Judith Graham: Beliefs about aging affect longevity
People’s beliefs about aging have a profound impact on their health, influencing everything from their memory and sensory perceptions to how well they walk, how fully they recover from disabling illness, and how long they live.
When aging is seen as a negative experience (characterized by terms such as decrepit, incompetent, dependent and senile), individuals tend to experience more stress in later life and engage less often in healthy behaviors such as exercise. When views are positive (signaled by words such as wise, alert, accomplished, and creative), people are more likely to be active and resilient and to have a stronger will to live.
These internalized beliefs about aging are mostly unconscious, formed from early childhood on as we absorb messages about growing old from TV, movies, books, advertisements, and other forms of popular culture. They vary by individual, and they’re distinct from prejudice and discrimination against older adults in the social sphere.
More than 400 scientific studies have demonstrated the impact of individuals’ beliefs about aging. Now, the question is whether people can alter these largely unrecognized assumptions about growing older and assume more control over them.
In her new book, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live, Becca Levy of Yale University, a leading expert on this topic, argues we can. “With the right mindset and tools, we can change our age beliefs,” she asserts in the book’s introduction.
Levy, a professor of psychology and epidemiology, has demonstrated in multiple studies that exposing people to positive descriptions of aging can improve their memory, gait, balance, and will to live. All of us have an “extraordinary opportunity to rethink what it means to grow old,” she writes.
Recently, I asked Levy to describe what people can do to modify beliefs about aging. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.
Becca Levy, a professor at Yale University, studies the way our beliefs about aging affect physical and mental health.
Q: How important are age beliefs, compared with other factors that affect aging?
In an early study, we found that people with positive age beliefs lived longer — a median of 7.5 additional years — compared with those with negative beliefs. Compared with other factors that contribute to longevity, age beliefs had a greater impact than high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, and smoking.
Q: You suggest that age beliefs can be changed. How?
That’s one of the hopeful messages of my research. Even in a culture like ours, where age beliefs tend to be predominantly negative, there is a whole range of responses to aging. What we’ve shown is it’s possible to activate and strengthen positive age beliefs that people have assimilated in different types of ways.
Q: What strategies do you suggest?
The first thing we can do is promote awareness of what our own age beliefs are.
A simple way is to ask yourself, “When you think of an older person, what are the first five words or phrases that come to mind?” Noticing which beliefs are generated quickly can be an important first step in awareness.
Q: What else can people do to increase awareness?
Another powerful technique is something I call “age belief journaling.” That involves writing down any portrayal of aging that comes up over a week. It could be a conversation you overhear in a coffee shop or something on social media or on your favorite show on Netflix. If there is an absence of older people, write that down, too.
At the end of the week, tally up the number of positive and negative portrayals and the number of times that old people are absent from conversations. With the negative descriptions, take a moment and think, “Could there be a different way of portraying that person?”
Q: What comes next?
Becoming aware of how ageism and age beliefs are operating in society. Shift the blame to where it is due.
In the book, I suggest thinking about something that’s happened to an older person that’s blamed on aging — and then taking a step back and asking whether something else could be going on.
For example, when an older adult is forgetful, it’s often blamed on aging. But there are many reasons people might not remember something. They might have been stressed when they heard the information. Or they might have been distracted. Not remembering something can happen at any age.
Unfortunately, there’s a tendency to blame older people rather than looking at other potential causes for their behaviors or circumstances.
Q: You encourage people to challenge negative age beliefs in public.
Yes. In the book, I present 14 negative age beliefs and the science that dispels them. And I recommend becoming knowledgeable about that research.
For example, a common belief is that older people don’t contribute to society. But we know from research that older adults are most likely to recycle and make philanthropic gifts. Altruistic motivations become stronger with age. Older adults often work or volunteer in positions that make meaningful contributions. And they tend to engage in what’s called legacy thinking, wanting to create a better world for future generations.
In my own case, if I hear something concerning, I often need to take time to think about a good response. And that’s fine. You can go back to somebody and say, “I was thinking about what you said the other day. And I don’t know if you know this, but research shows that’s not actually the case.”
Q: Another thing you talk about is creating a portfolio of positive role models. What do you mean by that?
Focus on positive images of aging. These can be people you know, a character in a book, someone you’ve learned about in a documentary, a historical figure — they can come from many different sources.
I recommend starting out with, say, five positive images. With each one, think about qualities you admire and you might want to strengthen in yourself. One person might have a great sense of humor. Another might have a great perspective on how to solve conflicts and bring people together. Another might have a great work ethic or a great approach to social justice. There can be different strengths in different people that can inspire us.
