Llewellyn King: Trying to spread the innovation culture to old businesses
100, 300, and 500 Technology Square, in Cambridge, Mass., as seen from Main Street. The neighborhood has been the site of many technological breakthroughs for decades.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Microsoft is buying, subject to regulatory approval, Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. The Internet of Things is white-hot and likely to remain so.
If you want to whistle at that humongous sum for a company that makes games, you may have to add many octaves to the known musical scale.
Yes, high-tech is chasing trivia. The imperative at work here is if you don’t get your latest game into the market, someone else will. The threshold of entry is low and the rewards are astronomical.
If you are talking innovation and creativity, you are talking the Internet. That means that whole areas of society aren’t progressing as fast as they might and should. There is asymmetry.
The Internet firmament is driven not by market demand, but by a business dynamic that exists in the world of internet entrepreneurism: Innovate and create because the internet can create great wealth — and take it away, too.
Most non-Internet companies — and I talk to a fair number of CEOs — say that they are innovative and that they are innovation-driven but, in fact, they aren’t. Most companies don’t need to innovate the way the internet giants do. The metaverse is demonstrably an unstable place.
Most companies are looking for stability, for a plateau where they can manage what has been created while adding to it cautiously, often by acquisition. They confuse innovation with evolutionary improvement. The last thing they want is the kind of destructive innovation that characterizes Silicon Valley.
The febrile need to innovate in the Internet world is unique to that world. This because internet companies are all on a treacherous slope; failure can come as fast as success. Remember MySpace, Nokia, Palm, and Wang?
The Internet is global, and it is intrinsically favorable to monopoly. In the internet world, first past the post takes the prize money — all of it.
When you have market caps that value a company at $1 trillion, and all of that is dependent on the next innovation not overtaking you, you are going to throw money and talent at innovation because the alternative is known. Whenever possible, you are going to buy up your competition, hence the Microsoft purchase.
With all of the money, all of the glamor, all of the talent, there also is fear that some kid in a garage somewhere will invent the next big thing.
I submit that for the non-Internet world the business dynamic is very different. Most CEOs of public companies, snug in their C-suites and buttressed by huge salaries, are seeking a quiet place; a plateau where profits grow but there is some business serenity. For example, Boeing doesn’t want new airframes, it wants upgraded models.
They won’t admit to it, but many businesses long to be rent takers (known collectively as rentiers). They want a steady income with small risk.
Unfortunately, the business culture, including that spawned in business schools, aims to channel ambition into the rent-taking model. We have a business culture where ambition is channeled toward climbing to the top of the established order, not creating a new order.
There are many excellent minds managing established companies, often established many decades earlier, but there are few who yearn to create something wholly new.
The great names of management are many, but the great names of true innovation are few. Almost always, they have to break away from the established to create the new, to alter the world.
My friend Morgan O’Brien, the co-creator of Nextel, and now the executive chairman of the pioneering wireless company Anterix, is that kind of innovator who saw new horizons and went for them.
Today’s standout inventor is Elon Musk. He began as an Internet whiz with PayPal and has blazed the innovation trail like no other since Thomas Edison, more than a century earlier. He has changed the world underground with new concepts of subways, changed surface transportation by going electric, and changed space with his rockets.
Thirty years ago, I wrote that the weakness of U.S. companies is that they are happy to make silent movies when the talkies have been invented. Today, the established auto manufacturers are hell-bent to make electric pickup trucks now that new entrepreneurs are in the truck market with electric trucks. They never wanted to abandon the internal-combustion engine, just improve it a little at a time.
If the dynamic of the Internet and its constant innovation is missing in most American businesses, it needs to be grafted onto the business body politic. Must the Internet be behind every innovation of consequence? Ride-sharing and additive manufacturing (3D printing) are all computer-driven — software at work.
The challenge for the business culture is to harness ambition – it is never in short supply — and point it not toward the greasy pole of promotion, but toward the firmament of innovation.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
White House Chronicle
100, 300, and 500 Technology Square, in Cambridge, Mass., as seen from Main Street. The neighborhood has long been the site of many technological breakthroughs.
Microsoft is buying, subject to regulatory approval, Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. The Internet of Things is white-hot and likely to remain so.
If you want to whistle at that humongous sum for a company that makes games, you may have to add many octaves to the known musical scale.
Yes, high-tech is chasing trivia. The imperative at work here is if you don’t get your latest game into the market, someone else will. The threshold of entry is low and the rewards are astronomical.
If you are talking innovation and creativity, you are talking the internet. That means whole areas of society aren’t progressing as fast as they might and should. There is asymmetry.
The internet firmament is driven not by market demand, but by a business dynamic that exists in the world of internet entrepreneurism: Innovate and create because the internet can create great wealth — and take it away, too.
