What they’ll remember
— Photo by kallerna
“In early autumn, there’s a concerto
possible when there’s a guest in the house
and the guest is taking a shower and the host
is washing up from the night before….
‘‘Much later they will remember only a color,
a golden yellow, and the sound of their feet
scuffling the leaves. A day without rancor….’’
— From “The Music One Looks Back On,’’ by Boston-based poet Stephen Dobyns (born 1941)
Surreal view
“North Head Afternoon’’ (oil painting), by Evan McGlinn, at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, in its “Fall 2022 Solo Exhibitions,’’ through Nov. 6.
The gallery says the show features 10 artists representing “a wide range of mediums and styles from photography to painting to etching.’’
Mr. McGlinn's "North Head Afternoon" is “a surreal snapshot of a classic New England scene. The oil painting behind the three bottle-lined windows seems to glow from within, illuminating the space.’’
A romantic route coming?
Long but scenic: Proposed route of Boston-Montreal sleeper train.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
What a neat idea! For years, government officials and businesspeople in New England and Quebec have talked of running an overnight sleeper train, with dining and club cars and even entertainment, from Boston to Montreal, via southern Maine and then up through New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Now, spearheaded by a Quebec organization called Fondation Trains de Nuit, the initiative is gaining speed, although the service probably couldn’t start until 2025-2026.
A couple of hundred million dollars would probably be needed to bring the the proposed route, all owned by private railroads, up to passenger-rail standard, but studies suggest it could be successfully marketed. For one thing, it would connect two large and dynamic metro areas (good for the economies of both); for another, projections are that the service’s tickets would cost considerably less than ones to fly, and perhaps most alluring, it would offer a fun, romantic and low-stress route through scenic terrain. And fewer young people these days want to drive.
A friendly reminder
From North Adams, Mass.-based painter Julia Dixon’s current show. “Memento Mori,’’ at the Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Mass.
She says of her show:
“My current painting series … depicts individuals in arresting scenes in order to confront viewers about time and impermanence. These paintings, as well as smaller oil and watercolor studies of skulls, insects, flowers, and other symbolic objects, are meditations on the inevitability of death while, at the same time, affirmations of the beauty and tenderness of life….
“My interest is in juxtaposing symbols hidden in Christian artworks and classical still lives, particularly those of the Dutch Golden Age, with modern secular environments and nature to explore the emotional implications of presence and absence, fear, futility, and legacy.’’
Park Square in downtown Pittsfield in 2014
— Photo by Protophobic
Llewellyn King: The talent shortage that imperils journalism
In the newsroom of the still successful New York Times.
Boston’s Newspaper Row, circa 1906, showing the locations of The Boston Post (left), The Boston Globe (center-left) and The Boston Journal (center-right).
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
“Journalists can be so good at reporting others, but are seldom good at reporting {on} themselves.”
That is what my friend Kevin d’Arcy, a distinguished British journalist, wrote in an article titled “Living in Interesting Times,” published recently on the Web site of the United Kingdom Chapter of the Association of European Journalists.
D’Arcy, who has worked for major publications in the U.K. and Canada, including The Economist and the Financial Times, argues, “The biggest change is that the job of journalism no longer belongs to journalists alone. To some extent this has always been true but, largely because of social media, the scale is touching the sky.
“This matters for the simple reason that the public lacks the traditional protection of legal and social rules. There is nobody in control. … The common realm is sinking fast.”
So true. But his argument raises the question: Is journalism itself doing its job these days?
I usually eschew discussion about journalism — its present state, imagined biases and its future. Dan Raviv, a former correspondent for CBS News on radio and television, told me in a television interview, “My job is simple: I try to find out what is going on, then I tell people.”
I have never heard the job of a journalist better explained.
Of course, the journalist knows other things: the tricks of the trade, such as news judgment; how to get the reader reading, the viewer watching, and the listener listening and, hopefully, to keep their attention.
Professionals know how to guesstimate how much readers, viewers and listeners might want to know about a particular issue. They know how to avoid libel and keep clear of dubious, manipulative sources.
But journalism’s skills are fading, along with the newspapers and the broadcast outlets that fostered and treasured them.
Publications are dying or surviving on an uncertain drip from a life-support system. Newspapers that once boasted global coverage are now little more than pamphlets. The Baltimore Sun, for example, in its day a great newspaper, once had 12 overseas bureaus. No more.
Three newspapers dominate America: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times. They got out in front and owe their position there to successfully pushing their brands on the Internet early. Now they have still have lots of advertising revenue from their print versions, and increasing revenue from their Web sites, with their pay walls.
Local news coverage may come back as it once was, but this time through local digital sites. I prefer traditional newspapers, but the future of local news appears to be online.
A major and critical threat to journalism comes from within: It is a dearth of talent. You get what you pay for; publishers aren’t paying for talent, and that is corrosive. Newspaper and regional TV and radio salaries have always been abysmally low, and now they are the worst they have been in 50 years. This is discouraging needed talent.
For more than 30 years, I owned a newsletter-publishing company in Washington, D.C., and I hired summer interns — and paid them. Some of the early recruits went on to success in journalism, and some to remarkable success.