Q: You also recommend cultivating intergenerational contacts.
We know from research that meaningful intergenerational contact can be a way to improve age beliefs. A starting point is to think about your five closest friends and what age they are. In my case, I realized that most of my friends were within a couple of years of my age. If that’s the case with you, think about ways to get to know people of other ages through a dance class, a book club, or a political group. Seeing older people in action often allows us to dispel negative age beliefs.
Judith Graham is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
The bellhop in hazmat suit will take you to your lab
The Hotel Buckminster (built in 1897), at Boston’s Kenmore Square, in about 1900; space for the future Fenway Park is at left. The shuttered hotel will reportedly be bought for $42.5 million by development company IQHQ and turned into — what else these days in Boston and Cambridge!? —biotech lab space.
The hotel was where the plot to fix the 1919 World Series was allegedly launched.
2009 photo
— Photo by John Stephen Dwyer
Cynthia Drummond: Nurture New England’s native plants
Blossoms of mountain laurel, a common shrub in southern New England
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
A story in a recent issue of a national gardening magazine extolled the benefits of “naturalistic garden design,” a less constrained landscape that features native plants grouped in ecologically compatible communities.
The reader was encouraged to look for inspiration in the local ecosystem and to “suspend fussiness” to develop a wilder, more resilient garden that is in tune with the surrounding natural landscape.
Magazine articles about native plants indicate their growing acceptance as garden plants, but because they have co-evolved over thousands of years with native insect and bird species, these plants play a much more critical role.
David Gregg, director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, described native plants as central components in the evolution of the Rhode Island ecosystem.“They’re the environment and context in which all the other animals in our plants in our area evolved,” he said.
“So, the bees’ tongues are the right length to get the nectar from the flowers. The birds can eat the caterpillars that that eat those plants. The soil microbes are such that those plants can get nutrients from the soil instead of fertilizer.”
While gardeners have differing opinions on how “native” a plant should be, whether a garden should contain only native species, and whether those species should be native to Rhode Island, New England or beyond, more people are choosing to plant natives, even if it’s just a few to start. This higher level of awareness is evident in the recent growth of the membership of the nonprofit Rhode Island Wild Plant Society, which, in the past two years, has gone from about 400 members to more than 600.
Society vice president Sally Johnson said she is not sure why the organization has so many new members, but she said it is probably due to people spending more time at home as well as growing concerns about the climate crisis.
“A lot of us are out in our yards, outside more, and a lot of us are going for more walks because it’s COVID-safe, so we’re appreciating nature more, and that’s got to contribute to it,” she said. “The other factor, and this is my gut feeling on it, it’s got to be global warming. We see so much environmental destruction. There’s so much talk of resiliency. That contributes.”
Johnson also noted people were becoming more aware of the need to support pollinating insects and birds.
“People are going from the purely ornamental, showy plants, and understanding more the role of supporting pollinators and host plants,” she said. “The understanding of, it’s not just the pretty bees and butterflies, but it’s also the wasps and who’s going to live there over the winter and leaving your perennials up over the winter so that insects can overwinter in them.”
Michael Adamovic, author, photographer and and a botanist at Catskill Native Nursery, attributes the greater interest in native plants to the noticeable decline in insect populations.
“Natives are definitely increasing in popularity,” he said. “Probably one of the main reasons is that because in the last 20, 30 years, there’s been a large decline in insect populations. You would take a road trip, 20 or 30 years ago, and your car would be completely covered with insects. These days, you’re lucky if you get one or two splattered on it. The same thing goes for songbirds. The songbird population is really starting to decline, and people are finally starting to realize there’s something wrong with the environment.”
Adamovic said sales at the nursery took off during the pandemic and continue to be strong.
“Our sales probably at least doubled from the previous year,” he said. “We couldn’t keep up with the demand. And even last year, 2021, it was still going in the same direction and there’s no indication of it slowing down.”
Johnson, who owns a garden design business that uses native plants, said they can still be hard to source in Rhode Island, and she often has difficulty finding them for her clients.
“You can’t find native species,” she said. “… I had a client who had to put in native plants for a CRMC [Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council] permit by the end of October and she could only put in three species.”
The Rhody Native program, a federally funded initiative of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey, began in 2010, but ended in 2018. The initial objectives were to provide enhanced job training for unemployed nursery workers following the recession, and plant native species to fill the spaces where invasive plants had been removed.
