Vox clamantis in deserto
Wrapping it all up
“The Declaration of Independence” (1950 offset lithograph), by Polish-Jewish-American artist Arthur Szyk (1994-1951), who battled fascism.
The stuff that students leave behind
Excerpted and edited from an ecoRI News article by Frank Carini
PROVIDENCE — Two Providence East Side women have a concept of a plan to stop clothes, vacuums, furniture, and books from being buried in Johnston, site of Rhode Island’s state landfill.
After our publisher and my wife, Joanna Detz, and I recently spoke with the duo, at Coffee Exchange on Wickenden Street, ecoRI News agreed to work with them to find a solution. I volunteered to be a grunt.
College move-out carelessness is a problem that mars the state capital every spring. Neighborhoods around Brown University are routinely littered with abandoned clothing, comforters, sheets, electronics, picture frames, books, unused notebooks, plastic shelving, shoe racks, cleaning supplies and other household items, food (some 42 tons nationwide), and beat-up furniture in need of a little TLC.
The average college student living in a dormitory generates an estimated 640 pounds of waste annually, with extreme waste coming at the end of the academic year, according to a study published in March. These spring spikes are what concern Sara Dorsch and Carolyn Birnbaum.
Chris Powell: Looks like some Democrats oppose ANY immigration enforcement
Immigration cases in Connecticut are handled in this Hartford building.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
______________________________________________
Many Democrats in Connecticut are always looking for opportunities to deplore the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But this week they jumped on what looked like an opportunity before determining what it was really about. They might have been embarrassed if journalists followed up about it.
It began when U.S. Rep. John B. Larson called a rally outside West Hartford Town Hall in support of a local businessman, Seyo Cecunjanin, who had been arrested and taken away by ICE agents nine days earlier as he exited a doughnut shop with his sons. Larson, joined by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, some state legislators, and a few others demanded Cecunjanin's release, and Larson and one of the arrested man's sons described the arrest's circumstances, which included guns and big black cars with covered license plates.
But WTIC-AM1080 talk show host Reese Hopkins also had shown up and unlike everyone else had brought a critical question: Did anyone know exactly why ICE had arrested Cecunjanin?
No one did -- not Larson, not Blumenthal, and none of the rally participants, including former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who is challenging Larson in the Democratic primary for the party's nomination in the 1st Congressional District, charging that Larson is too old and tired even as the rally was another proof that Larson is furiously running circles around him.
As good Democrats, they didn't care why Cecunjanin was arrested. They came to the rally on the principle that any arrest by ICE is to be protested and in the confidence that as more illegal immigrants are admitted to the country or exempted from immigration law enforcement, the next census will lead to the creation of more Democratic-leaning congressional districts and fewer Republican-leaning ones. (It doesn't matter that non-citizens aren't supposed to vote; the Constitution requires that they be counted in the federal census for apportionment of congressional districts, and illegal immigrants concentrate in the Democratic "sanctuary" cities and states that subvert immigration law, states like Connecticut. With enough illegal immigrants, Democrats will have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives forever.)
But if the rally had been postponed until Cecunjanin's arrest was clarified, the Democrats might have not been as strident about it. ICE is usually slow to explain itself, but by the end of the day WFSB-TV3 had gotten a response. The agency said Cecunjanin, a native of Montenegro, was arrested because he came to the United States in March 1997 using a fraudulent Dutch passport and six months later an immigration judge had issued a final order of removal for him. Cecunjanin apparently had been violating the order for 29 years until last July, when he left for Serbia, returning two weeks later despite the removal order. In the meantime he racked up a conviction for drunken driving.
"Cecunjanin has made a mockery of our immigration laws on several occasions for more than two decades," ICE said.
What do Larson, Blumenthal, Bronin, and the other rally participants think about that? What do they think ICE should have done about Cecunjanin's repeated violation of immigration law? Should ICE have ignored them because the people at the rally say Cecunjanin is a good guy, or because they think all immigration law violations should be ignored until the violators are convicted of mass murder?
There was plenty of journalism about the rally. But it is unlikely to extend to critical follow-up questions. For critical follow-up questions about illegal immigration are politically incorrect in Connecticut.
