Burgeoning print life

"Print Life: Neurogenesis, from Seed to Growth" (molded paper woodcut with wheat berry seeds, and flipbook), by Eric Avery, in the "2017 North American Print Biennial,'' at the Lunder Arts Center at the Lesley University of Art and Design, Cambridge, Mass., through March 4.
 

Health system needs surge protectors

U.S. Army field hospital.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Rhode Island and many other states have more hospital beds than they need most of the time. So here and elsewhere, some hospitals are  being closed or being turned into entirely outpatient operations. Consider the recent closing  of the inpatient part of Memorial Hospital, in Pawtucket, with considerable local anger.

But what happens when a big epidemic, such as  the current flu outbreak, or a sudden disaster, such as the Station nightclub fire, strikes?  That Rhode Island,  and the rest of New England, has an older demographic than most of America and thus a higher percentage of people who could get very sick, makes us particularly exposed.

Where do you put all these very sick and/or injured people in times of widespread medical emergencies? Instant hospitals under tents, such as on battlefields?

Our health "system'' needs surge protectors.

Suggestions appreciated.

Well, yes, there's only one

The Housatonic River at Shelton, Conn.

"Housatonic, Quinnipiac and Connecticut,

Making their way to Long Island Sound.

Connecticut, what does it mean?

With its New Englanders of every race, color and creed.

A state of great beauty and a state of mind,

There is no other place that you will find ...

A State called Connecticut.''

-- From "A State Called Connecticut,'' by Camille Simone

Industry and high culture in Worcester

American Steel & Wire Company, circa 1905,  in Worcester. At its height, the company employed thousands.

To many, Worcester may be best known as an old industrial city, with a particular focus on things made out of metal. Indeed, some people used to call it "The Pittsburgh of New England.'' 

Bu it  also has such aesthetic  and educational delights as many fine examples of Victorian-era mill architecture and Victorian mansions as well as such treasures as the American Antiquarian Society, the Worcester Art Museum, the Higgins Armory Museum, the Mechanics Hall concert venue, the EcoTarium and Clark University, where Freud gave his only lecture in America and from which came Robert Goddard, the pioneer of rocket technology.  Then there's a leading Catholic institution, the College of the Holy Cross, up on a windy hill.

Many of the rich local industrialists were avid patrons of the arts and education even as some of them were happy to employ children in their factories.

And there's  the Worcester Music Festival, allegedly the oldest music festival in the U.S.,  the Canal Festival (there are canals in Worcester dating back to Industrial Revolution days) and Rock and Shock

Beautful Mechanics Hall, in downtown Worcester.

Art against misogyny

"Bees with Honey'' (fiber), by Kimberly Becker,  in the group show "A Woman's Place,'' at the Belmont Gallery of Art, Belmont, Mass., through March 10. Kimberly Becker, a painter and embroider who is also the curator of "A Woman's Place."  Becker explains on her Web site, kimberlybecker.com; "My work speaks to current political and social issues that I believe need a loud voice. Women must tell their stories, and insist that the misogyny stop." 
 

Chris Powell: Political sanctimony won't solve gun-violence challenge

An AR-15, which was easily bought by Nikolas Cruz at a gun store and then used to murder 17 people at a Florida school.

Estimates are that 300 million guns are in private possession in the United States, 55 million Americans own guns, and that at any particular moment about 20 percent of the population is suffering some form of mental illness.

So the remarkable thing may be not that the country has mass shootings every week but that there aren't several every hour and that anyone lives beyond age 40, especially as the political atmosphere has become stifling with sanctimony about guns.

The country sure does have a gun violence problem. But the rhetoric about it often lacks much relevance.

The bodies hadn't even been hauled away from the high school massacre in Florida last week before Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy was pacing the Senate floor denouncing Congress for having done nothing about guns. Gov. Dannel Malloy, whose administration gave early release to convict Frankie "The Razor" Resto, who quickly went on to murder a store owner in Meriden, angrily accused Republican congressmen of having blood on their hands. 

As is often the case, the problem with the quick denunciations arising from the Florida massacre is that none of the common prescriptions for diminishing gun violence would have made any difference.

More background checks? Desirable as they are, the perpetrator in Florida had no criminal record and his rifle was legally purchased at a gun shop. No "gun show sales loophole" was involved.

More mental-health appropriations? These would be helpful. But while many of the perpetrator's acquaintances regarded him as troubled and he had been expelled from high school because of misconduct, he rejected treatment.

Limit the capacity of gun magazines? This is trivial, since plenty of damage can be done whatever the magazine size and empty magazines are quickly replaced with loaded ones. 

