “Nobody asks you what kind of stone you have. Even if they did, I wouldn’t mind telling them it’s a lab-grown diamond.” A California native, she’s noticed something about her adopted city: “I think people here are very social-justice-oriented, which is nice.”

Westford’s Kayla Prange—whose 3-carat oval-cut ring from Andover’s Melanie Casey cost just over $5,000—feels similarly. “It’s so freeing to just let go of the whole idea of natural diamonds and get what makes more logical sense,” she says—both from a financial and sustainability perspective. Prange did have to explain the lab-grown concept to a few befuddled family members, but she wasn’t losing any sleep over it. “It’s no surprise that the majority of diamond mines are located in places where people have historically been severely exploited,” she says.

But here’s what the diamond industry would rather you not think too hard about: When a whole generation shrugs off the mythology that made diamonds valuable—the scarcity, the sacrifice, the heirloom permanence—the disruption isn’t the stone. It’s the shrug itself.

You’re not going to find a lab-grown diamond at an antique jewelry store, “but that doesn’t make them less meaningful.”

So the buyers are on board. But what about the people who actually sell the things? Hannah Florman, a custom jeweler with a Newbury Street boutique, sees customers of two schools of thought walk into her store. “I see a lot of couples who are in the health and science fields who are genuinely excited and interested in the lab-grown diamond concept, and also those who are eco-conscious,” she says.

On the other hand, she’s worked with Boston clients concerned about the heirloom quality of their purchase. Natural diamonds, she notes, tend to retain long-term value because they’re tied to the whims of mining and availability. Lab-grown diamonds, which can be produced readily as literal carbon copies, don’t command the same scarcity-driven prices. You’re not going to find a lab-grown diamond at an antique jewelry store, “but that doesn’t make them less meaningful,” Florman says. “It just means they’re better understood as deeply personal objects rather than investments.”

That distinction—personal object versus investment—is the fault line running through every jewelry store in the region.

Anto Aboyan, co-owner of Adamas Fine Jewelry, a luxury jeweler in Newton, admits he was initially skeptical of the trend. Over three decades in the business, Adamas has catered largely to deep-pocketed clients, and natural diamonds accounted for most of the business’s sales. “In the beginning, I really felt that it’s going to be negative. But it really hasn’t been a negative: This is another avenue of selling engagement rings to a certain consumer who generally couldn’t afford a $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 diamond,” he says.

His sister and business partner, Veronica Sagherian, believes the trend is ushering in a more egalitarian era for the jewelry industry. “It’s basically opened up the opportunity for a younger, less affluent person to be able to afford something that would normally be only for a luxury market,” she says.

Natural stones continue to make up about 75 percent of their business, Aboyan estimates. The remaining 25 percent comes from buyers requesting lab-grown diamonds, often in larger sizes or elongated cuts. “If the consumer is asking for lab-grown, then we’ll be in the business of delivering lab-grown,” Aboyan says. “If the [demand] changes and 90 percent want lab, we’ll supply 90 percent lab.”

Boston Diamond Company, meanwhile, began carrying lab-grown diamonds about three years ago, but only after extensive vetting. Founder and CEO Stephanie Binder’s initial hesitation stemmed from quality concerns: Many lab grown diamonds are mass-produced and, despite strong certificate reports, at first weren’t up to the company’s standards. Certificates give baseline metrics like color, cut, clarity, and carat, the gemologist says. “But you can’t grade things like light, scintillation, brilliance, if it has haze or milky tones.”

Today, Binder estimates that about 90 percent of her clients choose lab-grown diamonds, and she believes they’ll be fully normalized within five years. In Boston, “We’re in a newer luxury market where consumers are no longer impressed by buzzwords,” she says. “They want to understand what they’re buying, how it performs, how it’s set, and how it will last over time.”

In other words, Boston’s jewelers say they haven’t been disrupted so much as recalibrated. The question, then, isn’t whether they can survive the lab-grown revolution; it’s whether the thing they used to sell—not the stone, but the story around it—can make it through.

Pull back a bit, and the bigger picture is hard to ignore. In 2015, lab-grown diamonds accounted for one percent of the overall market; in 2024, they accounted for 20 percent and have caused natural-stone prices to drop as demand shrinks. They’ve also upended a long-standing social ecosystem built on price, status, and meaning. In the past, “For a long time, the size of the diamond signaled what someone spent,” Iarrusso says. “Lab-grown diamonds are changing that equation.”

And while many of the Boston buyers in this story are proud, open, and even eager to sing their ring’s lab-grown status from the rooftops, not everyone is. One local jeweler who often works with clients in swanky enclaves like Palm Beach describes a quieter dynamic: buyers who choose lab-grown stones discreetly, especially in traditional or luxury-oriented circles. “I’ll hear, ‘I only want natural,’” says another local jeweler. “But then, privately, they’ll say, ‘I do want that. Can you create that for me? Nobody needs to know.’”

Then there are those who still gravitate toward natural diamonds—and don’t apologize for it. When Emily Baer was on the cusp of getting engaged, she says her fiancé, real estate agent Hans Nagrath, was firmly in the natural camp. “He was more in the heirloom, traditional, in-the-family-forever, work-of-art type mindset,” says Baer, a therapist and yoga instructor.

While Baer was initially indifferent to what type of stone her fiancé chose, she says her ring—a three-pronged teardrop stunner with a gold band from Boston Diamond Company—is perfect. “I trusted him with the design, and it’s beautiful,” she says. “It’s simple and timeless, and that’s where the heirloom piece ties into it.”

Beverly’s Noelle Guerin, meanwhile, went the other direction, eventually. When the hospitality and lifestyle marketing professional got married 23 years ago, she was proud to sport a natural diamond. But after it popped out of its setting on Thanksgiving last year and required replacement, she did some research: “I’d never considered lab until I did some digging and learned more about them: They’re ethically sourced, more affordable, and with great clarity,” she says.

Despite its lab-grown status, Guerin still considers her new ring an heirloom and plans to pass it on to her daughter someday. After all, it’s about the symbolism, not the stone. “To me, the ring signifies a beautiful marriage that I feel blessed to have and the journey to get there. That’s where the importance lies. I think there’s a misconception that lab-grown isn’t ‘real’ and therefore can’t be an heirloom,” she says.

And maybe that’s the real disruption—not that lab-grown diamonds exist, but that they’ve made the whole question of “real” beside the point. The scarcity is gone. The high cost is optional. The mythology has been politely yet firmly shrugged off. What’s left is just the ring on your finger and whatever story you decide it tells. For a lot of Bostonians, that’s turned out to be enough.

This article was first published in the print edition of the April 2026 issue, with the headline,“Can You Tell the Difference.”

The Rise and “Tragic!” Fall of Boston’s Most Powerful Stylist

Susan Zalkind — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 10:00:32 +0000

Photo by Tony Luong

Moments before it all fell apart, Suhail Kwatra—the most coveted stylist in Boston—was entirely in his element. It was already dark, just after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 18, and he was in his second-floor office within the exclusive Fifth Avenue Club inside Saks at the Prudential Center. This was his domain—a gold velvet couch, champagne, and racks of clothes he’d personally selected for each client.

It was chilly in the store that evening, and Kwatra was dressed in a Roberto Cavalli purple python-print puffer. He was styling the resident of one of Brookline’s grandest estates, and she wanted more sweaters and purses to peruse. Kwatra told her he’d venture into the store to fetch them.

Downstairs, a shopping bag full of Chanel knits and purses in hand, Kwatra was about to head back upstairs when he was approached by two men in dark suits from asset protection: Tim Wade and John Wells, according to a police report. Kwatra says the men suggested he follow them and ushered him past the designer shoes, through a code-locked door, and into a small office.

By the time Kwatra left the room, he no longer had a job—and police were waiting to charge him with larceny and fraud. The allegation: He had returned unclaimed merchandise and pocketed the funds on Saks gift cards for himself. The total: $11,707.51.

But that wasn’t it. Wade and Wells handed police a handwritten letter from Kwatra in which he apologized and admitted to stealing $429,400 by way of fraudulent returns, mismanagement of promotional cards, giving away merchandise, and abusing his corporate credit card over the course of his career at Saks. (Kwatra denies the charges and says he was forced to write the letter under duress.) He was then marched out of the store, flanked by management and police, for all to see.

By midnight, everyone in town knew. Kwatra’s life, as he’d built it, was over. And so, too, was an era in Boston society.

By midnight, everyone in town knew. Kwatra’s life, as he’d built it, was over. And so, too, was an era in Boston society.

Originally from New Delhi, Kwatra was not just any stylist. Over more than two decades, he had cultivated a cult-like following among Boston’s social elite, powerful professionals, the married-well set, and anyone else with tens of thousands of dollars a year to burn on clothing, bags, and jewelry. Starting in the early aughts, he was the man who enabled the city to transition out of country-club attire into avant-garde fashion replete with flashy markers of wealth—something unheard-of among Boston’s Brahmin set. He amassed a client list that read like a social register, became the gatekeeper to Boston’s fashion world, and orchestrated the look of the city’s entire social scene.

And then there was Saks, his stage. As a prized stylist with the Fifth Avenue Club—the store’s exclusive personal-shopping program—the company gave him a private office and, it seemed, free rein to build an empire inside its walls. It sent him to Fashion Week in Paris with his clients and to the galas around Boston for which he dressed the guests. His black book made him invaluable. And—according to some former employees and clients I spoke to—untouchable.

Along the way, he became a fixture of Boston society himself. “It was part of the social fabric of the town to go to Saks and go to Suhail,” an heir to a real estate fortune explained. And clients’ relationships with Kwatra extended far outside the confines of the Fifth Avenue Club. They texted with him at all hours, accompanied him to lunches, parties, and clubs, and traveled all over the world with him. They introduced him to the ins and outs of Nantucket. They told him their secrets and gossiped about other women with him. Among his most frequent lines when talking about someone—“Tragic!”

Despite his power and popularity, rumors began circulating among clients and coworkers that he could play things fast and loose—double-billing, charging for items that weren’t purchased, and capitalizing on women who didn’t pay attention to their credit card bills because an office or a husband handled them. These stories mostly stayed quiet. “In Boston, it’s old Brahmin—we don’t say anything,” one spouse of a finance titan and former Kwatra client explained. But some took their complaints straight to the management at Saks—and they say they watched as the company seemed to simply look the other way.

Until it didn’t.

The question is why. Why now, after two decades? The answer may have as much to do with Saks as it does with Kwatra. By the time security pulled him into that small office, the company was drowning in billions of dollars of debt. Vendors hadn’t been paid in months—some had filed lawsuits; others had simply stopped shipping. A dying institution, it seems, needed someone to blame.

Or so Kwatra claims.

Tiffany Ortiz was one of Kwatra’s many boldface clients.

Gossip moves fast in Boston, and news about what happened to Kwatra escaped Saks almost immediately. That evening, just down the street from the department store, the Australian luxury brand Zimmermann was opening its first Boston location on Newbury Street. Inside, moving between elegant clothing in muted colors and passed canapés, was a carefully curated crowd consisting of the city’s power glam spenders and socialites. Many were Kwatra’s clients.

The whispers arrived mid-party: Did you hear? Phones lit up. Jaws dropped. Shock registered on carefully made-up faces. “I’m not even sure people looked at what was happening at Zimmermann that night,” the spouse of the finance titan said.

By midnight, the police report had traveled far beyond Newbury Street—forwarded, screenshotted, texted from one boldface personality to the next. As it moved through the city’s gossip circuit, it triggered a kaleidoscope of responses among current and former clients: disbelief, hurt, satisfaction, and no small dose of schadenfreude. Others scrambled to find old Saks receipts.

The finance mogul’s wife, who said she’d spent “upward of a million dollars” with Kwatra over the years, told me the news left clients feeling “violated in the same way as having a husband cheat on them.” Another client—fabulously wealthy and close to Kwatra—began to wonder if his attention to her parents and her pets was only a ruse to get her business. Following the news, she read a 2014 Boston Globe profile of him for the first time. When she came across the part where he said he had a “folder” of notes about clients’ pets—and their favorite treats—to endear himself to them, she said it “kind of made me throw up in my mouth.” Yet she concluded that there must have been other elements of the relationship that were genuine. They had been such close friends. For all the public galas she attended, there were few people she let into her selective social circle like she did with him. Reflecting on their relationship in this new light was “hurting my heart,” she said.

Kwatra denied any strategy or “agenda” behind remembering a client’s dog’s name. But, if a client mentioned the name of a pet or brought a dog to the store, he said he would have one of his assistants take note. “You want to make the clients feel welcome,” he said.

Some clients rose to his defense, more disgusted by certain women’s reactions than by the alleged infractions. “There are people who almost want to see him fall,” noted one well-known gala regular on the philanthropy circuit. “People always love to see people on their knees. The glee in some people’s faces. You can hear it in their voice.” Sure, Kwatra could be pushy and sometimes judgmental, and, upon further reflection, she acknowledged he did charge her twice for an item—but it only happened once. She insisted she continues to “like him very much.”

One former client, who said Kwatra had long been one of her best friends, described his bill infractions as “just something we were used to.” She had learned to “accommodate it,” she said, because she assumed it was either an honest mistake or an assistant screwing up.

Others saw the charges Kwatra was facing as his just comeuppance. “Karma is a bitch, isn’t it?” said one local businesswoman. “I couldn’t be less surprised.” She guessed Kwatra had gotten away with it because “there are a lot of idiots who just pay their bills without looking at them.” In her experience, “the receipts would be screwed up all the time.” She would get charged for items she didn’t buy and alterations that never happened. “He deserves all of this,” she said. (Kwatra says that many of these issues were a result of wider billing and administrative problems at Saks.)

But many of the women left reeling by the news were also perplexed—after all, some said Saks had known about the issues with Kwatra the whole time. The socialite who had spent more than a million with him said she complained to the store years ago after noticing he had billed her four times for the same item. She had warned management: “Something is drastically wrong at Saks right now, and it’s all in the hands of Suhail.” That was years ago—and nothing happened.

Which leads to the obvious question one former client posed: “Who is worse: Saks or Suhail?”

Photo by Tony Luong

Before the scandal, there was just a kid from New Delhi. Kwatra grew up in a large, extended family, the son of the owner of a third-generation clothing business that specialized in European styles. “Fashion was always in my blood,” he told me.

His family had Boston ties, and he’d spent time in Weston growing up. He got a job at Saks in 2005, then moved to New York to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology—working for Saks there, too—and by 2007 was back at the Pru.

Saks opened in Boston in 1971, a few years after a store official brushed aside the notion that Bostonians are a drab lot, and insisted in an interview with the Boston Globe that the city was “receptive to high fashion.” The Globe’s fashion editor agreed, writing that Saks could be the “giant hand that whips Boston fashion into place.”

It would take a while. But by the time Kwatra came to work there some three decades later, Boston was in the midst of a cultural and economic renaissance. There were more people flashing money and fewer Brahmins around to turn up their noses at them. Even if the rich were no longer strictly old school, they were still playing Brahmin games: the fundraisers, the galas, the tables at charity events—all of which required designer looks that could compete with New York’s social scene. There were also ambitious women rising in real estate, medicine, and law, looking to close big deals in an increasingly global world. They needed to look the part. They needed someone to help. Kwatra—with his infectious love of luxury and his preternatural ability to immerse himself in his clients’ lives—would become their guide, their gatekeeper, their man.

Around 2013, Kwatra said, the store’s marketing manager told him that she wanted to get him out into Boston—“outside of these four walls.” Saks sponsored luncheons and charity events, inviting Kwatra to attend. At one of these luncheons, the manager introduced Kwatra to a group of very social women of means—whom Kwatra calls “the girls”—telling them they needed to visit him at the store. “After lunch,” he recalled, “I went back to work, and the gaggle of girls rolled in.”

The rest is history. Kwatra was a smashing success on the floor, and in 2015, after a record-breaking year of sales—some $7 million, he says—he was promoted to the Fifth Avenue Club, where he built something unprecedented: a personal-styling empire within the store.

His second-floor office at Saks became a destination. The champagne. The personalized, special treatment. The racks of clothes preselected for each client. He would have all the outfits before the big events, dressing each woman to ensure no duplicates. Kwatra made regular trips to New York to get special items, then messaged his clients—and they would come to what he called his “magic closet.”

Sinesia Karol, Daniela Corte, and Amber D’Amelio were some of Kwatra’s many boldface clients.

A lot of boldface names moved in and out of that closet: Tiffany Ortiz, former wife of Big Papi; Christy Cashman, an author and equestrian well-known in Boston society; Janet Sharp Kershaw who co-owns Cheers and private events venue Hampshire House with her husband; socialites Laura Baldini and Ashley Bernon-Miller; swimwear designer Sinesia Karol; Madhu Chopra, mother of Priyanka; and Sarah Mars, of that Mars family—to name a few.

Along the way, he shifted the fashion culture of Boston. “I’ll take credit for it,” he said, explaining that Boston is “a knit city” where women “love their cozy knits.” He pushed them to expand their tastes. Women back then were wearing Escada and Malo—“those were tolerable.” Then Rick Owens. He got them interested in Yigal, then Issey Miyake. And on it went, until he had elevated an entire city’s sense of style.

Dressing the powerful made Kwatra powerful in his own right. He controlled the velvet rope at after-parties with designers—a you-can’t-sit-here attitude—and was often in charge of the seating list. Women would let him pick the guests at their fundraising tables. He would also hold his own events, which he refers to as “thoughtful experiences,” that many people wanted to get in on so they could connect with his clients and climb the social ladder. Some people wanted to spend time around his clients because it was “good for their business,” he says. “I was doing my job well, I was successful, and I had the right contacts. A lot of people in this Boston social scene that I don’t think need me, I come to find out that they do because they want to be seen and they want to be included in these events. And it wasn’t me chasing after them—it’s them chasing after me.”

If Truman Capote had his swans, Kwatra had his “girls.” They partied with him. Shared their secrets with him. Gossiped with him. Beyond “tragic,” his clients recalled him calling other women “peasants” and “D-list.” And they loved it. The former client said Kwatra was “totally fun to be mean with…I could not wait to be mean with him.” She would go to Saks to find out “who had gotten fat and who had gotten skinny. If I was having a moment with somebody that I was a little jealous of, I’d have Suhail look up what size they’re wearing these days just to make myself feel better.” (Kwatra denies making fun of his female clients’ weight, and says that though he may have used “peasants” in conversation, it was all “silly talk.”)

Meanwhile, his coworkers watched with amazement—and, Kwatra says, no small dose of jealousy—at the loyal and highly profitable relationships he built. “The women would flock to him,” said Bianca Carney, who worked as his assistant in the early 2010s. His clients loved him and enjoyed having him around. Willem Learn, who worked in Saks’ jewelry department during Kwatra’s tenure, said Kwatra could be pushy and rude to his clients, but they seemed to eat it up: “There is some skill set that he has that was addictive to them.”

Still, there were rumblings that underneath the glitz, glam, gossip, and success, something was rotten. Coworkers had warned Learn that Kwatra played things “fast and loose.” But Learn understood why nothing would ever come of it. Kwatra was more powerful than Saks “because he owns the book”—meaning he had the contacts. “With that much power, it would be dangerous to mess with him,” Learn said. “He could have gotten in trouble a long time ago—he shouldn’t have lasted this long.”

Another former employee, Steven Ertel, who sold shoes from 2017 to 2018, agreed. “If you are a top seller at the store, selling millions of dollars, they are going to look the other direction.… It’s all about whoever is a top earner—they turn a blind eye.”

Inside Saks at the Prudential Center. / Photo by Roman Tiraspolsky

For many years, little about Wendy Appel suggested she was a woman of means. She drove Subarus or Volvos, and one of her only extravagances was buying a designer purse every few years. In reality, she was fabulously wealthy. She ran both the real estate company her father had founded, and the family’s charitable foundation, through which she donated quietly and generously to the Museum of Science, GBH, hospitals, and arts organizations.

Starting in 2012, she suffered a series of strokes. That’s when, according to multiple people close to the situation, everything started to change: her appearance and—perhaps most tellingly—the boxes upon boxes of unopened merchandise from Saks that began piling up in her building’s lobby.

According to spending records I reviewed, she became a regular Saks shopper in early 2013. Her purchases mostly consisted of skin care, makeup, and handbags. But as the months went on, her expenditures increased dramatically—more bags and expensive jewelry, often topping thousands of dollars each. By the end of 2013, she had spent close to $100,000 at Saks.

The next year, her jewelry purchases increased, and she started buying big-ticket items more frequently. She bought two $20,000 Chanel watches in a single day. One day in October, she made three jewelry purchases totaling more than $154,000, followed by a necklace for $320,000 in December. The total for 2014: $1.2 million. In 2015—Kwatra’s biggest sales year ever—she spent just under $3 million.

That year, Appel’s son Michael had started to grow concerned about his mother’s spending. After he confronted her about it, Appel was adamant there was no problem. That July, Appel sent Kwatra an email—which I reviewed—asking him not to share information about her account with anyone, including family members. When Michael reached out to Kwatra directly, Wendy caught wind of it and left Kwatra a voicemail—I’ve heard it—apologizing for Michael’s actions. “For some reason he thinks I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “I told him, ‘I can assure you I know exactly what I’m doing.’”

In December, Michael tried to get Saks to intercede, meeting in-person with the company’s head of northeast security to ask for help. Nothing came of it. In the first two months of 2016 alone, according to sales records, Appel spent half a million dollars at Saks.

Then, in February 2016, Michael received a text message from a Saks employee warning him about his mother’s relationship with Kwatra. “They are taking advantage of your mother,” it read. The employee added that Kwatra “made her buy a leather top from [Louis Vuitton]. Is that a joke? I don’t see your mother wearing that…. He is terrible.”

