And stick around
“Hug and kiss whoever helped get you – financially, mentally, morally, emotionally – to this day. Parents, mentors, friends, teachers. It you’re too uptight to do that, at least do the old handshake thing, but I recommend a hug and a kiss. Don’t let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.’’
Stephen King (born 1947), hugely successful novelist, and a Maine native, in his University of Maine at Orono (the flagship campus of the university) commencement address in 2005.
And:
King has chosen to live in his native state for most of his life. His main home is in nearby Bangor. So he asked the graduates to stay in the Pine Tree State.
''This can be home if you want it to be. If you leave, you will miss it, so you might as well skip the going away part."
Stephen King’s house in Bangor, built in 1858
'A blue-gray glow'
“Underneath,
mice and shrews are moving,
the dog can hear them down there,
out of sight and reach….’’
“a whole landscape laid out
in a blue-gray glow….’’
— From “Listening Through Snow,’’ by Burlington, Vt.-based poet and teacher Nora Mitchell
David Warsh: Putin wants to get his foes thinking
Vladimir Putin in 2018
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
The first bright light on the murky situation in Ukraine shone Jan. 28, when Ukraine officials “sharply criticized” the Biden administration, according to The New York Times in its Jan. 29 edition, “for its ominous warnings of an imminent Russian attack,” saying that the U.S. was spreading unnecessary alarm.
Since those warnings have been front-page news for weeks in The Times and The Washington Post. Ukrainian President Volodynyr Zelensky implicitly rebuked the American press as well. As the lead story in The Post indignantly put it, he “ [took] aim at his most important security partners as his own military braced for a potential security attack.”
Meanwhile, Yaroslav Trofimov, The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent, writing Jan. 27 in the paper’s news pages, identified a well-camouflaged off-ramp to the present stand-off, in the form of an agreement signed in the wake of the Russian-backed offensive in eastern Ukraine in February 2015. The so-called Minsk-2 had since remained dormant, he wrote, until recently.
Now, after a long freeze, senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are talking about implementing the Minsk-2 accords once again, with France and Germany seeing this process as a possible off-ramp that would allow Russian President Vladimir Putin a face-saving way to de-escalate.
I have had a long-standing interest in this story. In 2016, in the expectation that Hillary Clinton would be elected U.S. president, I began a small book with a view to warning about the ill consequences of the willy-nilly expansion of the NATO alliance that President Bill Clinton had begun in 1993, which was pursued, despite escalating Russian objections, by successors George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The election of Donald Trump intervened. Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years appeared in 2018.
I was relieved when Joe Biden defeated Trump, in 2020, but alarmed in 2021 when Biden installed a senior member of Mrs. Clinton’s foreign-policy team in the State Department, as undersecretary for political affairs. Seven years before, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland had directed U.S. policy towards Russia and Ukraine and passed out cookies to Ukrainian protestors during the anti-Russian Maidan demonstrations in February 2014. At their climax, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, fled to exile in southern Russia, and, in short order, Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that, when it came to interpreting the situation in Ukraine, it would be wise to pay attention to a more diverse medley of voices than the chorus of administration sources uncritically amplified by The Times and The Post. David Johnson, proprietor of Johnson’s Russia List, told readers he didn’t think there would be an invasion. Neither did I. Russian and Ukrainian citizens seemed to agree; according to reports in the WSJ and the Financial Times, they were going about their business normally.
Why? Presumably because most locals understood Russian maneuvers on their borders to be a show of force, intended to affect negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.
As for what Putin may be thinking and privately saying – his strategic aims and his tactics – I pay particular attention to Harvard historian Timothy Colton. His nuanced biography of Boris Yeltsin makes him an especially interesting interpreter of the man Yeltsin in 1999 designated his successor.
Colton, a Canadian, is a member of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think-tank, established in 2004 and closely linked to Putin. Its annual meetings have been patterned on those of Klaus Schwab’s better-known World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Membership consists mainly of research scholars, East and West. A little essay by Colton surfaced 10 days ago on the club’s site, as What Does Putin’s Conservatism Seek to Conserve?
Colton observed that Putin’s personal ideas and goals, as opposed to his exercise of power as a political leader, are seldom discussed. That is not surprising, he wrote, as Putin had relatively little to say about his own convictions during his first two terms in office, aside from First Person, a book of interviews published just as he took office in 2000. That reticence diminished in his third term, Colton continued, especially now as his fourth term begins. In a speech to a Valdai conference last autumn, whose theme was “The Individual, Values, and the State,” Putin borrowed a foreign term – conservatism – and used it four times, each time with a slightly different modifier, to describe his own fundamental views. Colton wrote:
Putin noted at Valdai that he started speaking about conservativism a while back, but had doubled down on it in response not to internal Russian developments but to the fraught international situation. “Now, when the world is going through a structural crisis, reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed in importance, precisely because of the proliferating risks and dangers and the fragility of the reality around us.”
“This conservative approach,” he stated, “is not about an ignorant traditionalism, dread of change, or a game of hold, much less about withdrawing into our own shell.” Instead, it was something positive: “It is primarily about reliance on time-tested tradition, the preservation and increase of the population, realistic assessment of oneself and others, an accurate alignment of priorities, correlation of necessity and possibility, prudent formulation of goals, and a principled rejection of extremism as a means of action.”