“The idea was, all right, here’s another economic opportunity,” Gregg said. “Let’s gather seed and cut clippings from local sources and we’ll pay out-of-work nurserymen to grow them up for us. And then, we will use them in restoration projects and we’ll let nurseries and garden centers sell them to try to change people’s minds about natives.”
But when the federal funding ended, the idea of building a local native plant supply chain ran up against the realities of the nursery business.
“You can’t pay a professional staff on the kind of volume we were doing in Rhody Native plants, and there’s a couple of reasons,” Gregg said. “One is, the margins on propagating nursery stock are so thin, you have to do zillions of plants in order to make a business out of it. For native plants, you still have to order from far away because it won’t pay. We didn’t have the right model for making local plants pay.”
There was also an issue, Gregg added, with a tax-exempt nonprofit operating on tax-exempt land competing with commercial growers in Rhode Island.
Current garden trends favor native plants, a change Adamovic has also observed.
“They are going more toward native plants than they are non-native,” he said. “We still get a few people who don’t get it at all. They’ll come in and have this huge list of non-natives. They don’t really understand what the whole native thing is about, but every year that goes by, that’s decreasing.”
Johnson believes gardeners evolve at their own pace, and some people will adopt native plans more readily than others.
“I think you have to accept people for where they are and try to just gently move them,” she said. “We as a wild plant society are trying to move towards being purists, of only selling plants from Rhode Island and trying to get out seeds from Rhode Island, and I totally support that effort. … It’s important to realize that hey, if you don’t want to do your entire garden as native plants, at least start putting some in and start looking at them and thinking about them, and then you realize ‘Hey, the native goldenrod is kind of nice.’”
It is becoming increasingly important, Adamovic said, that people include native plants in their gardens.
“It’s really rewarding, too,” he said. “You put a native plant in your garden and you’re able to see that the caterpillar that ate it turned into a butterfly. You’re also providing a bunch of food for wildlife in general, and you’re really helping to save the environment by switching over to using natives.”
For Gregg, native plants are the foundation of Rhode Islanders’ sense of place.
“Rhode Islanders live in a place that has oak trees that drop their leaves in the winter and it’s got stone walls with moss and asters growing along them and it’s got native beach grasses,” he said. “You go to the beach, you see the little waving grasses. … If you want a place with palm trees and eight foot-high elephant grass, go somewhere else. Rhode Island is about a sense of place. It’s about our native plants.”
Native plant resources
Rhode Island Wild Plant Society native plant sales.
Xerces Society pollinator-friendly native plant lists.
Cynthia Drummond is an ecoRI News contributor.
Oh come on! There were others
Bedford(N.H.) Presbyterian Church
“We had no religion at all, but we were Jews in New Hampshire, and my sister – who is now a rabbi – said it best: We were, like, the only Jews in Bedford, New Hampshire, as well as the only Democrats, so we just kind of associated those two things together. My dad raised us to believe that paying taxes is an honor.”
— Roseanne Barr (born 1952), American comedian and actress
Sculpture that crawls
Both at Boston Sculptors Gallery:
Top: “Carry” (wood, waxed linen and ink), by Somerville-based Julia Shepley. The gallery says that the show “features a series of inventive open-framework wood sculptures in procession with their shadows paired with a selection of new drawings and prints.’’
Bottom: “Three Types of Equilibrium (mixed media), by Kathleen Volp, in her show “Pointed.’’
“Pointed” comprises “small groupings of geometric forms made primarily from plaster, paper pulp and clay displaying humor and intrigue in the most elemental.’’ Ms. Volp lives in Waltham, Mass., and Cavendish, Vt.
Downtown Cavendish Vt. — during rush hour?
‘Panting like spaniels’
“Climbing the stairway gray with urban midnight,
Cheerful, venial, ruminating pleasure,
Darkness takes me, an arm around my throat and
Give me your wallet.
Fearing cowardice more than other terrors,
Angry I wrestle with my unseen partner,
Caught in a ritual not of our own making
panting like spaniels….”
— From “Effort at Speech,’’ by William Meredith (1919-2007), U.S. poet laureate in 1978-1980. He taught at Connecticut College, in New London, and had a farm on the Thames River in nearby Uncasville, an old mill village in the town of Montville. He became a very able arborist.
The admissions building at Connecticut College, founded in 1911 as "Connecticut College for Women" in response to Wesleyan University, in nearby Middletown, closing its doors to women in 1909; it shortened its name to "Connecticut College" in 1969, when it began admitting men.