Michael had had enough. In May 2016, his attorney sent Saks a formal cease-and-desist letter: “Michael is concerned that Wendy is being taken advantage of by Suhail Kwatra, a salesperson at Saks…. It appears that Mr. Kwatra is exploiting Wendy and taking advantage of her diminished capacity by suggesting that Wendy purchase large amounts of merchandise, most of which is quite expensive.”

Appel was subsequently diagnosed with dementia. She can no longer communicate verbally.

Kwatra says the sales associate who sent those texts to Michael did so because the colleague was “jealous of me and my success.” In one message I reviewed, the associate wrote: “I am the number one sales associate in this store and they are just trying to ‘beat’ me in sales by using your mother.” As for Michael’s efforts to get Saks to stop selling to his mother? Kwatra says Michael was “freaked out because I’m sure he’s thinking, ‘Well, there goes my inheritance.’”

Kwatra says he doesn’t think he did anything wrong—morally or otherwise—in his dealings with Appel. He was doing his job, he says, and Saks encouraged him to keep selling to her. “She was a number one client, and they wanted her to keep going. So they would say, ‘Well, if she’s not buying jewelry, then you should show her handbags.… Cross-sell, don’t just focus on one thing.’ Nobody ever said stop.… I got a huge pat on the back from leadership and executives that I was able to develop a cosmetics client into a top client of the store.”

One current store employee—no fan of Kwatra—agreed that the store encouraged Kwatra to sell to Appel. “They said, ‘There’s this trunk show, do you think there’s anything Wendy might like?’ That’s encouraging someone.” (Saks declined to comment on the record about matters pertaining to Appel.)

But Appel’s family members weren’t the only ones with complaints. I spoke to seven people who claimed Kwatra had mismanaged their accounts, either charging them for items they didn’t buy or overcharging them for items they did. Some said the discrepancies were in the thousands—and yet some of these women continued to shop with him.

Most who spoke to me did so on the condition of anonymity. Some were embarrassed to publicly admit how much they spent on clothes; others were concerned, they said, about how much Kwatra knew about their personal lives and what he might say about them, given the way he had talked about other women in the past. “A lot of us went through divorces with him,” one said, adding that she wished Saks had required him to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Kwatra says he would never reveal information about his clients.

Amber D’Amelio, a former client who is now an animal-rights activist, was willing to tell her story. She met Kwatra in 2011 when she was new to town. As they became friendly, he helped fill her charity foundation tables, and she threw his 30th birthday party on her yacht. She considered him a friend.

Then, a few years later, her husband “clocked a big charge” on her credit card bill for a “very expensive Chanel bag” she had never ordered. When Kwatra told her he had ordered it for her, she said she didn’t want it and asked him to return it. When the refund didn’t materialize, D’Amelio says, she reported the issue to Saks’ general manager, who refunded the charge. (Still employed by Saks, the general manager declined to comment for this story.) Incidents like that kept happening, D’Amelio says, and Kwatra made excuses, blaming his assistant.

Kwatra said that when D’Amelio was new in town, she “wanted to climb the ladder, and I was her ticket”—something D’Amelio denies. As for the billing issues: “If Amber had any issues with any of her charges, they were taken care of by the store manager,” Kwatra said.

Zach Haroutunian, who runs a private investment firm, had a similar experience. As a student at Suffolk University, he began shopping with Kwatra and believed they were truly friends. As the relationship progressed, he says, Kwatra began telling him he needed to hold charges on his card so Kwatra could bring items from New York to Boston for him to try on. Haroutunian initially agreed, but then “it snowballed into him sending racks of fur coats to my house.… I told him, ‘Suhail, this is a little bit too much,’ and he would be like, ‘Well, of course you need clothes.’” Haroutunian believes that management knew “exactly what was going on.” (For his part, Kwatra says that if anyone brought any discrepancies to his attention, “it was addressed right away.”)

When he tried to return items Kwatra sent him, Haroutunian says Kwatra made him “feel cheap,” suggesting that returning items was distasteful. People who return items were “tragic,” he recalls Kwatra saying. Later, Haroutunian says he found he had been charged for items he didn’t purchase at all. “Suhail took advantage of the fact that people weren’t checking their credit card statements,” he said.

Kwatra, though, contends Haroutunian “was an impulse buyer. He would buy and return and buy and return.” Kwatra also said Haroutunian would try to return items he had worn, clothes that came back with “stains on them and gum wrappers [in the pockets].” (Haroutunian denies he ever returned or attempted to return used merchandise.)

Whether Saks knew what Kwatra was doing—whether it was part of their business model or they simply never bothered to look into the complaints they received—is now a matter of legal dispute. What is not in dispute is that the whole thing was about to come apart at the seams.

Stylist Suhail Kwatra. / Photo by Joanne Rathe/the Boston Globe via Getty Images

By the time Kwatra was pulled into that small office by two men from asset protection, Saks was in trouble. Within two months, the company would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $4.7 billion in debt. The company owed Chanel $136 million; Kering (the conglomerate behind Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga) nearly $60 million; Christian Louboutin more than $21 million; Brunello Cucinelli more than $21 million; Georgio Armani upward of $10 million; and Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, and Vince more than $9 million each, according to the company’s bankruptcy filing.

It was a staggering turn for a brand that opened its flagship store on Fifth Avenue in 1924, the brainchild of two merchant families who dreamed of a store synonymous with gracious living. Back then, department stores were grand symbols of commerce—glittering public sitting rooms for affluent women to socialize while they spent. They shaped urban areas and were once so powerful that in 1939, industry titans successfully lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving one week earlier to lengthen the holiday shopping season.

The department store reigned for decades, but it could not reign forever. In 1992, department stores claimed 14 percent of all retail sales nationwide. Then came the Internet, and brick-and-mortar stores were hit across the board. Analysts believed luxury retailers were resilient—above a certain price point, customers want to try items on before buying, with a tailor on site. Going to a department store was not an errand, but an experience—the kind people like Kwatra provided.

Yet few foresaw that designers would find ways to connect with consumers directly and, through a series of mergers, become powerful enough to challenge the department stores. Brands worried that department store sales—especially online—would interfere with the strict price discipline and perception of exclusivity on which their success depended. Some brands began pulling their products from department stores altogether.

Saks fought back, purchasing Neiman Marcus and becoming Saks Global in a July 2024 deal, hoping that together they would have more leverage with brands. Executives put on a strong face. But behind the scenes, Saks had a crisis on its hands. Suppliers weren’t getting paid. Smaller companies couldn’t take the hit. Designer brands began refusing to send merchandise to the stores.

Kwatra, who earned commission from his sales, felt the successive hits the company was taking. Over the previous few years, he had started talking about a move within the company. He thought Saks Global would be an opportunity to expand into international markets, but when he received notice that he would no longer be able to take clients to Paris Fashion Week, he began to take more seriously an offer he had gotten from a competitor.

The merger may have affected Kwatra in another way. One Saks employee theorized it may have been the Neiman deal that set everything into motion. “If this merger with Neiman’s had not happened, it never would have come to light, because I think when Neiman’s came in, they started looking at the books and exploring. I think that’s when it really started to crumble.”

Kwatra claims that Saks heard about his outside offer and tried to retain him with a $50,000 bonus. When he didn’t accept, he says, it became clear he was leaving. He believes Saks knew that if its top earner left, he’d be taking the “city’s elite” with him.

His theory is simple: An already spiraling Saks couldn’t afford that hit, so they tried to destroy his reputation and keep his clients. Kwatra—the man who had operated in the gray zone for two decades, whose arrangements with Saks had seemed to be more handshake than policy—made an easy target.

Photo by Joanne Rathe/the Boston Globe via Getty Images

Tiffany Ortiz was one of Kwatra’s many boldface clients.

Kwatra’s since-deleted Instagram account was my first introduction to his aesthetically dark and dazzling world. There, in video reels set to Kesha dance tracks—do I have your attention?—and Chris Brown instrumentals—gimme that—he could be seen in jewel-encrusted velvet sport coats with a string of colorful gems down his chest, glittering turtlenecks, and an array of black leather statement boots, posing, hip cocked to the side, in Italy and Paris. Then there was his Facebook account. In one video, he is clad in a leather trench coat, posing in an open elevator and strutting down a hall, a lobster-shaped Louis Vuitton clutch—complete with dangling claws and a rumored price tag of $18,000—in his hand. “Have your people call my people,” his bio read.

So I did. Joe Baerlein, a crisis communications adviser, got back to me and set up a meeting at the Post Office Square offices of Goulston & Storrs, where Kwatra’s lawyer, Jennifer Furey—who is representing him in a civil complaint against Saks—is a director.

Kwatra did not disappoint. I found him in the lobby, where most of the couches and chairs are white leather, wearing a black fox-fur coat, an R13 cardigan—distressed, black, and covered in chains and safety pins—and black patent platform cowboy-style heels with a gem-encrusted toe. He clutched a small silver lunchbox-shaped purse, “FENDI” printed in bold across the bag. His wrists were wrapped in bangles that chimed as he shook my hand.

Kwatra told me he is innocent. The charges are bogus. This is not a story about a thief, he insisted—it is a story about a flailing corporation that knew about and encouraged the very practices for which it later fired him. They did it, he believed, because they feared he would leave and take his client book with him. When asked about Kwatra’s allegations, Saks only said: “We take any allegations of employee misconduct seriously and conduct thorough investigations when matters are brought to our attention.”

Kwatra described the moment he was standing there in his purple python-print puffer, a bag of Chanel knits in hand, when the “mall cops”—as Baerlein calls them—led him into a secluded office, through a door with a lock code he didn’t know. There were no security cameras documenting what unfolded, Kwatra noted. The omission, he claims, was to ensure there was no record of what happened.

At first, Kwatra told me, he had no idea where the conversation was going. Wade explicitly mentioned that he knew Kwatra was in talks about employment elsewhere, insisted Kwatra knew why he was there, and said that if he didn’t come clean, Saks would destroy his reputation and ensure he never worked in luxury retail again. Kwatra felt “trapped.” (Wade directed all inquiries about this case to Saks public relations. Wells declined to comment.)

Then, Kwatra says, the conversation turned to gift cards. He would go on to be accused of mismanaging $50,000 worth of promotional cards. Kwatra said he didn’t understand what they were asking about—in Kwatra’s court filings, he noted the cards were generated by his supervisors in management. Kwatra himself couldn’t generate gift cards, and Saks knew it. Kwatra’s court filings also claimed that his manager and previous manager created numerous “accommodation” gift cards and encouraged salespeople to distribute them to high-spending clients. His manager at the time, Kwatra alleged in court filings, was generous with gift cards and “frequently provided them to clients and club stylists.”

As for the accusation that Kwatra kept unclaimed merchandise or returned it in exchange for gift cards for himself—he’d eventually be accused of doing this with $375,000 worth of merchandise—Kwatra claims everything was known to management. There was a lot of unclaimed merchandise lying around storage closets, he says, and after a year, Saks managers told him and other stylists to distribute it as gifts to clients or take it home. He alleges that they encouraged him to wear the items at events or on social media to promote Saks and the brands. It was better to take the abandoned merchandise for personal use rather than reselling it at a deep discount or donating it, he says management told him.

A Saks employee pushed back on this, saying no one else had a designated room full of merchandise like Kwatra did, and that it was odd that all the billing problems people complained about seemed to happen only to him. (Kwatra says he had more merchandise because he had more clients, and that billing issues were a broader problem at Saks, and no fault of his own.) But the employee agreed with Kwatra on one point: Whatever was going on, management knew about it. “I’m just saying that the executives were also complicit. I mean, they allowed it to continue to happen. And in a small way, I even think they sort of encouraged it.”

Back in that room without any cameras, Kwatra says, Wade claimed to have a folder of “evidence” on Kwatra but refused to show him the contents. Wade claimed that Saks had been building a case against Kwatra for more than eight years—though Kwatra points out that they had offered him a retention bonus just weeks earlier and repeatedly praised his value to the company.

Kwatra recalls that they wanted him to guess the cumulative value of all the unclaimed merchandise he had turned into gift cards over the years—in writing—and they would “make it ugly” for him if he refused. “In my mind, when I heard that ‘make it ugly,’ I’m thinking, if I don’t sign this document, I’m gonna be handcuffed in the store.” The visual impact would have been immediately devastating.

Kwatra says they told him that if he confessed, they wouldn’t call the police—no one external would have to know. So he started writing. “Anytime I wrote something that didn’t really align with them, they would make me cross it out and be like, ‘No, no, no, cross that off and write this instead,’” he said. (By presstime, Saks had not responded to questions about Kwatra’s claim that he was coerced into writing the document.) Kwatra didn’t know the letter was legally enforceable. He figured he could get an attorney later, and if he signed, he could leave with his reputation intact.

That’s not what happened. When Kwatra was done, his store director came in, and he signed papers agreeing not to return to Saks. Then a police officer entered the room. Kwatra’s Prada tote was collected from his office, and he was escorted out of the building. “Do we have to make a scene?” Kwatra asked as he was led out. “Because I thought no one’s gonna make a scene.”

Kwatra personally selected jewelry, shoes, bags, and clothing for Boston’s elite. Along the way, he became a fixture among them. / Photo by Joanne Rathe/the Boston Globe via Getty Images

On a frigid January morning, Kwatra arrived at Boston Municipal Court near Haymarket for his arraignment on larceny and fraud charges. The date had been pushed back once already, and socialites had been calling me about it for weeks, wondering how the first scene of this legal drama might unfold. When the day came, Kwatra appeared in a relatively demure Hugo Boss blazer—black with a silver-tipped collar—and Alexander Wang boots in some kind of reptile skin. He looked smaller than usual in low-cut heels. Local TV crews arrived five minutes too late. I was the only reporter in the room.

After sitting through a morning robbery hearing involving an opioid-addicted amateur hockey player, Kwatra stood before the court, his face deflated, as the prosecutor read the charges alleging that he had appropriated $429,400 via “fraudulent returns and mismanagement.” The hearing did not go well for the state. The prosecutor requested $5,000 cash bail in what she said was a case carrying “state prison time” and asked that Kwatra be ordered to stay away from former clients. But Judge Paul Treseler released Kwatra without bail and ordered only that he stay away from Saks property and employees.

Then came another blow to the prosecution. Kwatra’s criminal defense attorney, Joseph Eisenstadt, demanded to see specific evidence to support the more than $429,000 figure—and Treseler agreed. Saks had turned over video evidence and records from three recent transactions, purportedly totaling more than $11,000 in fraud, but nothing else. “It looks like an $11,000 case right now,” the judge said, questioning the state’s evidence—as if “someone just threw a $429,000 figure out there.… You come up with that big number, and you have to explain the big number and explain where that number came from.” The prosecutor conceded that Saks had not yet provided the state with any additional evidence. Beyond Kwatra’s handwritten confession, the prosecution could not explain the number either. The judge ordered the state to turn over the evidence before the end of March; the next hearing is April 10.

Weeks earlier, it had been a very different scene. Kwatra stumbled out of Saks in his Gucci platform clogs, dazed. His phone died, so he couldn’t reach his partner, Michael, a music teacher who was teaching a class that evening. It wasn’t until he caught a cab and made it home to his Fenway apartment that the reality of what had happened hit Kwatra. He recalls feeling as though he “got hit by a bus.”

Then Kwatra mentioned the letter to his partner. “I wasn’t thinking. I maybe signed something,” he told Michael, who started freaking out.

“Where is the document?” Michael asked.

Kwatra told Michael they didn’t give him a copy.

“Why didn’t they give you a copy?”

The next morning, Kwatra called Jennifer Clark, a client who also happened to be general counsel at the commercial real estate firm RMR Group and was nearing retirement. Clark thought the absence of a copy was strange. The charges didn’t make sense, she says, because Kwatra’s assistants rang in the merchandise—“so there would have to be a conspiracy.” (Kwatra’s supervising manager, who was on maternity leave at the time of his firing, was due back in December. She has not returned to work and did not respond to my inquiries.) Clark sprang into action, connecting Kwatra with a civil attorney, who in turn connected him with a criminal attorney and crisis manager. Two weeks later, Kwatra attended a party thrown by Clark at Contessa—Kwatra in a long-sleeve fishnet top with shoulder pads and glittering silver pants, as seen in a screenshot from an Instagram story that was promptly passed around town. He was not hiding.

Meanwhile, Kwatra’s attorneys at Goulston & Storrs have filed a civil claim against Saks Global alleging that the company owes Kwatra punitive and compensatory damages for firing him, ruining his reputation, and false imprisonment for holding him in the interrogation room. The lawsuit calls it “a calculated campaign by a global luxury retailer to silence one of its most valuable employees” while attempting to “shift blame amid severe financial distress.” But perhaps Kwatra’s strongest argument is this: Why would Saks offer him a retention bonus in October if the company claims to have evidence of him conducting fraudulent returns in September? (Saks declined to comment on Kwatra’s claim that he was offered a retention bonus, as well as many of the allegations set forth in this story.)

Then I discovered something startling: Kwatra wasn’t the only stylist Saks had allegedly gone after.

In May 2025, Antonio Ferreira—reportedly a leading personal shopper at Saks Beverly Hills—claims he was also pulled into a room by asset protection and accused of involvement in improper use of gift cards. Ferreira filed a lawsuit against Saks three months later, alleging discrimination, defamation, and a hostile work environment, claiming the charges were brought in retaliation and that they stand “in stark contrast to Saks’ tolerance of similar conduct by others,” the complaint reads—including by management itself.

Both of these lawsuits are on pause due to Saks filing for bankruptcy. But on Newbury Street, the question isn’t really about the legal case—it’s about what happens next in a town that just lost the man who told it what to wear. Gala season is here, and this article comes out in the first days of it. Some women may be scrambling to find dresses—yet the ones who’ve been around Boston forever aren’t too worried. Kwatra was the one who created the pressure—new, avant-garde, no repeats. Turns out it’s more Brahmin, and more contemporary, to re-wear an old outfit. “You even get bragging rights if you can fit into a dress from 10 years ago,” says one gala regular.

Still, not everyone has moved on. Madhu Chopra, for one, remains loyal—calling Kwatra “impeccable and forthright” in a statement provided by her niece. Real estate developer Deborah George is also unwavering. She has been devoted to Kwatra for more than a decade, ever since he told her that her Ralph Lauren outfit looked “awful” and switched her over to Dolce & Gabbana. She insists that the allegations against Kwatra came about because Saks was “scared that he was going to leave.” In George’s eyes, Kwatra “is not a man who’s driven by money at all. This is a man who’s driven by things that we Americans don’t always put great value into. You know, honesty, beauty, art forms, things like that. I’ve never known him to be money hungry.”

Others have not been so generous. A group excursion Kwatra had organized to India—costing tens of thousands a head—fell apart when his clients backed out after news of Kwatra’s legal troubles broke. They want their money back. Kwatra says he told them to buy travel insurance at the outset and isn’t responsible for their decision to back out; in any event, he says, their beef is with the travel agency. He says he didn’t profit from the trip.

And then there are those who suspect Kwatra will somehow come out ahead of where he started. One former client called the whole saga his “sex tape”—a spectacle he’d find a way to profit from. Several compared him to Anna Delvey, the fake socialite who parlayed infamy into a Netflix deal. They wonder whether Kwatra will do the same.

As for Kwatra, he wants to keep doing what he loves—styling women of taste, like his fashion icons Daphne Guinness, Maye Musk, and Moza bint Nasser. He says the job offer he received from a Saks competitor was rescinded, and he’s thinking of a life beyond Boston, hopefully somewhere abroad. But as Baerlein, his crisis manager, says, it’s hard to plan a future “when you’ve had so many of these false accusations thrown at you in a short period of time.”

Asked how it feels to go from the center of Boston society to the fringes, Kwatra rolled his eyes. “In fashion,” he told me, “like they say—one day you’re in, one day you’re out.”

Kwatra dressed the city’s most important galas and fundraisers. / Courtesy photo

This article was first published in the print edition of the March 2026 issue with the headline: “”Tragic!”.”

The Real Cost of One Michelin Star

Simone Migliori — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:49:47 +0000

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

In the weeks before Michelin announced its first-ever Boston selections, whispers among dining insiders spread across town faster than whipped butter. The first question—“Did you hear who got an invite to the gala?”—was always chased by a second, more scandalous follow-up: “Did you hear who didn’t get an invite?” And underneath it all, the real question: Was Boston about to justify the estimated seven-figure bet it had placed on the world’s most prestigious restaurant guide?

Even those who received the coveted invite remained very much in the dark. The organization had sent out emails to every restaurant included in Boston’s guide, but they were vague. Each chef who found a golden ticket in their inbox didn’t know if they were about to be crowned with a coveted star or score one of Michelin’s other designations, like “recommended” restaurant, which denotes good cooking that isn’t yet star-worthy (but could be in the future).

The anticipation hung thick at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Philadelphia on Tuesday, November 18. The opening reception that night was crowded with chefs from Boston, Philly, Chicago, New York City, and DC—all of whom would see their fates revealed in one joint ceremony.

Familiar faces from Boston’s dining world gravitated toward one another—Erin Miller of Urban Hearth, Chris and Pam Willis of Pammy’s, Carl Dooley of Mooncusser—while servers carrying platters of canapés weaved through the crowd. Bibendum, the walking, talking stack of tires that serves as the Michelin mascot, beckoned guests to take photos alongside him on the step-and-repeat.

After an hour, ushers waved attendees into the auditorium. This was it. After decades of watching talent and attention drain to New York City and its many Michelin dining spots, Boston restaurants were, for the first time ever, about to be crowned with Michelin stars. Some of the most renowned chefs in the country, including Thomas Keller, of three-Michelin-starred Per Se, and Daniel Humm, of the three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park, sat in the audience. It was showtime.