Outlaw "assault weapons"? This usually means any rifle that just looks scary. But the only thing that matters about a gun is not its appearance but its mode of firing, and there are only three kinds of guns. 

There are fully automatic guns, semi-automatic guns and single-shot or double-shot guns The first kind reloads automatically and permits multiple rounds to be fired with a single squeeze of the trigger. The second kind also reloads automatically but requires individual trigger pulls for the discharge of each bullet. The third kind requires reloading for every one or two discharges.

Fully automatic guns are tightly regulated by the federal government and are not widely in public possession. Most modern guns are semi-automatic, as the Florida perpetrator's was. Outlawing them means outlawing most modern rifles and pistols -- that is, outlawing most of the guns held by the public -- and limiting public ownership to shotguns, bolt-loading guns, and derringers. 

If outlawing most guns is what the advocates of more restrictions want, they should be honest about it -- and they will need luck with confiscation. After all, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns -- along with President Trump, that paragon of mental stability who also controls the country’s nuclear arsenal.

So unless the country chooses gun confiscation, it may be stuck with the public identification and preventive detention of the mentally ill and more armed security for its many soft targets like schools, theaters, and nightclubs.

Where 20 percent of the population is armed and another 20 percent is psychotic, inevitably there will be some overlap, against which the usual political sanctimony will be no defense.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.,  and a frequent contributor.

 

Study suggests benefits of 'home hospital' care for acutely ill

A study  by researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital suggests that a “home hospital” care model in which patients receive hospital-level acute care at home may cut costs without hurting quality, including patient safety.

Although many  patients prefer to receive care at home, there are few “hospital at home” programs in America.

FierceHealthcare reports that gaps continue between hospitals and home-based care providers, which can pose patient-safety issues. “Home health workers are often provided incomplete or inaccurate information, and they often lack access to electronic health records to doublecheck patient information,” the news service reported.

The Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s  small randomized control trial on its pilot home hospital program found that it cut healthcare costs by half.

 The program included a daily visit from a physician and two daily visits from a home health nurse with patients also linking to physicians outside of those visits through video and/or texting.

“We haven’t dramatically changed the way we’ve taken care of acutely ill patients in this country for almost a century,” David Levine, M.D., a primary-care doctor at Brigham and the study’s lead author, said in an announcement about the study.

“There are a lot of unintended consequences of hospitalization. Being able to shift the site of care is a powerful way to change how we care for acutely ill patients and it hasn’t been studied in the U.S. with intense rigor,”  Dr. Levine added.

He and his team plan to expand the study to include a larger number of patients.

To read the study, please hit this link.

To read FierceHealthcare’s take on this, please hit this link.

The usual state of things

"Stalemate.'' by Cindy Journey, in the group show "With Eyes Wide Open,'' with the National Association of Women Artists, at the Thompson Gallery at the Cambridge School of Weston, Weston, Mass. through March 2.

'Oars & Paddles'

Into a rapture

Snow drops blooming on south-facing slope in Providence on Feb. 18.

"Was it the smile of early spring
That made my bosom glow?
'Twas sweet, but neither sun nor wind
Could raise my spirit so.

Was it some feeling of delight,
All vague and undefined?
No, 'twas a rapture deep and strong,
Expanding in the mind!"

--  Anne Bronte, "In Memory of A Happy Day in February''

A foundation for prettiness

"The White Church'' in Grafton, Vt.

You want a pretty town? It helps to find a rich foundation.

Thus it was with lovely Grafton, Vt., where back in the' 60s the Windham Foundation set up a preservation program for the whole town that did such prettifying things as restoring old buildings and covered bridges and burying all electrical and telephone lines.

The foundation says it "strives to preserve Vermont's rural way of life'' and works "to enhance the social, economic and cultural vitality of Vermont's smaller communities.''

Its efforts in Grafton were helped by the fact that many rich people "from away'' have weekend and summer homes in the rather precious-looking town.

The Grafton Inn, founded in 1801, has hosted many famous people, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling (who lived in Dummerston, Vt., in 1892-96; a battle with his alcoholic brother-inn-law drove him away) Theodore Roosevelt and other celebs down to the present day.

 

Frank Carini: Rhode Island tries to deal with a rising sea

Here at the Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge, in Middletown, R.I., the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service are working to restore and strengthen salt-marsh habitat as the rising sea level poses an intensifying challenge.

Via ecoRI News (ecofri.org)

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — Rhode Island is losing and has lost thousands of acres of salt marsh, much of it to development. These unique ecosystems are a priceless resource with irreplaceable benefits, including their ability to protect the human-built world from sea-level rise.