Most non-internet companies — and I talk to a fair number of CEOs — say they are innovative and that they are innovation-driven but, in fact, they aren’t. Most companies don’t need to innovate the way the internet giants do. The metaverse is demonstrably an unstable place.
Most companies are looking for stability, for a plateau where they can manage what has been created while adding to it cautiously, often by acquisition. They confuse innovation with evolutionary improvement. The last thing they want is the kind of destructive innovation that characterizes Silicon Valley.
The febrile need to innovate in the internet world is unique to that world. This because internet companies are all on a treacherous slope; failure can come as fast as success. Remember MySpace, Nokia, Palm, and Wang?
The internet is global, and it is intrinsically favorable to monopoly. In the internet world, first past the post takes the prize money — all of it.
When you have market caps that value a company at $1 trillion, and all of that is dependent on the next innovation not overtaking you, you are going to throw money and talent at innovation because the alternative is known. Whenever possible, you are going to buy up your competition, hence the Microsoft purchase.
With all of the money, all of the glamor, all of the talent, there also is fear that some kid in a garage somewhere will invent the next big thing.
I submit that for the non-internet world the business dynamic is very different. Most CEOs of public companies, snug in their C-suites and buttressed by huge salaries, are seeking a quiet place; a plateau where profits grow but there is some business serenity. For example, Boeing doesn’t want new airframes, it wants upgraded models.
They won’t admit to it, but many businesses long to be rent takers (known collectively as rentiers). They want a steady income with small risk.
Unfortunately, the business culture, including that spawned in business schools, aims to channel ambition into the rent-taking model. We have a business culture where ambition is channeled toward climbing to the top of the established order, not creating a new order.
There are many excellent minds managing established companies, often established many decades earlier, but there are few who yearn to create something wholly new.
The great names of management are many, but the great names of true innovation are few. Almost always, they have to break away from the established to create the new, to alter the world.
My friend Morgan O’Brien, the cocreator of Nextel, and now the executive chairman of the pioneering wireless company Anterix is that kind of innovator who saw new horizons and went for them.
Today’s standout inventor is Elon Musk. He began as an internet whiz with PayPal and has blazed the innovation trail like none other since Thomas Edison, more than a century earlier. He has changed the world underground with new concepts of subways, changed surface transportation by going electric, and changed space with his rockets.
Thirty years ago, I wrote the weakness of U.S. companies is that they are happy to make silent movies when the talkies have been invented. Today, the established auto manufacturers are hell-bent to make electric pickup trucks now that new entrepreneurs are in the truck market with electric trucks. They never wanted to abandon the internal combustion engine, just improve it a little at a time.
If the dynamic of the internet and its constant innovation is missing in most American businesses, it needs to be grafted onto the business body politic. Must the internet be behind every innovation of consequence? Ride-sharing and additive manufacturing (3D printing) are all computer-driven — software at work.
The challenge for the business culture is to harness ambition – it is never in short supply — and point it not toward the greasy pole of promotion, but toward the firmament of innovation.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle" on PBS.
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Celebration of contours
“Urban Form” (mixed media), by James C. Varnum, in his show “Contours of Change,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, March 4-27.
Galatea quotes him:
"In this exhibit … the pieces show my interpretation of changes in weather patterns and effects of climate disasters in our environments. I am influenced by the smoke maps of the world’s wildfires and by contemporary Australian Indigenous Art.
“These pieces are on cradled Claybord panels in mixed media. I create textures in acrylic molding paste, apply color and marks, then pour liquid acrylic over the work. When dry I apply more markings until the work is completed.
“I have always focused on the contours created by textures in my paintings, but these works are a change for me, from working on flat papers to creating on low-relief surfaces."
‘I celebrate plants’
“Weeds in Black” (encaustic), by Debra Claffey, who’s based in New Boston, a small town in southern New Hampshire. She’s a member of New England Wax (newenglandwax.com).
She says:
“My experience in horticulture and organic land care has led me to focus in on the plant world and the assaults on the soil, biodiversity of plant species, and the protection of native flora. I celebrate plants: their great age and history on the planet, their intelligence and successful adaptions, their beauty of form, shape, and infinite color. I marvel in our new knowledge of their ways of communication, of making themselves attractive to us and other species, and the trading of ‘goods and services’ that goes on between plants, fungi, bacteria, insects, birds, and even us mammals.’’
New Boston in 1875. Below is an edited version of the Wikipedia entry on the town, which was chartered in 1736.
“In 1820, the town had 25 sawmills, six grain mills, two clothing mills, two carding mills, two tanneries and a bark mill. It also had 14 schoolhouses and a tavern. The Great Village Fire of 1887, which started when a spark from a cooper's shop set a barn on fire, destroyed nearly 40 buildings in the lower village. In 1893, the railroad came to New Boston, and farm produce was sent by rail to city markets. Passenger service was discontinued in 1931, and the tracks were removed in 1935. Today the former grade is the multi-use New Boston Rail Trail.