The Boston crowd erupted when Michelin’s very first award of the night went to a hometown hero: Chompon “Boong” Boonnak, of Brookline Thai restaurants Mahaniyom and Merai, won Michelin’s “Exceptional Cocktails” award for the Northeast Cities. It was just about the strongest start that anyone could ask for. A shocked Boonnak made his way to the stage.

Then came the Boston guide selections. Stars are the highest honor, followed by Bib Gourmands—“exceptional food at great value”—and “recommended” restaurants, the inspectors’ nod to good cooking that hasn’t yet risen to the level of a Bib or a star.

In November, the city’s dining-scene luminaries gathered in Philadelphia for the unveiling of Boston’s first-ever Michelin Guide. / Photo by Marc Patrick/BFA.com

The presentation started with the recommended list. Five restaurants were called, then 10, then 15, then 19. Asta, Mooncusser, Nightshade Noodle Bar, Wa Shin—tasting-menu spots that had surfaced on just about every Boston prediction list published over the past six months—rolled across a gigantic screen above the stage.

For those in the building who had noticed all the Boston-area chefs milling around the reception, something was becoming uncomfortably clear: The city wasn’t going to walk away with an armful of stars. By the time it was over, 19 restaurants had earned recommended status, and six got Bib Gourmands. One restaurant—South End spot 311 Omakase—took home a star.

The reaction was immediate and merciless. Local content creators Marc Lewis and Marwa Osman, of @thecitylists, held up the list and its meager handful of picks as evidence that Boston’s restaurant scene has a long way to go. Boston.com polled nearly 100 readers and found that 74 percent disagreed with Michelin’s selections. How had local darlings like chef Cassie Piuma’s Sarma, Comfort Kitchen in Dorchester, or Italian favorite Tonino been left out entirely? Had Boston bet big just for this?

The answer was, for better or for worse, yes. And the story of how Boston got here had been years in the making. In recent times, Michelin—the more-than-century-old French tire company turned global restaurant arbiter—has become a worldwide marketing juggernaut and money-making machine with a simple business model: Tourism boards pay for new guides. And Boston’s tourism arm, Meet Boston, led by president and CEO Martha Sheridan, paid handsomely for a three-year deal. (Meet Boston declined to disclose the exact figure, but other U.S. cities, such as Atlanta, have paid sums around $1 million for three years. The Boston Globe reported in May 2025 that the partnership between Meet Boston and Michelin “costs just over $1 million.”)

It was a move initially championed by local hotels and chefs alike. Yet the results—26 restaurants, one star—left kitchen insiders with a burning question: Was it even worth it?

Meet Boston CEO Martha Sheridan, who initially resisted Michelin but changed course after hearing from local chefs. / Photo by Ken Richardson

Three years earlier, when Sheridan heard the word “Michelin,” her mind snapped to images of white tablecloths, cosseting servers, and a guide that only promoted exclusive restaurants in expensive neighborhoods. Tasked with championing Boston to the world as head of Meet Boston, the city’s tourism organization, she wasn’t interested in ponying up the estimated seven figures to promote that image.

In spring 2023, I approached Sheridan while I was the editor of Eater Boston, writing a story about why Boston didn’t have a Michelin Guide and how the organization’s pay-to-play model worked. When I asked whether she would consider paying for the guide if it came calling, she said no. “Making that kind of investment for what would likely be a smaller subset of our restaurant community probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense for us,” Sheridan said at the time.

The story, published on May 3, landed like a grenade. Some cheered Meet Boston, praising the organization for not paying into Michelin’s scheme. “The next time your NYC friends shit on Boston food, you can tell them Boston’s food is so good that we don’t need to pay to play,” @BostonFoodGuide posted on TikTok. Others thought the decision was shortsighted and didn’t take into account Michelin’s impact within the restaurant industry. “Challenge and pushing for competition is the way to bring a better food scene in our city,” Bonde Fine Wine Shop, a boutique Cambridge shop, wrote on Instagram.

One of the people reading the story was Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli, a lifelong Boston-area resident who had spent years working inside some of the area’s most sought-after restaurants, including one-time Cambridge hot spot Craigie on Main. He now runs Alcove, a neighborhood-y waterfront spot with a deep wine list in Boston’s West End.

Even though Schlesinger-Guidelli worked with Meet Boston as a culinary ambassador for the city at the time, Sheridan’s take didn’t sit right with him. “I wasn’t really a fan of that response,” he says. “I’m a rising-tides-lifts-all-boats kind of guy, and the more focus and attention that we have on the city’s culinary scene is an opportunity for us to continue to get better, and continue to be looked at throughout the country, and the world, in a way that I think that many of the chefs, restaurateurs, bartenders, wine professionals, and cooks deserve to be looked at—as real restaurant professionals.”

He had another reason to worry. Boston’s food media scene was shrinking fast. Fewer local outlets were writing about Boston’s restaurants, which meant fewer reasons for the rest of the country to pay attention. The Improper Bostonian and the Boston Phoenix had folded years ago, and there was only one full-time restaurant critic left covering the city. In the aftermath of 2020, when Boston needed more coverage of its restaurants, there had never been less. “I didn’t feel like we had the resources locally to advocate for ourselves nationally,” Schlesinger-Guidelli says. “And I felt like we were losing talent as a result of it.”

So Schlesinger-Guidelli decided to do something about it. Two days after the Eater story came out, he was on the phone with his publicist, Martha Sullivan, who has worked for decades as a restaurant rep for some of the Boston area’s top chefs. “I said, ‘Well, why don’t we get in a room with Meet Boston?’” he recalls. “These are great people. I think we can have an honest conversation about why we think [Michelin] is important—and why it might not be.”

It wasn’t a sure bet that they would be open to talking, Sullivan told him. “Some people make a decision and move on,” she says. “I didn’t know if the book was closed.” But she decided to give it a try. Later that same day, she reached out to Sheridan and her communications director, Dave O’Donnell. “I said, ‘Hey, I saw the article in Eater. I would love to share with you some input from other chefs. Would you be open to coming to Alcove?’”

Eighteen minutes later, Sheridan responded. She was in.

Three weeks after that, the Meet Boston duo headed to Alcove for a roundtable lunch with Schlesinger-Guidelli, Sullivan, Pam and Chris Willis of Pammy’s, Trevor and Kate Smith of Thistle & Leek, Douglass Williams of Mida, and Carl Dooley of Mooncusser. Inside Alcove’s private dining room, over a casual spread of salads and sandwiches, the chefs opened up, one by one, about their experiences working in Michelin-starred kitchens in other cities and countries.

Decoding Michelin

The five factors inspectors use to award stars—and what each rating means.

MICHELIN’S 5 CRITERIA

Quality of ingredients
Harmony of flavors
Mastery of cooking techniques
Chef’s personality on the plate
Consistency in execution

WHAT THE RATINGS MEAN

★★★ Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey
★★ Excellent cooking, worth a detour
★ High-quality cooking, worth a stop
Bib Gourmand: Exceptional cooking at a great value
Recommended: Good cooking, not yet star-worthy

Dooley recalled that when he worked in Washington, DC, prior to Michelin launching a DC guide, the city was known for politics, and that’s about it. Now, its restaurant scene regularly commands national headlines. Williams laid out what it would mean for Boston’s next generation of cooks to be able to have a shot at Michelin without decamping to New York or Chicago. The group talked through Michelin’s different categories, and how it didn’t only spotlight $300 tasting-menu spots. “One of the real fears was that we were going to do all this work and figure this all out, and one restaurant was going to be the only thing that mattered,” Schlesinger-Guidelli says. “[We were] trying to have a conversation about how much bigger Michelin is than just the stars.”

Throughout the lunch, Sheridan and O’Donnell listened more than they talked. “It wasn’t a ‘you should, you should, you should,’” Sheridan says. “It was just more like, ‘listen to our perspective’ kind of thing, and educate us.”

Afterward, the talent-retention argument stayed with Sheridan. “It builds a legacy,” she says. “I’m all about legacy. This organization, we’re building a legacy for tourism in Boston. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of it. I only thought about the guide itself, the dining experience.”

If Michelin could help attract and retain chef talent in Boston, making the city a more attractive place to take big swings—and keep pushing Boston forward as a culinary destination—then Sheridan was listening. “I have always wanted to elevate Boston’s culinary scene,” she says.

But she wasn’t going to beg. Though Sheridan was ready to have another look at Michelin after the lunch, she didn’t want to simply go knocking on their door. “I wanted it to be their idea and not mine, because I felt like, if we’re going out to them—and I knew they had a pricing model—like, I wanted them to not think we were chasing it, right?”

So she and O’Donnell reached out to John Fraser, a New York City–based chef and restaurateur who was expanding to Boston with a mini food hall and steakhouse inside Downtown Crossing’s Winthrop Center. Fraser had run Michelin-starred restaurants in New York, and his newer Tampa restaurant, Lilac, had just won a Michelin star following the hospitality group’s recent expansion into Florida.

The pair listened to Fraser’s pro-Michelin perspective before O’Donnell dropped a hint at the end of the conversation. “If you ever hear about them wanting to engage with us,” he said, “just let them know that we’re, you know, perhaps more open-minded than they might have thought if they read the Eater article.”

The stage was set.

Thistle & Leek. / Photo by Brian Samuels

By the end of 2023, Michelin reached out to O’Donnell and Sheridan. It’s not clear whether the company heard Meet Boston had changed its mind, but in any case, Michelin had conducted a “destination assessment,” according to a spokesperson, and deemed the Boston area worthy. Thus the courtship began. Michelin put its best foot forward, presenting case studies and statistics positioning itself as a marketing tool for city tourism organizations. A Michelin-commissioned Ernst & Young study shared with Meet Boston offered data points like these: 57 percent of frequent travelers said they’d extend their stay at a destination if there were Michelin restaurants nearby, and 61 percent of frequent travelers, when presented with two similar tourism options, said that the existence of Michelin “is decisive” in where they choose to go.

Around this time, according to O’Donnell, restaurant inspectors started coming to Boston. Michelin was hedging its bets. If Meet Boston eventually agreed to pay for a guide, the organization wanted to make sure that there would actually be something to publish. (“We don’t reveal specifics about the inspectors’ methods, but generally the process takes several months, at least,” according to a Michelin spokesperson.)

As the talks grew more serious, Sheridan and O’Donnell had one more important task: convincing a slew of local hoteliers that Michelin was worth the price tag. Early on in her tenure as CEO of Meet Boston (at the time, the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau), Sheridan had spearheaded the formation of the Boston-Cambridge Tourism Destination Marketing District (TDMD), which includes all hotels within the two cities with 50 or more rooms. The idea was that since destination-based marketing has a direct impact on hotel bookings, it was in Boston hoteliers’ best interest to fund those marketing efforts. A 1.5 percent fee gets tacked onto hotel guests’ bills, with the money set aside for tourism marketing projects and development.

The move had helped Meet Boston grow from an annual budget of $10 million to $50 million, according to Sheridan—but not without stipulations. Instituting the TDMD also involved the formation of a committee of hoteliers overseeing how Meet Boston spends those millions of dollars. It was that committee that Sheridan and O’Donnell now needed to convince that the Michelin play was worth it. “We suddenly were playing the role of those chefs at Alcove,” O’Donnell says. They had gone from completely writing off Michelin to thinking it was worth the considerable sum it charges tourism boards. Now, they needed to walk the hoteliers through a similar shift in perspective.

Carlos Bueno, general manager of the luxury Back Bay hotel Raffles Boston, recalled the TDMD board meeting at Meet Boston’s office downtown, where the Michelin play came to a vote. Reps from Michelin presented statistics on how the guide boosts foot traffic and hotel bookings. Sheridan and O’Donnell brought in Schlesinger-Guidelli, Williams, and Cambridge chef and restaurateur Will Gilson of Puritan & Company to talk about what the guide would mean from a dining-scene perspective—basically, a 20-minute version of the lunch at Alcove. Williams recalled reiterating the same points to the assembled hoteliers that he had at Alcove, though by this point, he was ready for someone to just make a decision already.

The hoteliers weren’t easy to convince. The estimated million-dollar price tag was significant, especially for a proposal where the benefit to hotels wasn’t immediately clear (as opposed to, say, supporting Boston’s bid to be a World Cup host city). Ultimately, though, the hoteliers began to see Michelin as a selling point, especially if they were going to compete with cities like Orlando or San Antonio for meetings and convention business. Raising Boston’s profile as a dining destination, they decided, would translate into more business for their hotels. The expenditure got their stamp of approval.

O’Donnell then went across the river and served up a similar pitch to the Cambridge Office for Tourism board, since Cambridge would be footing about 25 percent of the bill. Some of the committee members, including the office’s executive director, Candice Beaulieu, had already warmed to the Michelin proposal. Revenue from the city’s meals tax had been declining, an indicator that residents might not be dining out as much. This was a way to spotlight Cambridge restaurants on a much larger scale than, say, a restaurant guide on Cambridge’s tourism website.

The committee voted in favor of the proposal, and the deal was done. Greater Boston was getting a Michelin Guide. “It felt incredible,” O’Donnell says.

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

On Monday, May 12, 2025, the announcement went wide. Michelin was heading to Boston. The online reactions came fast and furious, from pure excitement to shock and dismay that Boston was, in fact, going to pay to play after initially saying it would never.

While diners debated who would make the Michelin list, chefs tied on their aprons and got to work. Dooley Googled the names of solo diners booked at Mooncusser to see if anyone might be visiting under a suspicious alias. At 311, the South End Japanese sushi spot that ultimately earned Boston’s only Michelin star, co-owner Carrie Ko kept an eye on diners, too, wondering if they were inspectors. Jason Doo, chef-owner of American-Chinese restaurant and tiki bar Wusong Road, posted an ad on Instagram offering to pay diners who were familiar with Michelin to come eat at the restaurant and test whether it would make the cut for a Bib Gourmand. Chef Robert Sisca turned the occasional tasting menus at Back Bay French restaurant Bistro du Midi into a nightly affair, just in case that might make the restaurant more attractive to Michelin.

A few weeks ahead of the mid-November launch of Boston’s first guide, the whispers started circulating. Michelin didn’t release a list of awardees to Meet Boston ahead of time, so everyone was left to piece together who made the cut on their own. Chris and Pam Willis of Pammy’s had received an invite to the awards ceremony in Philly, and so had Michael Serpa of Select Oyster Bar. Dooley and Rachel Miller, of French-Vietnamese tasting menu Nightshade Noodle Bar in Lynn, were in. The entirety of Columbus Hospitality Group (Mistral, Ostra, and Mooo…, among others) and Himmel Hospitality Group (Grill 23 & Bar, Bistro du Midi, the Banks Seafood and Steak, and Harvest) were out. Not one of the properties within powerhouse Xenia Greek Hospitality (including Kaia, Bar Vlaha, and Krasi) had gotten a Michelin ticket. “By the time we got to Philly, I was aware of about 18 of the 26 or so,” O’Donnell says. “But [we had] no idea if these were stars, Bibs, recommended, whatever.”

From left: Karen Akunowicz (Fox & the Knife, Bar Volpe), Eric Papachristos and Jon Mendez (A Street Hospitality), Jamie Bissonnette (BCB3 Hospitality), and Jody Adams (A Street Hospitality). / Courtesy

Then came the ceremony. There were some highs: Boonnak had nabbed a big-deal cocktail award for the region, beating out New York, DC, Chicago, and Philly for the honor. A couple of restaurant owners received nods for all of their spots: Chef Karen Akunowicz swept up Bibs for both of her Boston restaurants, Fox & the Knife and Bar Volpe, and Michael Pagliarini and Pamela Ralston, the duo behind Cambridge restaurants Giulia and Möeca, were awarded recommended status for both of their places. A third of the selections were for Asian restaurants, including Uyghur, Thai, and Japanese spots, tipping a hat to Boston’s strong Asian food scene. The inaugural guide also underscored Boston as a hub for talented female chefs, with Akunowicz, Ana Sortun (Oleana), Jody Adams and Amarilys Colón (La Padrona), Rachel Miller (Nightshade Noodle Bar), Erin Miller (Urban Hearth), Tracy Chang (Pagu), and Kate Smith (Thistle & Leek) all receiving recognition.

Yet there was no mistaking the feeling in the air that Boston’s guide was, well, thin. South End omakase restaurant 311, run by the husband-and-wife team of chef Wei Fa Chen and Carrie Ko, took home the city’s only star. Where was Cassie Piuma’s Sarma, the eight-time James Beard honoree? How about Boston’s hottest new restaurant in recent memory, Comfort Kitchen? Or the elder statesmen of Boston’s fine-dining scene, like O Ya and Uni? It didn’t help that another of Boston’s Northeast rivals, Philly, was also getting its inaugural guide that night. Everyone in the audience watched as the (admittedly more populous) city beat Boston out with 33 restaurant selections, including three one-star awards.

The next morning, the headline practically wrote itself: “Boston Scores Just One Michelin Star After Paying to Get Rated,” a Bloomberg story blared. Locally, the coverage was kinder, cheering on the whole group of restaurants in the guide versus singling out the lone star. Still, no one’s prediction list had guessed this outcome. For chefs like Dooley, who won “recommended” status for Mooncusser but was hoping for a star, the guide felt like a gauntlet thrown. “I think there was a little bit of an emotional letdown, like, ‘Oh, we didn’t do so well as a city,’” Dooley says. “But then, I think that immediately turned to—certainly for me—the competitiveness to be like, ‘Okay, we’ve got work to do.’”

For Ko and Chen, the moment was pure validation. A few years earlier, after supporting Ko in her dream to launch a medspa, the couple had turned to focus on Chen’s dream to open his own restaurant. Every decision involved sacrifice. Chen trained at the then-three-Michelin-starred sushi restaurant Masa in New York City, driving back to Boston every week to spend his one day off with Ko. When the pair signed the lease on the South End space, they ran through their savings and were using credit cards to make up the difference and get the restaurant off the ground. Ko worked a second job during the day until almost a year after the restaurant opened. They opened without a liquor license and were unable to get one until nine months later.

Still, they knew exactly what they wanted. In Chen’s bio on 311’s website, he stated that he was striving for “Michelin-level excellence” in the restaurant, two years before Michelin announced its entry into the city. The duo is meticulous about sourcing in every area of the restaurant; Ko can say exactly where, when, and from whom they bought each piece of serveware used during dinner service. The pair fought tirelessly to convince high-end seafood purveyors who mostly did business in New York to expand deliveries to Boston. In one instance, the president of a Japanese company was more willing to work with 311 after dining at the restaurant and determining that Chen was talented enough to carry their products.

The couple recently spent upward of $3,400 for 20 pounds of Oma tuna, a legendary type of bluefin tuna caught near the town of Oma, located on the northernmost tip of Japan’s Honshu Island. Ko did some quick calculations during a recent interview on the restaurant’s one closed day per week. The price per pound of Oma tuna worked out to about $20 per slice served during the omakase. The current price of dinner at 311 is $280 for 18 courses. Between their uncompromising sourcing standards and the constant spiking of ingredient costs due in part to the tariffs levied over the past year, “we don’t make money from the food,” Ko says.

This way of running a restaurant is not feasible for everyone, nor should it be the only yardstick that determines a successful restaurant. Fellow South End resident George Mendes, a longtime chef who ran his own Michelin-starred restaurant Aldea in New York City for a decade before moving to Boston to lead culinary operations at Raffles, then branching out on his own with a forthcoming South End tasting-menu spot, is careful to explain that Michelin isn’t the only gauge by which to determine a great restaurant. The organization states plainly that it only cares about what is on the plate. “It’s really putting the chef under a microscope,” Mendes says.

Despite how difficult it is to win Michelin’s favor, Mendes and Ko both expected Boston to earn more accolades. Ko says that she and Chen were both surprised but also sad to be the only ones on stage receiving a Boston star that night. Mendes, for his part, wasn’t surprised that 311 earned a star—but he was surprised that it was the city’s only star, given the “depth of talent” that exists in Boston’s dining scene. “There are so many talented chefs, and I’ve eaten in so many great restaurants [here],” he says.

Asta’s kitchen team, including chef-owner Alex Crabb. / Photo by Kristin Teig

Due to the way Michelin shrouds its operations in secrecy, it’s impossible to know exactly how the inaugural guide was shaped. Michelin doesn’t disclose how many inspectors it dispatches to a new city or how many restaurants it visits to determine its inaugural lists. Still, when Nyacko Pearl Perry heard that the Michelin Guide was launching in Boston, she knew right away that Comfort Kitchen, the Dorchester hot spot that she co-owns with partner Biplaw Rai, probably wouldn’t make the cut.

It didn’t matter that the restaurant had swept up just about every local restaurant award available, or that it had secured a James Beard nod in every award cycle since it opened three years ago. Comfort Kitchen doesn’t fit the bill for Michelin, “and I say that even not knowing exactly what they’re looking for,” Perry says. For starters, it’s run by a Black chef, the menu focuses on tracing the spice routes out of the African diaspora, and it’s located in Dorchester, which historically does not see a lot of shine as a dining destination. There are far fewer African restaurants in Michelin’s guides versus French or Italian fare; and who knows which neighborhoods the non-local inspectors were visiting when they touched down in Boston. (Michelin, for its part, notes that its inspectors have “no set quota on the types of restaurants or cuisine types included in a selection.”)

Perry also acknowledges that the restaurant has evolved significantly in its three-year lifespan. “We are working on consistency,” she says. “It’s a growth area for us, as it is for many restaurants.”