No one would have needed any explanation from ICE to put a critical follow-up question to Blumenthal at the rally. He remarked that the immigration system is "gridlocked and dysfunctional." He wasn't asked why the system is overwhelmed and whose control of the federal government overwhelmed it with millions of illegal entrants and for what purpose.
Another follow-up question might be why the Democrats don't just attempt candor and admit that their preferred solution to the problem they created is another mass amnesty, along with permanent Democratic control of the House.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Stalactites into the sea
“The middle part of Maine, all the way from Bar Harbor to Portland, hangs down like stalactites that drip little islands into the Atlantic. It's divided by rivers and harbors with cozy names that sound like brands of bubble bath or places boats sink in folks songs.”
— Linda Holmes, American author and podcaster
A place to hide?
“Ocean Inlet” (photographic pigment print), by Jim Westphalen, at Front Four Gallery, Stowe, Vt.
Weep and bear it
“There Was No Remedy’’ (acrylic on canvas), by Chris Gollon (1953-2017), British artist.
For further information, see:
‘Immersive, intuitive forces’
“Sun — Penetrating Wind” (acrylic on canvas), by Sheila Isham (1927-2024), in the show “Between Worlds,’’ at the Newport Art Museum, through Feb. 28.
— Image courtesy of Newport Art Museum
.
The museum says the show “features over 30 paintings and works on paper from 1968 to 2004 that traces ‘the evolution of an artist who continually expanded the possibilities of abstraction,’ according to curatorial materials. Sheila Isham, who traveled the globe and spent summers in Newport, took influence from her travels as well as the Washington Color School and ‘treated color and material as immersive, intuitive forces.’ Now, returning to Newport for this expansive retrospective, "this exhibition marks a meaningful rediscovery of Isham‘s work within a community connected to her personal history."
Llewellyn King: The birth of a new reactor
Early thorium-based (MSR) nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
If you are designing a car from scratch, there are certain essentials to begin with. You need to start with the wheels on the corners, for example.
But when it comes to building a nuclear reactor, things are different. There are hundreds and maybe thousands of ways of doing it. The constant is that you need fissionable fuel and a moderator to collect the heat and manage the neutron flux.
That embarrassment of choice — now reflected in the number of small modular reactors (SMRs) vying for market acceptance — may be why thorium reactors, which began with promise, have been left on the shelf.
The nuclear establishment, goaded by the Nuclear Navy’s Adm. Hyman Rickover, wanted light water technology. That is what the first 100-plus U.S. civilian reactors employed.
At the dawn of the civilian nuclear age, it was a straight contest between two fuels: uranium and thorium. Thorium is fertile but not fissile: It can’t start a chain reaction unless it is triggered by a small amount of the isotope uranium-235.
Once this happens, thorium becomes uranium-232 and fizzes wonderfully with a steady stream of neutrons, producing heat in the moderator, which is where the first steps in making electricity are taken.
That heat is captured to create steam that turns a turbine.
Thorium was used in part in the first power-producing, commercial nuclear reactor: the 60-megawatt Shippingport Nuclear Atomic Power plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. With three different fuel assemblies, it ran for 25 years, starting in 1957. It used solid fuel, which was to become the standard for civilian nuclear power.
Meanwhile, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, under its director, physicist Alvin Weinberg, work went ahead on what would become a legendary fast-breeder thorium reactor, using a liquid fuel embedded in molten salt. It went critical in 1965 and operated for five years before it was closed by the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Department of Energy) in a political move.
A fast reactor uses extra neutrons to create new fuel and burn up radioactive waste. The process is akin to perpetual motion — but isn’t, of course.
Now a charismatic nuclear engineer, Yash Patel, founder and CEO of AMR Reactor, is planning to bring thorium back as a viable future option for space exploration, power generation and, eventually, ship propulsion.
Patel told me he has designs for a microreactor (under 20 MW) and for a SMR (250 MW). The planned reactors are molten salt-moderated, thorium-fueled fast reactors.
He believes they will not only be cheaper, but will also operate better than the SMRs now entering the market.
Patel’s plan for Austin-registered AMR Reactor is to outsource as much of the fabrication as possible.
