Worcester's wild and wacky 2024

The year in 12 paragraphs

What’s up my merry pranksters!

The writing prompt I assigned myself for this year’s ‘in review’ was one month, one paragraph. The year in 12 grafs¹. I enjoyed the exercise. Behind each sentence you’re about to read is thousands upon thousands of words, hours of work. Interviews, background conversations, five hour stretches on council livestreams, digging through records, submitting FOIAs, reading every stupid thing every stupid person puts on the internet in this city.

Opposed to all that, this is the writing equivalent of a nice reduction. A pan sauce. I spent all year on the roast and now this is the demi-glace made from the renderings. If only I had some wine...

With a few exceptions, every sentence is a reference to a story I wrote at the time. That’s intentional. This is my year in review. Not the year in review. I know there’s stories I missed. But every week I did my best to choose the most important, prescient, illuminating topics available. A series of decisions about what deserved my attention and what didn’t. Same goes for this document.

Though I’ve become disillusioned with much of the journalism industry, the adage that it’s the first draft of history remains true. A necessary fact, like it or not. What do you think historians are doing... interviewing ghouls?

I spent the year articulating that first draft of Worcester in 2024. All told, that draft was whatever 3,000 word times six posts a month times 12 months comes out to. A big and unnecessarily long book, I can tell you that. Now the 2,000 word summary in front of you is the second draft. In the third draft, maybe none of it makes the cut. I have a feeling the DOJ report will. If there’s any justice in this world Maureen Binienda will not.

So, onto it. If you find it to be a whiplash of a ride, trust me big dog—so did I. If you haven’t listened yet, the most recent episode of this newsletter’s new podcast division, Outdoor Cats, covers the same general ground in much more lighthearted fashion.

After the review, a top 10 Worcester Sucks stories list and some book talk. Later this week, I’ll be publishing a “State Of The Newsletter” report. I was gonna include it here, but I think it deserves its own column space and it’d make this one way too long.

Happy New Years, everyone. Be safe tonight and in the words of AC/DC have a drink on me. If you can swing $5 a month please consider helping us out.

In review—Seanie D’s top 10 list—my year in books—odds and ends

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Worcester’s wild and wacky 2024

Oh trust me we’ll get to it

January

We started the year in anticipation of what Maureen Binienda’s school committee would look like after her historic revenge-tour school committee takeover. Turns out, it wasn’t hers at all. With a year of hindsight we can call the revenge tour an embarrassing failure, the yin to her election success yang. With any hope, she tries to run for mayor and eats shit. People close to her: please convince her it’s a good idea and she should run for mayor, yeah, totally, you got this, Maureen. We also saw Project Priceless establish itself with a protest encampment outside the RMV temporary winter shelter. The city manager ordered an especially swift demolition, violating a stated policy of giving a week’s notice before clearing an encampment. Oh yeah and the California Childhood Bedroom Nazis (CCBN) started calling in to city council meetings.

February

Then they kept calling. I investigated and found they have a whole Twitch stream where they call municipal boards across the country to say Nazi shit and snicker to each other like it’s their first sleepover and Cody has the new Call of Duty on Xbox and a headset. Meanwhile the adult fascists kept sweeping homeless encampments on a routine basis. Running cover, the city manager tried to lie about the quality of life team’s involvement in said sweeps, by removing that work from a report to the city council. Someone was caught on a hot mic telling Kate Toomey to shut up (hell yeah). Wired published its investigation into Shotspotter, revealing the full extent of the race- and class-based antagonisms informing where the “gunshot detection” mics go and where they don’t. The Supreme Court announced it would be taking up the issue of whether or not sleeping outside is a crime.

March

Despite the attempts of some, the city took precisely zero action in the wake of the Shotspotter report to reevaluate its relationship with the company, which costs us close to a million annually. Parents at Midland Elementary School caused a stink when credibly accused pedophile rapist John Monfredo came to the school to read to their kids. The principal there was, of course, a Binienda Loyalist. Her decision was overridden and Monfredo was barred from school grounds. A sleep out demonstration was held at city hall. Activists disrupted a presentation given by an IDF soldier at Worcester State. The speaker was invited by Steve Schimmel of the Jewish Federation of Central Massachusetts, who would continue throughout the year to be the local Israeli state propagandist no one asked for. We got the results of the racial equity audit of the WPD. Showed quite a bit of racism! One of the key recommendations, a civilian review board, was pointedly ignored by the city administration from March until December, when the Department of Justice released their report, which repeated the findings of the equity audit. Now, suddenly, the administration is moving on a civilian review board. Or so they say. Not holding my breath.