“We’re going to hit a point when marshes can’t keep up with sea-level rise,” University of Rhode Island researcher Simon Engelhart said. “We need to let them migrate inland, or we will lose them. We need to allow marshes to do what marshes do.”

He said humans should already be retreating from the coastline. He also noted that the clearing of trees and the destabilization of soil impacts the ability of salt marshes to migrate inland.

Engelhart, an assistant professor in URI’s Department of GeoSciences, is investigating how the state’s coastline has responded to past sea level-rise changes and studying the influence of land subsidence from the last ice age to better understand future implications as sea level-rise projections continue to climb.

So far, his research has found that sea-level rise is happening faster than at any point in Rhode Island’s past 3,000 years, in part because the Ocean State is sinking. Low-lying areas such as Island Park, in Portsmouth, and Oakland Beach, in Warwick, are among the most vulnerable areas.

Engelhart noted that sea-level rise is a complicated issue with many variables, such as gravity, density changes of water, water temperatures, the strength of the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents, the draining of aquifers, groundwater withdrawals, and the rate of ice-sheet melting in Greenland, the West Antarctic, the East Antarctic and the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.

“It doesn’t go up uniformly everywhere. The ground moves, shakes and is active,”  Engelhart said during a Feb. 14 talk at the Coastal Institute Auditorium on URI’s Bay Campus as part of Rhode Island Sea Grant’s annual Coastal State Discussion Series. “Sea-level rise is about what the ocean is doing and what the land is doing.”

Although Rhode Island is losing only 1 millimeter of ground annually, according to Engelhart, it plays a meaningful role in present-day flooding along a coastal state that is mostly at sea level or 10-30 feet above.

He said land subsidence — the gradual settling or sudden sinking of the Earth’s surface owing to subsurface movement of earth materials — “is going to be important in the short-term even though it’s small because it’s still a component of what we’re seeing,” referring to nuisance flooding where high tides can now cause road closures and overwhelm storm drains. These events are expected to increase with continuing sea-level rise, he added.

“This may seem minimal compared to projected sea levels, but is still a significant contributor to sea-level rise at present,” Engelhart said.

Since 1930 the Newport tide gauge has measured about 2.7 millimeters annually of relative sea-level rise. The Providence tide gauge has measured 2.2 millimeters. Those measurements, however, don’t tell the full story.

“Eighty to ninety years of data is not enough to put anything into context,” Engelhart said. “Those are just linear rates ... they’re not accounting for the acceleration of the current rate. There’s clear acceleration in the records of the past 25 years. We need to address greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Last year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration increased its sea-level rise projectionsto up to 8 feet by 2100. The Northeast is projected to experience an additional 1-3 feet on top of NOAA modeling.

Salt marshes are highly productive ecosystems that filter out pollution, provide habitat for wildlife and protect homes from flooding. They’re also sensitive to development. 

For the long-term context of Rhode Island sea-level rise, Engelhart and his research team turned to Narragansett Bay salt marshes. He explained that salt marshes grow at different elevations to the ocean and that life in them tells a specific story. To read these marsh stories, Engelhart’s team has taken core samples from four salt marshes — Fox Hill, Touisset, Nag Creek and Osamequin — and closely examined their finds with radiocarbon dating.

The team has plans to expand the number of salt marshes where core samples are taken.

Salt marshes are shoreline wetlands that are flooded and drained by salt water brought in by the tides. These intertidal ecosystems — foraging habitat for fish, shellfish, birds and mammals, and home to nursery areas and spawning grounds — are essential for healthy coastlines, communities and fisheries. They are an integral part of Rhode Island’s economy and culture.

They also have and continue to take a pounding. For instance, more than 50 percent of Narragansett Bay’s salt marshes have been destroyed during the past three centuries. Much of the remaining marshes have been diminished by coastal development and failed mosquito ditching. Mosquito ditches are narrow channels that were dug to drain the upper reaches of salt marshes. It was believed that such efforts would control mosquito breeding, but all that work did was drain salt marshes and kill off mummichogs, a mosquito-eating fish that are important prey for herons, egrets and larger predatory fish.

Healthy salt marshes help communities, buildings, infrastructure and the environment better withstand the impacts of sea-level rise and coastal storm surge. Salt marshes protect shorelines from erosion by buffering wave action and trapping sediment. These vital ecosystems reduce flooding by absorbing rainwater, and protect water quality by filtering runoff and metabolizing excess nutrients, such as nitrogen.

Salt marshes, however, are highly sensitive to development. Polluted stormwater runoff from inland development can damage salt-marsh health. Engelhart also noted that the marshes of Narragansett Bay face another problem: a lack of sediment supply.

