A state of rigor
Winter in Bangor, Maine
— Photo by Slashinme - Denis Santerre
“My grandfather once told her if you couldn’t read with cold feet, there wouldn’t be a literate soul in the state of Maine.’’
Marilynne Robinson (born 1943), American novelist and essayist, in the novel Gilead
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“In Maine we have a saying that there’s no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence. “
– Edmund Muskie (1914-1996), Maine governor and U.S. senator who served as secretary of state under President Carter
Reveling in the noise
Pre-Mass Pike map of the turnpikes of eastern Massachusetts, with the Worcester Turnpike following the roughly same path as the modern Route 9. Frank Kline would have used this map.
On the Massachusetts Turnpike
"Half the world wants to be like Thoreau worrying about the noise of traffic on the way up to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half."
-- Franz Kline (1910-1962), American painter who attended Boston University and summered and painted in Provincetown
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"All of my lower-middle-class Boston issues rose to the surface. I don’t like it when bratty, privileged old white guys speak to me like I am their mouthy niece."
— Amy Poehler (born 1971), a native of the Boston suburb of Newton who grew up in the middle-class suburb of Burlington and who’s a TV actress, writer and producer
Burlington’s business district. The large town hosts many high-tech companies.
Aquaculture and waterfowl
URI graduate student Tori Mezebish holds a black duck she tagged as part of her research on the interactions between waterfowl and aquaculture facilities. (Courtesy photo)
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
As aquaculture operations expand in Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island’s salt ponds, questions have arisen about how ducks and geese are impacted by the facilities. To begin to answer these questions, a University of Rhode Island doctoral student is tracking the movements of local waterfowl.
“There haven’t been any Rhode Island studies yet, but studies on the Pacific Coast have found issues with diving ducks getting tangled up in netting used by aquaculture, and birds that have been deterred from areas that might otherwise be good habitat because of the activities of aquaculture operations,” said Tori Mezebish, a native of Maryland who is collaborating on the project with URI professors Peter Paton and Scott McWilliams and officials from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
She noted previous studies have also observed sea ducks such as eiders and scoters, which feed on mollusks, preying on oysters and other shellfish being grown by aquaculturists.
“There’s also been some positive associations, like ducks and geese eating some of the aquatic vegetation that accumulates on the cages,” Mezebish said. “It’s a mixed bag of how the birds might interact with aquaculture.”
Last winter, Mezebish attached transmitters to 30 black ducks and 30 brant, a species of goose that lives in salt water. This winter she will deploy an additional 30 transmitters on common goldeneyes, a diving duck. All three species are common during winter in Narragansett Bay, the state’s salt ponds, and adjacent salt marshes.
Most of the brant have returned from their breeding grounds in the Arctic, and several of them spend every day with dozens of other brant on the lawn at Colt State Park in Bristol. Others are spending most of their time in the upper bay and Providence River. The black ducks are just beginning to return to the area from Maine and southern Canada, and the early arrivals have been tracked to the salt ponds and the Galilee area.
Mezebish is tracking the movements of each bird using a GPS unit on their transmitters to see how much time they spend near aquaculture facilities. She is also observing the birds in the field to validate the GPS data and see what the birds are doing around the shellfish farms.
“The goal is to understand what is important to these species outside of the aquaculture facilities,” she said. “Maybe brant need shallow areas with submerged vegetation, so that may not be the best place to put an aquaculture lease.”
In addition to Mezebish’s study, URI postdoctoral researcher Martina Müller is conducting land-based surveys throughout the year to see what other kinds of birds may be interacting with aquaculture facilities.
“Ultimately, we want to provide recommendations about the good and not so good places for aquaculture leases to be placed,” said Mezebish, who became interested in waterfowl research as an intern at the Pawtuxet Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, where she hand-reared ducklings used in the center’s research activities.
When the project is complete, Mezebish hopes to use the study as a springboard to study related questions about other conflicts and interactions between waterfowl and humans.