“The town {along with the adjacent towns of Amherst and Mont Vernon} is home to the 2,800-acre New Boston Space Force Station, which started as an Army Air Corps bombing range in 1942. By 1960, it had become a U.S. Air Force base for tracking military satellites. In July 2021, the facility was given its current name and began operating as part of the United States Space Force. New Boston was also home to the Gravity Research Foundation from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. Founder Roger Babson placed it in New Boston because he believed it safe from nuclear fallout should New York or Boston be attacked.’’
New Boston Space Force Station
David Warsh: Still the Free World in a second Cold War
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Since it arrived last summer, I have been reading, on and off, mostly in the evenings, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, by Louis Menand. It is a stupendous work, 18 chapters about criticism and performance, engagingly written and crammed with vivid detail. Most of it was new to me, since, while I am always interested in Thought, I don’t much follow the Arts. The book, in short, is readable, a 740- page article as from a fancy magazine. But then, Menand is a New Yorker staff writer, as well as a professor of English at Harvard University,
It is also a conundrum. The first chapter (“An Empty Sky,” is about George Kennan, a key architect of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union, its title taken from an capsule definition of realism by strategist Hans Morgenthau, in which nations after the war “meet under an empty sky from which the gods have departed”). The last chapter (”This is the End,”) is about America’s war in Vietnam (its title from the Raveonettes’ tribute to The Doors on the death of their vocalist, Jim Morrison).
In between are 16 other essays: on the post-WWII history of leftist politics, literature, jurisprudence, resistance, painting, literature, race and culture, photography, dance, popular music, consumer product design, literary criticism, new journalism and film criticism. My favorite is about how cultural anthropology displaced physical anthropology in the hands of Claude Lévi-Strauss and photographer Edward Steichen, organizer of the Museum of Modern Art’s wildly successful Family of Man exhibition in 1955
A preface begins, “This is a book about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world,” meaning the 20 years after the end of the Second World War. Does that mean that Menand thinks the US ceased to be actively engaged with the world after 1965? The answer seems to be yes and no. When its Vietnam War finally ended, in 1975, he writes, “The United States grew wary of foreign commitments, and other countries grew wary of the United States.”
During those 20 years, says Menand, a profound rearrangement of American culture had taken place Before then, widespread skepticism existed among Americans about the place of arts and ideas in national life; respect for their government, its intentions and motives, was strong. After 1965, he finds, those attitudes were reversed. “The U.S. had lost political credibility, but it had moved from the periphery to the center of an increasing international artistic and intellectual life.” The change had come about through a policy of openness and exchange.
Artistic and philosophical choices carried implication for the way one wanted to live one’s life and for the kind of polity in which one wished to live in it. The Cold War changed the atmosphere. It raised the stakes.
Menand is right about the big picture, I think. Inarguably the U.S. grew much more free in those years, even as the governments of Russia and China cracked down on their citizens. Whether or not the lively arts were the engine – as opposed to the GI Bill, civil disobedience, the Pill, Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, the Stonewall Riots, The Whole Earth Catalog, Milton Friedman – hardly matters.
The Free World’s introduction begins with a photograph: Red Army soldiers hangs a Soviet flag from the roof of the Reichstag, overlooking the ruins of Berlin. The photo was a re-enactment, as had been that of U.S. Marines raising a flag atop Okinawa’s Mount Suribachi that had appeared in newspapers six weeks before.
But there was a difference: the Soviet photo been doctored, a second watch on the wrist of the flag-bearer needled away – unwelcome evidence, perhaps, of prior looting in the otherwise heroic scene. Cover-up was the hallmark of Russian totalitarianism, Menand seems to suggest: what the Cold War was all about.
Fast forward 30 years, to the end of the Vietnam War. The book ends with a striking peroration. Menand writes, “The political capital the nation accumulated by leading the alliance against fascism in the Second World War and helping rebuild Japan and Western Europe [the U.S.] burned through in Southeast.” The Vietnamese Communists who arrived in Saigon as the Americans left “did what totalitarian regimes do: they took over the schools and universities; they shut down the press; they pursued programs of enforced relocation’ they imprisoned, tortured, and execute their former enemies. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City and Ho’s body, like Lenin’s, was installed in a mausoleum for public viewing.”
Ahead lay another flight, this time Vietnamese citizens from their homeland. Menand continues, “Between 1975 and 1995, 839,228 Vietnamese fled the country, many on boats launched into the South China Sea [bound for Hong Kong or the Philippine Islands]. Two hundred thousands of them are estimated to have died [mostly by drowning]. Those people may or may not have known the meaning of the word ‘freedom,’ but they knew the meaning of oppression.” The English writer James Fenton, then working as a news correspondent, stayed behind to witness the aftermath of war. In the last sentence of his book, Menand quotes Fenton’s judgement: “The victory of the Vietnamese a victory for Stalinism.”