What of the wellsprings of Putin’s conservatism? Perhaps nothing more fundamental than the preservation of his own power. “Two decades in the Kremlin, and the prospect of years more, may incline him increasingly toward rationalizations of the status quo as principled conservatism.” An alternative explanation would emphasize life experience. The fragility that Putin was talking about at Valdai was that of the present moment, Colton wrote, but, he continued,
Putin has commented more than once on the inherent volatility of human affairs. “Often there are things that seem impossible to us,” he said in the First Person interviews, “but then all of a sudden — bang!” He gave as his illustration the event that by all accounts traumatized him more than any other — the implosion of the USSR. “That is the way it was with the Soviet Union. Who could have imagined that it would have up and collapsed? Even in your worst nightmares no one could have foretold this.” Sticking with “time-tested” formulas would suit such a temperament [Colton wrote].
What sorts of time-tested formulas might the Russian leader adopt? Colton, a player in many venues, is constrained to speak and write so carefully that it is hard for an outsider to know what with any confidence what point he was making to insiders in his recent essay. As journalist, I am not.
One time-tested formula Putin has employed frequently, to the point of habit, is a tradition I think of as having evolved in the West. This is the practice of setting out a frank public account of public-policy views. It is a rhetorical tactic set out with especial felicity by the framers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, to the effect that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” requires those undertaking dramatic actions to declare the causes that impel them to act. In general, this Putin has done.
There was, for instance, his frank appraisal of the situation of Russia at the Turn of the Millennium, published as one of those First Person interviews in 2000. After he failed to dissuade George Bush from invading Iraq, Putin lambasted the U.S. in 2007 in a widely publicized speech to a security conference in in Munich. In 2014, after annexing Crimea, he delivered another blistering speech, this time to the both houses of the Russian parliament. And last summer, he published a long essay asserting his conviction that Ukrainians and Russians share “the same historical and spiritual space.
What might he do if his army goes home, having made its rhetorical point without firing a shot? My hunch is that he will give another speech.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.
Spiridon Putin, Vladimir Putin’s paternal grandfather, a personal cook of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin
Roger Warburton: Nearby ocean warming a climate-change warning for New England
The changes in heat content of the top 700 meters of the world’s oceans between 1955 and 2020.
— Chart by Roger Warburton/NCEI and NOAA
New England’s historical and cultural identity is inextricably linked to the ocean that laps at nearly 6,200 miles of coastline. And the region’s ocean waters are warming, and not just a little.
The above chart shows just how much the ocean has warmed over the past 65 years and, due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, the heat dumped into the ocean has doubled since 1993. It is even more concerning that ocean warming has accelerated since 2010.
The world’s oceans, in 2021, were the hottest ever recorded by humans.
The findings of the data from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have been confirmed by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, China’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute.
The news for New England is worse, as the ocean here is heating up faster than that of the rest of the world.
This map illustrates the seasonally averaged sea-surface temperature anomaly in the Gulf of Maine.
—Gulf of Maine Research Institute
The Gulf of Maine Research Institute announced that between September and November of last year, the warmth of inlet waters adjacent to Maine and northern Massachusetts was the highest on record.
“This year [the Gulf of Maine] was exceptionally warm,” said Kathy Mills, who runs the Integrated Systems Ecology laboratory at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. “I was very surprised.”
The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 96 percent of the world’s oceans, increasing at a rate of 0.1 degrees Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit) annually over the past four decades.
The increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere traps heat in the air. The air in contact with the ocean transfers heat to the ocean, increasing what is called the ocean heat content (OHC).
The first measurements of ocean data were taken on Capt. James Cook’s second voyage (1772-1775). Although not very accurate, those measurements were among the first instances of oceanographic data recorded and preserved.
Today, ocean measurements are taken by a variety of modern instruments deployed from ships, airplanes, satellites and, more recently, underwater robots. A 2013 study by John Abraham, a professor at the University of St. Thomas, contains an interesting historical overview of ocean measurements.
Abraham’s study used data from new instruments, such as expendable bathythermographs and Argo floats. The Argo program is an array of more than 3,000 autonomous floats that return oceanic climate data and has advanced the breadth, quality and distribution of oceanographic data.
As heat accumulates in the Earth’s oceans, they expand in volume, making this expansion one of the largest contributors to sea-level rise.
Although concentrations of greenhouse gases have risen steadily, the change in ocean-heat content varies from year to year, as the chart above shows. Year-to-year changes are influenced by events, such as volcanic eruptions and recurring patterns such as El Niño. In fact, in the chart one can detect short-term cooling from major volcanic eruptions of Mounts Agung (1963), El Chichón (1982) and Pinatubo (1991).
The ocean’s temperature plays an important role in the Earth’s climate crisis because heat from ocean surface waters provides energy for storms and influences weather patterns.
Roger Warburton, Ph.D., is a Newport, R.I., resident. He can be reached at rdh.warburton@gmail.com.
References: Cheng, L. J, and Coauthors, 2022, “Another record: Ocean warming continues through 2021 despite La Niña conditions. Adv. Atmos. Sci., https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-022-1461-3.
Abraham, J. P., et al. (2013), “A review of global ocean temperature observations: Implications for ocean heat content estimates and climate change,” Rev. Geophys.,51, 450–483, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rog.20022.
‘Name the unnameable'
Leonard Bernstein in 1977
“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.’’
— Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), celebrated American composer and conductor. He was born in Lawrence, Mass., grew up in Boston and graduated from Harvard. Though based in New York, he often conducted at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer venue — Tanglewood, in Lenox in the Massachusetts Berkshires.