‘Moment of vulnerability’
“The words that made me” (acrylic on wood panel), by Frantz Lexy, in his show “Exuding Power in Moments of Vulnerability,’’ at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston.
Mr. Lexy, a Boston-based artist who was born in Haiti, says:
“That painting exudes so much power, and when I took that photo {the inspiration for the painting}, I took a picture of my grandmother while she was over at the hospital waiting room waiting to get care. I thought that picture was a moment we should turn around, and I looked at her eyes and took that picture. Being in a hospital waiting room is a moment of vulnerability, so I like to flip it and give it a sense of power. My grandmother has always been my personal hero.”
Holiday spectaculars
Stock up now for Christmas 2022!
— Photo by Whoisjohngalt -
— Photo by V Smoothe
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
‘In the increasingly ferociously competitive world of front-yard Christmas displays, my favorites are those dominated by inflated figures – Santa, reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, the Holy Family and so on – usually supplemented by florid lighting and sometimes even by a Christmas tune, secular or religious.
From across the street, you can often hear the figures wheezing like asthmatics as the air pumps keep them upright, until the pumps are turned off or the characters spring leaks and fall flat on the ground.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!
Whatever you think of the aesthetics, these displays are very profitable amusements for your local utility.
Wearing word art
“Omnipotence Enough (Emily Dickinson)’’ (oil paint on fabric, wooden yoke and shoe lasts), by Lesley Dill, in her show “Lesley Dill: Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me,’’ at the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine, Jan. 28-March 26.
Among other things, Ms. Dill explores "the voices and personas of the American past,’’ including "inspiration in the poetry, prose, and declarations of early New England figures….” such as the great poet Dickinson (1830-1886).
Sam Pizzigati: Amazon’s business model can kill
From OtherWords.org
BOSTON
Old-school home-improvement contractors have a piece of folk wisdom they love to share with prospective clients. “Listen,” they like to say. “I can do this job fast, I can do it cheap, or I can do it well. But I can’t do all three.”
This wisdom has been around forever. But not everyone gets it — take billionaire Jeff Bezos. His Amazon empire prides itself on delivering good results fast and cheap.
That works well enough for Bezos, now worth around $200 billion. And Amazon consumers, the company PR maintains, can get almost whatever they want quickly and cheaply. But for Amazon workers — and our broader society — Amazon’s empire building has been anything but good.
That became disastrously apparent this month, when a tornado swept through Edwardsville, Ill., leaving six Amazon warehouse workers dead. Debris from their workplace turned up “tens of miles” away, the National Weather Service reported.
Unfortunately, this tragedy should not have taken anyone by surprise.
Why did Amazon locate its Edwardsville operations right in Tornado Alley? No mystery there. Edwardsville’s plentiful acreage and easy access to interstate highways, airports, and other transport offered Amazon the promise of speedy delivery times and lower delivery costs.
Check fast. Check cheap. But the warehouse went up with no special attention to tornado safety. That would have raised the cost.
OSHA — the federal occupational health and safety agency — has now begun an investigation. Since the deaths in Edwardsville, Amazon workers throughout the southern Illinois area have been ripping the company for failing to conduct tornado drills and expecting workers to keep working even after alarms ring out.
Amazon’s “storm shelter” spaces for Edwardsville workers turned out to have another name: bathrooms. Moments before the tornado’s arrival, Edwardsville worker Craig Yost told local news, Amazon supervisors were directing people into their worksite’s bathroom “shelters.”
“The walls caved in, and I got pinned to the ground by a giant block of concrete,” Yost said. “On top of my left knee was a door from the bathroom stall, and my head was on that with my left arm wrapped around my head. I could just move my right hand and foot.”
Meanwhile, the company has been actively exercising its considerable power to prevent the one turn of events that could reliably keep Amazon on its safety toes: a union. Earlier this year, Amazon quashed a union drive at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse so egregiously that the National Labor Relations board has ordered a do-over on the election.
But the problem goes beyond Amazon. Our nation’s corporate giants have been on a ferocious 50-year offensive against collective bargaining.