Uncasvillle Mill in 1906, in its industrial heyday
Potatoes and canoes in Maine's big country
Children gathering potatoes on a large farm in Aroostook County in1940. In those days, schools did not open until the potatoes were harvested. The country long competed with Idaho to be considered the potato capital of America.
— Photo by Jack Delano
“This is big country, larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, nearly the equal of Massachusetts; its vastness is more suggestive of the West than of New England. It winters, people will tell you, are fiercer, its forests thicker, it rivers wilder than anywhere else in the East.’’
Mel Allen, on Aroostook County, Maine, in “There’s No Easy Way to Pick Potatoes,’’ in the September 1978 issue of Yankee magazine. Mainers simply call Aroostook “The County’’. Its voters tend to favor right-wing politicians.
Allagash Falls on “The County’s” Allagash River
A growing romance
“Myself Becoming One with the Tree” (photo), by Alan Sonfist, in his show “Becoming Trees” (curated by Fritz Hortsman), at Concord Art, Concord, Mass., through May 8.
Mr. Sonfist is a New York City-based American artist best known as a trailblazer of the Land or Earth Art movement.
Llewellyn King: The beauty of a woman’s slap
I have never met Will Smith, but I would like to just so that I could pump that hand — the hand that connected with Chris Rock’s cheek at the Oscars; the slap that was seen around the world.
That hand connecting with that unsuspecting cheek should start us on a happy back-to-the-future journey.
I would rather the striker had been a woman. Slapping men’s faces has a long and honorable tradition in female defense of rectitude.
We need to reinstall the periodic slapping of the male face as a part of the interaction between men and women so there are fewer instances of #MeToo. Once there has been a slap, there can be no later debate about who allowed what. An open-handed blow to the over-eager male face is declarative: Cut it out now. It is the unique female form of defense without having to take up judo, kickboxing or succumbing to unwanted advances. Slapping the pushy male face is, or was, instinctive.
A crisp slap of the face puts a definite and embarrassed end to “inappropriate touching.” A face slap is so articulate, so incontrovertible, so absolute and so very effective. It doesn’t ever get confused with “consensual,” “maybe” or “perhaps.”
Had a few more faces been slapped, there would be fewer TV personalities sitting out their lives in early retirement because they said they thought there was mutual consent. Had the face of one governor been slapped, he would have restrained his unlicensed hands from roving where they shouldn’t have, and he would still have a job. No equivocation or doubt; no he-said, she-said. A slap is a notable event, never forgotten by the deliverer or the receiver.
Neither the slapper nor the slapped quickly forgets the inside of the female hand swiftly connecting with the outside of the male face. It hurts the male ego far more than it stings the offending cheek or the delivering palm.
Question: Did she slap your face? How can a man answer that without a simple “yes” or “no”? A slap can’t later be confused with foreplay. You weren’t desired is an unambiguous statement implicit in the face slap. Once thus discouraged, further advance is not allowable, or is the beginning of #MeToo territory.
What happened to face slapping? Why did it go the way of couches in women’s restrooms and nose-powdering, as in “I have to powder my nose.” Such a delightful euphemism. Somewhere in the women’s movement some useful things got lost.
The last time, as I remember, when a face slap echoed around the world was when Vivien Leigh, playing Scarlett O’Hara in the movie Gone With the Wind, brought an open palm against the astounded cheek of Clark Gable, playing Rhett Butler.
When a woman delivers the unambiguous slap to the face of an over-eager man, she has an opportunity to accompany it with a solid verbal rebuke; to append a testy codicil. How about one of these: “What kind of women do you usually go out with?” “How dare you, lover boy?” “I told you, keep your hands to yourself.” Or a withering, “What do you think you’re doing?” That should deflate the aspiring Don Juan and send the putative lover back to computer dating.
You are probably wondering how often this writer’s face has been slapped? Only once, in quite a different circumstance and for quite a different offense. It was a shock, an ego-crusher, and I have an indelible memory of it.
Despite the current imbroglio between Will Smith and Chris Rock, the face slap remains uniquely a woman’s prerogative and a man’s shame. Whack!
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
'Democracy never lasts long'
Document written by John Adams in 1776 and published anonymously.
John Adams, by Gilbert Stuart.
“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.”
— John Adams (1735-1826), American statesman, lawyer, diplomat, political philosopher, writer and a U.S. Founding Father who was the second president of the United States (1797-1801) and its first vice president (1789-1797). He was a loyal native of Massachusetts. His remarks were in a letter to a Virginian, John Taylor, in 1814.