April

The Mill Street redesign took center stage. Cranks loudly complained about bike lanes and protected parking as if evidence of a grand conspiracy. All the while, the reality that the development boom is at an end began to sink in. Jim McGovern called for a halt to aid to Israel, which never happened obviously. Being realistic, it will never will happen in the future either. We found out 84 of the highest 100 paid employees were cops. Maureen Binienda broke the law in my opinion by trying to hook up the school her daughter works at with more resources. I put forward the thesis that the city council is more a reality TV show than a governing body. Still waiting to be proven wrong. Clark University’s “director of genocide studies” left the school and penned a self-flajulating op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about “campus discourse”—the real problem, we were all being told at this time. Not the dead kids in the open-air prison. It’s the “campus discourse.” With any hope we’ll look back at this month as the moment America finally went insane. A nation so scared of 1968 Round II it cracked its own psyche.

May

The rental registry was rolled out finally and councilors, who voted for it months previous, showed they had no idea what it was or how it worked. We watched them flail under pressure from the guys who hang around at Honey Dew in the morning, and try to repeal the thing entirely. Meanwhile the Telegram gave human interest feature attention to Israeli rape atrocity propaganda and I wrote about it in such a way as to lose some longtime supporters and get ceaselessly yelled at for a week or so about how I was both a misogynist and an anti-semite. Those who demanded an apology will notice you never got one. Amid all that I attended a rally in support of Gaza in which a driver shouted at the demonstrators to kill themselves. The city manager promised in his state of the city address to make Worcester the best managed city in the country. As he was doing so, a decorative placard fell off his podium. Kate Toomey tabled a citizen petition to look into systemic racism in the police department, saying an upcoming routine review of crime statistics served the same purpose—a painfully obvious lie, and a successful one. The motion passed, and the petition is still on the “tabled” section of all city council agendas. Here it is on the Dec. 17 agenda for instance:

June

The State Democratic Convention, held at the DCU Center, gave us an early glimpse at the party’s failure to meet the moment. Inside, chants of “lock him up.” Outside, a Gaza protest. The police department’s budget cleared city council review without a hiccup, as is tradition. Meanwhile, the Binienda Camp tried making “revenge tour” style cuts to the school budget. As with everything, they failed. Candy Mero-Carlson pushed amendments to the rental registry through her subcommittee for the benefit of a handful of her slumlord constituents. Neal McNamara at the Patch (we miss you dawg!) broke the news that interim chief Paul Saucier tried to get a sales job at Shotspotter after being Worcester’s defacto salesman for years. The day after the presidential debate that showed the world Joe Biden’s previously-concealed senility, the Supreme Court cleared the way for cities to fine and arrest people for sleeping outside. While there’s been no overt change to homeless sweep policy in Worcester, we’d shortly start to see signs of certain unstated policy shifts.

July

While a crisis for pedestrians emerged in June, it boiled over in July. The summer was almost completely defined by the issue of drivers ramming their cars into pedestrians, killing or seriously injuring them. One child died, another was put in a months-long coma. The council majority responded by... continuing to complain about Mill Street. Meanwhile, Steve Schimmel was busy accusing local Gaza demonstrators of terroristic-style meetings, whipping local genocidal psychos into a frenzy. Governor Maura Healey’s cuts to the family shelter system increased. A Democrat, she presented a story to the public in which Haitian migrants were the villain. The state’s longstanding “right to shelter” law, a key aspect of what little social safety net still exists, was called to open question by our liberal governor.