In the mid-20th Century, over a third of America’s private-sector workers belonged to unions. Now only 6.3 percent of private-sector workers carry union cards, despite polling data showing that the share of nonunion workers who want a union at their worksite has increased markedly.
Corporate America’s squeeze on unions has kept wages low, share prices high and compensation for top executives at stratospheric levels. Earlier this year, Institute for Policy Studies research revealed that CEOs at America’s 100 largest low-wage employers saw their personal compensation jump by $1,862,270 in 2020.
Over the past year, Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth soar by over $4 billion — seven times the annual budget of OSHA, the agency investigating the disaster at his Edwardsville warehouse. So here’s an idea for lawmakers in Washington: A 5 percent annual federal wealth tax on those Bezos billions could quadruple the annual OSHA budget — and then quadruple it again.
Amazon’s relentless quest to sell goods fast and cheap has rewarded Bezos tremendously, but it’s come at a huge cost for the rest of us. If the company rebuilds its Edwardsville warehouse, Bezos should listen to his handyma\
Sam Pizzigati, who is based in Boston, co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.
Puritans' no to Noel
“The Examination and Tryal of Father Christmas’’ (1686). New England Puritans did everything they could to discourage the celebration of Christmas.
So close to us
“Pileated {Woodpecker} Feeding Its Young” (photo), by Linda Cullivan, in the 19-person photography show “Birds,’’ at Cove Street Arts, Portland, Maine, through Feb. 19.
The show quotes the great English naturalist, and TV presenter, Sir David Attenborough:
"Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?"
Ms. Cullivan lives in Scarborough, in southern Maine.
The Pileated Woodpecker’s unusual range
Scarborough from the air, looking to the southeast. Note the Prouts Neck Peninsula (where Winslow Homer did many of his paintings), and the Scarborough River and its tributaries.
Higgins Beach in Scarborough
Llewellyn King: The decline of two reliable Christmas gifts
— Photo by Ana Cotta
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
You may have noticed that gift-gifting was a bit more difficult this holiday season. Those two mighty standbys for the gift-givers, perfume and neckties, have moved from the “always welcome’’ list to the ‘‘What was he or she thinking?’’ list.
Perfume – oh, that never-surprising but always-delighting gift – isn’t the gift it used to be. The problem is scent wearing by women has fallen off, as health concerns about volatiles in the air have grown and casual dressing, especially in the time of pandemic, is de rigueur.
Pity – luxury perfume was the unchallengeable gift. It was giving on the strength of its brand, like Miss Dior or Chanel No. 5. Labels really counted in fragrance giving. You were ill-advised to try anything out of the usual. If you espied something called, say, Rocky Mountain Rose, you were advised to eschew it.
The best and easiest to give was Joy by Jean Patou. The fragrance advertised itself as “the most expensive perfume in the world.” Bingo! You couldn’t go wrong if you had the bucks. I used to give a small bottle of Joy to my office manager every year and was thanked with oohs and aahs, even though she knew what was coming. She explained that a woman’s real use of Joy wasn’t so much in wearing it (and she wore it with pleasure), but in displaying it – showing her friends how much her significant other loved her. I rush to say that wasn’t my role in her life.
Neckties were the perfect gift for the man who might have everything. A man couldn’t have too many, and a new one in the style of the day was genuinely welcomed to the sartorial collection.
The necktie is rapidly going the way of spats, detachable collars, and Homburgs, to oblivion.
So shed a tear for the necktie and its infinite giveability. You could play the brand game, but there was no need for that. An obscure neckwear maker, doing a good job with the silk or wool, would be just as fine an accoutrement, as a luxury name like Givenchy or Ralph Lauren. The outstanding exception to this rule was some fabulous work of art by Liberty of London. That would earn deep approval, a friendship cementer.
As a generalization though, an unknown name in neckwear was just as good as the names of the great designers. To those in the know, the best place to buy ties at a reasonable price is, for reasons unknown, at hotel gift shops. Good ties at great prices.