John Adams’s birthplace, in Quincy, Mass.
Higher and higher
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Shoreline access continues to be a stormy issue in Rhode Island and some other coastal states. There’s constant conflict that pits beach walkers, swimmers and sitters from the general public against generally affluent shoreline house owners, who have taken over more and more of the New England coast, with many striving mightily to keep the public as far away from their houses as they can. Understandable!
There’s a measure in the Rhode Island House that attempts to end the old confusions about how high on a beach the public can go without being legally kicked off by irritated owners. (“We paid a lot of money for this place!”) It states that folks can go 10 feet landward beyond a “recognizable high tide line.’’ That’s defined as the mark left “upon tide flats, beaches, or along shore objects that indicates the intersection of the land with the water’s surface level at the maximum height reached by a rising tide.’’ (Lawyerly poetry!) That would often, but presumably not always, mean a line of seaweed, oil, shells or other debris.
None of this means that you could legally climb up the wall in front of someone’s house, whatever passes for the high-water mark.
A not very helpful 1982 state Supreme Court ruling said that the mean high-water mark is the appropriate boundary between the shoreline to which the public has access and private property, but the court said that determining the line requires “special surveying equipment and expertise.’’ What with the changes wrought by waves and storms, it can be mighty hard to find the high-tide mark in any case. Confused and/or nervous beach visitors would thus tend to move down to the low-tide mark (also not always easy to define). The new legislation doesn’t seem on the face of it to make things much easier for beach walkers to follow. And where can beach strollers sit down without being yelled at?
Inevitably, a shadowy group, with the windy title of “Shoreline Taxpayers for Respectful Traverse, Environmental Responsibility and Safety,’’ representing affluent owners, plans to fight the measure with lawsuits. Since the rich generally run America, I’d bet they’ll win; and I suspect that most of the group’s clients are from out of state.
(Some members of this same crowd also try to stop the sand from washing away in front of their houses by putting up hard barriers to catch and hold it. But that just ends up depriving the shores further down the shore of sand. Indeed, it worsens erosion.)
But wait! Rising seas caused by manmade global warming may make this issue more wrought. Estimates are that sea level will rise by almost a foot between now and 2050, and there will be more and worse hurricanes and other storms. That would push the high-tide mark (or marks), and the strolling public, further landward, toward those beach houses.
For that matter, it will also force some landowners to eventually abandon their houses, many of which shouldn’t have been put there in the first place, let alone subsidized by taxpayers through federal flood insurance and frequent repairs to beach roads by states and municipalities. Indeed, permanently removing structures from stretches of the immediate shore will be a rapidly increasing phenomenon in the next few decades. Sad. Most people love being close to the water, as real-estate prices suggest.
Will the Feds be buying out a lot of these properties through the Federal Emergency Management Agency?
Before the rise of the shoreline summer house, spawned by the money from the Industrial Revolution, few people in New England coastal communities built houses right along the shore. It was considered too insecure in the face of storms and flooding. Houses were built much higher up. So you can see that the oldest buildings in New England coastal towns are in village centers or associated with now mostly gone farms.
Part of my family has long lived in Falmouth, on Cape Cod. Some of their 18th and 19th Century houses are still standing near the town green. These people were in farming, boat building, fishing and assorted other trades. On the other hand, most of the houses around the harbors and along the beaches of the town date from the 1870’s and later, when they were built as summer places after the extension of the railroad brought affluent people, including some of my other ancestors, from the Boston area to summer on the Cape. This sort of movement was replicated on coasts, including the Great Lakes, around America.
Occasionally hurricanes or other big storms would damage or destroy the houses, but the owners would usually have enough money and/or insurance (including in the past few decades federal flood insurance) to rebuild in exactly the same insecure places.
In any event, with rapidly rising seas, that can’t go on. Let the great trek inland begin (if only a few dozen yards).
The most ardent
The Massachusetts State House with a banner in honor of the Red Sox's 2013 World Series appearance. "B Strong" was a patch worn by the Red Sox in honor of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, which occurred on April 15 that year.
“New York is great, but the New England fans are probably the most knowledge and ardent fans, and not just in baseball, but all sports. But Red Sox nation is Red Sox nation.’’
— Dick Williams (1929-2011), manager of, among other Major League Baseball teams, of the Boston Red, in 1967-1969.
Needs replenishment
“Sustenance’’ (oil on canvas), by Kay Flierl, at Edgewater Gallery, Middlebury, Vt.