What, then, of the nearly years since the fall of Saigon, in 1975? The Chinese turn towards global markets after the death of Mao? The American resurgence as an economic hyperpower beginning in 1980? The collapse of the Soviet Union? NATO’s penning-in of Russia? The World Trade Organizations open-arms to China in 2000? The American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11? The divisions in U.S. civil society that have increased since?
The Winter Olympics in China underscore that a second Cold War has begun. What might be the consequences of it? How long will it last? How might it end? Who will turn out to be its Harry Truman? It’s George Kennan?
The distinction between a Free World and authoritarian regimes seems to hold up, though no longer do we think of the others as “totalitarian.” Britain’s reputation is diminished. Is the U.S. still leader of the Free World? Has its authority shrunk? I put Menand’s book back on the shelf thinking that it was a valuable contribution to work in progress.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, and proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
MIT’s ‘Superpedestrian’ startup growing in electric-scooter sector
Superpedestrian’s LINK scooters in Downtown Los Angeles.
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
BOSTON
“Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has begun gaining traction in the electric-scooter industry. This innovative technology startup named “Superpedestrian,” is unique in its pedestrian-defense features and AI software that can optimize safety and prevent riders from harming pedestrians on sidewalks.
“Assaf Biderman, founder of the MIT Senseable City Lab and founder/chief executive of “Superpedestrian,” is optimistic about his company’s position in the micromobility market. Competitors such as Lime and Byrd are following suit with similar technological innovations, but Biderman and his company remain confident in their product, stating that they hit “the holy grail of micromobility.”
“‘Superpedestrian’ scooters are available for rent under its ‘LINK’ service across the United States as well as in such European cities as Madrid and Rome, but with investors such as Antara Capital, the Sony Innovation Fund, Innovation Growth Ventures and FM Capita participating in Superpedestrian’s new funding round, the company intends to expand its services in 25 cities this year.
The New England Council applauds the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and its technology programs for paving the way towards pedestrian safety and technological innovation.
Samantha Garcia: We shouldn’t have to rely on National Guard for basic services
National Guard members perform multiple tasks at a COVID-19 test site at Rhode Island College in May 2020.
From OtherWords.org
As the highly transmissible Omicron variant continues to spread, hospitals across the country have reported critical staff shortages. In my home state of New Mexico, nearly half of all hospitals are understaffed, and more could be soon.
The U.S. health-care system has buckled under the strain of the pandemic. COVID-19 hospitalizations reached a peak in early January, nearly two years in. According to the American Hospital Association, “we’re facing a national emergency” as health care facilities simply don’t have enough workers to keep up with these surges.
With worker shortages now plaguing hospitals, nursing homes, and other long-term care facilities, states have turned to the National Guard for relief. So too have school districts, child-care facilities, and communities reeling from natural disasters.
Montgomery County, Md., for example, recently called on the Guard to fill in as public school-bus drivers. In fact, school district leaders in at least 11 states have turned to the Guard to shuttle students to school amid acute bus driver shortages.
New Mexico recently became the first state in the nation to recruit Guard troops to fill in as substitute teachers and day-care workers, but even that’s not meeting demand.
As schools struggle to stay open, some school administrators are covering custodial duties while parent volunteers fill in as cafeteria workers, classroom support, and COVID-19 testing aides. Even New Mexico Gov. Lujan Grisham is stepping into the classroom as a substitute.
Meanwhile, there’s the increasingly constant need for disaster response. Last year, Guard members were deployed across the West to support overstretched firefighting crews. And this past January, the Virginia Guard deployed members to support winter storm response.
According to the National Guard Bureau, more than 19,000 National Guard members are now mobilized across the country to support pandemic-related relief efforts. At other times, up to 47,000 have been deployed to meet pandemic demand.
“From the beginning of the pandemic, National Guard men and women in each of the 50 states, three territories, and the District of Columbia have been on the front lines,” said Army Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson, the Guard’s bureau chief. “We continue to work closely with the states to ensure” that we’re “meeting their needs.”
Certainly, National Guard members have stepped up heroically to serve their communities. But it’s worth asking: Why has the Guard become the “Swiss army knife” to meet states’ emergency needs?
To put it another way: Time and again, why is it only the military that has extra resources to go around? The simplest answer is we’ve spent decades ramping up our military spending while letting these other priorities stagnate.
For what taxpayers spent on military contractors alone last year, we could have instead provided health care for 25 million low-income adults and 38 million children. We could have funded over a million elementary school teachers. And we could have launched over a million clean-energy jobs — all with money to spare.
