Adam Sweet

When Hampshire College announced that it had secured a large loan that would allow it to complete its final semester, one detail caught my attention. Nobody initially said who had provided the money. Hampshire described the lender as a "philanthropic partner." The loan would allow the college to continue its summer and fall 2026 teach-out, wind down operations and give the trustees more time to deal with the college's land and other financial obligations. That seemed worth following. I had attended Hampshire years ago, so I already had a personal interest in what was happening to the college. But this became something different. I wanted to know who had lent Hampshire the money. $29.5 million The answer eventually appeared in documents filed with the Hampshire County Registry of Deeds. The lender was Artocarpus Partners LLC. The amount was $29.5 million. Artocarpus was a newly created Massachusetts limited liability company with a Boston address. The mortgage covered Hamp...

Years ago, I started looking for an instrument that I wasn't entirely sure existed in the form I wanted. I had played mandolin for years, along with guitar and violin, and I wanted something that occupied a different space. I wanted the tuning and fingering relationship I already knew from the mandolin family, but with a deeper voice and enough range to function differently in an ensemble. In other words, I wanted to go lower. That started a search that lasted for years. What was I actually looking for? There were instruments that came close. Mandolas existed, of course. So did mandocellos. Irish bouzoukis and citterns occupied some of the same territory, although builders and players weren't particularly consistent about what those names meant. What interested me most was what we now commonly call an octave mandolin: an eight-string instrument tuned G-D-A-E, like a mandolin, but one octave lower. Today it's easy to type "octave mandolin" into a search engine and ...

I've always had a tendency to follow questions long after most people would probably have moved on. It doesn't have much to do with the subject. I've done it with music, businesses, people, property, history, technology, old records and things I've stumbled across online. Something doesn't quite make sense, or two pieces of information don't seem to fit together, and I want to know why. Usually I don't know where I'm going when I start. One question leads to another. A name in one document turns up somewhere completely different. A newspaper story leads to a property record. A company leads to another company. Someone asks how to find a particular piece of obsolete equipment, and after a little digging it becomes apparent that the equipment isn't really what they're looking for at all. Sometimes the most important part is figuring out what the actual question is. I've spent years doing this in one form or another. Some investigations last an ...

After I was laid off in 2024, I applied for a lot of jobs. I applied broadly at UMass Amherst and the Five Colleges, including two positions at Hampshire College. I also applied at CVS, Stop & Shop, Big Y and other local employers. The response was remarkably thin. Out of all those applications, I received one callback and interview, for a janitorial position at UMass. That left me with a question. What was happening to all the other jobs? I wasn't particularly interested in guessing. I wanted to see what I could actually find. Looking at H-1B records One place I started looking was the federal employment data associated with H-1B workers. Before an employer can sponsor someone for an H-1B visa, it generally files a Labor Condition Application, or LCA, with the U.S. Department of Labor. Those filings create a public record containing information such as the employer, occupation, location and offered wage. Several websites make that data searchable, including H1BData, MyVisaJobs...