Chris Powell: Feds should bar defense contractors from extorting corporate welfare from states; fascism and theft at Yale
A Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut may be paying the Sikorsky helicopter division of military contractor Lockheed Martin as much as $250 million to keep its facilities in the state for the next 20 years -- an average of more than $12 million per year -- if the company gets major new helicopter contracts from the U.S. Defense Department.
Gov. Ned Lamont has struck such a deal with Sikorsky, similar to one struck by his predecessor, Dannel P. Malloy. While the General Assembly would have to approve it, legislative leaders of both parties seem to favor it because Sikorsky, based in Stratford, already has about 8,000 employees and 250 suppliers in the state and with the new contracts might hire thousands more.
Even with the subsidy from state government, Sikorsky could relocate to a state that made a better offer, though it might have to repay whatever it had taken from Connecticut.
Under the circumstances the subsidy may be good policy. But it is still corporate welfare, and smiling through it are Connecticut's members of Congress. Instead they should be advocating legislation to prevent recurrence of this kind of thing not just in Connecticut but throughout the country.
States should compete with each other to draw businesses and residents. But the federal government shouldn't take sides in this competition. The federal government should prevent military contracts from being used as leverage to extort corporate welfare from state and municipal governments.
That is, federal law could forbid military contractors from obtaining corporate welfare that is conditioned on the award of a military contract, like the corporate welfare that Connecticut plans to give Sikorsky.
With the Sikorsky arrangement, the leverage of the federal government will be used not for public gain but for corporate gain. What President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has enough power, influence and wealth already.
xxx
Yale University, in New Haven, is as renowned as any institution of higher education in the world. But recent events suggest that Yale is overrated.
In recent years Yale has become a center of political correctness as much as education, and on March 10 this political correctness turned again to fascism as more than a hundred students at the university's law school besieged what was supposed to be a forum on civil liberties.
The students interrupted the forum, stood up and held signs, blocking sight lines, and shouted and jeered in objection to the participation of one of the invited speakers, a representative from the Alliance Defending Freedom, which supports the civil liberties of conservatives. Police were needed to escort the speakers away.
While the young fascists are law students, Yale will not punish them, apparently because they noisily left the assembly room and congregated disruptively outside before they were given a fourth warning, a threshold set in student conduct rules.
Neither will Yale give any thought to how such people are getting admitted to the university, nor to why the atmosphere at the university is so intolerant of political disagreement.
Then last week, Jamie Petrone, a former finance official in Yale's School of Medicine pleaded guilty to federal charges that she stole $40 million in electronics equipment from the university over 10 years through the fraudulent purchase and sale of computer equipment and programming.
Yale also has a School of Management, but the student thuggery and colossal theft at the university suggest that it doesn't have nearly enough management.
xxx
Legislation to allow farmers to get state permits to shoot bears and other predatory animals that damage crops and kill or injure livestock failed last week in the General Assembly's Environment Committee on a vote of 18-13.
Connecticut already allows deer hunting to protect agriculture and deer don't attack livestock as bears do, so it is hard to understand the opposition to protecting agriculture against bears.
The bill that was rejected did not authorize a general bear-hunting season in Connecticut. But unless bear hunting is authorized soon to some extent, the continuing explosion in the bear population will put at least several bears in every town. Their cuteness is already wearing off fast.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Yale medical diploma awarded Asaph Leavitt Bissell, Class of 1815, signed by school's four professors and Yale President Timothy Dwight IV.
Yes, plenty of shoes are still made in New England
New Balance trail running shoes
Edited from a New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com) report.
“New Balance, the athletic-shoe company, is expanding with a new facility in Methuen, Mass. This factory was opened with Gov. Charlie Baker, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan and local leaders, to participate in the grand opening of New Balance’s newest manufacturing hub.
“The 80,000-square-foot facility opened for business in January after $20 million in renovations, according to the company. The factory currently employs more than 90 associates producing the brand’s MADE 990v5 running shoe, with plans to more than double the current workforce and production capabilities by the end of the year. Including the new New Balance factory in Methuen, New Balance owns five manufacturing facilities in Maine and Massachusetts where about 1,000 U.S. workers prepare, cut and mold athletic-shoe materials and components and then sew, press and assemble into the final product.
“Manufacturing has always been an important part of our company culture,” said Joe Preston, New Balance president and CEO. “Our associates have proven that high-quality athletic footwear can be produced in the U.S. Their skilled craftsmanship and dedication to continuous improvement will help us meet our significant U.S. and global consumer demand and drive our continued business growth.”