August

Protests of Healey’s shelter cuts escalated while the routine work of shuffling unhoused people from camp to camp continued unabated, helping no one but the cops who bill the taxpayers for the man hours required. The Boston Globe ran sponcon about Polar Park, paid for by a local bank with a vested interest. There was no disclaimer. Breakthrough bedroom pop artist Clairo released a music video featuring Beyond Wrestling at the White Eagle—perhaps the one and only “hell yeah” moment for Worcester all year. WPI announced its purchase of two hotels and the shadow city council got so worked up about it they told on themselves. The Binienda Coalition gave Monarrez really bad scores on her first annual review for revenge purposes, dragging what would have been an A+ down to an A-. While it accomplished nothing at all, it was the most successful action so far for the Binienda faction. The city allocated a “cultural programming” portion of ARPA funds mostly to well-off and white-led organizations like the Hanover Theater, snubbing smaller and more diverse groups in need of COVID relief. I discovered Larry Lucchino was the protege of a powerful CIA asset with deep ties to Holy Cross.

September

The city council passed a 25 MPH citywide speed limit after getting it out of Donna Colorio’s subcommittee, where it sat for nine of the deadliest months for pedestrians the city’s ever seen. Candy Mero-Carlson continued to push for legal action against WPI for their completely legal purchase of the hotels. Resident opposition to a crappy gas station proposal at the Hope Ave rotary mounted. A state police recruit from Worcester was beaten to death in the training facility. Later, an “outside investigator” with deep ties to the state police was appointed to investigate the death. Still no results as of my writing this. Another driver killed another pedestrian. I published a travel essay about eating mushrooms at Stonehenge that I consider the second best piece of writing I’ve ever produced, behind one coming up in October.

October

The leaders of countless cultural institutions by and for people of color came to city council to demand that ARPA money be allocated in the way it was supposed to be. City leaders said their hands were mostly tied and moved on. The public left having been punished for caring, as is tradition. Ta-Nehisi Coates went on a cable news morning show to promote his new book about writing and Palestine and other things and left having been called an extremist by a neatly manicured white man, but not before articulating a dangerously accurate summary of the situation in Palestine. The moment got me writing a long essay that I consider my finest work. Then, as if pulled from the pages of Coates’ book, Worcester was party to a micro-birtherism initiative from local Republicans. They were allowed to speak on it at city council. The gas station proposal on Hope Ave was defeated at the Zoning Board Of Appeals. A very real evangelical protest erupted outside Ralph’s Rock Diner over an upcoming haunted attraction event. Unlike the “show me your papers” show, Mayor Joe Petty barred a citizen petition asking the council to vote on a Gaza ceasefire petition. In response, activists behind the petition shut the city council down. In doing so they became the first group I can recall to meaningfully challenge the council’s go-to tactics for ignoring and diffusing local movements.

November

An unhoused woman, pushed just over the line into Millbury by the WPD’s endless sweeps died in a fire next to her tent a few days after pictures of her camp were posted to the city’s most reactionary Facebook group. No foul play, said investigators. Subsequently the city made no changes to its homeless response policies. This was a permissible death. Donald Trump won the election. Rather than take actual stock of its historic failure, the Democratic Party machine blamed Latino men. I made the case for killing the Democrat in your mind and replacing it with a community-based politics of mutual aid. On the Saturday following, police were kicking unhoused people off the city common at random. They arrested one of them for talking back. The “pay for itself” plan for Polar Park fell apart when city accountants announced they’d have to “borrow” some $790,000 from the operating budget for construction loans. A developer whose projects were key to the plan told the Worcester Redevelopment Authority he might do them at some point but only if the market turns around. Local restaurateur and old guard political operative John Piccolo spray-painted a city resident in the face right outside of the council chamber. (Recently, we learned that a person who tried to stop Piccolo from fleeing was charged with assault for doing so.) Several dozen WPD officers were put under investigation for using some app to skip mandatory trainings like the ones the DOJ was about to suggest as a meaningful reform. Project Priceless put mutual aid principles to work and got a fellow member out of jail. City officials announced a day center for unhoused people set to open in 2026. Local political operative Paul Giorgio made out handsomely in the deal (I haven’t reported on this yet but it’s crazy lol). Just so happened Batista’s administration chose Giorgio’s building. Hmm.