Tanglewood Music Shed and lawn, where people lie on the grass to listen to the music.
— Photo by Daderot.
1958 poster
Makes you love winter, at least for a few minutes
A gorgeous morning on the estuary in Rowayton, Conn., on Jan. 30 after the beautiful if inconvenient snowstorm the day before.
— Photo by Hilary Cosell
A model of eco-responsibility
“Our Lady of the Recycling Center” (encaustic over fiber clay with found objects), by Otty Merrill, a member of New England Wax (newenglandwax.com) who is based in Tenants Harbor, Maine.
She says in her Web site:
“Though I am surrounded by magnificent landscapes and brilliant natural light on the coast of Maine where I live and work, I tend to turn inward when making art, drawing on memories, travels and emotions. Through color, texture and often embedding photos and other materials into the surfaces of my work, I lean towards semi-abstract and interpretive imagery in my compositions. I admire the works of artists such as Harold Garde (of Maine), Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley and Mary Cassatt. You might see their influences in my work. I strive to be honest, original and hopefully a little unique, both in my artwork and my life.’’
Sail Loft, Tenants Harbor, St. George, Maine.
— Photo by Magicpiano
‘The New England idea’ could no longer serve
Dartmouth Hall at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
“Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture —the ‘New England idea’ -- could no longer serve.”
— Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), American writer, best known as a literary critic. He wrote a lot about the immigrant experience.
Don Pesci: With the middle class forgotten?
VERNON, Conn.
The question “Why do Democrats win elections in Connecticut?” is intimately bound up with the question “How do Democrats win elections in Connecticut?”
It helps a great deal to have a 400-pound gorilla in your corner.
What shall we make of the proposition that we have the kind of government we have in Connecticut, left of center and increasingly progressive, because we have the kind of media we have in Connecticut, left of center and increasingly progressive?
The media, as a political campaign amplifier, is not unimportant in campaigns. If you have a message and do not have a media to relay it objectively, you are at a considerable disadvantage. The media may not be the message, but you cannot present yourself adequately to voters if your message is damagingly edited by a media that has, in effect, chosen sides.
Is this the case in Connecticut?
The answer to the question is – maybe.
There has got to be some reason, other than superior numbers, why there has not been for many years a Republican in Connecticut’s U.S. congressional delegation. It is true that registered Democrats in Connecticut outnumber registered Republicans roughly by a ratio of two to one, and there are in the state slightly more unaffiliated than Democrats. But that was the case as well when the distribution of Republicans and Democrats within the U.S. congressional delegation was more or less even.
Money remains important in campaigns. Incumbents, of course, are always able to out-finance challengers, even though challengers in Connecticut may, provided they are willing to abide by stringent regulations, garner money for campaigns through tax dollar contributions. Self-financing of campaigns is also an option, limited, we are told, to the sort of people who own yachts and do not worry overmuch about the price of beef and gas.
Increasingly, the Democratic, not the Republican, Party is becoming the party of the rich and the disenfranchised poor. The usually productive middle class is the real orphan of post-modern politics.
According to IRS data, Democrats have now become the party of the wealthy, a turnabout when it was the party of the poor and middle class decades ago. “In 1993, the last time a president asked Congress to vote in a significant tax hike,” Bloomberg reports, “the typical congressional district represented by a Republican was 14 percent richer than the typical Democratic district, according to household-income data from the Census Bureau. By 2020, those districts were 13 percent poorer…. Democrats now represent 65 percent of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000 or more, according to pre-pandemic Internal Revenue Service statistics.”
Still, the amount of money poured into campaigns is not alone decisive. Linda McMahon, a Republican, self-financed a senatorial campaign in which she had spent $50 million, and yet she was not successful in overthrowing a popular Democrat, Dick Blumenthal, also a millionaire. Many regard this as a hopeful sign, indicating that elections cannot be bought.
Ah, but we know they can be bought, usually by incumbents whose campaign bank accounts are flush, swelling with about a million in cash even before their campaigns have officially begun.
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, also a millionaire, has consistently out financed and outspent all of her Republican opponents. Such is the distribution of forces in DeLauro’s 3rd District that DeLauro likely need not spend a single campaign dollar to win against any Republican challenger. That rule holds true in Congressman John Larson’s gerrymandered 1st District as well. Exceptions that prove the rule, such as McMahon’s campaign against Blumenthal, do not invalidate the rule. And the rule is: Majority incumbent Democrat politicians, moderate or otherwise, tend to rule. Money and political entropy win elections. In the land of steady bad habits, elections lie in the hands of those disposing of superior political force, mostly incumbents, and de-energized opposition voters.
“Stefanowski to put $10 million into {gubernatorial} bid,” the front page, above the fold story in The Hartford Courant announced. That would be $40 million less than was spend by McMahon on her campaign against Dick Blumenthal for the U.S. Senate. And Stefanowski’s contribution to his own campaign will be dwarfed by the money that Gov. Ned Lamont will deploy in his own campaign, the big advantages of incumbency, and Connecticut’s 400-pound media gorilla, no mean advantage. The endorsements of the 2022 gubernatorial campaign likely have already been written.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
Bet the farm
UConn women’s basketball team’s 2004 NCAA Championship trophy, ring and signed ball
—Photo by Sphilbrick
“Bottom line, you’re either a risk taker, or you’re not, and if you never take take risks, you’ll never win big.’’