Instead communities are often left seeking help from the military to fill these roles.
Meanwhile, military spending is only going up. Congress recently passed a $778 billion military budget bill — a peacetime record.
All that spending is supposed to make us safer. But as critical public services reach their breaking point, it’s clear that short-changing our health, our children, and our planet has left us less safe.
As the pandemic and climate crisis are showing us, real security means divesting from excessive military spending and prioritizing the things we actually need to flourish — so maybe next time there won’t be a crisis.
Samantha Garcia is the New Mexico Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Nature crawls up
“Plague,’’ by Massachusetts artist Bruce Armitage, in the group show “Build and Lay Bare,’’ at Boston Sculptors Gallery, through Feb. 20.
The gallery says:
“Armitage’s playful yet foreboding ceramic sculpture depicts a classical figure atop a high plinth. Gazing upward, he is oblivious to the plague of colorful frogs ascending from below, laying bare humans’ neglect of nature.’’
Chris Powell: Conn. population gains don’t help if housing can’t keep up because of nimbyism
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Maybe all those people who in the last year or so have given up on New York City and its inner suburbs and moved to Connecticut are not so good for the state after all.
While they have offset the decline in population that Connecticut long has been suffering relative to the rest of the country, they also have driven up the state's housing prices and rents and have worsened its housing shortage. People who own their homes may be glad of their unrealized capital gains, but these gains come at huge expense to people who don't own their homes.
Average rents across the country are estimated to have risen 14 percent to nearly $1,900 a month last year, which should shock the many homeowners who can remember paying rents less than $500 when they were young. Of course housing price inflation has come amid enormous price increases in all other necessities, including food, energy, and medicine. Altogether lately inflation is running well above 10%, double the federal government's deceitful official figure.
This is what happens when the government hobbles the economy with ineffective epidemic restrictions and then pays people not to work, whereupon production of goods and services declines and prices rise still more. Inflation has far overtaken wage gains for ordinary people while enriching the already wealthy -- the owners of real estate and stocks, which soar with inflation.
Even three years ago, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, a quarter of renters in the United States were paying more than half their income for housing. That burden for renters is surely far heavier now.
The virus epidemic and government's mistaken responses to it are the first cause of the worsening madness and despair in society -- the crime, drug abuse, and general hatefulness. But when it consumes half or more of people's income, the price of housing is a big part of what brings them to the end of their rope.
Since most people in Connecticut have adequate housing -- housing that they can afford and even achieve capital gains from -- the state is largely indifferent politically to the harm done by rising housing prices. A housing scandal in Danbury is receiving little attention outside the city, whose Zoning Commission is refusing to let a social-service organization, Pacific House, continue to operate a shelter for the homeless in a former motel building.
Pacific House would like to turn the building into what is called "supportive housing" -- housing that includes medical and rehabilitative services facilitating recovery for residents. But the commission wants none of it. The commission is ready to push these troubled people back out on the street -- in the winter, no less.
State government purchased the former motel for Pacific House's use, and without zoning approval the shelter is able to operate only because of one of Governor Lamont's emergency orders. Those orders are to expire in a week.
The General Assembly should extend the one applying to the Danbury shelter and demand some humanity from the city's Zoning Commission and the shelter's neighbors, who haven't been any more inconvenienced by the shelter than they were when the building was operated as a motel.
The cornerstone of the campaign of the likely Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, is an effort to make Connecticut more affordable. That objective will resonate widely.
But most Republicans, who ordinarily celebrate property rights and an "ownership society," and most Democrats, who ordinarily pose as friends of the poor and struggling, are not enthusiastic about housing construction, at least not outside the already densely populated cities. No one wants more neighbors.
Even in the cities themselves, few people want greater population density and more facilities to help the troubled. Lately hundreds of New Haven residents have mobilized to block an addiction-treatment clinic in their neighborhood, though the city is full of people needing such treatment -- as are the suburbs.
Connecticut's state motto sometimes seems to be "Not in my backyard." But shunning problems doesn't solve them. It worsens them and makes them more expensive. More housing could make the state less expensive.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
The growing complications of admissions to elite colleges
Morgan Hall at Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass. The very prestigious college, founded in 1793, accepts less than 15 percent of applicants.
— Photo by Tim4403224246
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
What will highly selective colleges, of which New England has many, do to try to maintain student populations at least vaguely representative of the country and world if, as seems likely, the U.S. Supreme Court bans affirmative for racial minorities in admissions?
Should the Feds ban the consideration of race and ethnicity as part of a holistic evaluation of a student’s application? I’d rather leave that to the colleges’ judgment.
An example of an SAT "grid-in" math question and the correctly gridded answer.