Ties were in their day so important that good restaurants and clubs had selections of ties to fix up men who came with – Shock! Horror! -- an open-necked shirt. The proprietor of a famous Manhattan restaurant of yore, La Cote Basque, told me he wouldn’t serve a king if he wasn’t wearing a tie. La Cote Basque has long gone and so that poor man was never put to the test of facing down royalty.
I wear a bowtie. I have Tucker Carlson – yes, that Tucker Carlson — to thank for that change in my appearance, that bit of sartorial shtick. When I met Carlson, long before he found, as one writer said of someone else, the cramped space to the right of Rupert Murdoch, he was a funny, likable conservative who had just left a CNN talk show and authored an amusing book about the experience of being TV chatterer.
I had him as a guest on my television program, White House Chronicle, on PBS. He was known as a bowtie-wearer and, as a joke, I donned one. I got so many favorable comments that I’ve taken to wearing them instead of the long, silk emblems of the once well-dressed man.
Shame, I say, on the retreat of perfume and the near extinction of the necktie. Women don’t smell so elegant, and men look unfinished.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Jim Hightower: Fossil-fuel companies rush to create even more plastic pollution
Via OtherWords.org
In a world that’s clogged and choking with a massive overdose of plastic trash, you’ll be heartened to learn that governments and industries are teaming up to respond forcefully to this planetary crisis.
Unfortunately, their response has been to engage in a global race to make more plastic stuff — and to force poor countries to become dumping grounds for plastic garbage.
Leading this Kafkaesque greedfest are such infamous plunderers and polluters as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and other petrochemical profiteers. With fossilpfuel profits crashing, the giants are rushing to convert more of their over-supply of oil into plastic.
But where to send the monstrous volumes of waste that will result? The industry’s chief lobbyist outfit, the American Chemistry Council, looked around last year and suddenly shouted: “Eureka, there’s Africa!”
In particular, they’re targeting Kenya to become “a plastics hub” for global trade in waste. However, Kenyans have an influential community of environmental activists who’ve enacted some of the world’s toughest bans on plastic pollution.
To bypass this inconvenient local opposition, the dumpers are resorting to an old corporate power play: “free trade.” Their lobbyists are pushing an autocratic trade agreement that would ban Kenyan officials from passing their own laws or rules that interfere with trade in plastic waste.
Trying to hide their ugliness, the plastic profiteers created a PR front group called “Alliance to End Public Waste.” But — hello — it’s not “public” waste. Exxon and other funders of the alliance make, promote, and profit from the mountains of destructive trash they now demand we clean up.
The real problem is not waste, but plastic itself. From production to disposal, it’s destructive to people and the planet. Rather than subsidizing petrochemical behemoths to make more of the stuff, policymakers should seek out and encourage people who are developing real solutions and alternatives
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.
‘Now whispered and revealed’
An early classification of snowflakes by Israel Perkins Warren (1814-1892) American Congregational minister, editor and author who lived in Connecticut and Maine.
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
“ Snow-Flakes,’’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The Portland, Maine, native was the most revered American poet of his time as well as a famed professor and translator (most notably of Dante) at Harvard. His reputation, long in eclipse, has lately been in a revival.
Longfellow Square, with statue of the poet, circa 1906
Going their own ways
In the Litchfield Hills: Bridgewater, Conn. — houses, farms and fields, as seen from Brookfield
— Photo by Liam E
“The Yankee mind was quick and sharp, but mainly it was singularly honest.’’
— Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), once-famous historian, biographer and literary critic, in The Flowering of New England
He spent much of his life in Bridgewater, Conn., long a weekend and summer place for affluent New Yorkers
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“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.’’
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), world-renown essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet. He spent most of his life in what we now call Greater Boston.
Thank God for that little cardinal
“Winter” (oil on canvas), by Daniel Heyman, at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, through Dec. 31
Tools of old-fashioned daily work
“Intimations” (oil on linen) by Middlebury, Vt.-based painter Kate Gridley, at Edgewater Gallery, in Middlebury. Her Web site says:
“Known for her insights into human character, the quality of light in her work, and her painting technique, Kate Gridley maintains a studio in Middlebury, Vermont, where she has lived and painted full time since 1991.’’