December

Beloved brewery Redemption Rock announced it was to close at the end of the year. People asked why we can’t have nice things. The Department of Justice provided the answer, cosmically, when it released the findings of a two-year investigation into the WPD. They found rampant sexual abuse and excessive force. The city’s official response came from a member of the MAGA movement vying to be Trump’s pick for the state’s US Attorney. He called the whole thing a bunch of lies. Batista reversed course a few days later, calling the report very serious. He said he intended to propose a civilian review board. The following Tuesday the city council gave him a raise, pushing him over $300,000 annual with a stipend for car payments. Meanwhile, new data showed homelessness in the city spiked 13 percent year over year. The week after, off duty police officers stuffed the council chambers while the most virulent and powerful of them barked at the city council about a report full of lies. Next to them in the speaking line were unhoused survivors of the sex trade testifying to the truth in it. A community meeting held by the Department of Justice the next day drew hundreds. DOJ lawyers on scene said it was the best attendance at such a meeting they’d seen. The report hit the front page of the Washington Post. The city paid out $350,000 to a man bit by a police dog while lying on the ground, then imprisoned on the false testimony of the dog’s attendant officer, a 2019 incident the DOJ references in a section dedicated to malicious use of dogs. Petty and Batista released their respective top 10 songs of the year on Instagram. Petty’s missed 2024 by 27 to 65 years. The closest is Elton John’s performance of “Candle In The Wind” at the 1997 funeral of Princess Diana. Batista’s list is topped by two songs from a children’s YouTube program called Blippi. Third pick fucks though.

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Seanie D’s Top 10 Picks

It isn’t up to me what pieces were “the best.” I have my personal favorites, but once a piece of writing goes out into the world it becomes the job of readers to determine its value. Really, it no longer belongs to me. In response to a call out in the “chat” feature of this newsletter (a thing that could be cool if we all commit to using it), reader Seanie D put together his Top 10 list of Worcester Sucks stories of the year. I know him to be a man of good taste and I’m honored he took the time. Some of the picks surprised me, which is great! And to underscore my earlier point, neither of the pieces I thought were best made his list. Here it is:

March 17 | “Creating a perpetual cycle of despair”

Aug. 11 | “College of the Holy Spook”

Sept. 12 | “What is ResourceRouter?”

Sept. 19 | “‘The most important thing is the human beings’”

Oct. 17 | “‘The very serious function of racism is distraction’”

Nov. 7 | “We need to start at the definition of ‘politics’”

Nov. 25 | “Project Priceless and the power of collective action”

Nov. 1 | “Another little death that no one notices”

Nov. 11 | “‘It is the very nature of the state that is putrid’”

Nov. 29 | “A city so motivated could do a lot more”

Thanks again for taking the time, Seanie D! What’s your favorite, dear reader? Always useful and interesting to hear what sticks, especially with a bit of time between.

And now’s good a time as any to say it’s the paying subscribers who keep this ship sailing. If you can swing it, please consider.

Tips and merch orders are also great!

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Send a tip on Ko-Fi / Merch Store

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My year in books

The past year, I committed to making reading as much a part of my job as writing. Every day with only a few exceptions I started with a straight hour of reading. Before looking at my phone if I could swing it. I set a timer on the kitchen stove and left my phone in another room. It’s been a useful routine for a number of reasons, chief among them that it drove a wedge between my thoughts and the endless chattering online. Anyone reading this who considers themselves “terminally online,” I can’t recommend enough finding a thing that puts some distance between you and the phone. I feel I’ve grown as a writer tremendously. The piece I wrote for Hell World about Maura Healey’s shelter cuts is a good example. I simply couldn’t have produced that any earlier in my career. Too many craft deficiencies. Coincidence? I think not. A writer’s primary job it turns out is reading.