The decision of many colleges to no longer require that applicants for admission take the SATs probably makes sense because, in part, of the increasingly unfair advantage that kids from affluent families have because their parents can afford to send them to such expensive SAT-preparation services as the Princeton Review.
I suppose something like SAT-prep services existed back in the mid-60’s when I was taking such tests but I didn’t hear of any then. My high school’s college-admissions chief, the red-faced, chain-smoking and stout Mr. Sullivan, simply announced that the next SATs would be on such and such date – always a Saturday in two weeks. He said: “Bring two {or was it three?} No. 2 pencils and try to get plenty of sleep the night before’’ (ensuring that we wouldn’t sleep well).
And now the kids will take the tests on their own laptops and tablets. Hmm…will this favor more affluent students with more digital experience and could it make cheating easier? And what about kids who may not even own a laptop or tablet?
‘Designed for EXCESS’
Left, Abelardo Morell’s “Paint #16” (photo). Right: Anthony Fisher’s “The Light of Day” (oil on canvas), in their joint show “Two of a Kind: Abelardo Morell and Anthony Fisher,” at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth Art Gallery, at its Star Store Campus, in downtown New Bedford, Feb. 10-March 20.
The gallery says:
“This exhibition presents two creative approaches that focus on the abstract image – Abelardo Morell’s incredibly lush and sensual photographs of fresh paint frozen in time with the help of light, fast exposure and flash, and Anthony Fisher’s ingeniously captured lines and shapes featured on layered, monochromatic abstract paintings.
Both Morell and Fisher share a restless urgency to invent novel ways to play with traditional media, subjects, and methods. In their respective studios in the same creative community just outside of Boston, each pours his unique experimentation into their own patient and carefully crafted process. Results sometimes arrive as wonderful surprises transformed into bold work that the visitor can almost enter – inspiring, open minded, and deeply creative.’ Abelardo Morell admires Anthony’s work because he, ‘like me, thinks a lot about how a picture is made. Subject matter for him is, of course, important, but it is within his working process that the subject emerges. Anthony has used all sorts of devices to make marks on the canvas – perhaps to get his ego out of the way a bit.’
“Anthony Fisher’s studio process involves quirky and lumbering invented tools, physical struggle, gravity, chemistry, and physics to allow hundreds of marks to be thrown onto a canvas all at once. ‘My process is specifically designed for EXCESS – with so many visual ideas emerging at once, the overwhelmingly vast majority are discarded. I want the unexpected. My goal is to spark ideas that otherwise wouldn’t appear with a more deliberative, considered approach,’ says Fisher.’’
Abelardo Morell explains his admiration for the subject matter of his photographs, “When I visit museums, my eyes often take me first to the painting galleries. I marvel at the surfaces of paintings, which contain their own visual dramas, often independent of any narrative or formal aspect of the work. A difference between us as a photographer and painter is that photographers normally start with the world, while painters begin with a blank canvas and end up at times with astonishing creations.” Morell’s photographs show “that substance on its way to drying – a stage that finished paintings can never retain. “I also use other lighting sources pointed at a low angle to increase the raking light effects on the thick paint surface. I like the translucent and geometric visual marriages achieved through this method. Because what I am making are not ‘paintings’ in their own right, I am able to quote and crop discrete small paint details to make them play a big role in the final picture.”
Created specifically for this exhibition and presented at the gallery’s entrance is another visual surprise that underlines the connection between these two artists, neighbors and friends – a photograph of Abelardo Morell titled, “Paint: After Anthony Fisher’s 2021 Painting ‘Some Will Still Be Standing’, 2022” right next to the actual paintin
William Street, New Bedford, in the old “Whaling Capital’s’’ 19th Century section.
— Photo by PenitentWhaler
Evanescence on ice
Ice-fishing structures on Alton Bay in Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire.
“And there ain’t much to ice fishing till you miss a day or more
And the hole you cut freezes over
and it’s like you have never been there before.’’
— From “Ice Fishing,’’ a song by New Hampshire-based songwriter-singer Bill Morrissey (1951-2011)
From Marxism to the Burlington marketplace
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington
“‘People’s Republic
of Burlington,’ old Marxist
stronghold, now just a stage
on its way to high
capitalism. Church
Street commodified.
Out on the loop roads
of Montpelier, what does ‘strip
development’ strip? Grass
from pastures….”
— From “Hayden’s Shack I Can See to the End of Vermont,’’ by Neil Shepard (born 1951), a Johnson, Vt.-based poet
Tough but softening a bit in Boston
Mark Twain at age 31
“Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4,000 critics”
— Mark Twain (1835-1910), in a Nov. 9, 1869 letter to his sister Pamela Clemens Moffat
xxx
“Boston’s upper zones
Are changing social habits
And I hear the Cohns
Are taking up the Cabots’’
— From Ira Gershwin’s lyrics for the 1931 song “Love Is Sweeping the Country,’’ with music by his brother George.