— Luigi “Geno’’ Auriemma (born 1954), coach of the University of Connecticut’s astonishingly successful women’s basketball team. The Italian-born coach has led UConn to 11 NCAA Division I national championships, the most in women's college basketball history, and has won eight national Naismith College Coach of the Year awards.
Folding up winter
“Dragon Journey Book” (monoprint, antique paper, encaustic, on BFK paper), by Soosen Dunholter, who lives in Peterboro, N.H., which has long hosted many artists. The MacDowell residence there for artists founded in 1907, has attracted famed creative types (painters, writers, composers, etc.) from around America since its inception. Ms. Dunholter is a member of New England Wax (newenglandwax.com). Hit this link for her Web site.
View of Peterboro circa 1907, looking toward Mt. Monadnock.
Sarah Varney: Omicron hits even super-vaxxed Vermont but packs less punch
Lamoille County Superior Courthouse, in Hyde Park, Vt.
Fog in the Lamoille River valley in Hyde Park.
Even Eden, a snow-covered paradise in northern Vermont’s Lamoille County, is poisoned by Omicron. {The area was poisoned for decades by the mining of asbestos at Belvidere Mountain.}
The nearly vertical ascent of new coronavirus cases in recent weeks, before peaking in mid-January, affected nearly every mountain hamlet, every shuttered factory town, every frozen bucolic college campus in this state despite its near-perfect vaccination record.
Of all the states, Vermont appeared best prepared for the omicron battle: It is the nation’s most vaccinated state against covid, with nearly 80% of residents fully vaccinated — and 95% of residents age 65 and up, the age group considered most vulnerable to serious risk of covid.
Yet, even this super-vaxxed state has not proved impenetrable. The state in mid-January hit record highs for residents hospitalized with COVID-19; elective surgeries in some Vermont hospitals are on hold; and schools and day care centers are in a tailspin from the numbers of staff and teacher absences and students quarantined at home. Hospitals are leaning on Federal Emergency Management Agency paramedics and EMTs.
And, in a troubling sign of what lies ahead for the remaining winter months: about 1 in 10 covid tests in Vermont are positive, a startling rise from the summer months when the delta variant on the loose elsewhere in the country barely registered here.
“It shows how transmissible Omicron is,” said Dr. Trey Dobson, chief medical officer at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital in Bennington. “Even if someone is vaccinated, you’re going to breathe it in, it’s going to replicate, and if you test, you’re going to be positive.”
But experts are quick to note that Vermont also serves as a window into what’s possible as the U.S. learns to live with covid. Although nearly universal vaccination could not keep the highly mutated Omicron variant from sweeping through the state, Vermont’s collective measures do appear to be protecting residents from the worst of the contagion’s damage. Vermont’s COVID-related hospitalization rates, while higher than last winter’s peak, still rank last in the nation. And overall death rates also rank comparatively low.
Children in Vermont are testing positive for COVID, and pediatric hospitalizations have increased. But an accompanying decrease in other seasonal pediatric illnesses, such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, and the vaccinated status of the majority of the state’s eligible children, has eased the strain on hospitals that many other states are facing.
“I have to remind people that cases don’t mean disease, and I think we’re seeing that in Vermont,” said Dr. Rebecca Bell, a pediatric critical-care specialist at the University of Vermont Health Network in Burlington, the only pediatric intensive-care hospital in the state. “We have a lot of cases, but we’re not seeing a lot of severe disease and hospitalization.”
She added, “I have not admitted a vaccinated child to the hospital with COVID.”
Vermont in many ways embodies the future that the Biden administration and public health officials aim to usher in: high vaccination rates across all races and ethnicities; adherence to evolving public health guidelines; and a stick-to-itiveness and social cohesion when the virus is swarming. There is no “good enough” in Vermont, a state of just 645,000 residents. While vaccination efforts among adults and children have stalled elsewhere, Vermont is pressing hard to better its near-perfect score.
“We have a high percentage of kids vaccinated, but we could do better,” said Dobson.
He continues to urge unvaccinated patients to attend his weekly vaccination clinic. The “first-timers” showing up seem to have held off due to schedules or indifference rather than major reservations about the vaccines. “They are nonchalant about it,” he said. “I ask, ‘Why now?’ And they say, ‘My job required it.’”
Replicating Vermont’s success may prove difficult.
“There is a New England small-town dynamic,” said Dr. Tim Lahey, director of clinical ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington. “It’s easy to imagine how your behavior impacts your neighbor and an expectation that we take care of each other.”
While other rural states in the Midwest and South have struggled to boost vaccination rates, New England, in general, is outpacing the pack. Behind Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine and Connecticut have the highest percentage of fully vaccinated residents in the country.
“It’s something beyond just the size,” said Dr. Ben Lee, an associate professor at the Robert Larner, M.D. College of Medicine at the University of Vermont. “There is a sense of communal responsibility here that is a bit unique.”
In a state with the motto “Freedom and Unity,” freedom has largely yielded to unity, and the state’s pandemic response has been met with eager compliance. “The general attitude here has been enthusiasm to be safer,” said Lahey.
Lahey credits the state’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, who has been “unambivalent about pro-vax messaging.” Combined with a “tendency to trust the vaccine, you get a different outcome than in places where political leaders are exploiting that minority voice and whipping people up in anger.”