At Middlebury College, with the Green Mountains in the background
Chris Powell: Why it’s so tough to reduce domestic violence in our disintegrating society
Cycle of abuse, power and control issues in domestic-abuse situations
— Graphic by moggs oceanlane
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut, the state's Hearst newspapers found this month in a series of investigative reports, has not made much progress solving its domestic- violence problem. Of course studies of the state's other major problems might reach a similar conclusion, but one has to start somewhere.
Connecticut's main response to domestic violence is the protective order, with which a court warns an allegedly abusive party to stay away from the party who feels abused. The dark joke has been that every woman murdered by her husband or boyfriend dies clutching a protective order. That is, protective orders aren't terribly effective, as the Hearst series showed.
The series found that a protective order had already been issued in a quarter of the 15,500 domestic violence incidents reported to police in Connecticut in 2020. A fifth of domestic violence charges in the state's courts from 2016 to 2020 involved at least one violation of a protective order, and many of those charges were dismissed. Only about 20 percent of the 23,000 protective-order violations charged in those years resulted in convictions.
Most of those charges were resolved by plea bargains or the referral of the accused to a rehabilitation program.
And so about 300 people, mostly women, have been killed by domestic violence in Connecticut in the last 20 years. Many more have been injured.
The data call for more vigorous enforcement. But then so do the data for most crimes in Connecticut. For all criminal justice is a system of discounting charges via plea bargains and probationary programs, because there is far more crime than resources to prosecute them and because Connecticut's criminal-justice system strives most of all to keep perpetrators out of jail.
Other than domestic violence, it is hard to find any serious crime in Connecticut where the defendant doesn't already have a long criminal record but has remained free or suffered only short imprisonment, since the state lacks an incorrigibility law.
The Hearst series reported that domestic violence cases are discounted in court more often than equally serious crimes, but this is misleading, for domestic violence cases can be more difficult to prosecute. More of their evidence is uncorroborated testimony -- "he said, she said" cases -- more of their accusers lose the desire to testify, and fewer of the accused have long records indicating a danger to anyone besides their accusers.
As the stream of domestic violence deaths and injuries suggests, protective orders, rehabilitation programs and social workers are no substitute for speedy trials, convictions, and imprisonments. Meanwhile, there is always infinite demand for government to protect people against all the risks of life.
But government can't protect everyone from everything all the time, and, distracted by the virus epidemic, government now is less able to protect everyone from even ordinary threats. Until Connecticut is ready to prosecute, convict and imprison abusers quickly or to hire round-the-clock bodyguards for everyone threatened by domestic violence, people will have to be ready to protect themselves and take some responsibility for the awful partners they have chosen.
It's an unpleasant thought, but then nothing is gained by ignoring the social disintegration worsening all around, of which domestic violence is only one part.
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Responding to recent commentary in this space, a reader writes that if Bob Stefanowski can get next year's Republican nomination for governor without a primary, he has a chance to beat Gov. Ned Lamont. But if Stefanowski has to run in a primary, "he will have to kiss up to every Trump-supporting, gun-toting, anti-abortion nut in the Republican Party" and then the nomination will be worthless.
Another reader counters: If Governor Lamont wins renomination by the Democrats without a primary, he has a chance to beat Stefanowski. But if Lamont faces a primary, "he will have to kiss up to every AOC-Squad-supporting, illegal-gun-toting, pro-abortion nut in the Democratic Party," and then his nomination will be worthless.
Yes, both parties have extremes that can dominate their primaries, and the governor has done a fairly good job tiptoeing away from his party's crazy left. Can Stefanowski get around his party's crazy right?
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
David Warsh: Hillary in ‘24 and a second Yalta agreement?!