Jenny Gold: The emotional exhaustion from too many choices
Most all of us have felt the exhaustion of pandemic-era decision-making.
Should I travel to see an elderly relative? Can I see my friends and, if so, is inside OK? Mask or no mask? Test or no test? What day? Which brand? Is it safe to send my child to day care?
Questions that once felt trivial have come to bear the moral weight of a life-or-death choice. So it might help to know (as you’re tossing and turning over whether to cancel your non-refundable vacation) that your struggle has a name: decision fatigue.
In 2004, psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote an influential book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. The basic premise is this: Whether picking your favorite ice cream or a new pair of sneakers or a family physician, choice can be a wonderful thing. But too many choices can leave us feeling paralyzed and less satisfied with our decisions in the long run.
And that’s just for the little things.
Faced with a stream of difficult choices about health and safety during a global pandemic, Schwartz suggests, we may experience a unique kind of burnout that could deeply affect our brains and our mental health.
Schwartz, an emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and a visiting professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, has been studying the interactions among psychology, morality, and economics for 50 years. He spoke with KHN’s Jenny Gold about the decision fatigue that so many Americans are feeling two years into the pandemic, and how we can cope. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What is decision fatigue?
We all know that choice is good. That’s part of what it means to be an American. So, if choice is good, then more must be better. It turns out, that’s not true.
Imagine that when you go to the supermarket, not only do you have to choose among 200 kinds of cereal, but you have to choose among 150 kinds of crackers, 300 kinds of soup, 47 kinds of toothpaste, etc. If you really went on your shopping trip with the aim of getting the best of everything, you’d either die of starvation before you finished or die of fatigue. You can’t live your life that way.
When you overwhelm people with options, instead of liberating them, you paralyze them. They can’t pull the trigger. Or, if they do pull the trigger, they are less satisfied, because it’s so easy to imagine that some alternative that they didn’t choose would have been better than the one they did.
Q: How has the pandemic affected our ability to make decisions?
In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, all the choices that we faced vanished. Restaurants weren’t open, so you didn’t have to decide what to order. Supermarkets weren’t open, or they were too dangerous, so you didn’t have to decide what to buy. All of a sudden your options were restricted.
But, as things eased up, you sort of go back to some version of your previous life, except [with] a whole new set of problems that none of us thought about before.
And the kinds of decisions you’re talking about are extremely high-stakes decisions. Should I see my parents for the holidays and put them at risk? Should I let my kid go to school? Should I have gatherings with friends outside and shiver, or am I willing to risk sitting inside? These are not decisions we’ve had practice with. And having made this decision on Tuesday, you’re faced with it again on Thursday. And, for all you know, everything has changed between Tuesday and Thursday. I think this has created a world that is just impossible for us to negotiate. I don’t know that it’s possible to go to bed with a settled mind.
Q: Can you explain what’s going on in our brains?
When we make choices, we are exercising a muscle. And just as in the gym, when you do reps with weights, your muscles get tired. When this choice-making muscle gets tired, we basically can’t do it anymore.
Q: We’ve heard a lot about more people feeling depressed and anxious during the pandemic. Do you think that decision fatigue is exacerbating mental health issues?
I don’t think that you need decision fatigue to explain the explosion of mental-health problems. But it puts an additional burden on people.
Imagine that you decided that, starting tomorrow, you are going to be thoughtful about every decision you make. OK, you wake up in the morning: Should I get out of bed? Or should I stay in bed for another 15 minutes? Should I brush my teeth, or skip brushing my teeth? Should I get dressed now, or should I get dressed after I’ve had my coffee?
What the pandemic did for a lot of people is to take routine decisions and make them non-routine. And that puts a kind of pressure on us that accumulates over the course of the day, and then here comes tomorrow, and you’re faced with them all again. I don’t see how it could possibly not contribute to stress and anxiety and depression.
Q: As the pandemic wears on, are we getting better at making these decisions? Or does the compounded exhaustion make us worse at gauging the options?
There are two possibilities. One is that we are strengthening our decision-making muscles, which means that we can tolerate more decisions in the course of a day than we used to. Another possibility is that we just adapt to the state of stress and anxiety, and we’re making all kinds of bad decisions.
In principle, it ought to be the case that when you’re confronted with a dramatically new situation, you learn how to make better decisions than you were able to make when it all started. And I don’t doubt that’s true of some people. But I also doubt that it’s true in general, that people are making better decisions than they were when it started.
Q: So what can people do to avoid burnout?