Vermont’s medical leaders are advising state leaders to shift from a covid war footing — surveillance testing, contact tracing, quarantines, and lockdowns — to rapprochement: testing for COVID only if the outcome will change how doctors treat a patient; ceasing school-based surveillance testing and contact tracing; and recommending that students with symptoms simply recuperate at home.
Once the Omicron wave passes and less virus is circulating, Dobson said, a highly vaccinated state like Vermont “could really drop nearly all mitigation measures and society would function well.” Vermonters will become accustomed to taking appropriate measures to protect themselves, he said, not unlike wearing seat belts and driving cautiously to mitigate the risk of a car accident. “And yet,” he added, “it’s never zero risk.”
Spared the acrimony and bitterness that has alienated neighbor from neighbor in other states, Vermont may have something else in short supply elsewhere: stamina.
“All of us are just exhausted,” said Lahey, the ethics director. But “we’re exhausted with friends.”
Sarah Varney is a Kaiser Health News journalist.
svarney@kff.org, @SarahVarney4
William Morgan: A medical firm’s lost design opportunity in a very dramatic spot
When can a substandard commercial building be transformed into good architecture? Can a despised icon of second-rate design become a beloved object? More specifically, can the ugly behemoth of University Orthopedics, in East Providence, R.I., overcome the stigma of being just another spec medical box?
University Orthopedics, 1 Kettle Point, East Providence, N/E/M/D Architects.
Photo by William Morgan
Kettle Point, which is also the site of a development of the kind of suburban housing seen near urban interstates everywhere, is a gorgeous promontory with unparalleled views of the Providence skyline, a working waterfront and down Narragansett Bay. If this site were not in the perceived ugly step-sister of East Providence, it would have been one of the most desirable pieces of land in the state. One thinks of what will happen to the neighboring Metacomet Golf Club course, glorious open land with tremendous potential: It will turn into the all-too-familiar faux-Colonial tackiness on a sea of asphalt.
Kettle Point housing development.
— Photo by Will Morgan
On the positive side, University Orthopedics is affiliated with Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School and so is one of the parts of Providence’s growing importance as a medical center. And the Kettle Point location offers expansive and maybe healing views of water, trees and skyline. This giant infusion of sunlight and a panorama of nature must surely contribute to the wellness of the patients and the happiness of the staff.
Providence harbor and downtown skyline from Kettle Point.
— Photo by William Morgan
The ugly duckling becomes a swan when a loved one needs treatment for osteoporosis or a broken limb. Then the state-of-the-art facilities and the staff’s training seem more important than aesthetics. But do they need to be mutually exclusive? What if the medical group that commissioned 1 Kettle Point had hired someone besides a value-engineering-minded developer? At the very least, a location this visible demanded a better design than a clunky real-estate container wrapped in cheap materials, one that looks like every other new medical office block from Boise to Little Rock.
Does this signage or the Home Depot-orange cladding symbolize quality medicine and research?
— Photo by William Morgan
A sensitive architect might have at least given 1 Kettle Point a more distinctive skyline. (Please do not whine that a good architect costs too much, as a really smart designer might have even given University Orthopedics a lot more for less.) And given such an environmentally sensitive site, a landscape architect should have been consulted, and maybe allowed to integrate this hulk into its prime surroundings.
Alas, the response in our high-quality (for those who can access it) but often unobtainable, fragmented and even chaotic American health-care system to such concerns is always one of money. What a building looks like seems minor compared to the medicine it delivers. But why not heal the entire patient, while at the same time supporting a quality building that could have been a great advertisement for the practice, for Brown, for Rhode Island?
The handsome lights on the stair compliment the undoubtedly unintentional industrial aesthetic of the metal railings.
— Photo by Will Morgan
Hospital needs, admittedly, dictate their forms. Think of all the university-affiliated and other medical centers that keep spreading across America, with new wings and additions, often in disparate styles. Yet, a handsome example that exists within the jumble of buildings that comprise the main campus of the august Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, is the handsome neoclassical original building, designed by Charles Bulfinch. In erecting their signature structure, the hospital trustees chose the architect of both the Massachusetts State House and the U.S. Capitol.
Massachusetts General Hospital, Charles Bulfinch, architect, 1818-23. Wikimedia Commons.
My favorite example of a successful hospital that is also a work of architecture is a tuberculosis sanatorium in rural Finland, designed in 1929 by a then-young Alvar Aalto. Built with limited resources, the sanatorium launched Aalto’s career, but it also became one of the noblest landmarks of modern architecture. The revolutionary aspects of the design were dictated by the treatment of TB, which emphasized abundant sunlight and fresh air. Aalto fashioned draft-less windows and splash-less sinks, along with bright colors and inexpensive furniture that is still being manufactured.
Tuberculosis sanatorium, Paimio, Finland, 1929-33.
— Photo by the Alvar Aalto Foundation.
Why should what University Orthopedics looks like, and how it contributes to or detracts from its environment, be any less important than the layout of its labs and operating rooms? This medical group, presumably, would not accept low professional standards of medicine. So, it is unfortunate that, in the quest for medical integrity, University Orthopedics’ patronage did not aspire to high standards of architectural design
William Morgan has taught the history of modern architecture at several colleges, including Princeton and Roger Williams Universities, and has written extensively on Finnish architecture.
Save working waterfronts
Lobster boat in a Portland, Maine, Harbor marina competing for space with yachts.