A fast reactor is called a breeder reactor because it generates more neutrons than are needed to produce fission, and these transmute waste into additional fuel.
Patel went to school in California and while looking for a career, a break came that changed the trajectory of his life. He got an internship with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There he worked on Curiosity, the plutonium-fueled Mars rover. His nuclear love affair, he said was “complete and instant.”
From NASA, he went to Texas A&M and graduated in nuclear engineering. He was well along with his PhD, when a family illness caused him to abandon it.
Patel lists two great blessings in his life. “The first was that I moved to America from India. The second was attending Texas A&M. That was another wonderful break.”
After a stint in biopharma, where he prospered, Patel started designing reactors in all his waking hours along with a friend, D’mitri Scott, now the chief technology officer at AMR Reactor.
Patel said the numbers didn’t work for their plans until they switched to thorium. It was a eureka moment.
There followed a period which he likened to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak working on the first computer operating system. The two young men were obsessed and inspired by what they believed was extraordinary. “Our girlfriends, now our wives, saw very little of us. We sometimes worked all night,” Patel said.
With thorium, they found all they were looking for: a stable source of reliable power that was safe, couldn’t melt down, and was able to handle most of the fission products.
And it was proliferation-proof because of the presence of intense gamma radiation, which made it hard to process, steal or divert. “Thorium was the winner,” he said.
A new reactor is on the way.
Llewellyn King, an international energy-sector consultant, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
New England’s ‘dual’ housing/workforce crisis
Triple-decker housing in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.
Housing affordability has become one of the defining economic challenges facing New England. As home prices and rents continue to rise, employers across the region are confronting a difficult reality: their ability to attract and retain workers increasingly depends on whether those workers can afford to live near their jobs.
On June 16, 2026, the New England Council hosted a special program, “Housing and the Workforce in New England: A Conversation with U.S. Representative Stephen F. Lynch.” The forum, sponsored by Liberty Bay Credit Union and moderated by President & CEO John Baron, brought together business leaders, housing advocates, developers, lenders, and policymakers to discuss the link between housing availability, workforce retention, and regional economic competitiveness.
Congressman Lynch, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, described what he called a “dual housing crisis.” While housing affordability has traditionally been viewed as an issue affecting low-income households and vulnerable populations, he said, rising costs are increasingly affecting the broader workforce. Employers across New England are struggling to recruit and retain workers, including teachers, nurses, first responders, construction workers, and young professionals who are being priced out of the communities they serve.
Rep. Lynch noted that the United States faces a housing shortage of roughly seven million units and emphasized that increasing supply must be central to any long-term solution. He advocated an “all-of-the-above” approach that includes affordable housing, workforce housing, and market-rate development, arguing that expanding housing opportunities across income levels is essential to improving affordability and supporting economic growth.
The conversation also examined barriers to new housing production. Rep. Lynch cited rising construction costs, elevated interest rates, tariffs on building materials, restrictive zoning policies, and local opposition to development as contributors to the shortage. He also emphasized the importance of transit-oriented development, arguing that investments in public transportation can expand housing opportunities while reducing commuting burdens for workers.
Federal policy solutions were another focus of the discussion. Rep.Lynch highlighted ongoing congressional efforts to advance a broad bipartisan housing package, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which aims to modernize housing policy, reduce barriers to development, and increase housing production. At the time of the forum, the legislation’s path to final passage remained uncertain. Since that discussion, however, Congress has approved the bill with overwhelming bipartisan support, sending it to President Trump for consideration. Supporters view the measure as the most significant federal housing legislation in decades and a meaningful step toward addressing the nation’s housing supply shortage. Congressman Lynch also discussed opportunities to redevelop underutilized public land, including federal properties, to create additional housing without acquiring new land.
The event concluded with a discussion of policy proposals under debate in Massachusetts, including rent control. The Congressman expressed concern that rent control could discourage investment and reduce housing production, arguing that increasing supply remains the most effective long-term strategy to improve affordability.
Throughout the discussion, one theme remained constant: housing is no longer simply a housing issue. It is a workforce, economic development, and competitiveness issue. The bipartisan passage of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act since the forum underscores the growing recognition in Washington that housing affordability has become a national economic challenge. As New England continues to confront rising housing costs and workforce shortages, expanding the housing supply will be critical to ensuring the region can attract workers, support employers, and sustain long-term economic growth.