David Doyle, the Jamaica Plain restaurateur who co-owns Centre Street hot spots Tres Gatos, Tonino, and Casa Verde, is more forthright in his criticism. “Michelin as an arbiter of taste, for me, is a little suspect,” he says. Doyle believes the standards that Michelin looks for, especially in its star ratings, are at odds with what it takes to build a successful restaurant in Boston: warm service, a community focus, and the kind of price point that can sustain regulars. The organization, in his mind, wasn’t interested in restaurants that function as cornerstones of their community and pack dining rooms on Monday nights.

“That whole notion of scarcity bugs me because there’s an implication that we just don’t have a lot of restaurants that qualify for whatever their standards are,” Doyle says. “I’m opposed to the idea, because, for those of us involved in the restaurant world here who take pride in what we offer, I feel like it automatically excludes a lot of wonderful chefs, and a lot of wonderful concepts that are beloved in their neighborhood and that really succeed as restaurants.” (The online uproar when Tonino didn’t get a Michelin nod, even with proven Boston talent Luke Fetbroth leading the kitchen, was almost visceral.)

Perry and Doyle’s critiques point to a larger question that Michelin faces in every city it enters: Can a European institution built on French fine-dining traditions recognize excellence in restaurants that don’t fit that mold? Michelin’s thin first guide—with no selections in Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, or Hyde Park, as well as the entire cities of Somerville and Quincy, which were all within Michelin’s stated geographic bounds—didn’t reflect the full wealth of neighborhood spots and immigrant-run kitchens that are a strength of the Boston dining scene.

A spokesperson for Michelin wrote in an email that inspectors worldwide are focused on five criteria when grading a restaurant: the quality of ingredients, mastery of cooking techniques, the “harmony of flavors,” how well the chef’s personality comes through on the plate, and consistency in execution. Whenever the organization expands to a new geographic location, the inspection team conducts “an initial study” of the area to “evaluate the main major culinary hotspots for the inaugural selection,” according to the spokesperson. They focused on “the metro Boston area” for the initial guide and expect to see the selections grow in the coming years. “It is only the beginning of our story with Boston, and as the Michelin Guide works on a long-term scale, we observe very often the extension of its geographical scope within a country, a region, or a state over time,” the spokesperson said.

Still, whatever Michelin’s blind spots, the hoopla that follows the organization wherever it goes translates into tangible benefits, according to every chef I spoke with for this story. Mendes predicts a stronger relationship with suppliers as chefs are more motivated to dial into their ingredient supply chain and work more closely with specific farmers in the region. Schlesinger-Guidelli hopes that Michelin aspirations will help stave off corporatism and guide developers toward favoring ambitious, independent restaurant ideas. Williams is already looking forward to the day when he can dine in a Michelin-starred restaurant run by one of the next generation of chefs coming up through the city’s kitchens. Now that inspectors are allegedly slipping in and out of Boston’s restaurants throughout the year, all diners will benefit from chefs who will be more on their toes, Dooley says. After all, Michelin recognition could be hanging in the balance.

Sheridan, who originally rejected the idea of Michelin because she didn’t want to pay for yet another spotlight on Boston’s white-tablecloth steakhouses, now calls that fear “unfounded” in the face of the guide’s initial selections, with its mix of Uyghur, Thai, Korean, and Hunanese restaurants alongside New England seafood stalwarts like Neptune Oyster. “It’s tamping down that feeling that people have about that sort of outdated perception of Boston’s dining experience,” Sheridan says. “When I hear the disparagement [about Boston’s dining scene], it sits so wrong with me.”

Still, was that worth an estimated seven-figure investment? Sheridan says it’s too early to tell. Chefs in the guide have been seeing upticks in sales, but the more important gauge to Meet Boston will be the overall buzz about Boston restaurants and whether Michelin’s presence boosts the number of hotel bookings in the city. “I think, really, years two and three are going to be what tell us, What does this really mean for us?” Sheridan says.

Bueno, Raffles’ general manager, says that post-guide launch, he remains “100 percent on board” with the decision to pay for Michelin. “When you’re making an investment like that, I don’t think you’re looking at 26 restaurants, or 50, or 100,” Bueno says. “You’re looking at the number of lives that we have the opportunity to impact. We take a look at the opportunity to elevate our city.” On that, Michelin promised many returns. Bueno noted, though, that when the contract comes up for renewal, the board will look at those statistics that Michelin initially presented to the TDMD and closely measure how they lined up with reality.

Back in Jamaica Plain, Doyle says Tonino will keep doing what it does best—friendly service, exacting standards, a packed dining room on Monday nights. If Michelin doesn’t notice, he notes, perhaps that says more about them than it does about us.

311 Omakase. / Photo via FWA Creative

The Complete List

All 26 restaurants that made Boston’s inaugural Michelin Guide.

ONE STAR

311 Omakase (South End; Omakase)

BIB GOURMAND (6)

Bar Volpe (South Boston; Italian)
Fox & the Knife (South Boston; Italian)
Jahunger (Cambridge; Uyghur)
Mahaniyom (Brookline; Thai)
Pagu (Cambridge; Spanish-Japanese)
Sumiao Hunan Kitchen (Cambridge; Hunanese)

RECOMMENDED (19)

Asta (Back Bay; New American)
Carmelina’s (North End; Italian)
Giulia (Cambridge; Italian)
La Padrona (Back Bay; Italian)
Lenox Sophia (South Boston; New American)
Moëca (Cambridge; Seafood)
Mooncusser (Back Bay; Seafood)
Neptune Oyster (North End; Seafood)
Nightshade Noodle Bar (Lynn; French-Vietnamese)
Oleana (Cambridge; Eastern Mediterranean)
Pammy’s (Cambridge; Italian)
Select Oyster Bar (Back Bay; Seafood)
Somaek (Downtown Crossing; Korean)
Thistle & Leek (Newton; British)
Urban Hearth (Cambridge; New American)
Toro (South End; Spanish)
Wa Shin (Downtown; Japanese)
Woods Hill Pier 4 (Seaport; New American)
Zhi Wei Café (Downtown; northwestern Chinese)

For full descriptions of each Michelin-recognized restaurant, including what Michelin liked about them and what we like, read more here.

This article was first published in the print edition of the March 2026 issue with the headline: “One-Star Town.”

Our List of the Top 50 Restaurants in Greater Boston
A Wish List for the 2026 Michelin Boston Guide
Michelin Recognizes These 26 Greater Boston Restaurants
The Michelin Guide Is Coming to Boston. Cool?

The Gilded Identity Crisis of Boston’s Favorite Winter Escape

Simone Migliori — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:45:45 +0000

Illustration by Jon Reinfurt

The Palm Beach Daily News is called the “Shiny Sheet” by locals because of the thick, glossy paper it is printed on. It has all the fixings of news, and the high rollers keep score about how many times their pictures appear. Palm Beach is keeping-score paradise.

A Boston real estate developer once told me, “In Boston, I’m a rich old man. In Palm Beach, I’m a poor young one.” I’ve been playing in that luxurious sandbox on and off for many years and have witnessed endless sightings of incredibly rich people who look like characters out of zombie movies. I’ve seen elderly men, even on canes or walkers, escorted by much younger blond women. The thought balloons over the heads of the men surely say something like, “Where were you when I was in high school?” Then there’s the line about the women taking care of the older guys: “The women down here are either nurse or purse.” But if you loved Vanity Fair, Palm Beach is for you. Thackeray is alive and well.

People want to be with their tribes. It’s human nature. True in Boston. True everywhere. A gossipy friend of mine, whose parents owned a home in Palm Beach for many years, told me, “A number of Bostonians, when they became prosperous in various manufacturing businesses, typically shoes or textiles, migrated there in the winters. Several of them helped to found the Palm Beach Country Club, whose members have included Bostonians such as Robert Kraft.” Most people who own escape homes go there because friends moved there first and said, “You should come to Palm Beach, you’d love it.” Then my friend made another observation: “The three most insecure places in America are Beverly Hills, East Hampton, and Palm Beach.”

“Why insecure?” I asked him.

“They’re insecure because they can’t stand that the guy at the next table in the hottest restaurant has millions…or billions more than they have. It drives them crazy. And all these people are so proud that the maitre d’s know their children’s names. That’s insecurity.”

I visited Palm Beach last winter, happy to be in the sun, checking out the gilded playground. The classic WASP flavor—old money, jackets and ties, linen and seersucker, Panama hats, one-trick ponies from Greenwich, Darien, Lake Forest, Dearborn—has given way to arrivals from anywhere in the country where you’ve made enough to strut your stuff. These people are almost all from three industries: private equity, venture, and…consulting. They’re the modern Gatsbys. They made it themselves and they want you to know. They’re flocking to Palm Beach and West Palm, fleeing the cold and the taxes.

Everyone’s biggest complaint is the traffic. The second complaint from waitstaff and Uber drivers can be summed up in one word: entitled. “No one ever used to blow their horns down here. Now, rudeness rules,” an Uber driver told me. She said she’s writing a novel about the Palm Beach attitude: “If this place is progress, count me out. On the other hand, I’m having a great year.”

Still, for all its changes, Palm Beach remains what it’s always been: the poster child for capitalism. The old money is nervous. The new money is loud. And everyone is keeping score.

A couple of decades ago, Bernie Madoff took a big bite out of Palm Beach. Dozens of Palm Beachers, including not just wealthy people but solidly middle-class folks as well, got caught up in the Ponzi scheme. He fleeced his best friends, he destroyed his family, and he wiped out widows. I first heard about Madoff in the 1990s. I had a lot of clients at that time who were in the shoe business. “Shoeies,” as they called themselves, were born gamblers. Because every season for them was a bet on fashion trends, shoeies could be on top of the heap one year and in bankruptcy the next. They all competed with one another in loving ways, playing gin rummy, golfing, and debating who had the hottest money manager. Many of them went to Palm Beach in the winter. One of them I called “Mr. K.” He often gave me his impressions of life in Palm Beach. And I know he had put money with Madoff. In the early 2000s, he said to me, “Do you know why I came to Palm Beach? Not just for golf.” (He had a low handicap.)

“No, why?”

“Well, I sell shoes, right? You have to always look like you’re a big success. Show no weakness in the shoe business. We like good service in restaurants. So if you’re gonna make it in Palm Beach, you’ve got to learn how to duke.”

“Duke?” I said.

“Slip the maitre d’ a folded bill, down around your pants pocket so no one can see. You duke him. Palm Beach is basically Duke City.” I asked him about Madoff. “Well,” he said, “you weren’t ‘in with the in crowd’ down here if you didn’t have money with him. It was its own club. You know, I never could read any of his monthly statements. And neither could my accountant.”

“And you didn’t think anything might be phony?”

He smiled a sad little smile. “Well, I did think that.” He paused. “But I liked the checks.” Many of the early investors took money out on a regular basis. The classic Ponzi scheme. Fear and greed. Pay out the old investors with money from the new ones.

Boston, in a sense, created Madoff. A clothing manufacturer in Boston was one of Madoff’s first investors. They met, and the con man did his magic. It’s human nature to share with friends when opportunity presents itself. Friends spread the word to other friends. Madoff eventually expanded his action to Palm Beach, introducing his Ponzi scheme at the country clubs there, his perfect stage. In the major playpens of sun and money, there is a herd mentality: “We have to go where the action is.”

Speaking of going where the action is: Peter was an amusing client of mine from Pittsburgh, a divorced man who spent winters in a Palm Beach apartment. He was an outlier, a loner, not a member of any of the tribes that dominated there: high WASP old money at the Everglades Club and the Bath & Tennis Club and the Society of the Four Arts, or the Jewish population, with the Palm Beach Country Club at the top of the social food chain. Peter belonged to a different beach club that had a lot of members from the Midwest. “We’re down market from the East Coast crowd,” he told me. “We shake your hand; we have a deal. We don’t come to meetings with 20 lawyers. We don’t need the flash and dash. I wear khaki pants and a blazer everywhere. Women seem to like it. The waiters at Café L’Europe all wear ties. It’s more genteel than the other restaurants. I sit at the bar when I don’t have a date, sip a bourbon, and talk to the bartender. Recently, an attractive woman sat next to me and said, ‘You must be really rich to dress like that, as if you don’t care.’” Peter laughed. “I’m a single man in Palm Beach. Women are always fixing me up. They have a ‘hook’ when they describe me: ‘Peter’s like a prep school kid in the 1950s. He talks about William Faulkner and restaurants in Paris.’”

Peter smiled at me. “I grew up in L.A., Bel Air. It’s fun to live in places so insecure. You can be The Talented Mr. Ripley all the time.” Peter called the bartender over. “Give my friend a peek at the stash,” he said. The bartender brought out a cardboard box, put it down on the bar, and opened it. It was full of scarves. Peter said, “Every time I have a date, I’ll surprise her by whipping a scarf out of my blazer pocket, and I’ll give it to her.”

“Pretty expensive date,” I said. “Ferragamo.”

He smiled. “Why do I live in Palm Beach? I’m trolling to find a rich widow. At least I’m honest about it. And the odds are in my favor. Nurse or purse.” He knocked on the bar. “I’ll take the purse.”

Peter was playing a role, but so was everyone else. The difference in Palm Beach is that the stage keeps getting more expensive—yet some of the old backdrops are still worth the price of admission.

I would suggest, if you travel to Palm Beach today, that you stay at the Breakers hotel. Or at least have dinner or lunch to experience hospitality at the highest level. I cannot imagine another large hotel run like a boutique one, where the employees—up and down the spectrum of jobs, from concierge to shuttle-bus driver—are like the citizens of It’s a Wonderful Life. Last year, I was having a drink with a friend staying at the Breakers on the Flagler Club floors, which covers you with butler service and free cocktails at cocktail hour. “Yup,” my friend told me. “Free drinks and great hors d’oeuvres…I’m paying $4,000 a night.” I clinked my glass with his.

One day, I wandered into the Polo Ralph Lauren store just outside the lobby of the Breakers. A salesman wanted to help. “Online shopping is killing the buying experience,” he said. “All the great stores are going, going, gone down here. Neiman Marcus, Brooks Brothers, Saks. And there was a gentleness to Palm Beach, high standards. Yes, they were superrich, but they read books and listened to classical music and drove Bentley convertibles. Now it’s the Barbarians at the Gate.”

“And Gatsby’s your favorite book, I bet,” I said.

“Well, that’s why I work at Polo. I still want men in suits and ties and women in dresses not hiked up to their pippick.” He smiled a sad smile. “Sooner or later, it’s all gone, the gentility.”

The Breakers / via Getty Images

Golf is big in Palm Beach, as is everything else in this bastion of money. There is a pecking order: good, better, best. My friend Jerry from Texas has a timeshare apartment and belongs to the cream of that crop: Seminole Golf Club, one of the elite courses in America that I call “CEO Paradise.” And as another friend, a Boston transplant, told me, “In Palm Beach, people-watching gives me laughs every day. It’s like one big New Yorker cartoon.”

Jerry, high up the food chain in the automobile business, was put up for membership at Seminole by several heads of major corporations. He took me out to play. The course is on almost every golfer’s bucket list—like Augusta, it’s hallowed ground. And tough to get into, even as a guest. The Seminole locker room is among the most impressive in golf, with shining wooden lockers so large you could almost sleep in one.

On one visit years ago, Jerry and I were going to lunch after our round. “Best jellied consommé in America,” Jerry said. Then he noticed a couple coming into the dining room. “There’s a new member and his wife,” he said, nodding toward them as they walked in with the president of the club. He mentioned the new member was the CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the country. The CEO looked nervous to me. He was wearing a blue suit and a tie. His wife was wearing gloves, as if they both had come from church on a Sunday. They both looked as though they were trying to pass muster.

Which was exactly what they were trying to do. Even CEOs of Fortune 500 companies can have imposter syndrome. In Palm Beach, they can make you feel that way. Can I fit in with pedigreed Eastern preppies? Do I measure up?

Here’s a sign of the golf times: Real estate developer Stephen Ross has built three new courses just north of Palm Beach: the Apogee Golf Club. The initiation fee is more than $500,000, and I’m told the caddie fees run $600 to $700 a round. When I caddied at Putterham in Brookline, I got $5 a loop.

My favorite place to dine: outside at Bice. Then I’ll explore shimmering Worth Avenue. Two of my favorite stores in America are on opposite sides of Worth Avenue, facing off. Maus & Hoffman is one. The shop has flair and endless colors, from shoes and jackets to bathing suits. Don’t expect cheap on Worth.

Across the street is Trillion. Beautiful clothing as well. And as the name implies, incredibly expensive. While wandering around recently, I saw the perfect advertisement for the store: an elderly man, high patrician, white hair slicked back, standing with a walker. He was wearing a brilliant green cashmere sweater, and he was staring into space, as if he had no idea where he was. “Nice sweater,” I said to him.

“It was my father’s,” he said. “Used to wear it to the beach.” There was a display of cashmere sweaters on the table behind him. They came in multiple bright colors. I picked one up and looked at the price. “This one’s $700,” I said.

“The Baron,” he answered. “That’s what everyone called my old man. The Baron always told me, ‘Free is better. And if it isn’t free…wait for the sales.’” I put the sweater back.

Back across the street is the Adelson Galleries, which several years ago had a space in Boston’s South End. They always have wonderful artists. And they still do, including one of my favorites, Andrew Stevovich, who lives in the Boston area. And also Boston’s Robert Freeman, whose paintings of Black lives inspire me.

I met a woman that week at a dinner party in a client’s apartment on Breakers Row, next to the hotel, right on the beach. Her name was Charlie. She had run a major consulting firm and retired to Palm Beach, with several other dwellings where the one percent gather. I asked her about the current Palm Beach scene. “The people in Palm Beach are overwhelmed by what they have: fatigue from counting how many houses, how many planes. Fastest game in the past few years is to buy a great house and location, tear it down, and build a tribute to your success. Then buy the house on your left and the house on your right and say to yourself, ‘Can you top this?’” She went on. “Palm Beach used to be a sleepy place. Rich, yes. But kind of seersucker suit and straw-hat rich. Polo, not pickleball. Years ago, when I came down here, everyone lived a gentle life. Now there’s a crowding out, a wall of people, the toniest clubs, the Everglades, the Bath & Tennis, all taking in more members than they’ve ever had. The dream of being ‘in with the in crowd’ is relentless.”

“Well,” I said, “Everything changes in life, whether we like it or not. Why don’t you move someplace else?”

Charlie smiled. “Well, I like to see how people live. I was a marketing whiz and a history buff. I do like to people-watch at La Goulue because it has a New York feel. Then I can go to Kapsiki on Worth Avenue. They have a one-of-a-kind flair for original outfits.”

As she was leaving the party, she said, “Looking around Palm Beach, I wonder if it’s somewhat like Paris right before the revolution—the royals about to lose their heads. When you run into new friends here, they all tell you they’re running off to visit somewhere else: Venice, Antarctica…they’re nervous.”

The Palm Beach shore / Via Getty Images

My friend Frank has lived half the year in Palm Beach for at least 30 years. He was a star at one of the premier investment firms in the country, based in New York. He has a great sense of history about the world around him, and some sharp observations about his second home: “It was a quieter place when I came down here. Now, new clubs are popping up and are immediately filled up, with most of the members from other places, making the traffic out of control,” he said. “One recent place got this all started, the Carriage House, modeled on Annabel’s, the über club in London. Symptoms of the times. Young crowds, rock ’n’ roll. When it opened, it was around $250,000 initiation fee. Now it’s more than $400,000. No sports, just ‘see and be seen.’ Fun, fun, fun, till Daddy takes the T-bird away.”

“It’s finance-bro city,” Frank added. “They’ll probably bring back the dress code: suspenders and suits, slicked-back hair, huge watches…cuff links. They already have the clubs to go with it all.”

Real estate and hotel rates, accordingly, have skyrocketed. “We can’t believe the home prices…$120 million. New hotels are going up all over the place. I visited friends in a new hotel in West Palm. A tiny room is $2,000 a night. And getting a restaurant rez is crazy. We stay home mostly. And so do our friends.” He winked at me. “But we’ll go to the Everglades…no tourists there.”

My favorite place in Palm Beach is the Society of the Four Arts, with an amazing sculpture garden designed by the great Boston landscape architecture firm Morgan Wheelock. The Four Arts was created in 1936 to bring education and culture to Palm Beach County. There are courses and programs featuring visiting speakers, the best America offers in politics, literature, music, and current events. Name your favorite person in any field, and more than likely, they’ve spoken and delighted the gatherings at Four Arts.

I was writing in a notebook, dining outside at Bice, when a woman alone at the next table asked, “Are you a food critic?”

Donatella had been an opera singer, not quite the Met or La Scala, but a diva nonetheless. “I’m a culture maven,” she told me. “The new big money here means Palm Beach will be one of the great cities in America for the performing arts. I heard the most interesting people in the world, like Boris Johnson and Neil Gorsuch, want to speak here. The greatest symphonies as well, and wonderful theater at Glazer Hall. And every single great New York restaurant is opening a place down here. I could go to the Kitchen in West Palm or Milos every night, but I hope your wallet is fat.”

I guess whether Palm Beach is getting better or worse depends on your perspective. But either way, the point of coming down here is rubbing elbows with the economically rarefied, playing in the pools, the golf courses, the clubs and dining, the shopping, the people-watching. On my last night on a recent visit, I was waiting for a shuttle bus to take me back to my hotel. I sat in a small vestibule. Four young women came over and sat next to me. They noticed me writing in a notebook. One of them said, “You writing a book?”

“Always,” I answered. “I’m writing an article about Palm Beach.”

“We’re here on a long weekend, down here from Quincy, staying at the Breakers.”

“Having fun?”

“The best big hotel we’ve ever stayed in. Palm Beach is really lit. All kinds of old guys, young guys hitting on us. Buying us drinks. It’s like a great parade, taking it all in, away from the cold. And we get to pretend we’re as rich as they are. We’re all from Quincy but thinking that we’re Cinderella and the prince will show up and ask us to the ball. Wanna buy us some stingers?”