James Boyd of the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council partook in an informal conversation, which included about a dozen questions from the audience, after Engelhart’s recent presentation.

Boyd noted that if sea level in Rhode Island rose a foot, 13 percent of the state’s remaining salt marshes would be lost; 3 feet, 62 percent; 5 feet, 83 percent.

“Our salt marshes are in trouble,” said the coastal policy analyst. “The ability of salt marshes to migrate inland is the most important element. We need to preserve that upland. That’s what will save our salt marshes: room to move.”

The impact of losing healthy salt marsh can be seen across southern New England. The coastal portion of the Sapowet Marsh Wildlife Management Area, in Tiverton, has experienced more than 90 feet of shoreline erosion in the past 75 years, according to the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.

The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service are working to restore and strengthen salt-marsh habitat at the Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge, in Middletown, to better withstand the impacts of sea-level rise, coastal storm surge and coastal erosion.

Salt marshes of the picturesque Narrow River are threatened by a combination of rising water and human activity. In recent years, motorboat wakes and extreme weather events such as Hurricane Sandy have destroyed 15 percent of the watershed’s marshland, according to state officials.

Salt-marsh islands in the West Branch of the Westport River have declined by nearly half during the past 80 years, according to a 2017 report.

By studying aerial imagery of six salt-marsh islands in the river’s West Branch, scientists found that the total area of salt marshes has consistently declined during the past eight decades, with losses dramatically increasing in the past 15 years. Altogether, the six islands lost a total of 12 acres of salt marsh since 1938. If marsh losses continue at the accelerated rate observed during the past 15 years, the Westport River’s marsh islands could disappear within 15 to 58 years, according to the researchers.

“Plan for the worst-case scenario is the best way to handle sea-level rise,” Engelhart said. “Take the longer-term view. There’s benefits regardless if we cut greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Engelhart’s research aims to provide a better understanding of future coastal hazards, to help coastal planners make more informed decisions.

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.

David Warsh: Amidst scandals, centrists are gaining as Mueller plays a long game

SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Prosecutors’ charges against 13 Russian individuals and organizations for interfering with the 2016 presidential election are the latest step in a lengthy and painful process in which serious people of both political parties are working to straighten the U.S. political narrative out of a very difficult twist of the plot.

Remember its central feature; it now seems a long time ago.  The 2016 campaign was widely expected, at least for a time, to become a Hillary Clinton-Jeb Bush rematch -– a continuation of a 25-year antagonism in which both candidates had been damaged.  That prospect was so unattractive that challengers arose in both parties – 16 of them in the Republican case. Bernie Sanders failed to win his party’s nomination, but Donald Trump improbably gained his. The election campaign began. As Michael Wolf’s Fire and Fury: Inside Trump’s White House (Henry Holt, 2018) makes clear, Donald Trump never expected to win.

Two disruptive forces of particular interest intervened in the election itself.  One was the  Russian interference.  The other was an incipient FBI mutiny, involving agents in at least four field offices, eager to indict Clinton for matters related to the Clinton Foundation, and threatening to go to the press or to Congress.  Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett surfaced as much in "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe''  (subscription required) on Monday, Oct. 31, 2016, a few weeks before he left the WSJ for The Washington Post.  Those angry agents had a point, of course: there was something suspect about the Clinton Foundation from the very beginning. But the late stages of a presidential campaign is no time to begin an investigation.

The Russian campaign has received a great deal of attention, the FBI mutiny hardly any at all, but it was the threat of disclosure of previously unexamined Clinton e-mails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop that forced  then FBI Director James Comey to reopen the investigation of Clinton’s private server. As former WSJ columnist Bret Stephens wrote last month in The New York Times (he moved to The Times a few months after the election), the FBI “probably did more than any other agency of government to create the Trump presidency in the first place, in part because disgruntled FBI field agents were intent on forcing James Comey to reopen the Clinton e-mail investigation 11 days before the election.”

It is impossible to say with any real authority that either intervention tipped the election.  Clinton contends that Comey cost her the White House. Trump pretends that he received no such help. This much is clear: Had Clinton won, she would by now be up to her ears in investigations of the Clinton Foundation, from Congress at least.  Talk about the winner’s curse!

The new indictments mean that the Russian meddling that Trump has repeatedly denounced as a “hoax” turns out to have been quite real.  The charges make it much more difficult to fire Mueller. The president was quick to pronounce himself off the hook.  Soon after the Justice Department delivered the news, he tweeted, “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong. No collusion!”

Yet there are many more steps to go. It is still very much an open question whether Trump will serve out his term; it is highly unlikely that he could be re-elected. Congressional Republicans remain in Trump’s corner, it is true. Some development may yet turn them against him. Maybe.  Maybe not.