A recording of this discussion is available here.
Honoring the forgotten
“Matriarch,’’ by Wheaton Mahoney, in her series “The Forgotten,’’ at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Mass. through Sept. 27.
The museum explains that “The Forgotten’’ “unearths the mysterious world of abandoned portrait art collected over a six-year period.
Throughout history, portraiture has held a profound significance in
immortalizing loved ones and those in power. Yet these portraits, acquired through auctions, had been
discarded and forgotten, leaving the stories of the subjects and the journey of the canvases shrouded in
mystery.
The artist’s mission is to offer these subjects a final acknowledgment by hanging them on living trees in her back woods, symbolizing the connection between earthly origins and their ultimate return as well as the metaphorical family tree. Captured over multiple years, the series reveals the passage of time through the changing of seasons while preserving the agelessness of the portraits. The artist’s titles offer yet another layer of character to each subject.
“The Forgotten’’ aims to honor those who have come before us and have slipped into obscurity.
Our dialect difficulties
Northeastern (NENE), Northwestern (NWNE), Southwestern (SWNE), and Southeastern (SENE) New England English dialects, as mapped by the Atlas of North American English on the basis of data from major cities.
“I'm from Connecticut, and we don't have any dialects. Well, I don't think we have any dialects, and yeah, it's very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts New England region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail.’’
Seth Woodbury MacFarlane (born 1973), American actor, comedian, director and producer.
‘The world knows it by heart’
"I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever."
— Daniel Webster (1782-1952), U.S. senator and congressman from Massachusetts, secretary of state and famed orator and lawyer.
‘Time and technology’
“Thinking of You” (oil and acrylic on panel), in the group show “Vanishing Ecologies: Speculative Futures,’’ at the New Bedford Art Museum, through Oct. 11.
The museum says: :
“This exhibition explores artistic responses to the Anthropocene—the era in which human activity has reshaped the planet—and imagines what might follow it. Through painting, sculpture, installation, and time-based media, artists confront climate change, mass extinction, and the lingering shadow of the atomic age, while probing the accelerating entanglement of technology and time. Some works trace the fragile thresholds between collapse and adaptation; others speculate on post-human futures, ecological resilience, and planetary memory. Together, these visions ask how we narrate an ending that is also a beginning, inviting viewers to consider their place within deep time and the uncertain worlds still unfolding.’’
Ghostly reminders
Sign for a defunct clothing store in Salem, Mass.
— Photo by Fletcher6
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com.
Boston’s WBUR had a lovely piece on “ghost signs’’ – those fading identifiers on old brick walls of mostly long-departed companies and industries, large and small. They serve as a reminder of capitalism’s “creative destruction,’’ and of how New England was once a manufacturing and retailing marvel. (All those long-gone local department stores.) Being of a certain age myself, I remember some of these sorts of old enterprises in their final years; indeed I worked for a couple of them in summer jobs.
The dangers of romance
“Hidden Agenda #1” (lucite cast and facsimile gun), by Judy Haberl, in the group show “We Can Only Be Human Together”), at the South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, Mass., through July 25.
We’re all living in ‘helter skelter’
“Construction Trailer Manhattan Bridge’’ (oil on curved canvas), by Sam Cady, in his show “Helter Skelter Paradise,’’ at the Zimmer Art Museum of the University of Maine in Bangor.
The museum says:
“Known for his meticulously painted subjects realized on hand-crafted shaped canvases, Maine-based artist Sam Cady explores dual concepts, replete with tension and nuance, in the exhibition ‘Helter Skelter Paradise’. Images that evoke recreation, comfort and beauty are featured, while in an adjacent gallery, chaos and uneasiness pervade.
“What grounds us in turbulent times? Which scenes or objects bring us joy and a sense of calm? In one gallery Cady brings together an assortment of works under the umbrella title of ‘Paradise.’ The selected paintings are subjects of introspection and solace and are imbued with optimism. ‘My paintings are homages to my subjects. They are ‘icons’ of the everyday world, objects, land/seascapes, weather, light, and how they make us feel’. Of course, subjects that bring positivity are different for each person but in this installation, we see Cady’s personal vision, history and inspiration.