“A little late for me,” I said.

“Too bad—you should really act like we do. Pretend you’re really rich.”

This article was first published in the print edition of the February 2026 issue with the headline: “Scenes from the Gilded Sandbox.”

18 Winter Travel Destinations to Escape This Mess

Stranded in New Hampshire: A Rescue Mission at Franconia Ridge

Catherine Elton — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:00:40 +0000

Fish and Game calls in the Army National Guard for helicopter evacuation only in life-or-death emergencies. Patrick Bittman’s situation required one. / New Hampshire Army National Guard

A single beam of light bobbed in the darkness as Patrick Bittman, cold and winded from hours of hiking, hauled himself up the last stretch to the summit of Little Haystack. Hours earlier, he’d set out alone on a nighttime winter hike in New Hampshire’s White Mountains to climb the three peaks of the Franconia Ridge loop and watch the sun rise from the final summit. He had left the trailhead at 12:15 a.m. under a light snow, shortly after scribbling down his first journal entry: “Maybe this is foolish.”

Three hours later, as he scanned the first peak with his headlamp, he felt as though he’d stumbled into a Norse hellscape. The summit of Little Haystack, at nearly 5,000 feet above sea level, was far colder, windier, and buried under much more snow than the trailhead. Off the sides of the ridge, stunted trees—gnarled and bent by years of pounding wind—were caked in thick layers of frozen snow. Icicles jutted out at improbable angles from the black rocks. Then there was the sound—that unnerving, haunting sound. He took off his gloves, exposing his hands to the cold, to pull his journal out of his pack. “The wind is primordial, not a roar, but a deep, unceasing, guttural back-of-the-throat growl,” the 28-year-old wrote. Still, he pressed on.

On his way up Little Haystack, the trees on either side of the trail had kept him on course. Now, above the tree line, the path vanished under fresh snow. Every few steps he strayed from the invisible, rocky spine of the mountain and sank up to his waist in drifts. Each time, it took him 10 minutes to fight his way out, leaving him colder, wetter, and more exhausted than before. A distance that would have taken 15 minutes in normal conditions took him two hours. He was badly behind schedule. But he didn’t turn back—he just adjusted his goal. Instead of sunrise from Lafayette, he’d catch it from Lincoln, the middle peak.

As he slowly advanced, Bittman kept stripping off his gloves, exposing his hands, to consult his GPS or write in his journal, yet decided against eating food or drinking hot coffee from his thermos because he was worried about the cold. After a while, the words he wrote weren’t making much sense either.

Finally, a realization cut through his mental fog—unless he made strategic decisions right away, he would freeze to death on this mountain. He thought of his friends and family, how he’d be letting them down if he never made it home. None of them even knew where he was out hiking.

But when he finally decided to turn back, it was too late—he couldn’t find the trail. Instead, he started frantically down a steep, treeless gully, thick with snow, moving faster and faster. He figured he’d eventually intersect the trail and, even if he couldn’t go any further, a hiker would find him in the morning. Sliding 10 feet at a time in the deep snow, then getting back on his feet and sprinting again, he was animalistic, his body buzzing with adrenaline, his heart thundering beneath his layers.

He ran on in a panic, littering the mountainside with his belongings—his hat, his gloves, his walking stick, his headlamp. His mind was locked in flight mode.

After about a third of a mile, his mad dash came to a sudden halt as he sank waist-deep into the snow. He could no longer move his body, nor did he even want to. His adrenaline drained away, and his heartbeat slowed. Peace settled over him. He closed his eyes and waited for death.

The Franconia Ridge loop in the White Mountains—New Hampshire’s most frequent rescue site. / Courtesy photo

Just before 8 a.m. on December 19, 2024, New Hampshire Fish and Game Department Lieutenant James Kneeland drove north through Franconia Notch on Route 93 to a meeting in Lancaster. It was wild in the notch that morning, the mercury at 25 degrees, with 40-mile-an-hour winds blowing snow everywhere. As always when driving north, he decided to check out the scene at the trailhead to the Franconia Ridge Loop, which lies just steps off the highway, to see how busy things were. The loop is one of the most popular hikes in the Northeast—and the single most frequent site for rescues in New Hamsphire.

He pulled his Chevy Silverado into the snow-covered lot where a single car sat parked. Who the eff would be up there in this goddam weather? he wondered. Still, with so few cars in the lot, he felt confident he wouldn’t get an emergency call that day.

Minutes later, more than 3,000 feet above that parking lot, Bittman opened his eyes, surprised he was still alive. One lucid thought surfaced: Maybe he had cell reception. He fished his phone out of his jacket and dialed 9-1-1. To his disbelief, a dispatcher answered. He told her he needed help.

Kneeland had only made it 20 minutes up Route 93 when State Police texted him at 8:13 a.m. about a hypothermic hiker on Little Haystack. He pulled over, took out his laptop, fired up his GPS mapping software, and entered the coordinates. Bittman’s location appeared as a red dot in the Dry Brook drainage, a gully he knew all too well. Two years earlier, on Christmas Eve, he had sent a team of rescuers up there to find a lost hiker. They returned on Christmas Day carrying his lifeless body.

Kneeland called Bittman and asked if he could move, explaining he could guide Bittman back to the trail over the phone. But Bittman was too cold and his limbs were frozen. Kneeland knew a helicopter was his best chance, and he asked how far Bittman could see. When Bittman replied that he was in the clouds and could only see about 50 feet, Kneeland knew a chopper wouldn’t be able to safely fly through the clouds to get there. He would have to send rescuers up on foot. “I’m going to get a team together and send them up to you. It’s going to be several hours till they’re there, though,” he told Bittman, adding that he would call every 30 minutes to check on him.

“I know it’ll take you as long as it took me to get here,” Bittman replied.

Kneeland hung up and started calling members of his team. It was time to save Bittman.

Fish and Game Lieutenant Bob Mancini was sitting on the exam table at the doctor’s office getting his blood pressure taken when his phone lit up with a message from Kneeland about Bittman. He read it and turned to the doctor. “You might want to give me a minute,” he said. “My blood pressure could be a little high.” He called Kneeland to accept the mission, then hustled out to his truck.

Fish and Game Conservation Officer Christopher McKee was at home when he got the call. He opened his pantry, snagged two cans of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup from his kids’ lunch cache, boiled them up, and poured it into his thermos before grabbing his coat and jumping in his truck, where his rescue gear was already packed and ready to go. Conservation Officer Jim Cyrs was on his way to pick up a potentially rabid bat for testing when he received the call. He rerouted his GPS and headed for the notch. Conservation Officer Joseph Canfield also responded.

Kneeland knew he was going to need more rescuers for a carry-out—it would take a minimum of 18, in shifts of at least six, to carry Bittman down the mountain in a litter. He called Allan Clark, founder and then-president of the Pemigewasset Valley Search & Rescue Team (Pemi SAR), an all-volunteer group that covers this stretch of the White Mountains, and gave him the details.

Dan Allegretti, a semi-retired private equity guy and Pemi SAR volunteer, was walking his poodle with his wife when an alert hit his phone: We have a male off trail below the ridge; he is currently alive. We will be going up Falling Waters Trail to Shining Rock and then bushwhacking north to his coordinates. Staging will be at the normal trailhead. This will likely be a carry-out. Fish and Game is bringing the litter. This is for winter crew only. Temperature is dropping currently 15 degrees, wind 25 mph. Need traction and likely snowshoes.

Allegretti walked home, filled a thermos with hot black coffee, wrapped up a piece of his wife’s homemade banana bread, and gathered some electrolytes and additional food for the mission. Then he grabbed his snowshoes, pack, and fluorescent yellow Pemi SAR jacket, and headed for his car.

When Rusty Talbot, a local climbing-gym owner and mountain guide, saw the alert, his mind flashed back to nearly two decades earlier, when he and some friends had gotten caught in a snowstorm after ice climbing. When they tried to get down the mountain, they got lost for a couple of hours in deep snow in the very gully where Bittman was located. He knew exactly how disorienting that terrain could be.

Talbot quickly checked his calendar. That night was his son’s last concert of his elementary school career. He crossed his fingers that he’d be back by then and accepted the mission. Six other winter-qualified members also responded.

Kneeland knew the cloud cover was too low for a helicopter medevac mission, but he also knew that weather moves fast on Franconia Ridge. He put in the call to the New Hampshire Army National Guard base in Concord, just in case.

National Guard Chief Warrant Officer Luke Koladish was in the flight operations room that Thursday morning when the call came in. He knew from the sense of urgency on the line, and the time it would take a ground crew to reach the hiker, that the Guard’s medevac team was Bittman’s best shot at survival. He agreed to take the mission as pilot-in-command, asking Chief Warrant Officer Jeremy Gray to serve as pilot and Sergeant First Class Aaron DeAngelis to build out the rest of the crew. DeAngelis recruited Sergeant Daniel Bourque to operate the hoist and Staff Sergeant Ethan Major to serve as medic. It was a solid team; they all had extensive experience, including some who had rescued wounded soldiers from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, often under fire.

After their commanding officer signed off on the mission, Koladish headed to the Black Hawk on the tarmac, where the crew had already prepared their gear for the mission. He and Gray climbed into the cockpit, pulled on their headsets, and ran through their lengthy preflight checklist. The engine whined, and after a while, their seats began to shudder as the rotors came to life overhead. The rest of the crew climbed in. As the Black Hawk began to slowly rise into the air and head north, Gray radioed base: “We are off of Concord, en route to Franconia Notch.”

Fish and Game calls in the Army National Guard for helicopter evacuation only in life-or-death emergencies, as with Bittman’s rescue. / New Hampshire Army National Guard

At about 9:15 a.m., Conservation Officer McKee swung his truck into the snowy parking-lot staging area where Kneeland was waiting. Kneeland briefed him on the plan as McKee pulled on his outer layers, grabbed his radio, and hauled his 60-pound pack from the back of his truck. Inside it were warm clothing, a chemical warming blanket, sleeping bags, and a bothy bag—a pole-less survival shelter used for keeping warm. McKee waited for Canfield to arrive on the scene, and by 10 a.m., they were heading up the trail.

Allegretti and fellow Pemi SAR volunteers Corey Swartz and Mark Casale pulled into the lot shortly after, checked in with Kneeland, and started up the mountain. Then Mancini arrived from the doctor’s office, stripped out of his dark-green Fish and Game uniform right there in the parking lot, and started pulling base layers and outer layers from the drawers in the back of his Chevy Tahoe before grabbing his spikes, snowshoes, and 50-pound pack. Kneeland handed him the litter, and Mancini began up the trail, dragging it behind him. Soon after, Talbot and three other volunteers checked in and set out with Jim Cyrs from Fish and Game.

Eventually, Allegretti and the other two Pemi SAR volunteers caught up to McKee and Canfield. Since the volunteers were carrying much smaller packs than the Fish and Game officers, they decided the volunteers should push ahead as the hasty team to reach Bittman first and start warming him. McKee handed over some of his warming gear, including the bothy bag and chemical blanket. The volunteers stuffed them in their packs and took off, moving at as fast a pace as they thought they could reasonably sustain.

Meanwhile, far overhead, the Black Hawk closed in on Franconia Ridge. In the back, medic Ethan Major was readying his rescue gear. If the clouds were high enough to get to Bittman’s location, they were going to have to move fast. They would need a long enough break in the weather to lower Major down to Bittman, hoist both back up, and safely get out of there. DeAngelis monitored visibility out the left-side window, down toward the notch. “We have an escape route down to the left, toward 93,” he said over the chopper’s intercom.

As they neared their target, their rotors whipped up fresh snow from trees and created a rotor cloud from the moisture—both limiting visibility. But the most dangerous obstacle by far was the low cloud ceiling. Koladish and Gray inched the Black Hawk slowly up the mountain to avoid punching into the clouds if they suddenly shifted. When that happens, pilots lose all visibility in an instant and with it, often, their sense of orientation. It’s an extreme emergency—and often fatal.

Over the chopper’s intercom, Koladish announced their emergency plan: If they went into the clouds, they would immediately turn left and climb to 7,500 feet—far above the range’s peaks. The pilots would fly to the edge of what was possible, but they couldn’t risk five lives onboard to save one on the mountain.

The chopper got within a half mile, then a quarter mile to where the needle on their grid indicated Bittman should be. But as they inched higher, they reached 3,900 feet—as high as they could safely fly in the clouds. Bittman’s coordinates were at 4,300.

Just then, DeAngelis piped up: “93 is starting to fade.” They were losing visibility, and their escape route was disappearing. The pilots backed off, turned left, and prepared to retreat down toward the notch.

Still, there was one last possibility: Maybe Bittman was just above the top of the clouds. The chopper climbed over the band of clouds and tried to descend to him from above, but no luck. Bittman was unreachable.

The National Guard team radioed Kneeland and told him that they would land at the Cannon Mountain Ski Area, just north across the highway, to conserve fuel and wait for a possible break in the weather. “Granite ops this is ABLE 12,” Koladish radioed to the base in Concord. “We’re unable to get to the patient. We’re going to land at the Cannon Mountain parking lot to stage.” Down in the parking lot, Kneeland sat alone in his pickup, following it all on the Guard’s radio channel. “Goddammit,” he said aloud.

The pilots lowered the chopper onto the snowy surface and powered it down. Then they strode into the ski lodge in their camo flight gear, where ski-school kids buzzed around the lodge. Around that time, Kneeland called Bittman to check in. “Could you hear the helicopter overhead?” he asked. Bittman said he could not.

Kneeland felt a pit in his stomach. Either it was far windier up the mountain than he thought—putting Bittman in even more danger—or his coordinates were off, meaning the rescuers might need to conduct a search before they could even get to him.

At about noon, the hasty team reached the turnoff to Shining Rock, just below the summit of Little Haystack. They checked their GPS maps. Bittman was at that same elevation, but about 1,000 feet off the trail. They decided to climb a bit higher, figuring they’d naturally drift downhill as they traversed toward the little red dot marking Bittman’s location.

The trail they’d climbed was hard-packed snow. Now they faced 3 feet of undisturbed powder. They pulled the spikes off their boots, unhooked their snowshoes from their packs, strapped them on, and ventured off trail.

Swartz took point, using his GPS to guide the trio through the spruce-fir forest’s nasty, matted low-lying branches. They pushed tree limbs aside with their arms and clomped over them with their snowshoes. It had taken them nearly two hours to climb the 3 miles to where they left the hiking trail. After 20 minutes of bushwhacking through the forest, they’d only made it about 500 feet.

Meanwhile, the four Fish and Game officers, Talbot, and the other Pemi SAR volunteers had made it to the point where they too would leave the trail to move toward Bittman’s location. Their mission was different: to secure Bittman’s exit. That meant blazing a trail through the trees wide enough for the litter and the rescuers carrying it, and as level as possible to avoid jostling him. Sharp or rough movements can send a hypothermic patient into immediate cardiac arrest.

They got out their hatchets and saws—Cyrs pulling his recently sharpened two-handed axe—and started hacking. Early on, McKee hit a steep drop-off. He knew they would never get a litter back up it, and they backtracked to cut a new path. They did this again and again, backtracking, rerouting, and searching for a way through.

While the ground crew made their way toward Bittman, Kneeland sat in his truck at the trailhead, calling Bittman every 30 minutes. On an earlier call, he asked again if Bittman felt strong enough to try to reach the trail. Bittman said he could not. Kneeland reassured him that help was on the way and gave him a warning: “Whatever you do, if you do move, do not go downhill.” On another call, Kneeland asked if Bittman could build a snow shelter. The answer was no.

Kneeland kept calling to check in, but by late morning, Bittman could only respond with moans. He was fading.

At noon, Kneeland called him again. The phone rang and rang. No one answered. He dialed once more. No answer. “Fuck,” he said, banging his fist on the steering wheel. He thought the worst. If Bittman’s battery had died, the call would have gone straight to voicemail. Calls were going through but Bittman was no longer answering.

All volunteer rescuers from the Pemigewasset Valley Search & Rescue Team reached Bittman first, working to warm him. / Courtesy photo

Kneeland knew his team was moving as fast as they could, yet he needed them to understand how dire the situation was getting. He picked up his radio and reported that Bittman was no longer responding to calls.

At 1 p.m., about 45 minutes after the hasty team had left the trail, they were closing in on the red dot. Swartz was out front, whacking through what his map showed was the final stretch. Then a clearing came into view, and he emerged from the forest into the open gully.

There, precisely where the map said he’d be, was Bittman. A few feet away lay his phone, dropped from his frozen hands.

Down in the parking lot, Kneeland picked up his cell phone again. One more try to see if he would answer. He dialed Bittman. It rang. Then he heard a voice on the other end.

“This is Corey.”

“Oh, Corey. Sorry. I must have dialed the wrong number,” Kneeland said.

Before Kneeland could hang up, Swartz explained that he had just gotten to Bittman and picked up his phone.

“Is he alive?” Kneeland asked.

Pemi SAR volunteers reached Bittman first, warming him until the helicopter arrived. / Courtesy photo

Swartz said he was, and the team was already working on warming him. Kneeland felt a wave of relief. “Update me when you can,” he said before hanging up.

Bittman was in bad shape, sitting dazed in the snow. When Swartz told him they were from search-and-rescue, he seemed to understand, but he had a vacant look in his eyes, like he wasn’t even there.

The three volunteers got busy constructing a makeshift platform out of their snowshoes and packs to get Bittman off the ice. Then they opened the red bothy bag and climbed inside. Under the warm glow of the shelter, they started pulling layers and blankets out of their packs.

Allegretti pulled out the chemical blanket McKee had given him and tried to activate it. Nothing. It was a dud. “Okay, what else do we have?” he asked. They rifled through their packs—a Thinsulate blanket, an extra jacket, a hat, and gloves—and started dressing Bittman. Then Swartz and the other volunteer opened their bright yellow Pemi SAR coats and sat on either side of Bittman, sandwiching him between them, using their own body heat to warm him. Allegretti pulled out his thermos. “I’m sorry, all I have is some black coffee,” he said. “Will you drink that?”

“I’m a barista,” Bittman replied with a smile.

Allegretti was relieved to see a sliver of the person who was still in there. They got him to eat some of Allegretti’s wife’s banana bread. He seemed to be coming back.

Still, Bittman was confused. He gazed at the strangers around him offering sips of hot coffee, a puzzled look on his face. After a while, he asked Allegretti if he could lie down. “So long as you keep talking to us,” Allegretti said. They didn’t want him to drift off.

Allegretti checked in with Kneeland, relaying that Bittman’s condition was inconsistent and unstable. He looked at the time—they’d been with Bittman for more than an hour now. Where was the litter?

Just a few hundred feet away, the rest of the ground crew was hacking through the forest, searching for the best route. They were moving as fast as they could without sweating through their layers, which would chill them and turn them from rescuers into liabilities. They looked skyward. Still socked in. This would be a carry-out, no question about it. That meant the hardest part of the day was still ahead of them. The carry-out would require great care, potentially ropes to maneuver the litter down hairy sections, and as many as 10 hours. What was less clear was whether, somewhere along the way, this rescue would become a body-recovery mission.

The view from the air during the mission to find Bittman. / New Hampshire Army National Guard

Down the mountain, time was running out. In the basement of the Cannon Mountain ski lodge, the National Guard members gathered around their radio, tracking the slow progress of the ground rescue and monitoring the weather. Mount Washington’s weather station predicted a break in the clouds at 6 p.m.—four hours away.

It was two days shy of the winter solstice, with sunset at 4:13 p.m. Outside, daylight was draining from the sky. Just before 2:45 p.m., they radioed Kneeland that they had run out of time—they couldn’t carry out the mission after dark without night-vision goggles and would have to head back to the base in Concord. The news rippled across the forested hillside and into the gully where the Pemi volunteers were huddled under the red bothy bag, trying to keep Bittman alive.

If Koladish had worked expeditiously through the lengthy preflight checklist on the way out here, he was now slow-walking his safety check outside the chopper, hoping for a break in the clouds before they left. He climbed into the Black Hawk, grabbed the checklist off the hook behind his seat, and methodically ran through it with Gray, one item at a time.

Up on the mountain, the trail crew knew they were almost there and had sent Talbot ahead with the litter. In the bothy bag, Allegretti kept Bittman talking. Then Allegretti heard rustling outside and stuck his head out to see Talbot emerging through the trees. He climbed out to meet him and discuss the plan for getting Bittman into the litter.

Down in the parking lot, Kneeland looked skyward and saw a break in the clouds. He radioed Talbot and Allegretti, who confirmed they were seeing it, too, as did McKee. For the first time all day, he and the other Fish and Game officers could see the entire mountainside, meaning that they—and Bittman—were about 100 feet below the cloud ceiling. “Send the helicopter,” McKee said. “It’s now or never.”

At 2:55 p.m., the pilots and crew were already in the Black Hawk, ready to fly home, when they heard the chatter on the Fish and Game channel. The three crew members in the back looked at one another and knew the mission was back on. By the time they heard one of the Fish and Game officers asking Kneeland if the Guard was up on the channel yet, Koladish had already thrown the throttles into fly.

The pilots still had Bittman’s location on their grid and headed up the mountain, this time with urgency. In back, Major was already out of his seat, preparing to rappel out of the chopper. DeAngelis monitored their escape route on the left, while Bourque scoured the mountainside through the right-side window, looking for their target. The chopper made a pass over Bittman but didn’t see him. McKee came on the radio: They were one ridge off and needed to come back.

Then Bourque spotted them—the bright yellow Pemi jackets against the fresh white snow. “I’ve got him at 4 o’clock, a half a mile or so,” he said. He opened the side door. Cold air rushed into the cabin. The pilots slid the chopper sideways toward the mountain.