Meanwhile, dealing with FBI mutineers remains part of the problem, moving them onto side tracks, or out of the bureau altogether, proceedings the still-divided agency understandably hopes to keep within the family.  They may not be able to.  Part of Trump’s aim in firing Comey presumably had to do with hopes of advancing the careers of agents who helped him during the campaign, including the mutineers. The rogues continue to stick up for themselves, in leaks to two WSJ columnists, William McGurn and Holman Jenkins Jr. (subscription required). Former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani has all but disappeared from the news, after serving as one end of a conduit for “outraged FBI agents” during the campaign.

This is how plot lines adjust. Elections take time. It doesn’t help for the enraged Left to say that the Republican Party “basically lies about everything.” Everything?  Deputy Atty. Gen.  Rod Rosenstein announced Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments last week – both men are long-time Republicans.  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a James Baker III proxy, is still on the job. So are White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and the other two calming generals:  Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

Meanwhile, former presidential nominee Mitt Romney announced his candidacy last week for the Senate in Utah. If elected, he will take on the role performed to this point by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) – a conscience of sorts for a political party that has otherwise lost its head.

The sooner the current Republican majority in Congress loses power to the Democrats, the sooner that sensible women and men can begin rebuilding the party. The Democrats’ own major rebuilding is well underway.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time business and political columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran.

Irene Tung/Teofilo Reyes: Now the big restaurant-chain owners seek to steal workers' tips

Via OtherWords.org:

When we give someone a tip, we expect the money will go to the workers who provided us with service.

We might leave a little extra because someone went above and beyond for us. Or because we want that person to have a slightly easier time getting by.

Whatever the circumstance, we trust that the money will help the workers who served us.

But the National Restaurant Association — a group controlled by owners of major restaurant chains —has long been promoting the idea that business owners, not workers, should control the tips we leave.

If they have their way, the U.S. Department of Labor will soon let minimum-wage employers confiscate all tips left by customers. Business owners would not have to disclose to patrons what happens to tips, and could simply pocket the tips themselves.

This would apply to anyone who receives tips — from the housekeeper who makes up your hotel room, to the valet who parks your car, to the assistant who pushes your wheelchair at the airport.

Overall, women represent two out of three tipped workers.

The NRA’s key leadership includes Olive Garden, IHOP and Applebee’s, Denny’s, Cracker Barrel, Chili’s and Outback Steakhouse. These companies already have an egregious track record of squeezing workers while inflating CEO pay. If the new rule is finalized, they could use tips to fuel even more stock buybacks and CEO pay hikes.

By doing these companies’ bidding, the Trump administration is poised to make life even harder for restaurant workers and their families. A recent study shows that more than half of hourly earnings for servers and bartenders come from tips.

Restaurant lobbyists claim that giving employers control over tips would let them redistribute tips from servers to such non-tipped workers as dishwashers. But there’s nothing in the rule to require this. And even if they do redistribute, there’s a good chance that employers would cut base wages to make up the difference.

With the rule change, employers would have a strong incentive to pay only the federal minimum of $7.25 and then claim ownership of all tips. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that changing the rule would transfer $5.8 billion from workers directly to employers, and 80 percent of that amount would come from the pockets of women who earn tips.

To be clear, this rule will hurt workers — and the Labor Department knows it. Revelations that senior political officials there tried to bury a damaging economic analysis of the proposal have led to an internal investigation.

Even with tips, servers and bartenders take home only $10.11 per hour. This is already far below what workers throughout the country need to make ends meet. These employees need more wage protections, not fewer.

And voters seem to agree.

Recent polling from the National Employment Law Project shows 83 percent of voters disapprove of the proposal to give employers control of worker tips, and most respondents say they would tip less often if the rules are changed.

This is an attempt by lobbyists to transfer a massive amount of wealth and power from consumers and workers to corporate restaurant chains and their private equity owners

Irene Tung is a senior policy researcher with the National Employment Law Project. Teófilo Reyes is a visiting scholar at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University at California. at Berkeley, and research director with Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. 

Chris Powell: As civic life and local news media decline, why keep slogging on?

How many more press runs?

When the Journal Inquirer, of Manchester, Conn.,  merged the weekly newspapers in Rockville, South Windsor, and East Windsor, Conn., and went daily in August 1968, its premise, like the premises of the Connecticut newspapers that had been started long before, was that people wanted local news. The Hartford newspapers serving the growing suburbs to the north and east were not providing much of it. For 25 years the upstart's circulation grew steadily and two of its competitors closed, in large part because they lacked local news. 