By the late 19th Century, the shoemaking industry had migrated to the factory and was increasingly mechanized. Pictured, the bottoming room of the B. F. Spinney & Co. factory in Lynn, Mass., in 1872.
Furniture like people
“Family Portrait” (pastel), by Joan Baldwin, in the “Spectrum Show,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through April 30.
Ms. Baldwin is a Boston area painter whose studio is at River Street Artists, part of Waltham Mills Artists Association, in Waltham. She says:
“Over the years I have expressed my ideas in a variety of artistic forms. The medium has been pastels and oil paintings, using furniture with human qualities as the subject matter.’’
Just be an ‘urban mechanic’?
Take care of this.
— Photo by David Shankbone
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Providence mayoral candidate Brett Smiley, who has held high managerial positions in both Rhode Island state government and Providence City Hall, may well have chosen the right approach: Present himself as a version of the late Boston Mayor Thomas Menino – an “urban mechanic’’ who focuses on the basics of local governance – snow plowing, filling potholes, maintaining adequate police and fire protection, addressing various neighborhood quality-of-life issues, such as noise (leaf blowers, loud parties, etc.) and graffiti, repairing schools and public buildings and so on.
He would, apparently, tend to stay away from implementing new social-engineering programs. Good. They are best left to the state and federal governments, which have far greater resources to pay for them, if they actually make sense at all. And remember that cities and towns are legal children of the state. And we already ask such municipal employees as teachers and police officers to do far too much stuff – especially social work – that’s not in their core mission.
It’s too early to know whether Mr. Smiley has the fortitude, creativity, endurance and political coalition-building strength to get elected, and if he’s elected whether he could engender enough loyalty and fear to bend city employees to his will, as Tom Menino was famously able to do.
Michael McAuliff: Insulin bill goes to the Senate
The chances of passing election-year legislation to help diabetics afford insulin — which weeks ago seemed mired in political fighting — are looking brighter as a bipartisan effort to tackle the issue takes root in the Senate.
That effort is still in the early stages, but it is moving forward with the support of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who tapped Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) to craft a compromise that members of both parties could accept. Adding pressure to the Senate’s efforts was a vote by the House on March 31 to pass a different bill that caps out-of-pocket insulin costs for many patients with insurance at $35 a month.
Collins said in an interview March 30 that the two senators had come up with an outline based on a bill they worked on three years ago that goes beyond capping what diabetes patients pay and aims to bring down the prices drugmakers charge.
“It tackles the broader issue of the high list price for insulin, and the conflicts of interests that occur in the chain from manufacturer to the consumer buying it at the pharmacy counter,” Collins said.
The idea of reducing patients’ out-of-pocket insulin costs is immensely popular, and more than half of the public sees it as a “top priority” for Congress, according to a KFF poll out last week.
It had been a key selling point of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, but when that legislation stalled, Biden and Schumer gave Sen. Raphael Warnock (D.-Ga.) an open lane to promote a stand-alone measure identical to the House bill that caps insulin costs at $35 a month for people with private insurance and Medicare coverage.
The political climate, however, presented roadblocks. The odds that a bill sponsored by a Democrat facing a tough re-election in the fall could get enough Republicans in the Senate on board seemed slim, and even some Democrats were nervous about stripping the insulin provisions from a possible revised version of the Build Back Better bill. So Schumer embraced a different option from Collins and Shaheen that would include a cap on out-of-pocket costs and possibly draw more votes.
Insulin prices have spiked dramatically since the early 2000s, with Americans paying 10 times what people in other developed countries pay.
Although Collins said details are still being worked out, her legislation would be based on the pair’s earlier bill, the Insulin Price Reduction Act of 2019, which aimed to roll insulin costs back to what they were in 2006. It would have done that by barring rebate payments for insulin to pharmacy benefit managers — those intermediaries who negotiate price breaks for insurance companies and determine which drugs the insurance plans cover.
Collins and other critics of PBMs believe they inflate prices because they favor higher-priced drugs from which they can extract a larger rebate and therefore more profit, which gives drugmakers extra incentive to raise list prices.
Under that 2019 plan, drug manufacturers who agreed to return to 2006 costs could then raise prices each year only at the rate of medical inflation. The senators estimated the plan would lead to a 75% cut in prices from those listed in 2020.