—Photo by Bd2media
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Perhaps because I’m slightly involved with a project in Maine to preserve working waterfronts, I noticed that one of Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee’s projects in his state-of-the-state address on Jan. 18 was to boost seafood-processing facilities in the state so that more of the profit from that processing stays in or close to the state. A fine idea for the Ocean State, which, like Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, needs to do a lot more to preserve and if possible expand its working waterfronts.
People in many communities on our coasts are fighting to save waterfronts by being almost completely taken over by expensive houses and pleasure boats (replacing fishing boats). Many of these houses are used only seasonally. Suggestions requested!
For a look at how Mainers are trying to save what’s left of their working waterfronts, hit this link.
xxx
There are continuing controversies about the susceptibility of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council to political and business pressures. CRMC members are political appointees who aren’t required to have experience in coastal environmental matters.
So I ask yet again why it can’t just be abolished and all its powers granted to the (now understaffed) state Department of Environmental Management, whose employees include people with technical and scientific training, not political and business connections.
This becomes more important with the rising seas caused by global warming.
Save the Bay, the state’s leading environmental advocacy organization, has been denouncing state leaders for slashing the DEM’s staff, especially inspectors and enforcement officers.
“The Department of Environmental Management has seen its budget and staff cut dramatically over the past 20 years. These cuts have led to delays in permitting, reduced inspections of potential polluters, and lax enforcement of RI’s environmental laws and rules,” said Jed Thorp, advocacy coordinator of the organization.
Hit this link for more information.
Creative criminals of yore
“Case Closed” (encaustic with image transfers), by Providence-based artist Angel Dean. She is a member of New England Wax (newenglandwax.com)
Linda Gasparello: Millennials can be pioneers in cities with cheap houses
In Danville, Va., home of tobacco entrepreneur William T. Sutherlin, called by locals the "Last Capitol of the Confederacy.’’ But most houses there don’t look like this!
WEST WARWICK
Millennials are supercharging the U.S. housing market. They have lots of cash, and they’re making a dash for cities like Boise, Idaho, Raleigh, North Carolina, Tampa, Florida, and Austin, Texas.
As home-mortgage rates rise and inventory shrinks in those and other A-list cities, Millennials, particularly those who can work remotely, might want to consider C-list – C for cheap -- cities.
Hey, Millennial. Don’t be bummed about being outbid for that pricey “adorable vintage house within walking distance to entertainment” in Austin (actually, a teardown with a honky-tonk a few yards from the back porch). Be cheered that Wall Street 24/7, a news and financial site, has just released a special report entitled “The Cheapest City to Buy a Home in Every State.”
If you’re a pioneering Millennial, here are a few cities in the report:
Gary, Ind., could be “your home sweet home” -- just like the line from the song in The Music Man, which was a hit on stage and screen long before you were born. The median home value is $66,000. Cheap homes abound in this not-so-cheerful city.
Flint, Mich., The fact that you can’t drink the water is no problem for you because you’ve only ever drunk bottled water. The median home value is $29,000. If you decide to buy a home there, keep buying bottled water from fresh municipal springs -- in other states.
Camden, N.J. There is great news for home buyers. Trenton has taken the “Murder Capital of New Jersey” title away from Camden, a perennial titleholder. The median home value in Camden is a bargain $84,000 versus $335,600 for New Jersey as a whole. Camden is downriver from Trenton, so mind the floating corpse risk.
Minot, N.D. It’s a hot market: the median home value is $208,700 versus $193,900 for the state. As for temperature, it’s not. I had a school friend from Minot who told me the saying there was, “Why not Minot? Because freezing is the reason.” Look at those months of frigid temperatures as being the reason to get more wear out of your chichi Canada Goose Expedition Parka.
East St. Louis, Mo. One resident, in a review on the Niche site, wrote, “I didn't like all of the abandoned homes and buildings. It looked like the area isn't livable and then two houses down, it is livable.” The Niche reviewers give the city bad marks for violence, but great ones for the high school football team and the diners. The median house value is $54,000.
The city that really caught my eye in the report was Danville, Va. – in a state where I lived for most of my life.
For years, because I’m interested in architecture, I’ve pored through listings on historic house sites. Recently on one site, there were many dilapidated Victorian houses listed in Danville’s Old West End, priced from $15,000 to $55,000.
For much of its history, Danville was a D-list city – D for disreputable. This tobacco-processing and textile-manufacturing city’s reputation rolled downhill for a century, from the Civil War (where it was major center of Confederate activity and was the “Last Capital of the Confederacy” from April 3-7, 1865) to “Bloody Monday,” the name given to a series of arrests and brutal attacks that took place during a nonviolent protest by Blacks against segregation laws and racial inequality on June 10, 1963. Of the protests, leading up to the March on Washington on Aug. 28, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, “As long as the Negro is not free in Danville, Virginia, the Negro is not free anywhere in the United States of America.”
Danville’s work in recent decades to create a new identity is paying off. The median home value is $90,500. The city is attracting high-tech companies and Millennial workers – new residents who will continue its transformation from disreputable to desirable.
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com, and she’s hased in West Warwick, R.I. and Washington, D.C.
Good place to work
“The living room he took me into was neat, cozy, and plain: a large circular rug, some slipcovered easy chairs, a worn sofa, a long wall of books, a piano, a phonograph, an oak library table systematically stacked with journals and magazines. Above the white wainscoting, the pale-yellow walls were bare but for half a dozen amateur watercolors of the old farmhouse in different seasons. Beyond the cushioned window seats and the colorless cotton curtains tied primly back I could see the bare limbs of big dark maple trees and fields of driven snow. Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live.’’’