Back then Connecticut, literate and prosperous, had the highest per-capita newspaper readership in the country. But for most of the last 25 years newspaper circulation throughout the country and in Connecticut has declined, even for the most local of papers. 

This is commonly blamed on the rise of the Internet, but recent surveys suggest it is something else. They find that most people are not using the Internet much to obtain local and state news, that most of the news sought on the Internet is national and world news, that there isn't so much interest even in that news, and that most use of the internet is not for news but for social contact, shopping, and amusement. 

While newspapers and their internet sites remain the primary providers of local and state news, it seems that interest in such news has collapsed.

Indeed, the collapse of interest in local and state news may correlate less with the rise of the Internet than with the collapse of civic engagement generally as indicated by measures like voter participation. 

Census and voter registration figures suggest that even in Connecticut about 25 percent of the eligible adult population doesn't even register  to vote. As a result, actual voter participation is probably only 50 percent of the eligible population for presidential elections, a third for state elections, and around 10 percent for municipal elections.

For example, far more people voted in Manchester's town election in 1962 than in its town election in 2017, though the town's population is 40 percent larger.

That is, newspaper readership, like voter participation, is mainly a matter of demographics. The more literate, self-sufficient, and engaged with public life people are, the more they read newspapers. The less literate, self-sufficient, and engaged with public life people are, the less they read newspapers -- and the demographics of Connecticut and the whole country are declining fast. 

No one needs newspapers for keeping up with the Kardashians.

Trouble for newspapers is not the worst of it. Democracy and the country are in jeopardy.

So someone who has spent 50 years at a newspaper in Connecticut may be permitted his discouragement. The civic engagement business was never lucrative, but now nearly all local- and state-oriented newspapers struggle to survive. 

As the state's economic and demographic decline accelerates, knowledge of Connecticut's past, present, and public policy has lost all financial value except for those who would use it to extract the last scraps of patronage and graft from the state's hapless and insolvent government.

Of course many lives are always wasted, but what kind of future awaits Connecticut when most of its high school graduates never master high school English and math, much public college instruction is remedial, and most people cannot identify the state's three branches of government? (You know -- the teacher unions, the lawyers, and the liquor stores.) Maybe Dire Straits was right:


I shudda learned to play the guitar.
I shudda learned to play them drums. ...
Maybe get a blister on your little finger.
Maybe get a blister on your thumb.



Some pensioners wear T-shirts inscribed: "I'm retired. Having fun is my job." They may have earned their fun, and old folks remain the best newspaper readers, but how much attention are even they paying to Connecticut these days, especially since so many of them are moving to warmer and less-taxed jurisdictions, as even the state's most recent former governor has done? 

While everyone of a certain age is entitled to a little time out of the winter cold, for a former governor to leave the state is also demoralizing, and a warning too. 

For many state residents have nowhere else to go, nor, as Bing Crosby and Judy Garland sang, do they want to abandon Connecticut despite the damage being done to it:



Circled the globe dozens of times.
Seen all its wonders, known all its climes.
I've searched it with a fine-tooth comb
And found that I only have one home, sweet home.
Connecticut always will be my home.


Still, after so much time in the news business it can be difficult not to view much of what is reported as trivial or a cliche, as T.S. Eliot did even before the era of "weather every 10 seconds."


You will see me any morning in the park
Reading the comics and the sporting page. 
Particularly I remark:
An English countess goes upon the stage, 
A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance, 
Another bank defaulter has confessed.


Of course while the news is repetitive it is not all trivial to the people directly involved, and it usually involves different people, who make it new, though they may no longer care as much about appearing in print as they care about appearing on "social media," where news tends to be less about wars and rumors of wars than boyfriends, girlfriends, relatives, and pets.

So what is the point of staying in the newspaper business? Maybe only spite. It might be hard to let certain people in what is left of the state's public life think that no one was on to them.



Fare thee well now.
Let your life proceed by its own design.
Nothing to tell now.
Let the words be yours. I'm done with mine.



Chris Powell will retire Monday as managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. He plans to continue writing columns for Connecticut  newspapers and New England Diary.

-
 

Llewellyn King: Learn a trade and study liberal arts at a tiny, one-stop college

American College of the Building Arts junior measuring for a custom stair.

An awful lot of people would love to work with their hands. But there’s a problem: If you don’t go to college, preferably a four-year college, you’ll be doomed to a stigmatized existence. You are blue collar, seated all of your life below the salt.

Yet blue-collar industries across the country are facing a massive skills shortage. There are shortages of bulldozer and crane operators, carpenters, electricians, automotive mechanics, truckers and welders, among other workers.

If you want to build or fix things, you need skilled workers, artisans — men and women who work with their hands and their heads.