“There’s a very complex system which essentially encourages high list prices, because the pharmacy benefit managers frequently receive a percentage of the list price,” Collins said. “So their incentive is to choose one that is higher-cost. And so we are trying to address that broader issue, as well as looking at the out-of-pocket costs.”
Warnock’s proposal to cap the cost of insulin is silent on list prices and benefit managers, an omission some Democrats complained about even as they voted for the similar bill in the House. They noted that since insurers would likely be forced to absorb the costs no longer paid by patients, the companies would likely raise premiums.
“This bill does not lower the price of insulin by one penny,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D.-Texas). “It just shifts the burden of paying for the insulin off of the shoulders of insured insulin users, and shifts it on to the rest of all of us who are paying insurance premiums.”
Collins also noted that the uninsured would not benefit from the House cap, which applies to Medicare and insurance companies but doesn’t affect drugmakers’ prices.
“It doesn’t help someone who’s uninsured,” Collins said. “When you address the high list price, then it’s going to help more people.”
Collins warned that much could change as lawmakers keep working with various stakeholders on a final bill, including diabetes advocacy groups, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Congressional Budget Office. And as caps on out-of-pocket expenses and list-price changes start interacting, things get complicated, indeed.
“We’re talking to CBO, which says it’s so complex that they need a new model,” Collins said.
The politics also remains tricky. Collins and Shaheen never got their measure close to the Senate floor in 2019 and 2020 when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was majority leader. They did attract some praise from both sides of the aisle, and conservative North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer was a co-sponsor.
While that opens the door to GOP support, Collins said she was still only at the stage of circulating among her colleagues what she called a discussion draft.
Republicans in the House who voted against the $35-cap bill panned it as a political stunt, saying Democrats should have advanced ideas that had been worked on with Republicans.
Such objections could not block the bill in the House. But in the Senate, Democrats command only 50 votes, and it would take 60 to pass the legislation.
Although GOP members of the upper chamber might also be opposed to Warnock’s bill, one of the House sponsors argued that having the House advance a dramatic cut in insulin costs — with the support of only a dozen Republicans — would raise the stakes for the Senate.
“If 10 Republicans stand between Americans being able to get access to insulin or not, that’s a good question for 10 Republican [senators] to have to answer when they go back home,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D.-Mich.) said ahead of the House vote. “So we’re gonna pass this bill, and this will put the pressure on the Senate to act.”
He and his fellow Democratic co-sponsors also signaled their willingness to take a measure that included the Shaheen and Collins additions.
“Any train that’s leaving the station that gets folks affordable insulin — I’m open to any vehicle,” Kildee said. “We think this is a solution that would work. How it gets to the president’s desk, I’m agnostic on that question. Any way we can get it there.”
Michael McAuliff is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
‘Grief and love within the frame’
“Through the dahlias, backyard, Auburndale’’ (archival digital print), by Mary Lang, in her show “Farandnear,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, June 1-26. She lives in Auburndale, part of Newton.
The gallery says:
“Mary Lang is known for her large scale, evocative color photographs, and for the groundless feeling of space held within the frame. These new images in ‘Farandnear’ hold space differently, encompassing both near and far in composition and focus. We often feel like we are looking past or through a screen or veil. There is a complexity in the details that both draw the viewer in and at the same time hold us back. Similarly for Lang, the climate crisis feels both far -- in that we can’t fully comprehend the most horrific events yet to come, so we push them away — and unbelievably near, in that mere observation of ice on the Charles River or plants in the garden tell us what is happening before our eyes.
“The exhibition is titled “Farandnear’’ after a Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations property in Shirley, an historic summer home aptly named because it was ‘far’ enough to require a two-day journey by horse to reach, but ‘near’ enough to be a vacation home. Lang’s camera records wild beaver swamps and ordinary urban patches of weeds, as well as images of her garden, in equal measure. The images are lush with growth; even in winter the earth offers an abundance. She says: ‘For me there is no distinction between the beauty of the untouched landscapes or the ones we often overlook because they are ubiquitous. It’s a matter of paying attention. They all hold both grief and love within the frame’’’
Old Shirley Town Hall
Shirley Shaker Village in 1884
The Turtle Lane Playhouse, in Auburndale
‘136 weathers in 24 hours’
The “April Fool’s Snowstorm’’ of 1997
“There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration — and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of twenty-four hours.’’
— Mark Twain (1835-1910), in his “New England Weather” speech to the New England Society on Dec. 22, 1876. The native of Missouri spent much of his adult life at his grand house in Hartford and spent his last two years at his house in Redding, Conn.