By now, Major was hooked into the hoist, bringing along a bright orange stuff sack containing an air rescue vest. He leaned backward on the edge of the chopper door, his harness tightening around his pelvis, and fist-bumped Bourque before stepping off into the abyss. Bourque began lowering him, calling out directions for the pilots. “Five, continue right, four, continue right, three, two, one, and hold,” Bourque said. They were on target, with Major hanging just feet from the ground.

On the snow below, the Pemi SAR volunteers stood sideways and leaned into the slope, bracing against the downdraft that threatened to blow them off the mountain. Bourque lowered Major the rest of the way. When Major’s boots finally touched snow, he unhooked from the cable and gave the signal. The pilots retreated to hover off to the side to spare them the hurricane-force winds—but not too far in case the weather changed and they needed to get out fast.

Major made his way over to Bittman, who was still inside the bothy bag, raised his visor, and looked him in the eyes. “My name is Ethan. I’m a medic, and I’m here to help you.” He quickly assessed Bittman’s condition and asked him his name. Bittman answered. Good—he was alert enough to follow directions. They removed Bittman from the bothy bag and Major laid the triangular-shaped rescue vest on the snow and told Bittman to roll onto it. Together, they got his arms through the armholes. Then Major clipped it across Bittman’s chest and between his legs, before clipping himself to Bittman.

From the chopper, Bourque was monitoring everything on the ground. When he saw Major and Bittman were clipped in, he guided the pilots back until they were hovering right overhead, then lowered the hoist. The hook swung in the downdraft, and Allegretti reached up, grabbed it, and immediately handed it to Major. He clipped in and they were hoisted into the air.

In an instant the chopper was in motion again, banking left toward the notch, with Bittman and Major dangling beneath. Bourque hauled them up, and as soon as they were inside and he’d shut the door, the pilots blasted the heat. Major immediately knelt beside Bittman, wrapping him in the litter on the chopper floor, defibrillator pads close by in case his heart stopped. “We have the patient and are en route to Littleton Hospital,” Koladish said over the radio.

An instant later, the pilots and crew heard the sounds exploding from the radio channel—cheering, whooping, and several top-of-the-lungs “fuck yeahs” from the gully where the Pemi SAR volunteers had kept Bittman alive; the mountainside where the Fish and Game officers and Talbot had hacked through the forest; and the parking lot where Kneeland had coordinated it all. They smiled as they heard the radio channel. After all, they’d all had rescues that didn’t end the way they wanted. This one did. The mountains didn’t take this one, Cyrs thought to himself as he watched the chopper fly off toward Littleton. They’d made it just in time. Five minutes after the helicopter disappeared from view, the cloud ceiling came down again. The window had closed.

Staff Sergeant Ethan Major hoisted Bittman into the Black Hawk for evacuation to Littleton Hospital. / New Hampshire Fish and Game

Ten minutes later, the Black Hawk set down on the hospital helipad, where medical staff were waiting just inside the building. Major orchestrated the handoff, hustling alongside the gurney into the hospital before jumping back in the chopper to head back to Concord. The doctors went to work on Bittman. His body temperature was in the 70s, at the edge of death.

At the gully, the rescuers gathered their gear, strapped on their snowshoes, and met up with the trail crew on the path they’d hacked through the forest. As they approached, Cyrs put his fist in the air and shouted, “Pemi SAR”—a salute to the volunteers who had been on the frontline all afternoon. McKee opened his thermos of Chicken and Stars, and they passed it around, sipping from the cup. Cyrs broke out his gummy bears for everyone to share. Then they headed down the mountain together, the empty litter dragging behind them.

At the parking lot, Kneeland waited for every one of them to come off the mountain and sign out before heading to a McDonald’s on the way home. He hadn’t eaten all day and ordered three cheeseburgers and fries from the drive-through.

Talbot knew that if he hurried, he could make it to his son’s winter concert. Mancini could, too—it was his kindergartener’s very first one. They both hustled toward their vehicles and drove to the school. Still in their wet mountaineering gear, they raced into the building, took their seats, and watched their children perform.

Bittman in the Black Hawk. / New Hampshire Army National Guard

When Cyrs went home, the first thing he did was lay out his gear on the floor to dry. If a call came in the next morning, or even that very night, he’d have to be ready to head back out.

The first thing Bittman remembers from the hospital was doctors moving around the room talking about his organ function. He was lying there, his hands and feet extending off the table, warm water streaming over them, as the doctors tried to save his fingers and toes from amputation.

The next morning, Allegretti woke up unable to shake Bittman from his mind. He called Kneeland to ask if it would be okay to visit Bittman in the hospital. Kneeland said it would.

When he walked into the hospital room, Allegretti didn’t recognize Bittman—he was like a different person. “Do you remember who I am?” Allegretti asked. Bittman said he did. He was grateful for the mission that was orchestrated across two government agencies and a volunteer group, but to him, it had felt very personal. Strangers had fed him coffee and homemade banana bread. When Bittman’s mother walked into the room and he introduced Allegretti, she threw her arms around him.

As Bittman improved, his nurse joked with him about defying natural selection. Bittman thought of all the people—volunteers, Fish and Game officers, National Guard officers and crew members—who’d dropped what they were doing that day to save his life, risking themselves in the process. Maybe it isn’t survival of the fittest that matters most, he thought. Maybe the strongest force in natural selection is community.

A Fish and Game officer also showed up at the hospital—to collect information for their report, which would cite cotton layers, insufficient preparation, and poor judgment. Bittman hadn’t purchased the state’s $25 Hike Safe Card, meaning he could be charged for the rescue. But Bittman knew no amount of money could repay the strangers who had risked their lives for his. (In the end, he was not charged.)

Months later, Allegretti saw a message pop up on his phone. It was a video of Bittman, healthy and happy, back at his café job in Portland, Maine. In the video, he waved, then lifted a pitcher of foamed milk over a cup of espresso and poured a perfect tulip, topping it with a heart.

This article was first published in the print edition of the February 2026 issue with the headline: “Stranded.”

Our Most-Read Stories of 2025

Camille Dodero — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:00:41 +0000

Clockwise from top left: Portrait by Ken Richardson; Photo by Nina Gallant; Portrait by Tony Luong; LinkedIn; South Station Tower renderings by DBOX for Hines/Pelli Clarke & Partners; Nathan Carman photo by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Below you’ll find the 10 most-viewed longform stories we published this year, a handy list of things to (re-)read that includes Boston’s in-depth coverage of watery deaths (Nathan Carman’s deadly fishing trip, a Charlestown houseboat murder), civic controversies (bike lanes, South Station Tower), and much more. But our most-read story of 2025 wasn’t about national AI or influencers. It was about what can still happen in the basement of a fraternity house. Scroll down to revisit the stories people couldn’t stop reading.

10. The Quiet Evolution of Joe Kennedy III

by Tom McGrath

Photo by Tony Luong

Four years after becoming the first Kennedy ever to lose an election in Massachusetts, JK3 is ready to talk—about his 2020 defeat, his divisive uncle, and how the Democratic Party desperately needs a radical reinvention. Read the story>>

9. This Isn’t About Bike Lanes

by Jon Keller

City Hall’s ambitious plan to reshape Boston’s streets has ignited a battle over who really controls the town’s future—and exposed an identity crisis long in the making. Read the story>>

8. The Ultimate (and Unabridged) Guide to New England Seafood

by Rachel Leah Blumenthal, Wyndham Lewis, and Jacqueline Cain

An A-to-Z encyclopedia to our wild, whimsical, and occasionally weird regional bounty of fish. Read the story >>

7. Could This High School Football Tragedy Have Been Prevented?

by Julie Suratt

Illustration by Benjamen Purvis / Photo illustration by Benjamen Purvis

When Sharon sophomore Rohan Shukla suffered a devastating brain injury during a Thanksgiving game, the small Massachusetts town had to confront a difficult question: How can we get the balance of sports culture and student safety right? Read the story >>

6. They Tried to Silence Her COVID Origin Theory. Now Even the CIA Agrees with Alina Chan.

by Rowan Jacobsen

Portrait by Ken Richardson

In 2020, the Broad Institute scientist ignited a controversy by suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a Chinese lab. Five years later, it sure looks like she was right. Read the story >>

5. The Crypto Con Woman and the Charlestown Houseboat Murder

by Michele McPhee

Courtesy of the Donohue family (Joseph Donohue); Pool (Nora Nelson)

Nora Nelson charmed Boston’s elite with tales of virtual millions and Harvard dreams. Prosecutors say her final performance was homicide on the water—taking the lives of a lawyer who’d fallen for her and his dog. Read the story >>

4. Inside South Station Tower, Boston’s Big Bet on Downtown Living

by Kyle Paoletta

Completed renditions of the new South Station Tower. / DBOX for Hines/Pelli Clarke & Partners

At 51 floors, the city’s newest skyscraper embodies both the neighborhood’s potential and its inequality problem. Read the story>>

3. The Chilling Case of Nathan Carman’s Deadly Fishing Trip

by Casey Sherman

Illustration by Comrade

Linda Carman vanished on a boating excursion near Block Island, Rhode Island. Her 22-year-old stood to inherit millions. Then came one final surprise. Read the story >>

2. I’m a Rapper Who Starred in “The Town.” Then Addiction Nearly Killed Me.

By George Carroll

Photo by Tony Luong

A Boston kid became a Hollywood actor and an underground rap legend, then watched it all disappear. He’s since returned to the streets that raised him, trying to save the ones still fighting the same disease that nearly killed him. Read the story >>

1. Greek Tragedy: A Drowning at Dartmouth College

By Susan Zalkind

Left: Photo via Gary Kuhlmann/Getty Images. Right: Won Jang, Dartmouth College class of ’26. / Photo via LinkedIn

Last summer in New Hampshire, a night of ritualized drinking ended with a sophomore drowning in the Connecticut River. Yet in the place that gave us Animal House and beer pong, will the party ever really end? Read the story>>

How to Fix the Restaurant Industry

Simone Migliori — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 05:16:58 +0000

Illustration by Comrade

The city’s restaurant scene has never looked better from the dining room, but behind kitchen doors, the industry is struggling with thin margins, labor shortages, and a culture of burnout. To survive, today’s top chefs are reinventing everything—and their solutions might just save it all.

The Problem: The Barriers Never End

So you want to open a restaurant in Boston? It’s notoriously difficult, and we’re not just talking about the staggering cost to nab one of the city’s handful of liquor licenses. (Although, yeah, that can run you upward of $400,000.) Chefs who are well versed in putting together a winning menu are also tasked with all the operational headaches that come with restaurant ownership, from managing staff to juggling building upkeep. And then, once you finally get the place open, how do you get people in the door? The path to each new restaurant in Boston is less like a ribbon-cutting and more like a dizzying obstacle course that every prospective owner is forced to run.

Photo by Pat Piasecki

Solution 1: Own Your Neighborhood

Garrett Harker
Owner, Eastern Standard, Equal Measure, and Standard Italian

“Eastern Standard is definitely in a neighborhood in transition. The first two years have been a lot of heavy lifting, of overcoming construction, and even the orientation of the restaurant [is confusing]. It’s not like we’re on a high-traffic road. You have to find us. A lot of the work that my team has done is really trying to give people a reason to search us out.

We do a lot of cooking classes, cocktail classes, any sort of reason we can provide people to come and think about spending time with us. We have to be really active. We’re out at the farmers’ market. We have great breads and great pastries from our bakery team, but it’s really a chance to be out in front of the neighborhood, because that’s who’s walking through.”

Photo by Ally Schmalling

Solution 2: Let Someone Else Buy the Liquor License

Alyssa Mikiko DiPasquale
Owner, the Koji Club

“First and foremost, we have a licensing agreement instead of a formal lease at the Charles River Speedway. We were really lucky that we were one of the first in those little horse stalls to get a licensing agreement, and we are one of the lucky people who are able to manage the liquor license that is on the property. Otherwise, we would not have been able to open in the city of Boston, period.

I really like the structure of our landlord at the Speedway owning the liquor license, and us having a management agreement with them. I hope that in future projects, these big guns that have lots of money would own the license and have a management agreement. There are giant national landlords opening things in the city of Boston right now, who have both the money and the power. If you’re in partnership with one of those types of landlords, then maybe you don’t have to go to the back of the line to get something open.”

Solution 3: Let AI Do your Homework

Courtesy of Row 34

Shore Gregory
CEO and owner, Row 34

“One of the greatest things now is that data and information for restaurant operators have never been more available and easily accessible to help with decision-making. I think that is a great boon for the industry. It just takes a little bit of willingness to find it and then know how to use it.

For example, Toast, which makes the point-of-sale software most restaurants use, just rolled out a product called Toast IQ, which is basically like a ChatGPT version of Toast. You can ask it any question, and it will give you really detailed, actual information. It could be about food costs, labor, or about managing overtime. It could even give you ideas around programming or how to bulk up soft segments of your business. I think that is going to be a really great tool, because everybody’s limited on time in this business, and it’s hard to kind of dig through all the information to figure out what you should do with it.”

Solution 4: Market Old-School

Photo by J-M Leach

Colin Lynch
Chef and owner, Bar Mezzana and FIDO Pizza, among others

“It’s so easy to put something out on social media when you open a restaurant, but if you don’t hit that person at the right time in the right place, they’re going to forget about it, because they’re seeing 19 other things that same day. There’s a constant cacophony of things happening. It’s really hard to break through that.

I think there’s something to be said about going old-school. At Fido Pizza, which we just opened, we’re going to start playing around with sending out old-school mailers that have coupons. I just remember growing up, you got the thing from the local pizza place that said, ‘Buy two pizzas and get a free 2-liter Coke,’ or whatever. Finding stuff like that, it plays to nostalgia but also offers a good deal for people.

We also launched a loyalty app at Fido, where, if you order online, you automatically get points. People love points these days, I think, and rightfully so. It just goes back to how everyone’s concerned about the economy.”

Getty Images

The Problem:
Everything Costs Too Much

Walking down the grocery store aisles and wincing—eggs are how much, now?—is the new normal. Now imagine ordering hundreds of eggs every week (or pounds upon pounds of butter, or countless slabs of beef) and watching those prices add up. While we’re shaking our fists over our grocery receipts at home, chefs are steeling themselves against food-order invoices that are the stuff of nightmares. And just when one ingredient cost levels out, another one skyrockets. Spiking costs are forcing chefs to rethink everything from portion sizes to whether takeout even makes sense anymore.

Photo by Nina Gallant

Solution 1: Make Takeout an Event

Tam Le
Co-owner, Lê Madeline

“In these difficult economic times, it’s about finding ways to still provide value for our customers and doing things that we typically wouldn’t do. When we created Lê Madeline, it was about the experience—about the quality, the service, and the hospitality. Now, it’s like, how can we create that sense of hospitality in someone’s home?

We’re more of an occasion-type restaurant, but we’ve been trying to find more ways to meet our customer. We’ve been thinking about takeout—we’re not going to call it takeout because we’re not a takeout restaurant—but we’ve been thinking of ways to have people experience Lê Madeline at home.

Enter our picnic baskets for two, which we sold during the summertime, when people were going to the beach, to the park, stuff like that. It was a little bit packaging, it was a little bit marketing—it was just shifting your perspective on it, right? It was novel. It was executed well. We sold it well, and people very much enjoyed it.”

Solution 2: Use Every Last Scrap

Photo by Brian Samuels Photography

Erin Miller
Chef and owner, Urban Hearth

“We are seeing significant increases in ingredient costs, particularly with proteins and wine. The one magic wand or tool that I have in my tool belt is that we have always functioned in our restaurant with a strong commitment to sustainability. Understanding how to use ingredients at their peak and use every element of them, you know, from pith to peel. We’re using proteins as a supporting role on our plate, as opposed to the big piece of beef that a lot of restaurants would do.

Being ingenious in how we use our ingredients and not wasting has enabled us to keep an even keel with our prices and not be affected as heavily as restaurants using fixed menus with fixed ingredients, and they just have to absorb the variability in costs. I also oversee purchasing with an iron fist. We’re so small; we can’t over-purchase. There’s not a lot of room for waste, literally or figuratively.

It’s a complicated time, but hopefully we can walk away from these challenges feeling inspired to get in touch with how our food grows and where it comes from.”

Solution 3: Make it In-House

Photo by Troy Ali

Chompon Boonnak
Co-owner, Mahaniyom and Merai

“The cost of goods is really going up. I use quite a lot of products from Thailand, and there’s no sign of the costs going down, and then there’s all the tariffs. Believe it or not, I was just dealing with Topo Chico, the soda water. I used to get it for $30 or $35 per case; now, it’s $48. It’s just sparkling water! This cost is too high.

Now, for some of the cocktails at Merai, I bought this new equipment so I can do fast carbonation on my own. It’s cheaper. It’s more efficient. We still offer Topo Chico to guests who want sparkling water, and we’re still using it for some of the highballs, but in the future, if costs keep going up—I know I can make it on my own.”

Solution 4: Turn Guests into Regulars

Courtesy photo

Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli
Owner, Alcove

“Everybody is extremely price-conscious at the moment. So one of the things that we’ve tried to do is put a price-conscious, thoughtfully executed neighborhood menu in place. We’ve created a three-course menu for $38 that we change up once a week.

It’s got two offerings for appetizers, two offerings for entrées, and two offerings for dessert. We attempt to make sure that it has gluten-free and dairy-free offerings in each course, as well as pescatarian; you know, we try to be accommodating to allergy challenges and dining preferences.

We’ve seen an uptick in people who come in once a week to try the menu because the price point feels like a value, and regulars need to feel value in their dining experience. This neighborhood menu felt like a really good and responsible way that we could offer extremely good value to people.”

Via Getty Images

The Problem:
Nobody Wants to Work Here

It’s no secret that working in a restaurant has its challenges. Restaurant staffers are on the clock when everybody else is off. That Saturday day trip that your 9-to-5 friends are planning? Forget about it. Want to spend the holidays with your family? Those are your busiest workdays. The pay gap between servers and cooks keeps widening, the hours are brutal, and ICE raids have added a new layer of fear. But some restaurateurs have stopped accepting “that’s just how it is”—and their fixes are surprisingly practical.

Courtesy of Edible Rhody

Solution 1: Stand By Your Staff

Cecelia Lizotte
Chef and owner, Suya Joint

“My brother Paul Dama, who helps manage Suya Joint, had a valid work authorization till 2029. He was just waiting for a final decision of asylum granted or not, and he was picked up by ICE.

I just felt defeated, dehumanized. At times, I didn’t want to leave my house, but I had to be strong for him and supply everything the attorneys needed.

With the restaurant, we’re already struggling—we can go back all the way to COVID. And then this. People encouraged us to open a GoFundMe, which we did, and they came out in masses to support us. We also discounted jollof rice and meals on our website, just so all the funds would be donated toward his legal proceedings. [Note: Dama was granted asylum and returned home in September.]

We should be safe to go to work, but the fear of ICE is just enormous. Myself, the staff, the customers, everybody just walks in looking over their shoulder. We just want to go back to our livelihood, to continue to showcase the culture of West Africa through food.”

Solution 2: Give Them Three Days Off

Photo by Brian Samuels Photography

Carl Dooley
Chef, Mooncusser

“[Mooncusser’s four-day work week] really stemmed from my own experience as a line cook and an hourly employee in the restaurant industry. It’s long hours, high stress, and a high-paced environment.

Something that we focus on here is I want my team to be really engaged while they’re here. The four-day week allows us to get the most out of our kitchen team while they’re here while also giving them time to explore their other interests or just rest. It ends up being four 11-ish-hour shifts per week.

By having a longer workday, our team is able to come in around noon, and their responsibility is everything on their station, whether it’s cutting fish, cutting meat, baking bread, making pasta, or the long braising projects. It’s a lot of the things that, as a young cook, you want to learn how to do to advance your skill set. And, during service, they know that everything that they’re preparing for the guests, they’ve made. There’s a level of pride that comes with doing everything yourself.”

Solution 3: Put Your Recipes in the Cloud

Photo by Hugh Galdones

Will Gilson
Chef and partner, Puritan & Co. and the Lexington, among others

“One of the things that became really hard about running multiple kitchens is that we almost always found ourselves wrestling with a chef leaving, and they were the ones who had put their recipes in the mix. And everybody had been copying out of that person’s notebook and putting it into their own notebook.

Oftentimes, depending on the game of telephone that’s played, you’d have somebody who’d leave an ingredient out when they were transcribing a recipe, and then the next person would then do the same thing. All of a sudden, you realize the recipe that had been making your food really great, now three people are making it three ways.

So what we did, in all of our kitchens, is we installed wall-mounted iPads, and we are using Google Docs to essentially create a central nervous system to the recipes of all of our restaurants that can be accessed from anyone’s phone or from the iPad. And then we’re able to lean into Google Translate to take those recipes and make it so that anyone can read it in his or her native language.”

Solution 4: Fix the Tipping Law (Again)

Photo by Kristin Teig

Ana Sortun
Chef and co-owner, Oleana, Sarma, and Sofra bakery & café

“In Massachusetts, we have certain laws that keep us from doing things, like we can’t distribute tips to everyone. They have to go to tipped employees. This, to me, is the current challenge that affects the next generation of restaurants.

We’ve talked for ages about the wage gap between the front of the house and the back of the house. The servers can make about three times what a cook would make. It’s never made sense to anyone in this business.

When we put the kitchen appreciation fee in from COVID onward, instead of it being a huge gap, it was just a gap. That’s all done now. The new legislation removing junk fees basically just made that worse.

Now, we have to raise prices. But what’s going to happen is the customer is going to be tipping on the higher price. That higher tip is still going to the server. Before, we could at least bring the back of the house closer. Now, they’re staying very far apart. This is going to be an ongoing thing until the laws of the state change.”