From Philip Roth’s 1979 novel The Ghost Writer. The passage was inspired by Roth’s time at his estate in Warren, Conn., where the novelist wrote some of his most important novels.
Robert P. Alvarez: The filibuster assaults democracy
The filibuster hamstrings the “pluribus’’
From OtherWords.org
If you’re under the impression that the filibuster is an important tool in the toolbox of American democracy, you’ve been misled.
The filibuster is a made-up Senate convention that lets a minority of senators block votes on bills that have majority support. Under current rules, just 41 senators can sink legislation this way.
In the past, filibusters were used only rarely. But with Republicans filibustering virtually everything these days, it now takes 60 Senate votes to pass anything at all. That’s a tall hurdle in our polarized age.
The main argument for the filibuster is that it promotes bipartisanship and debate, but research has repeatedly debunked that.
According to supporters, allowing a minority of senators to extend deliberation on a bill indefinitely forces the majority to negotiate a version that the minority feels more comfortable with. This leads, supporters contest, to legislation that appeals to the broadest number of people.
That sounds nice. But peel back the onion a bit and it’s clear that the filibuster just adds to the gridlock around issues voters want resolved.
A new University of Chicago study, for example, found that the filibuster did not “enhance the Senate’s consideration of laws.” Instead, “the filibuster detracts from, rather than bolsters, public discussion on the floors of Congress.”
This makes sense. Why would a committed minority debate or compromise on a bill they can simply kill altogether?
In Republicans’ case, it means that they can stop Democrats — who won control of the House, Senate, and presidency in the 2020 election — from delivering the policies they promised. As a result, popular ideas such as voting rights, police reform, immigration reform and an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6th insurrection are all getting stonewalled.
It gets even worse when you factor in that the Senate already over-represents less populated and often more conservative states. According to one figure, senators representing just over 20 percent of the country can block legislation that even overwhelming majorities of voters want.
As you might imagine, this has made the filibuster a powerful political weapon, which unfortunately has been used to cause harm — particularly in the area of civil rights.
A group of Southern senators in 1922, for instance, used it to kill a bill that would have let the federal government prosecute people who participated in lynchings. Years later, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond famously filibustered for over 24 hours straight, the longest individual filibuster ever, to try to tank the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
More recently, Republicans have used the filibuster to block major voting rights bills such as the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have strengthened election security and made it easier to vote.
These voting rights bills were filibustered in a time of rising voter suppression. According to the Voting Rights Lab, 385 bills that restrict voter access have already been introduced in 2022 alone.
Most Democrats now agree that the filibuster needs to be eliminated or reformed. But two of their own, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have joined Republicans in defending the practice. Both recently voted against making a “voting rights exception” to the 60-vote threshold.
They could have kept their commitment, however misguided, to the filibuster while still voting to make a one-off rules tweak to bring the voting rights bills up for a vote. This would have treated voting rights the same way as judicial confirmations and budget reconciliations, which can’t be filibustered.
Is there hope for filibuster reform in the future? I think so.
Manchin and especially Sinema could face primary challengers when they’re up for re-election in a few years, and support for the filibuster is likely to be a line in the sand for voters. Alternatively, if Democrats expand their Senate majority, they may be able to reform the filibuster even without those two.
Either way, the days of the filibuster appear limited.
Robert P. Alvarez is a media relations associate at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Harris Meyer: Resistance to Mass General Brigham expansion centers on fear of higher prices
MGH Brigham complex in Foxboro, Mass.
— Photo by Patriot-place
A boisterous political battle over a proposed expansion by the largest and most expensive hospital system in Massachusetts is spotlighting questions about whether similar expansions by big health systems around the country drive up health-care costs.
Boston-based Mass General Brigham, which owns 11 hospitals in the state, has proposed a $2.3 billion expansion, including a new 482-bed tower at its flagship Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a 78-bed addition to Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital. The most controversial element, however, is a plan to build three comprehensive ambulatory-care centers, offering physician services, surgery and diagnostic imaging, in three suburbs west of Boston.
On Jan. 25, the state’s 11-member Health Policy Commission unanimously concluded that these expansions would drive up spending for commercially insured residents by as much as $90 million a year and boost health- insurance premiums.
The commission also ordered Mass General Brigham to develop an 18-month “performance improvement plan” to slow its cost growth. The action, believed to be the first time in the country a hospital has been ordered to develop a plan to control costs, reflects concern about giant hospitals’ role in rising health care costs.
Other states, including California, Delaware, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington, have created or are considering commissions on health care costs with the authority to analyze the market impact of mergers and expansions. That’s happening because the traditional “determination of need” process for approving health facility expansions, which nearly three dozen states still have in place, has not been effective in the current era of health system giants, said Maureen Hensley-Quinn, a senior program director at the National Academy for State Health Policy.
The Mass General Brigham health system, which generates $15.7 billion in annual operating revenue, announced that the massive expansion would better serve its existing patients, including 227,000 who live outside Boston. Its leaders said the new facilities would not raise health spending in the state, where policymakers are alarmed that cost growth in 2019 hit 4.3%, exceeding the state’s target of 3.1%.