The popular solution, which I hear a lot about (including on White House Chronicle, the television show I host, where we’ve been running a series on the future of work), is that we need more apprenticeships.

The apprenticeship approach has an ancient and noble lineage, but it may not be for our time. It involves a degree of bondage to a trade. I’ve seen apprenticeships up close in a number of trades including construction, printing and newspaper production in general.

While apprenticeships work, they don’t address the social consequences of not going to college. Ergo, trade schools don’t solve the social dynamic that keeps willing hands off essential tools.

Society doesn’t expect blue-collar workers to have ambition. They’re expected to drive a pickup, go bowling and love hunting.

They aren’t expected to enjoy the refined things of life; they’ve chosen to travel by the low road, at least in society’s thinking. They may love the poetry of Keats and revel in grand opera, but the corner office doesn’t care. They haven’t been stamped out by a four-year college; they’re inferior.

Well, you can have both and a small college (so small you might not think it’s a college) is nurturing a big idea, a really big idea — an idea for our time. It’s the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA), in Charleston, S.C

As Anthony Wade Razzi, chief academic officer, explained it in a letter to the Charleston Post and Courier, and in a telephone interview with me, “At ACBA, we teach six traditional trades: architectural carpentry, timber framing, architectural stone, masonry, plaster and architectural forged iron.”

But while learning their specialties for years, the students still get a traditional liberal arts education. This includes math, science, literature, philosophy, foreign language, drawing and drafting, and business management.

Razzi, who holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford, says the college “fuses two branches of learning that have been artificially separated for 2,500 years.”

The college came out of the devastation following Hurricane Hugo, which hit in 1989. A group of civic-minded South Carolinians realized that there weren’t enough artisans to help with the rebuilding. So they founded the four-year college, which has a two-year option.

In the letter, Razzi says the students “learn to lay brick, carve stone, forge iron and frame timber” but they also learn to plan work and manage a job.

The unanticipated outcome: entrepreneurism. Many ACBA graduates have started their own businesses because they graduated with skills that allowed them to do that.

ACBA is minuscule, hardly a speck of its own stone dust on the face of education. There are just 55 students this year at the private, nonprofit college but, as Razzi says, it’s a start.

I think it’s more than a start. I think it should be a guiding light to the future of education; a curriculum for the future that addresses the urgent need for artisans, allows many to do the manual work they love, and ends the “no college” stigma. Yes, you can enjoy framing carpentry and aspire to be the president of the construction company.

There’s a way forward for society and the individual in this tiny, private venture in Charleston. Eureka!

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

American College of the Building Arts.

New Bedford as a green-energy Houston? thanks, Dunkin'; a big city running out of water

New Bedford Harbor.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Could southeastern New England become to offshore wind power what Houston has been for oil and natural gas? Maybe, but gradually. New Bedford’s Marine Commerce Port Terminal would probably be its center; it’s the first dock in the U.S. that’s strong enough to handle those very heavy offshore wind-turbine parts, and the Whaling City is all in about becoming a renewable-energy center.

Despite the Trump administration’s affiliation with the fossil-fuel industry, interest in  offshore wind may be as intense as ever. The Boston Globe reported that an offshore-wind supply-chain conference held last year in Newton, Mass., attracted nearly 150 companies. And unions love this industry, which employs highly paid, highly skilled workers in the “blue-collar elite.’’

It’s too early to know what the impact of the Trump administration’s anti-green energy might be. U.S. solar-energy companies,  for their part, have expressed concern that they’ll be hurt by the administration’s tough tariff policy on  imports of solar panels from China.

Recently, survey ships for proposed projects south of Martha’s Vineyard have set forth from the Whaling City to study seabed conditions and plan transmission routes.  Indeed, all the current developers for Massachusetts’ first wind projects have agreed to deploy from New Bedford. (Wouldn’t it be nice if Quonset could get some of that business?)

Another very promising port for offshore wind-turbine operations would be the recently decommissioned Brayton Point coal-fired plant, in Somerset.

New Bedford,  Fall River, Quonset, Brayton Point and other places in southeastern New England could also become sites for other new renewable-energy projects that might develop, such as tidal and wave power. Meanwhile, the Trump administration would like to allow oil and gas drilling off New England near famous fishing areas….

New Bedford was an energy capital in the 19th Century because of the whale oil used for lighting; it was considered “clean’’ energy for the time.  It was said to burn brightly and cleanly.