“In contrast, Cady creates a visual overload in the Zillman Gallery as paintings are installed in an unexpected, disjointed manner on several walls. It’s as if the works were swept away suddenly by the roiling winds of a tornado. He comments on the focus of his work during the last five years, ‘the chaos of the world has made me want to comment on the extremes and contrasts of life with a range of emotional responses from humorous to deadly serious.’’’
‘Where are they now?’
— Photo by Romanceor
I made a garden just to keep about me
The birds and things I love, all summer long.
I doubt not they'd live well enough without me;
How would I live without them -- their sweet song?
I made a garden and had my own flowers --
All that I cared to pick and more too, there.
Most of them died and fell in scented showers
Upon the beds, and colored the warm air.
Mine was not such a garden as I'd thought of --
A deep wild garden that no hand has trimmed
In many years -- a tangle that is wrought of
Old fashioned flowers 'neath old trees, barren limbed
But so my flowers brought the insects winging,
The butterflies, the neighbors' murmuring bees,
And birds one must not cage or they cease singing,
I asked no more, well satisfied with these.
My garden my fair garden! I saw wither
Flower, leaf, and branch, and from the maple bough
Leaves race across the bare beds none knows whither.
The lives I entertained where are they now?
— “A Summer’s Garden,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
William Morgan: Beautiful manufactured nostalgia
Summer by the Sea: Cottages from Watch Hill to Little Compton (Monacelli, $64.95) is an absolute stunner of a coffee-table book — eye candy at its best. In highlighting 16 shingled vacation houses stretched along the Rhode Island coast, architect Thomas A. Kligerman and photographer Read McKendree have captured the essence of summer along this shore. “The combination of history, geography, and architecture captures summer redolent of a sail in a wooden catboat, lying in the dunes on July Fourth, clambakes, rose hip jam, and rainy nights around a jigsaw puzzle spread across an old card table,’’ Mr. Kligerman writes.
These seaside cottages are not the wealthy mansions we associate with Newport, but rather comfortable, putatively unpretentious (we do expect families emerging right out of a Ralph Lauren tableau)–pine not mahogany. Kligerman is “drawn to a nearly unfettered American architecture, one that developed here in Rhode Island: the shingle style. Shingle is a key element in Kligerman’s own work–he even calls a huge house in Oyster Bay, on Long Island’s Gold Coast, “Shinglish.” (Picture just below.) One contemporary house is Kligerman’s own, Nushka Koo in Weekapaug, where he nails the spirit of the shingle style without resorting to his overblown, often grotesque recreations of the work of English architects such as Edwin Lutyens, C.F.A Voysey, and John Nash.
Oyster Bay Retreat, Long Island’s Gold Coast
Is there something more in this five-pound tome than Cottage porn? Fiddler’s Green, on Block Island, is the work of Peter Bohlin, one of the most serious designers of contemporary residences that combine modernism with tradition. Also, on Block Island is Jens Risom’s 1967 A-frame; the Danish designer was a founder of Knoll, the supplier of 20th-century modernist furniture. Many of the houses here appeal because they have been unchanged, but Boothden, the actor Edwin Booth’s 1883 home–the work of Calvert Vaux, the noted American architect who was co-designer of Central Park–got a makeover by David Andreozzi, an architect whose overblown shingled houses are too often more McMansion than the modest simplicity of its supposed inspiration.
The Cottage, Saunderstown
Muscovy Ridge, Watch Hill
The luscious, evocative photographs and the cozy writing (“The compact house wraps around the old tapered tower like a honey bear hugging a tree”) are seductive. And while it is refreshing that the houses are mostly smallish and unknown, Kligerman’s paean to these Rhode Island gems seems a little disingenuous given his career designing over-the-top bloated renditions of styles from the past. So, rue as we might the decline of serious architectural history, we can enjoy the book as an exercise in manufactured nostalgia.
William Morgan, a Providence-based architectural historian, has published numerous books on the buildings and culture of New England (and elsewhere), including The Cape Cod Cottage and American Country Churches.