Photo via Getty Images

The Problem: The Kitchen is Toxic

Life in the industry is often portrayed as not-so-controlled chaos. In the kitchen, all that matters is keeping the pirate ship afloat, and if you can’t hack it—that’s on you. This pressure-cooker environment, often amplified by the rigid, traditional hierarchy of the brigade system, has fostered all sorts of abuse—verbal, physical, sexual. And the power imbalance inherent in the structure means those lower on the ladder, like line cooks and prep cooks, often have no effective way to report harassment or move up the ranks. But as a new generation of chefs takes over, they’re making it clear: They’re not repeating the toxic patterns from their own grueling days working the line.

Courtesy photo

Solution 1: Enforce your “no assholes” policy

Tiffani Faison
Chef and owner, Sweet Cheeks Q and Bubble Bath, among others

“We have a ‘no assholes’ rule. We have standards of respect and equality that we uphold. Inappropriate comments don’t fly, and being horrible to people or screaming at people—none of that flies.

What we’re learning is that a lot of people talk about it and say one thing, and then maintaining it is different. The maintenance of it is really zero tolerance. You have to call it out at every turn. And it’s not embarrassing people. It’s having side conversations, saying ‘That’s not okay. That’s inappropriate.’

You have to create an environment where people feel safe to talk about the things that are making them and the team uncomfortable. And then, there can’t be any retaliation. If someone is open about what is happening, it can’t be used against them.

I’ll be honest, it’s really hard because with a zero-tolerance policy, you’re very likely to find yourself standing in a restaurant with a lot fewer employees than you need to run that restaurant, and you have to be able to weather that storm.”

Solution 2: Offer Actual Benefits

Courtesy photo

Sumiao Chen
Owner, Sumiao Hunan Kitchen

“The restaurant industry is very tricky because people treat the job like a temporary solution. They don’t think it is a real job. So how can we make them feel that it is a real job, that makes them professional and eager to learn? That’s something we’ve been focusing on.

Here’s what we’ve done: Any employee who maintains more than 30 hours of work in the restaurant is eligible to enroll in our group health insurance with 100 percent premium coverage. That’s number one. Number two: We reimburse transportation costs, and for the management team, we offer to pay for parking.

And then, we have an incentive program for all non-tipped workers based on monthly revenue goals to help close the gap in hourly pay difference between tipped employees and non-tipped employees. This way, if the revenue increases and the workload increases, non-tipped employees feel that they get some reasonable compensation back.”

Solution 3: Teach Them, Don’t Just Use Them

Courtesy of nine

Andrew Simonich
Chef de cuisine, Nine

“One of the big things that I focus on is the education and coaching aspect. I don’t want the line cooks to be line cooks forever. I want them to actually develop their skills.

The pitch process for the menu is, cooks will say, ‘Chef, I have this idea,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, great, put it together for me.’ Then my sous chef and I will taste it all together. And we’re like, ‘All right, what are your thoughts on this?’ Because I want to start that thinking process of, ‘What does this taste like? How is the guest going to eat this? Are the flavors combining the way that you intended them?’ And then we have that open conversation of, like, ‘I really like this idea, but let’s tweak these certain elements to bring it all together.’

That also gives all of my line cooks time to sit down with me and understand what I’m looking for in the food that we’re putting on the menu here.”

Solution 4: Close on Sundays (Yes, Really)

Courtesy of Thistle & Leek

Kate Smith
Co-owner and chef, Thistle & Leek

“Back in the day, it was expected that you would work if you were sick. You would work through family events, vacations, and holidays. You could request time off, but it was going to affect your career.

I was okay with it for a long time. The idea was that this is the kind of sacrifice it takes to be successful. And then, at some point, it became harder to see people in my life.

Earlier this year, my husband and I decided that we needed to close the restaurant on Sundays (we’ve always been closed Mondays) so we could spend more time with our kids.

As it turns out, we’re now busier on our other days. And our staff knows they are never going to work Sundays or Mondays as well. The idea that we always have to be available, the industry needs to move away from that. Plus, this new structure helps us thrive when we are at the restaurant.”

Getty Images

What It Takes to Open

Demetri Tsolakis, CEO of Xenia Greek Hospitality, shares the grueling process it took to open the restaurant group’s latest hot spot, Kaia, from liquor-license hunting to permitting

One Year (or More) Before Opening

Obtain Liquor License

“In Kaia’s case, we worked with a liquor-license broker since there were no licenses available at the time. We were outbid on the first license, which took about six months to locate, and it wasn’t until six months later that we successfully secured one.”

8 to 12 Months Before Opening

Simultaneously Design and Negotiate A Lease

“While waiting for a liquor license, we developed a floor plan and finalized architectural drawings during lease negotiations, so we were ready once the lease was signed.”

6 to 8 Months Before Opening

Apply for Permits and Begin Construction

“We applied for permits so we had everything ready to start the build-out. I recommend going into this knowing how many seats you want and where things like the ice machine are going.”

Two Weeks Before Opening

Fire Marshal Visit

“You wait, and wait, and wait for a visit from the fire marshal to come in and do their thing. You pray you have it right by this point, because anything wrong usually means a long delay.”

One Week Before Opening

Health Inspection and Certificate of Occupancy

“At this point, the excitement had kicked in because we’d begun training our staff and tasting. When we got the okay to open, we ran to [the Inspectional Services Department office] at 1010 Mass. Ave. to get our permit and opened the same day. Because why not? We had already waited so long.”

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The Great Divide

We asked an office worker and a line cook the same questions about their jobs. Guess which industry can’t retain workers.

Time worked in industry
Office worker: 11 years
Line cook: 15-16 years

Wages
Office worker: $157,00 per year plus bonus
Line cook: $18 per hour

Time spent at home in the past week
Office worker: “If I’m not working, I’m generally home, aside from the weekends.”
Line cook: “I am at the restaurant most of the day, and then I go home to sleep. Basically, I just go home, sleep, and then work.”

Typical dinner
Office worker: “Grains, roasted vegetables, and hard-boiled eggs.”
Line cook: “We have a family meal, but I don’t always have the time to grab a plate and eat. I’ll graze. I’ll have a piece of chicken here or there, or eat a tomato. It’s almost impossible to eat a proper dinner unless you make a concerted effort.”

Vacation policy
Office worker: “Unlimited PTO. I take about three weeks per year.”
Line cook: “We do have some paid time off that we can use if we want to take it. It’s at least two weeks. I took one weekend off in the summer.”

Health insurance
Office worker: Yes
Line cook: “Right now, no. They do offer it, but it was cheaper for me to keep the one I had through MassHealth. We’ll see if that changes next year.”

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The Power Flow

How decisions, feedback, and accountability move through a kitchen—then and now.

TOXIC KITCHEN

(Traditional Brigade)

Executive Chef → Sous Chef → Line Cooks → Prep Cooks/Dishwashers

✘ Problems/abuse travel down
✘ No feedback loops upward
✘ Complaints go nowhere (or get you fired)
✘ “Yes, Chef” culture = no questions asked

HEALTHY KITCHEN

(New Model)

Chef Sous Chef Line Cooks Support Staff

Anonymous feedback systems
Regular check-ins/reviews
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This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue with the headline: “In the Weeds.”

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey Is Playing to Win

Tom McGrath — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:00:55 +0000

Healey in the governor’s ceremonial State House office. / Photo by Steph Larsen / Hair and makeup by Nicole Baglione

The interview is coming to an end, but Maura Healey is not quite finished delivering her message. And that message is clear: Massachusetts is winning.

It’s a pleasant afternoon in Boston, and Healey has come to Bloomberg’s Boston bureau, in the Financial District, for a 30-minute conversation about the economic issues facing the city. There are a few dozen people in the room, many of them journalists like me, but the governor knows the real audience is the business-minded viewers catching this interview on Bloomberg TV or streaming it at Bloomberg.com. To put it in basketball terms (as one does when writing about Healey, a former standout Harvard point guard): It’s a wide-open shot to sell Massachusetts—and she’s going to take it.

The interviewer, Bloomberg’s Caroline Gage, has asked Healey an array of questions, but the governor has focused most of her answers on a single point—how terrific Massachusetts is. “I want to be clear: As the governor of this great state of Massachusetts, we’re open to the world for business,” Healey says in response to a query about how the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research funding might affect the commonwealth’s innovation-based economy. She mentions her administration’s new DRIVE Initiative, a proposed $400 million fund intended to offset those cuts—a solution, an answer, and reassurance that Massachusetts has this handled.

“I’m a very competitive person,” she says. “I want Massachusetts soaring. And I want America soaring.”

The interview moves forward, hopscotching across various topics, from energy policy to ICE raids to the potential for the Trump administration to send the National Guard into Boston. After a couple of questions from the audience, Gage signals that it’s time to wrap things up. But Healey wants one more opportunity to leave this audience feeling good about Massachusetts.

“I just want people to know,” she says, leaning forward in her chair, “rankings came out; we’re number one in education, innovation, healthcare. We are ranked the best state to have a baby, the best state to raise a family, the best state if you’re a woman. We have the safest drinking water. A lot of good things going for us. I gotta work on driving down costs—housing, healthcare, energy. We’re working together to do that every single day. But, as you might imagine, my money’s on Massachusetts. Thank you.”

There’s pleasant applause as the interview comes to an end.

Part of the job of being governor, Healey will tell me later, is being “cheerleader-in-chief,” but watching her work a room—any room—you start to see something else at play. She wants people to feel good. About Massachusetts, yes, but also about the conversation they just had, and about themselves. In the events I saw her at over the period of a couple of weeks, Healey got the metaphorical pompoms out almost every single time—including reciting that list of Massachusetts bests and firsts more than once.

Healey and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll as the self-styled “DunQueens” at last year’s St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast. / Photo by Pat Greenhouse / The Boston Globe

Of course, as she gears up her 2026 reelection campaign, the real question might be: How much are Massachusetts voters cheering for Healey? Polls taken over the past year have been solid but not quite spectacular for the governor. An August survey sponsored by CommonWealth Beacon had her approval rating at 55 percent, while a May poll from University of New Hampshire had her at 49 percent. A February snapshot from UMass Amherst fell in between—52 percent. The numbers are hardly a disaster, but they’re a ways off from the 60 percent-plus ratings former Governor Charlie Baker often received during his two terms in office, not to mention the 63 percent share of statewide votes Healey herself garnered in trouncing Republican Geoff Diehl in the 2022 governor’s race.

So why is Healey not—let me borrow her word—soaring? At the top of the list is the state of the state’s economy. After three decades of mostly firing on all cylinders, Massachusetts’ economic engine has sputtered in recent years. Housing, as we all know, is ridiculously expensive, which has caused plenty of residents to move away in search of cheaper pastures. Businesses are also feeling the effects of high costs, driving some of them to less expensive, lower-tax states while dampening overall activity for others. (Since 2020, Massachusetts has seen a net loss of 37,000 jobs, and ranks below average nationally when it comes to job growth.) Healey wasn’t in office for the birth of these problems, but as CEO of the state, she now owns them. She’s also had to govern during a period of federal chaos—first Biden’s border crisis, then Trump’s unpredictable policies and funding cuts. Few governors would have an easy time navigating this landscape.

But Healey’s middling numbers also reflect, to an extent, her style of governing. On a podcast last year with comedian Samantha Bee, the governor described herself as a “natural-born sort of pleaser,” a trait she suggested came from her parents splitting up when she was 10. “My mom’s a single mom, so I didn’t want to see acrimony or fighting,” she told Bee. “That’s my personality, for better or worse.”

It’s the same instinct on display at the Bloomberg interview—the desire to make people feel good, to smooth over tension. This particular trait—not only wanting others to feel good but jumping in to make everything all right—has served Healey extraordinarily well in the various roles she’s taken on through the years, from co-captain of Harvard’s basketball team to corporate attorney to two terms as Massachusetts’ attorney general. But as governor, the job demands making choices that inevitably leave someone unhappy.

Politically, Healey has ties to three different constituencies: working-class voters (with whom she feels a bond in part because of her own up-from-the-bootstraps background); progressives (who’ve long been drawn to Healey, thanks in part to her identity as a gay woman); and the business community (whose role in building the economy Healey understands). In her nearly three years as governor, Healey has given something to each of those groups, but has hardly gone all-in with any of them. Which perhaps explains why, when I asked a wide range of insiders how they think she’s doing, I often heard words like “pretty good,” “okay,” and “fine.” I believe the math equivalent of those phrases is…52 percent.

Healey is not, we should be clear, quite the same person she was when she burst on the state’s political scene 12 years ago. Her role has changed. Her status has changed. Her personal life has changed. But one thing about her hasn’t changed: She remains, as she told that Bloomberg audience, a very competitive person, someone who still sees herself, as she often puts it, as a point guard determined to engineer a victory. “The vigor that she brings to the job is reminiscent of who she’s always been,” says political consultant Sean Curran, who’s known Healey for years and played a role in her campaigns. “Very few people are as driven as she is.”

All of that is another way of saying: Healey will be damned if Massachusetts goes backward on her watch. Her challenge? The game she’s playing now isn’t quite like any she’s ever played before.

Photo by Steph Larsen / Hair and makeup by Nicole Baglione

“Especially now, states matter. State leadership matters.”

A couple of weeks after the Bloomberg event, Healey is sitting on a love seat in her ornate, high-ceilinged State House office, telling me that, yes, she really does like being governor.

“I love my job. I love leading the state,” she says brightly. “And I’ll tell you why: Especially now, states matter. State leadership matters.”

The subject of Healey’s job satisfaction has come up, in part, because there have been whispers in power circles that Healey isn’t particularly happy as governor; in fact, the whisperers will tell you, if Kamala Harris had won last November, Healey would have pushed hard to be her attorney general. So I ask the governor: Was she interested in that? Were there any discussions about it?

“Unequivocally no,” she says firmly. “You know, people make stuff up all the time, right? They’re trying to advance their own agenda. I love my job.”

Healey does allow that her current role is intense. She and her partner, Joanna Lydgate, with whom she lives in Arlington, are up before 7 a.m., getting two kids (Lydgate has a teen and tween with her ex-husband) off to school. Healey kicks off her own workday with a morning team call; then it’s on to whatever her jammed calendar calls for—speeches, signings, photo ops, calls, meetings. Activities often don’t wrap until 8 or 9 in the evening, but even then, Healey isn’t off the clock. There are binders of material to review and prep to be done for the next day. “She works really long hours, and even more than that, she has a job that always comes home with her,” Lydgate says. (The pair met as attorneys in the AG’s office but say they didn’t become a couple until a few months after Lydgate left the office in late 2020.)

Along with being intense, Healey also acknowledges that the job of being governor is decidedly different from the role she played as attorney general from 2015 through 2022. As AG, your job is to advocate for a particular side. As governor, your job is to listen to all sides—then decide. “I think anybody in [this position], if you’re doing your job, you are sitting at the intersection of competing interests, or at least you should put yourself at the intersection of competing interests,” she says. Another difference: While attorneys general more or less set their own agendas, deciding which cases to pursue on behalf of the public, governors have no such luxury—they deal with what’s in front of them, whether the issues are appealing or not.

Indeed, if Healey had a magic wand to set her own agenda as governor, it’s hard to imagine that said agenda would have included the issue that’s most dogged her during her first three years running the state: the migrant shelter crisis.

The problem began during Baker’s last year in office, the byproduct of millions of immigrants flowing over America’s southern border—thousands of them ending up here—and the state’s more than four-decade-old law requiring that any families with children residing in Massachusetts be provided shelter. Healey knew that was an equation for trouble, but the situation quickly grew more dire than she imagined, with migrants living at Logan and crammed into hotels, all at taxpayers’ expense. (The crisis would eventually cost the state a billion dollars per year.) A low point came this past January, when an undocumented migrant was arrested in a Revere motel, which was being used as a migrant shelter, and charged with possessing an assault rifle and 10 pounds of fentanyl. Healey said she’d ordered criminal background checks that should have stopped such a person from being given shelter, but state officials at the time acknowledged those checks were not being implemented.

The crisis has since faded: Healey and the legislature took steps to limit emergency shelter stays, and the Trump administration’s crackdown on the border has all but stopped the flow of migrants. But to Healey’s critics, the entire situation remains an example of mismanagement. Earlier this year, state auditor Diana DiZoglio, a fellow Democrat, issued a harsh audit from her office accusing the Healey administration of unlawfully giving out no-bid contracts to food and transportation vendors helping to manage the crisis.

I bring the shelter issue up with Healey, and she makes two points. One is that the system she inherited from the Baker administration for housing migrants was essentially a hot mess. The other is that the root cause of the crisis—a loose federal border—was out of her hands. In fact, she’s more openly critical of Biden than I can recall her previously being. “I remember telling President Biden and his team multiple times that they needed to take action on the border, and, unfortunately, they didn’t,” she says. “My frustration as governor—you’re dealing with problems that are made outside of your jurisdiction. There are geopolitical forces in Latin and South America at play. You’ve got failed leadership on the part of the presidential administration, on the part of Congress.”

It’s a reasonable defense—she inherited a chaotic situation, and the federal government failed to act. But it’s also a reminder of the bind Healey is in: When things go wrong, governors own the outcome, fair or not.

Photo by Steph Larsen

On the issue that may matter most to voters—Massachusetts’ struggling economy—Healey has taken a distinctly collaborative approach, one that reflects both her management style and the political realities of governing a diverse state.

To oversimplify (a bit): Massachusetts built a remarkable economic engine over the past several decades—world-class universities fed innovation, creating companies that generated tax revenue, which funded excellent schools and attracted more talent. At the same time, healthcare became an ever-larger part of our economy. But around a decade ago, success bred its own problems. Housing costs exploded. People left. In 2022, the state passed a millionaires’ tax. Business leaders felt overtaxed and underappreciated. By the time Healey took office, the virtuous circle had become a vicious cycle of competing grievances.

Healey has tried to attack the problem in multiple ways. On the “competitiveness” front—basically, making Massachusetts more friendly to business—she shepherded through the first tax cut in roughly 20 years (and I’m a Democrat, Healey likes to say). The bill had a range of provisions, including increasing child- and dependent-care tax credits as well as reductions in inheritance and capital gains taxes. She also signed an economic development bill boosting AI, climate-tech, and life-sciences industries, and developed the DRIVE Initiative to ease the blow of Trump’s research cuts.

To try and make housing more affordable, Healey has focused on increasing supply, speeding up the environmental review process while signing a $5 billion package intended to make it easier to build in the state. When Healey took office, she asked for an audit of how many housing units Massachusetts needed to balance supply and demand. The answer was 220,000. On her watch, she tells me, at least 100,000 new units have been built or broken ground.

Finally, there’s the T, whose financial and operational problems were arguably making all the other economic issues worse. Healey hired transit veteran Philip Eng, who’s gotten nearly unanimous praise for turning around a system that was not just figuratively, but sometimes literally, on fire.

All of these, it should be noted, are real accomplishments. And yet they’re solutions that come with problems of their own. The first: Making Massachusetts more affordable and competitive is not something that can happen in weeks or months; if it happens, it will happen over the course of many years. And people—a.k.a. voters—might not have that much patience. (In the UNH poll showing Healey’s approval rating at 49 percent, she was underwater with less-educated Massachusetts residents, who cited housing as the number one issue.) Healey acknowledges some things can’t be solved immediately, but says there’s nothing to do but get moving. Those 220,000 housing units the state needs, for instance? “Those can’t be built overnight, right?” she tells me. “So what do you do? You just get to work. And my approach was, you know, I’m still that point guard.”

Healey keeps returning to this metaphor—the player who distributes the ball, keeps everyone involved, and tries to make the whole team happy. But it illustrates the second problem she faces: In trying to solve the state’s problems, she’s given various constituencies some of what they wanted, but she’s also disappointed each of them. Progressives, for instance, were hardly stoked about the parts of Healey’s tax bill that benefited wealthier Bay Staters. They’re further frustrated that she won’t get behind efforts to allow rent control to happen in Massachusetts. The business class, meanwhile, wants taxes cut even more, including a reduction in or complete elimination of the millionaires’ tax. Healey has given a political answer—let’s study it—but she surely knows that pushing to deep-six the tax will only alienate already-not-so-thrilled progressive and working-class voters.

Healey is hardly the first elected official to deal with these kinds of problems; in many ways, this is what politics is. But her management style has her biggest critics wondering how well she’s mastered becoming a decisive executive. In reporting this piece, I was told a story about a member of the business community who met with Healey and presented her with a number of economic development ideas. Healey purportedly listened intently and nodded her head in agreement—and then never followed up.

On the flip side, others see her willingness to at least listen as a virtue. Chrissy Lynch, head of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, makes clear she’s not always thrilled that the business community has such a large seat at Healey’s table, but she gives the governor credit for bringing stakeholders together. “She doesn’t have an ego in this stuff,” Lynch says. “She is so solutions-driven.” Jim Rooney, head of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, likewise praises Healey’s willingness to listen, which he says is in contrast to the Baker administration. “That administration was much more top-down and confident that they had all the answers to all the public policy issues,” he says. “This is a much more collaborative approach.”

That said, Rooney believes there’s a time for listening and a time for action. “I’d like to see a bigger sense of urgency on some of these issues of competitiveness,” he says. “Otherwise, we’ll look back in 10 years and say, what happened?”

The governor acknowledges feeling the push and pull from various groups. But she believes she’s doing this job the right way. “I’m a pro-growth, pro-business Democrat,” she says. “I’ve worked incredibly well with the business community. It’s also the case that I have an excellent relationship with our labor unions. I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. And actually, if you get people in the room together, you can figure out that there’s often a way to compromise. There’s often something that works for everyone.”