New Bedford Harbor in the late 19th Century, as the whaling boom disappeared.

xxx

Thank you,  Canton, Mass.-based Dunkin’ Donuts, for deciding to phase out your polluting and nonrecylable foam cups by 2020. I hope that other fast-food operators do the same thing. These cups leave a mess: They last in the environment for many years. And the chemicals used to make them are dangerous. The main ingredient, styrene, may cause cancer in humans.

xxx

Cape Town, South Africa, is expected to run out of water in May, as extended drought, population growth and insatiable agricultural use drain aquifers. Some have linked the drought to man-made climate change.

The crisis in Cape Town recalls the sort of crisis that   other basically dry places, such as Southern California, may soon face. Note that that drought continues to worsen across much of the West and South.  But many places will  eventually need detailed long-term and emergency measures to address climate change. In New England the biggest climate challenge will be coastal flooding; Boston had a foretaste of that last month during a big Northeaster.

New England’s, er, vigorous climate poses challenges but at least we have lots of fresh water – even more valuable than, say, oil.

Art, of a sort, on a gas tank, has become yet another New England 'icon'

The Rainbow Swash is the official name for an untitled work by the late Sister Corita Kent, a Roman Catholic nun and artist, in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. (We always just called it the "Sister Corita splashes'').  The design,  painted on a 140-foot-tall LNG storage tank, on Boston Harbor, is called the world's largest copyrighted work. It's highly (too?) visible by the hundreds of thousands of  tortured commuters driving on the stretch of Interstate 93 called the Southeast Expressway, aka Distressway or World's Longest Parking Lot.

The  design first went up in 1971 and was transferred to its present location in 1992, after the original LNG tank  on which it was painted was torn down. The pattern seems a relic of schlock and pop art of the '60s and '70s. It was controversial for a long time because some said they saw the profile of Vietnamese Communist dictator Ho Chi Minh in it. Remember that the U.S. was in the Vietnam War until May 1975. Sister Corita was said to be a bit of a lefty and was a pacifist.

A superb and overdue book about a great American architect

The building above is the Merchants Exchange, Philadelphia.

William Strickland (1787-1854) was one of the most important American architects. His re-interpretation of Greek temples for a modern democracy in such monuments as the Second Bank of the United States and the Merchants’ Exchange, both in Philadelphia, along with the Tennessee State Capitol, in Nashville, are among the noblest landmarks of this country’s civic identity.

William Strickland, by John Neagle, 1829, with Second Bank of the United States in the background.

-- Courtesy, Yale University Art Gallery.

Although  a pioneering monograph on Strickland was  published in 1950, a serious study of this master has been desperately needed. Now, Robert Russell has written the definitive book, William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture (University of Tennessee Press).

Despite his national stature, Strickland designed only one building in New England, the Providence Athenaeum. The building committee of one of the city’s oldest cultural institutions “ascertained that William Strickland of Philadelphia had a reputation second to none in this country and in his profession” and invited the architect to Rhode Island, where he submitted a design. The library opened in the summer of 1838, having cost $18,955.76.

The Providence Athenaeum (1837-38).

Professor Russell, who wrote his dissertation at Princeton University on late medieval architecture in Italy, is one of those civilized, non-politicized historians whose interests and abilities range far beyond one narrow field.  He has written a book on the buildings of Memphis and is a noted authority on gravestone restoration. His last academic post was at Salve Regina University, in Newport, where he was the director of the historic-preservation program. He is now breeding goats in the mountains of western North Carolina.

Robert Russell, in Richmond, R.I., in 2013.

Architectural histories, like that exemplified by William Strickland, set the standard in the profession before academia was sabotaged by political correctness and infected by pseudo-philosophical posturing. Russell’s writing is clear, eloquent and without the overlay of verbal obfuscation that characterizes so much contemporary writing about buildings. The sort of scholarship that characterizes the Strickland book will undoubtedly be dismissed as old-fashioned, and, since its subject led an upright life with no sex scandals or financial skullduggery, it is unlikely that the book will receive much notice. Yet the Strickland book it is the kind of treatment that so many inadequately documented American architects need, and far too few will receive in our increasingly know-nothing culture.

Architectural historian William Morgan wrote his Columbia University master’s thesis on William Strickland’s contemporary Alexander Parris, and is the author of The Almighty Wall, The Architecture of Henry Vaughan.

Grinding away at a sub

"Although you might be just as likely to hear a submarine sandwich in New England called a 'sub' as anywhere else, New England has an additional term: 'grinder.' No, not the dating/social networking app, but a New England word that either referred to the Italian-American slang term for a dock worker or the fact that it took a lot of chewing to eat the hard crust of the bread. It’s worth noting that some only use the term grinder for a hot sandwich — using sub for other large sandwiches — and some call them all grinders.

-- From The Daily Meal (thedailymeal.com)