Anyway, I gathered up all the books I read this year. In total, 38. Probably my best reading year, at least since college. The selections, especially the non-fiction ones, were made with the newsletter in mind. Some are in service of a few ambitious projects I’ll discuss in my next post. Careful readers of this newsletter may find other titles familiar. Here they are, loosely in the order I remember reading them:

Non-fiction

—Lurking by Joanne McNeil

—Homelessness Is A Housing Problem by Clayton Aldern and Gregg Colburn

—The City Authentic by David A. Banks

—Eight Hours for What We Will by Roy Rosenzweig²

—Generation Kill by Evan Wright

—Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan

—Before and After the Book Deal, by Courtney Maum

—Getting There, by Stephen Goddard

—Thinking Like Your Editor, by Alfred Fortunato and Susan Rabiner

—Quick Fixes, by Benjamin Fong

—Fight Like Hell, by Kim Kelly

—The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

—Banished: The New Social Control In Urban America, by Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert

—Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, by Lester Bangs

—In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, by Davarian L. Baldwin

—On Writing, by Stephen King

—There Are No Accidents, by Jessie Singer

—The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

—A World Without Police, by Geo Maher

—Inventing Reality, by Michael Parenti

—People Before Highways, by Karilyn Crockett

—Urban Warfare, by Raquel Rolnik

—Rebel Cities, by David Harvey

—The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Frederick Engels

—The Dialectic of Sex, by Shulamith Firestone

—Nazi Billionaires, by David de Jong

Fiction:

—To Have and Have Not, by Hemingway

—The Drowned World, Crash, and Concrete Island, by J.G. Ballard

—Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler

—We Are All The Same In The Dark, by Julia Heaberlin

—Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte

—Watchmen, by Alan Moore (re-read)

—New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith

—Neuromancer, by William Gibson

—Elvissey, by Jack Womack

Favorite: The Message. A god damn good book. Runner up: Parable of the Sower. A book that predicts the future with increasing accuracy. Currently reading: VALIS by Philip K. Dick, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, Splish Splash by James Donald Forbes McCann. Books I gave up on: Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysses by James Joyce.

If you want my take on any of these feel free to hit me up at billshaner@substack.com, in the chat, or in the comments.

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Odds and ends

Thanks again for reading and, again, happy new year!! I hope everyone has a good night and a restful day tomorrow. I will be eating pork & kraut with my family up in Maine, as is tradition. I will also jump in the ocean afterward, as is a new tradition.

One more subscription pitch for the road!

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Send a tip on Ko-Fi / Merch Store

And still lots of good stuff in the merch store! I put in for another round of longsleeves so those will be going up soon.

Just a few quick hits here let’s see let’s see. Oh! The state police trooper caught stealing $1,000s worth of various goods from Target, using a “skip-scan” technique I never—certainly have never ever employed myself, your honor. That a statie would be the only person in history caught doing this makes sense, I think. Likely it was his ability to nonchalantly “skip-scan” overtime pay slips at the office that made him over-confident in the Target.

Relatedly I’m giggling thinking about pronouncing Target like Targe (as in “Sarge”). Finally, the right-wing answer to the liberals’ “Targét.” In Targe, the defining liminal space of the American middle class takes its final form, grafted onto the tactical aesthetic of the new right. The faux-fancy self depreciation of liberals at last subsumed by the new American fascist kitsch.

Happy to read that Refaat Alareer posthumous book, If I Must Die, continues to climb the charts! Still hasn’t made the NYT list but it could soon, as Ryan Grim explains over at Dropsite News. Excited to get my copy.

TrueAnon, the podcast, does a good newsletter now called Crackpots that’s paid only on Patreon, but there’s a recent essay about housing by Kate Wagner, architectural critic at The Nation, that’s so so so good. Readers of this newsletter will surely enjoy it. (shhhhh keep this link between us)

The more the rent goes up – and it’s gone up a deranged 23% during Biden’s presidency – the more we are going to see widespread displacement, spatial redistributions of wealth in favor of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and massive upheavals in countless individual human lives, usually for the worse.

This is an economic reality and it is an ugly one. It sucks and no, it’s not “rational” – it’s barbaric. A great deal of effort goes into transforming people and property into statistics and wonkish policy in order to hide what is undeniably a form of social violence and with it, the faces of real human suffering.

Lastly you can thank Shaun Connolly for this, the most deranged post I’ve seen on a local Facebook group.

I haven’t dared investigate further, but those 43 comments are sure to contain some solid townie gold.

Ok everyone see you next year ha ha ha get it?!

1. Graf is the annoying journalism industry term for “paragraph,” a product likely of “paragraph” being an annoying word to type and graf being fun to type

2. re-read, for book club, the future of which I will discuss later this week!