It’s a reminder of how different this particular game is from those Healey has played before. On the basketball court, in the courtroom, you win or you lose. Period. Governing offers no such clarity.

Healey played point guard for Harvard, 1988-1992. / Courtesy Healey Family

Healey has been around Massachusetts politics long enough that by now, many people know the basic outlines of her bio: Grew up on a farm near the New Hampshire Seacoast, the oldest of five kids whose dad left when Healey was just 10. “That was a shock to my mom, a shock to our household,” she tells me. “I think a little bit from that experience, you kind of live moment to moment. I threw myself into school. I threw myself into sports. You try to work hard and put yourself in a position where you have some options.”

Out of that feeling of insecurity, a powerful inner drive emerged. She helped her single mom by working multiple part-time jobs—including, eventually, cocktail waitressing at Hampton Beach Casino—while also becoming the best basketball player Winnacunnet High School had ever seen. It was a masterclass in juggling competing demands—and making sure nobody felt let down. After graduating from Harvard—where she had a work-study job in the fieldhouse, which turned her into a whiz at folding laundry—she allowed herself to explore a bit, playing two years of pro basketball in Austria (it was during this period she came out as gay). But then it was back home and back to serious stuff: law school, followed by a decade as a business litigator, followed by a fascinating turn into public service as divison chief in the AG’s office.

Healey says there was no grand strategy in any of this; it was all moment to moment—just use your wits and listen to your gut about what comes next. “None of it was planned, you know? I mean, honestly, that’s been the story of my life.”

But there was a pattern: Work harder than everyone else. Don’t complain. Make people around you feel supported. Win.

It’s an approach that served her brilliantly when she ran for attorney general in 2014. Given the role Healey has played in Massachusetts politics for more than a decade, it’s hard to remember what a long shot she was back then. She’d never been involved in politics before and was almost completely unknown. Turns out it didn’t matter. Her natural political skills—and her story—clicked with voters. She pummeled endorsed Democrat Warren Tolman by 24 points in the primary, then crushed Republican John Miller by nearly the same margin in the general election.

As AG, Healey leaned into the role of protector of the underdog, the person who jumps in to try to make everything all right. She famously sued Donald Trump nearly 100 times during his first term, while also challenging other powerful interests, including winning a $4.3 billion settlement from the opioid-pushing Sackler family and Purdue Pharma. She was both fierce and beloved simultaneously.

By 2022, after Charlie Baker announced he wouldn’t run for a third term, Healey was such a rising star that she cleared the Democratic gubernatorial field. She seemed to be the right candidate in the right place at the right time: a tenacious progressive prosecutor who’d be the first woman and openly gay person ever elected governor in Massachusetts.

Yet Healey’s smooth path to victory in that race may have also contained a downside. “She didn’t have much of a race, because no one was going to beat her, and that’s a tribute to her,” says one Democratic insider. “But she was so clearly the frontrunner in that race that she was never forced to articulate a strong vision for what she was going to do as governor.”

The vision thing continues to hound Healey three years later. The vision she does articulate—the litany of bests and firsts she rattles off—isn’t so much about transformation as preservation, maintaining Massachusetts’ position at the top. In some ways, she’s like the coach who took over a championship team: Sure, that team might have more problems than people realized, but the goal is still to stay on top, not reinvent the game.

I don’t think Healey spends much time thinking about her role in these terms. Her approach—as it’s been since she was 10—is just to throw herself into the task at hand so that people don’t have to worry so much. “Every night I go home and I think about, you know, there are upward of 7 million people out there in this state who are depending on me,” she says. “You feel that responsibility.”

It’s the same instinct that made her successful on that New Hampshire farm, in that Harvard fieldhouse, and in the AG’s office. Whether it will be enough to continue governing a state facing challenges that require difficult trade-offs—not just hard work—is the test of her governorship itself.

The governor with First Partner Joanna Lydgate. / Photo by Matt Stone / MediaNews Group / Boston Herald via Getty Images

In January 2023, a few days after her inauguration as governor, Healey did something somewhat uncharacteristic: She let the public in. Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham wrote a piece introducing readers to the state’s new First Partner, Joanna Lydgate. Healey and Lydgate had mostly kept their relationship out of public view until then, in part to protect the privacy of Lydgate’s kids and ex-husband. “This is a person I love very much, and I have great respect and admiration for,” Healey told Abraham. That summer, Healey’s office announced the governor was moving in with Lydgate and her kids. (Healey had previously been in a long-term relationship with Gabrielle Wolohojian, whom she nominated—to some public outcry—to the state Supreme Judicial Court in 2024.)

Ask ChatGPT for a list of major life stressors, and you’ll find starting a new job, moving, and becoming a stepparent—all three of which Healey essentially did in fairly rapid succession in 2023. When we talk one morning, Lydgate acknowledges that she and Healey have navigated a lot of change, and that their lives—she now runs the nonpartisan elections organization States United Democracy Center—are busy. When I ask how much work-life balance the couple has, she chuckles. “What work-life balance? She has her job, which is a very big job. And I have to travel a lot for work,” she says. “We have a teenager and a soon-to-be teenager at home. But I think it’s honestly not so different from so many families that are trying for a balance.”

Lydgate tells me that she and Healey strive for as much normalcy as possible: Working out together when they can. Watching a TV show when time allows. Taking their dog, a female golden retriever named Charlie, for a walk. On the more mundane side, Healey—harking back to her work-study days at Harvard—handles washer-and-dryer duty. “My son likes to joke that the governor does his laundry,” Lydgate says with a laugh.

I ask if there are elements of Healey’s personality that the public might not fully appreciate, and Lydgate talks about how grounded her partner is. “She’s very good at putting furniture together,” she says. “She grew up on a farm, and I think that’s a really deep part of who she is. Not just because she loves to be outside, but she has a really strong work ethic.” (Speaking of farm life, Lydgate mentions that Healey was initially thrown by the fact that Charlie is allowed on the couch. “She grew up with dogs who lived outside on the farm. Like, who is this princess dog that you are treating like a fifth member of the household?”)

Lydgate also talks about how much Healey thrives on interacting with people. She says the couple once took an online quiz measuring introversion versus extroversion. “She was, like, 100 out of 100 on the extrovert scale,” Lydgate says. “She would be so happy to spend all of her time talking to people.”

It’s a revealing detail. Healey doesn’t just tolerate the endless meetings and glad-handing that come with being governor—she genuinely likes it. For her, listening to all sides isn’t a chore—it’s central to how she leads. There is one area, though, where Healey has been willing to take clear stands and risk making people unhappy: Donald Trump.

It’s in dealing with Trump that Healey most resembles the protector figure from her days as attorney general—the person who jumps in to make things right. She’s spoken out repeatedly about various Trump decisions and policies, and in certain cases has taken steps to counteract those moves with measures of her own. The DRIVE Initiative is one example. Her announcement this summer that Massachusetts would protect vaccine access was another. Healey has also engaged in political theater—hosting a high-profile meeting with Canadian premiers to discuss Trump’s tariffs and tourism issues, and later welcoming Democratic legislators from Texas who hightailed it out of their state to stop GOP-led redistricting.

But as with many things Healey has done, not everyone is thrilled with her version of the resistance. Especially in the early months of Trump’s current presidency, progressives complained she wasn’t speaking out often or forcefully enough. Meanwhile, some in the business community complain that every time she criticizes Trump, Massachusetts gets whacked in terms of slashed funding. (The Trump administration clawed back $600 million in Congressionally approved money to replace two Cape Cod bridges, and in September slashed nearly $7 million in federal safety funding for Massachusetts. And this on top of research grant reductions and ongoing funding threats aimed at Harvard.)

Healey scoffs at the idea that clamming up would make anything better. “I don’t think it matters,” she says. “He’s been attacking us and other states since the beginning of his administration. He’s a guy who, if you think you’re making a deal with him, he just moves the goal posts.”

All of this is bigger than politics or dealmaking anyway, she believes. “I’m not going to stand by when this president decides to give away intellectual assets to China,” she tells me. “I try to talk about the facts. I try to say ‘Yes, it’s a criticism, Mr. President, that you are deferring research and medical innovation in our state and in our country and then allowing China and other countries to scoop up our scientists, researchers, engineers.’”

If only governing Massachusetts were this straightforward.

At the Biogen headquarters groundbreaking in September. / Photo by David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe

A few hours before I sat down with Healey in her office, she appeared at a groundbreaking ceremony in Kendall Square for Biogen’s new headquarters. The event had the air of history about it, not just because of the size of the project—the facility, built in conjunction with MIT, will be 580,000 square feet—but because Biogen was one of the companies that helped establish Massachusetts as an innovation hub back in the ’80s, kicking off a new economy—a new era, really—in the Bay State.

At the event, held in a giant tent near the building site, the crowd of nearly 300 people got on their feet for a standing ovation. But it wasn’t for the governor. It was for Biogen cofounders Phillip Sharp, now age 81, and Wally Gilbert, now age 93. When Healey was introduced, she got a pleasant reception. She went to the podium and talked about how the new complex was exactly the kind of commitment Massachusetts needs if it’s going to continue to lead the world in innovation, if it’s going to continue to have a robust economy. Then she went into full cheerleader-in-chief mode.

“I say this to the world: If you’re a researcher, scientist, entrepreneur, soon-to-be-founder, come to Massachusetts. There is no better place. This is why we’ve been number one in education, innovation, healthcare. We’ve been rated the best state for working moms and dads, the best state to have a baby and raise a family….”

It’s the same pitch she’s been making since she took office—Massachusetts as champion, herself as cheerleader-in-chief. And it might be enough to win her reelection.

The dynamics of next year’s governor’s race appear, at least right now, to be in Healey’s favor. She’s unlikely to have an opponent in the primary, while on the Republican side, three contenders will likely battle it out. Two of them—Mike Kennealy and Brian Shortsleeve—are moderates who served in the Baker administration. The third—Mike Minogue—is a military veteran and biotech executive who gave substantial money to Trump and other GOP candidates in 2024. No matter which one of them wins, Healey will undoubtedly try to tie them to Trump and make the election about the president. Meanwhile, it’s important to remember: Healey has not only won every election she’s ever had, but she’s also won each one of them by 20 points or more.

That said, Healey’s reelection is not a sure thing. In a UMass poll taken in late October, 43 percent of respondents said the state is on the wrong track, versus only 40 percent who said it’s on the right track. Meanwhile, it’s not hard to imagine the three Republican candidates—all men—going after Healey as not decisive enough, not moving quickly enough, not cut out for this game. The one who let the vaunted Massachusetts economy really slip.

Several people I talked to for this story pointed out that, contrary to many expectations, Healey has largely followed the template Bill Weld established 30 years ago for successful Massachusetts governors: conservative on business issues, more liberal on social ones. It’s been pretty damn effective from a governing standpoint, but it’s fair to wonder if the model is starting to show its age politically. We live in an era, after all, when the politicians who generate the most energy (and social media visibility and money) are the ones on the edges—Trump and his MAGA acolytes on the right, figures like Zohran Mamdani (and Michelle Wu) on the left. It’s not just that the positions they stake out are bolder; it’s that none, at least politically, would be described as pleasers. Our new norm isn’t avoiding acrimony and fear; it’s cultivating it.

Healey, true to who she is, is betting that in Massachusetts, at least, there’s still room for someone who wants everyone to leave the room feeling good. As always, she’s in it—“it” meaning fixing the state’s economy, or standing up to Trump’s excesses, or winning reelection, or whatever she turns her attention toward—to win. Still, it’s unclear whether the victory she’s chasing—keeping all her constituencies satisfied while moving the state forward—is actually achievable. Perhaps Healey’s approach requires more time to bear fruit than a single term allows, or perhaps her governing approach is past its prime. The next year will help answer which of these is true.

When I talked to Lydgate about her partner, she mentioned the governor’s stint as a Hampton Beach cocktail server a couple of times. “I honestly think she liked that job almost as much as she likes being governor,” Lydgate said. “She loves being around people, meeting people, hearing people’s stories.”

But, of course, a cocktail-server gig was never going to be enough. The point guard was too driven for that, too competitive, too determined to do more than just make people happy—she wanted to win. Whether she’s figured out how to do both as governor remains to be seen.

This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue with the headline: “Maura Healey is Playing to Win.”

Squeezed to Death: Inside Boston’s Sandwich Generation Crisis

Simone Migliori — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 13:00:07 +0000

Illustration by C.J. Burton

They’re planning birthday parties while moving their parents across the country. They’re fielding calls from their kids’ daycare in the morning and their parents’ assisted-living facility in the evening. They’re potty training while adding adult diapers to the shopping list—all while working 40 hours a week to pay for it all. This is the sandwich generation—and it’s exactly as brutal as it sounds. This squeeze affects 23 percent of U.S. adults, with 65 percent of them finding themselves in this situation during their forties, according to Pew Research Center data. In Massachusetts, the balancing act is especially difficult given the high cost of, well, just about everything. We spoke to four local caregivers to learn how they navigate impossible logistics, financial strain, and emotional exhaustion—and how they’re juggling, or barely juggling, it all.

Tony Luong

The Impossible Balance

It was a Monday night about six months ago when Sarah Berkley hit her breaking point. She was prepping for a client presentation, the part-time nanny she’d hired for her three- and five-year-old was out sick, and she was being peppered with calls from her parents’ assisted-living facility about their medications and health. Overwhelmed, Berkley called her boss in tears and arranged a leave of absence.

But let’s rewind. It’d been a little over a year since her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and given that her mother had been suffering from Parkinson’s for about 15 years, her parents agreed to give up their homes in New Jersey and Florida to enter assisted living in Boston’s suburbs. They first moved into the facility closest to Berkley and her husband’s home, but Berkley wasn’t satisfied with the care there. The final straw at the first facility came when her father, admittedly a fall risk, had a small stumble and bruised his forearm. It was the facility’s strict policy that all medications, prescription and over-the-counter, be purchased and administered through its pharmacy provider.

Fed up with the red tape, Berkley smuggled her father a couple of Tylenol. When the caregivers found out, they offered an alternative to address her father’s minor soreness: They could happily administer morphine instead.

That whole incident seemed unbelievable, Berkley says, but the pressure she felt was very real, and during her tearful phone call with her boss, she let it all out: “I literally can’t do everything, I just can’t. I don’t know what to do. I can’t do all of this; I’m suffocating,” she told her. Luckily, Berkley’s supervisor, who was also a mentor and friend, and working for an insurance broker, was familiar with programs that could help. In Massachusetts, that meant paid family leave and short-term disability. “With my parents, my kids, and work, it was just like I was drowning,” Berkley says.

Berkley insists she is in a “fortunate position” because her parents have the resources to cover the cost of their own care, but is also clear that the stress involved with being part of the sandwich generation isn’t merely financial. Just minutes before we spoke, she was handling reimbursement paperwork and setting up speech and occupational therapy for her youngest child. Still on leave, she maintains a full schedule but says life has thankfully started to calm down. “Without work on my plate,” she says, “I have a little bit of time now to take care of myself, focus on my own mental health.”

Tony Luong

When Everything Falls Apart at Once

In mid-May 2024, Amy Scheuerman found herself in her aunt and uncle’s living room in the Bay Area, 3,000 miles from her Somerville home, sorting through Tupperware bins of old bills and attempting to catalog their various memberships and subscriptions. At the same time, she was working with her husband back East from afar, planning a combined fourth and sixth birthday party for her sons, both May babies.

In reality, the time bomb that blew Scheuerman’s world apart had actually started ticking 15 years earlier, when her father flew to California to move his parents closer to his childless brother and sister-in-law. “His plan had been to have his brother be in charge,” she explains. But during the visit, her uncle suffered a stroke and became incapable of caring for his parents, thus forcing Scheuerman’s father to relocate unexpectedly to the West Coast from Massachusetts to help them.

Scheuerman’s father remained in California after his parents passed, helping his brother and sister-in-law navigate health issues. When Scheuerman and her husband began having children, her father wanted to come home, but the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns got in the way. And then, another challenge: In the spring of 2024, Scheuerman’s aunt was diagnosed with aggressive uterine cancer and died soon after. “Only after she passed away did we realize that my uncle was getting pretty severe dementia, and my aunt had basically been covering for him,” she says. (This is the point in the story when Scheuerman shared a crucial tip: Have your older relatives make a list of their usernames, passwords, and phone-screen codes; Scheuerman did not have any of those, and canceling subscriptions and memberships became a nightmare.)

Being the only child born to either couple, Scheuerman became health proxy for her uncle, and, later on, preemptively for both of her parents as well. And that was how she found herself in the Bay Area, attempting to sell her aunt and uncle’s home and get their affairs in order before moving two aging relatives back to Massachusetts.

Still, the biggest time suck involved researching and identifying housing for two men requiring vastly different levels of care. Her uncle was put in a memory unit in Newburyport with many of his fellow veterans, and her father moved in briefly with his wife, from whom he’d lived separately for years, until Scheuerman found an apartment for him closer to her Somerville home.

As an involved parent, Scheuerman isn’t sure if her prolonged absence negatively affected her kids, but when she began receiving calls from her four-year-old’s school and afterschool programs about him biting, kicking, and hitting others, she couldn’t help but blame herself. While Scheuerman is quick to praise the virtues of Somerville schools and the city’s widely available afterschool programs, the calls required that she drop what she was doing and retrieve her son.

The constant drain on Scheuerman’s time wasn’t without consequences: Having already taken three months of unpaid leave to move her family members back East, the higher-ups at her company were losing patience with her attention being elsewhere. With Scheuerman on the verge of being put on a performance-improvement plan, she decided to transition from full-time employee to contractor. Eventually, they let her go, all while she incurred the additional cost of hiring a nanny for her son, who could no longer attend afterschool programming.

A year removed from the tumult of having everything go haywire at once, Scheuerman has a new job, and her father lives close enough that he can pick up her now-five- and seven-year-old from school. Scheuerman repeatedly refers to herself as one of the lucky ones, citing her good fortune of being happily married with insurance and having family members who were financially capable of supporting themselves. As tough as it’s been for her, she says, “In general we’re luckier than a lot of people.

Tony Luong

When Family Actually Works

On a Friday afternoon, Malette Lanier is cleaning the Spirithouse Music recording studio, one of several offices, banks, and other businesses that contract her cleaning services. She loves her job, mostly because she has the flexibility to look after her grandson, Takai, while her daughter works. Her daughter and grandson, ages 31 and four, round out the four generations living in Lanier’s 81-year-old mother’s home. Being so close to her mother gives her “peace of mind,” Lanier says, “because I’m there every day and if there is some decline mentally, physically, I’m going to see it. If I were living elsewhere, I might not be aware of what’s going on.”

Lanier knows the challenges of aging firsthand. During the COVID lockdown, she and her father, who lives nearby, had to figure out a new care plan for her late stepmother, who’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and was rapidly succumbing to the disease. Because they no longer wanted to risk exposing her to outside caregivers, they decided to handle her full-time care themselves. “I would just go in the morning and help my dad get her up and dressed,” she says. “Then I would go back in the afternoon to help him change her, and then in the evenings to help him get her ready for bed.”

In many ways, Lanier was practically born into a caregiver’s role when her younger sister’s complicated delivery resulted in cerebral palsy. Lanier has been caring for her now-49-year-old sister for most of her life, always at home, and she doesn’t regret leaving her more traditional day jobs for the flexibility of running her own cleaning business.

Lanier is cautiously optimistic about her household’s future, though challenges remain. She has one more year watching Takai during work hours while her daughter works at a Lasik surgery office before he starts preschool in 2026. She and her mother also talk openly about future care needs now that her mother is in her eighties. “She told me once that if it became necessary to put [my sister] in a home, that would be fine, but I don’t see that happening,” Lanier says, adding, “She knows she has family she can count on. One hand washes the other—it’s family, it’s what you do.”

Tony Luong

The Great Role Reversal

Ever since her father’s 2016 death in their home state of Michigan, Somerville attorney Danielle Kinkel knew the clock was ticking on her mother’s inevitable relocation to Massachusetts. And tick it did: By 2019, her mother had moved into the first-floor unit of Kinkel and her husband’s multifamily home, where they lived on the second and third floors with their two young kids.

Because Kinkel’s mother had been a fierce careerist who postponed having children until later in life, the odds were high that she would need care while Kinkel was still raising her own young family. The Filipino immigrant and doctor had become a leading clinical psychologist and the president of the Michigan Psychiatric Society before winding down her career.

When her mother moved East to live with them, Kinkel’s life didn’t stop—but at that point, her mother was still healthy. Now, Kinkel is beginning to question whether her mom is still capable of living independently, especially after learning she has Alzheimer’s. The diagnosis confirmed what Kinkel and her husband had already suspected after her mother fell victim to an online scam. The scammers had instructed her to withdraw cash and deposit it in a local bitcoin machine, demanding that she not tell anyone.

Kinkel says she hadn’t anticipated how the living arrangement would shift their dynamic. Before, mother and daughter were both so busy they sometimes didn’t speak for months. Now her mom monitors her every move. “It’s like being watched, trying to navigate this weird space of being an adult and an adult child,” she says. “I am the adult to my adult parent, and sometimes I feel like I’m being catapulted back to being 17 and trying to sneak into my own home after midnight.” Conversely, her mother still has a car in the driveway—though the keys have been taken away—and has recently been caught trying to sneak it out. “The whole thing has gotten turned on its head,” she says.

Fortunately, the CEO of Kinkel’s organization has been sympathetic to her plight. Even so, Kinkel struggles as an active member of the sandwich generation shopping for long-term care for her 84-year-old mother. Her advice? Plan ahead and have the difficult conversations before you’re in crisis mode. And if you don’t have all the answers, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

This article was first published in the print edition of the October 2025 issue with the headline: “Squeezed to Death.”

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