The hospitals’ cost-analysis report, submitted to the state last month, concluded that the system’s existing patients would pay lower prices at the new suburban sites than at its downtown locations. John Fernandez, president of Mass General Brigham Integrated Care, projected that prices at the new centers would be 25% less, and he said patients will not have to pay extra hospital “facility fees” at the new outpatient sites.
“We’re all going to have a tsunami of patients over the next 20 years given the aging population, and everyone has to step up to meet that demand,” he said in explaining the expansion.
But a well-funded coalition of competing hospitals, labor unions and chambers of commerce argues that Mass General Brigham’s invasion of the Boston suburbs would spike total spending by drawing in patients from lower-priced physicians and hospitals. They cite the health system’s own planning projection, unearthed by the attorney general’s office in a November report, that the expansion would boost annual profits by $385 million.
Dr. Eric Dickson is CEO of UMass Memorial Health Care, a safety-net health system serving the towns west of Boston that is part of the coalition of opponents to Mass General Brigham’s expansion plans. “If you let the state’s most expensive system grow wildly, it will drive up the cost of care,” he says.(UMASS MEMORIAL HEALTH CARE)
“How could you be fooled?” said Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Memorial Health Care, a safety-net health system serving the towns west of Boston that is part of the coalition of expansion opponents. “If you let the state’s most expensive system grow wildly, it will drive up the cost of care.”
The controversy signals a shift in the concerns about the cause of rapidly escalating health care costs. Up to now, state and federal policymakers examining how hospital system growth affects costs have largely focused on hospital mergers and purchases of physician practices. Studies have found that these deals significantly boost prices to consumers, employers, and insurers. State and federal regulators have stepped up antitrust scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions.
Deep-pocketed hospital systems increasingly are turning to solo expansion to gain a bigger share of the market. These expansions fall outside the legal authority of antitrust enforcers.
Health systems are building satellite ambulatory care centers to attract more well-insured patients and steer them to their own hospitals and other facilities, said Glenn Melnick, a health economist at the University of Southern California.
“The outcome is the same as a merger — capturing patients and keeping them,” he said. “That’s not necessarily good for consumers in terms of access to care or cost efficiency.”
Critics of Mass General Brigham’s plans also warn that the expansion would financially destabilize providers that heavily serve lower-income and minority residents because some of their more affluent patients would move to the new facilities. Those patients’ commercial insurance plans pay nearly three times what the state’s Medicaid program pays.
“It’s a very, very good business move for MGB,” said Dickson, whose system serves a large percentage of Medicaid patients. “But they know quite well this will impact our ability to care for vulnerable populations.”
The Health Policy Commission agreed with those opposing the expansion and said it would advise the state Public Health Council — which will decide on the three expansion applications by April — that the proposals are not consistent with the state’s goals for cost containment.
“Our strong assessment is this would substantially increase spending,” said Stuart Altman, a health policy professor at Brandeis University who chairs the commission. In addition, “there is a clear indication it would reduce revenues to those institutions we count on to provide services to lower-income and historically marginalized communities.”
In a written statement, Mass General Brigham ripped the commission’s findings as flawed. It also disagreed with the commission’s decision to require a cost-improvement plan but said it would work with the agency to address the challenge.
Under Massachusetts’s determination of need process, Mass General Brigham must show the Public Health Council that its expansion proposals would contribute to the state’s goals for cost containment, improved public health outcomes, and delivery system transformation.
The council has never blocked a project on cost grounds in its nearly 50-year history, said Dr. Paul Hattis, a former member of the Health Policy Commission. He argues that Massachusetts needs more explicit statutory power to decide whether health system expansions are good for the public, because he doesn’t think the council understands its own regulation.
A bill passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives last fall would give the commission, which was created in 2012, greater authority to investigate the cost and market impact of such expansions. Its legislative fate is uncertain.
Upping the stakes in the Massachusetts expansion fight: Massachusetts General Hospital charges by far the highest prices in the state, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital isn’t far behind.
Patients with a Mass General Brigham primary care physician had the highest total per-member spending in 2019, nearly $700 per month, according to the Health Policy Commission. That was 45% higher than spending for patients served by doctors at Reliant, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum unit. Average payments for major outpatient surgery at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s were nearly twice as high as at the state’s lowest-paid high-volume hospital.
Harris Meyer is a Kaiser Health News journalist.
Harris Meyer: @Meyer_HM
Promise joy, build it and get out of town with a big profit
Polar Park, in Worcester. The local company Polar Beverages bought the naming rights.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I suppose we can mostly blame the pandemic, but revenue hasn’t looked all that rosy at the Worcester Red Sox’s new Polar Park, which, as with most such stadium projects, has received many millions in public dollars that benefit the investment group that owns the team. But then, even in pandemic-free times, rarely do such facilities pay off for the taxpayers, although pro sports fans and grandiose promises of local economic gains often overcome strenuous community opposition to these projects.
Study after study by economists finds that these are crummy investments in terms of taxpayer dollars.
A campaign by the same group for a new, taxpayer-subsidized stadium in Pawtucket as a home for the now deceased PawSox failed, and considering what’s happening in Worcester, there may be many fresh sighs of relief in Rhode Island. That’s not to say that there are not psychic benefits from having a local baseball team. (We enjoyed taking guests from out of town, especially foreigners, to PawSox games.)
But wait! The WooSox owners may well sell the team sooner than you might think, and at a big profit. Call this welfare for the rich, or just the American Way!