First, simplify your life and follow some rules. And the rules don’t have to be perfect. [For example:] “I am not going to eat indoors in a restaurant, period.” You will miss out on opportunities that might have been quite pleasant, but you’ve taken one decision off the table. And you can do that with respect to a lot of things the way that, when we do our grocery shopping, we buy Cheerios every week. You know, I’m going to think about a lot of the things I buy at the grocery, but I’m not going to think about breakfast.
The second thing you can do is to stop asking yourself, “What’s the best thing I can do?” Instead, ask yourself, “What’s a good enough thing I can do?” What option will lead to good enough results most of the time? I think that takes an enormous amount of pressure off. There’s no guarantee that you won’t make mistakes. We live in an uncertain world. But it’s a lot easier to find good enough than it is to find best.
Jenny Gold is a Kaiser Health News reporter
‘Spatial painting’
“Three Boxes” (oil on canvas), by Don Smith, in his show “Space, Intuition, and Expression”, at Bannister Gallery, Providence, through Feb. 11. It’s only on view in person for Rhode Island College faculty and students but can be seen online.
The gallery says: “The show features a variety of different painting techniques, including the method Smith calls ‘Spatial.’
"The Spatial pieces are arrived at through a complicated format of drawing, usually done from life. Once the drawing is in place, Smith begins to paint over areas he feels to be extraneous, leaving various shapes or forms to which he assigns a particular color value."
Mr. Smith lives and works in Johnston, R.I., a Providence suburb.
Clemence Irons House in Johnston, built in 1691
‘Thaw through frost’
— Photo by Scoo
“Home drive. High beams shearing the bromegrass,
blackcaps, brambles by the roadside;
red stems siphon frozen ground
grown soft, a bruise beneath the smooth suede
winter peach that rolls across
the dashboard. Thaw through frost….
…Mount Equinox, Ascutney …far ahead….’’
— From “Driving Sleeping People,’’ by Richard Kenney, who has lived in western Vermont and teaches at the University of Washington.
Mount Ascutney, in eastern Vermont
Boston Children’s to buy Franciscan in bid to improve mental-health care
Boston Children’s Hospital
Via The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Boston Children’s Hospital plans to acquire Franciscan Children’s {hospital}, in Boston’s Brighton section. Through this acquisition, Boston Children’s Hospital hopes to improve its response time for children who are awaiting psychiatric treatment and expand the mental-health resources available to its patients.
“As the coronavirus pandemic persists, there has been a significant uptick in the number of patients receiving or waiting for inpatient psychiatric care at Boston Children’s Hospital. By joining forces, Boston Children’s Hospital can increase and diversify its mental-health resources offered to patients, expanding into services such as treatments for those with psychiatric disorders and developmental disorders. This acquisition would also allow for Boston Children’s hospital to better manage the increase in patients who seek treatment.
“Dr. James Mandell, chairman of the Franciscan Children’s board, recognizes that this plan would be mutually beneficial, as the acquisition would provide Franciscan Children’s with the opportunity to ‘better train and recruit staff,’ and ‘provide access to more patients.’’’
But where to? Spring?
“Follow Me” (dye sublimation print on aluminum), by Irene Mamiye, at Lanoue Gallery, Boston
Lost and found in the mountains
Mt. Washington from Intervale, N.H.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I was wandering around in the Internet the other night and came across a 1941 movie called Sun Valley Serenade, a musical film set in the Idaho ski resort of the same name. Seeing it took me back to February 1971, when I watched the film in a hotel room in Jackson, N.H. I was up there covering, (for The Boston Herald Traveler) the search for a couple of guys lost or dead just up the road, on Mt. Washington. The search was being run out of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Pinkham Notch facility.
For three days, about a dozen of us journalists (including from such national media such as Time magazine) hung around as rescuers from the National Forest Service looked for these guys. They eventually found them safe in a shelter somewhere near the tree line. But the authorities were very angry that such inexperienced climbers had jeopardized the rescuers on that infamously stormy mountain. (I’ve climbed it myself twice in the winter with an experienced team. It’s a beautiful spectacle.)
“Do those little bastards know how much this is costing?’’ griped one of rescuers.
Of course, we journos were bored much of the time, but some of us snuck away for cheery drinks and dinner in Jackson, hoping that nothing exciting would happen while we were enjoying ourselves.
But what I most remember from that trip, one of many crazy expeditions during my time at The Herald Traveler, was sitting in my hotel room as wet snow fell outside watching Sun Valley Serenade on the TV and, particularly, listening to the song “I Know Why’’ being sung while backed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. One of the lines is “Even though it’s snowing, violets are growing.’’
Corny but it brings a pang about the passage of time
I probably have yellowed clips of my stories of the lost climbers in the cellar, but I’d bring on an asthma attack looking for them. In those deep, dark, pre-Internet days you’d need clips to get your next newspaper job, if you were foolish enough to want one.