— Photo by Niele
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner’s well- remembered adage (from Requiem for a Nun) was underscored last week when John Ellis, a vigorous second-presidential-generation member of the Bush clan, published a special edition of his six-days-a-week newsletter describing an “invisible primary” that has begun unfolding among the Democrats.
Whatever may be in the offing among the Republicans for 2024, Ellis said, Hillary Clinton is preparing a possible run for the Democratic presidential nomination then. Biden will be too old to run again, he averred; the Democrats’ Plan B has become a “jump ball.” Hence the shadow-boxing that Clinton has begun, most recently in the form of a subscription “Masterclass” in which she performed the speech she planned to deliver in 2020 had she won. “She can win the nomination [in 2024],” Ellis wrote. “She might not. But don’t for a minute think she can’t.”
It is against this background that the current Ukraine “crisis” should be understood – those 100,000 Russian troops practicing war games nears the Ukrainian border. In keeping with Putin’s long-standing habit of setting out policies in a series of documents and speeches, Russia last week set forth an elaborate series of proposals for a post-Cold War national-security agreement between Russia, the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Putin first called for a “a new Yalta” after annexing Crimea in 2014, The old Yalta Conference (code-named Argonaut!) took place on the Crimean peninsula in the waning days of World War II. It was there that Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and their deputies carved Europe into spheres of influence along lines ratified a few months later in Potsdam, Germany.
What to make of all this? When Biden came into office, imagine Putin’s surprise to find Victoria Nuland newly installed as undersecretary of state for political affairs. Nuland, you may remember, is the former Hillary Clinton press secretary who, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration, was taped by Russian security agents instructing the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine to “fuck the E.U.” during Ukraine’s 2014 “Snow Revolution.” Earlier, she and former GOP presidential candidate John McCain had passed out cookies to demonstrators in Kyiv’s Maiden Square. Last week Nuland was threatening to throw Russia out of the international payments system known as SWIFT if its army invaded Ukraine, while Biden weighed proposals to send left-over helicopters intended for Afghanistan to Ukraine.
Why did Biden nominate Nuland? That’s for The Washington Post to find out and explain. But from Putin’s point of view, the American president’s overreach on foreign policy must have seemed as striking as did Biden’s domestic policy plans to congressional Republics and a couple of moderate Democrats in the Senate.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that Russia was a nation in economic decline. Putin clearly thinks the U.S. itself is declining, lacking cohesion. Presumably, the Russian leader is posturing, waiting for the results of the next U.S. presidential election to emerge. He may want a “new Yalta agreement,” but until a few years ago, a slow-motion, wide-ranging face-saving maneuver seemed more likely on the part of the West with respect to NATO expansion. Something analogous to the little-noticed concessions President Kennedy gave Russia in exchange for its high-profile retreat from the Cuban Missile Crisis might have served. Today it seems likely that Putin may be able to extract more than that with his bullying threats.
It all depends on the next presidential election. A re-run of the 2016 contest would clearly be a disaster. The past may always be with us, but the future is unclear because it hasn’t happened yet.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.
Of ends and means in building a great museum
The famed courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, built in 1896-1903 in Boston’s Fenway section, financed and directed by Mrs. Gardner (1840-1924), a very rich arts collector and patron originally from New York who married a Boston Brahmin, Jack Gardner. The museum, unfortunately, may be most famous as the site of the world’s greatest art theft, in 1990. They’re still looking for the hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen paintings.
“The imagination of Isabella Stewart Gardner yielded a remarkable achievement in the museum to which she gave her name and treasure. But it is an achievement easily overlooked. Because she was rich and famous, we are too willing to gape at her legacy, with dollar signs in mind. And because she was eccentric, there also is scarcely any story we will not credit, however much it sensationalizes and trivializes her. We seem relentlessly more interested in her means than in her ends. It is a losing battle, perhaps, for a historian to try to set the record straight.”
— Douglass Shand-Tucci (1941-2018), Boston architectural historian and author of a 1997 biography of Mrs. Gardner, The Art of the Scandal, in a 1990 Boston Globe interview.