Latterly, I got the same bright journalism students — young men and women so able that you could send them to a hearing on Capitol Hill or assign them a complex story with confidence.
The most gifted, alas, weren’t headed for newsrooms, but for law school. They told me that as much as they were interested in reporting, they weren’t interested in low-wage lives.
Most reporters across America earn less than $40,000. Even at the mighty Washington Post, a unionized newspaper, beat reporters make just $62,000 a year.
To tell the story of a turbulent world, you need gifted, creative, well-read people, committed to the job. The bold and the bright are not going to commit to a life of penury.
To my friend Kevin, I must say, If we can’t offer a viable alternative to the social-media cacophony, if we have a workforce of the second-rate, if the news product is inadequate, and untouched by knowledgeable human editors, then the slide will continue. Editing by computer is not editing. I appreciate editing, and I know how much better my work is for it.
The journalism that Kevin and I have reveled in over these many decades will perish without new talent. Talent will out, and hopefully provide the answers that our trade needs.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. He was an editor at The Washington Post and some other large papers in America and England.
For last time until spring?
“Path through the Dunes” (oil on canvas), by Vermont-based artist, writer and farmer Greg Bernhardt, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
His artist says:
“I am a painter living in central Vermont on a farm that my wife, Hannah Sessions, and I began 20 years ago. With animal husbandry and producing award winning cheeses as the reason why we live where we do, painting and writing has been the method by which we understand what we do here.
Blue Ledge Farm affords us an intimate look at the relationship between people and animals, and an appreciation of the land as we spend the vast amount of our time on this plot of earth and have come to know it as deeply as we could anything.
Since having majored in Studio Art and Creative Writing at Bates College (in Maine) in the late ’90s, and having lived abroad studying the Italian language, Renaissance Art, and Italian Literature in Florence, Italy 1997-1998, I have aimed to merge the central themes of my life and found in the end that all these focal points rely on one another, the farm and its inhabitants, the artisanal cheese craft, and the creative acts of writing and painting about these subject matters.’’
Companies’ creepy surveillance of their own workers
The evil dictator in George Orwell’s 1984
Via OtherWords.org
For generations, workers have been punished by corporate bosses for watching the clock. But now, the corporate clock is watching workers.
Called “digital productivity monitoring,” this surveillance is done by an integrated computer system including a real-time clock, camera, keyboard tracker, and algorithms to provide a second-by-second record of what each employee is doing.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pioneered use of this ticking electronic eye in his monstrous warehouses, forcing hapless, low-paid “pickers” to sprint down cavernous stacks of consumer stuff to fill online orders, pronto — beat the clock, or be fired.
Terrific idea, exclaimed taskmasters at hospital chains, banks, tech giants, newspapers, colleges, and other outfits employing millions of mid-level professionals.
They’ve been installing these unblinking digital snoops to watch their employees, even timing their bathroom breaks and constantly eying each one’s pace of work. They’ve plugged in new software with such Orwellian names as WorkSmart and Time Doctor to count worker’s keystrokes and to snap pictures every 10 minutes of workers’ faces and screens, recording all on digital scoreboards.
You are paid only for the minutes the computers “see” you in action. Bosses hail the electronic minders as “Fitbits” of productivity, spurring workers to keep noses to the grindstone, and also to instill workplace honesty.
Only… the whole scheme is dishonest.
No employee’s worthiness can be measured in keystrokes and 10-minute snapshots! What about thinking, conferring with colleagues, or listening to customers? No “productivity points” are awarded for that work.
For example, The New York Times reports that the multibillion-dollar United Health Group marks its drug-addiction therapists “idle” if they are conversing off-line with patients, leaving their keyboards inactive.
Employees call this digital management “demoralizing,” “toxic,” and “just wrong.” But corporate investors are pouring billions into it. Which group do you trust to shape America’s workplace?
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.
'Persistent interrogation'
“Checkerboard ("It's How You Play the Game"), (mixed-media collage). by Greater Boston artist Rosamond Purcell, in her first retrospective show, “Nature Stands Aside,’’ at the Addison Gallery, at Phillips Andover Academy, Andover, Mass., through Dec. 31.
The gallery says:
“Murre eggs nestled in cotton that appear to have been decorated by an overzealous Abstract Expressionist, a blanched piranha charging ahead in a glass jar of orange-tinged formaldehyde, a cast off typewriter transformed by time into an octopean tangle of rusticles. From luscious large format Polaroid prints to objects rescued from obscurity, the empathetic, evocative, and multifaceted work of the photographer and conceptual artist Rosamond Purcell (born 1942) explores the ill-defined interstices between the unsettling and the sublime, the beautiful and the bizarre, the natural and the manufactured. As a body of work, it lays bare humanity’s desperate desire to collect and make sense of it all.
“Over a career spanning some fifty years, Purcell has collaborated with paleontologists, anthropologists, historians, museum curators, termite experts, and even a scholar-magician to illuminate and explore the shifting boundaries between art and science. She has found some of her greatest inspiration in long-overlooked storage spaces in natural history museums across the world and in the hills and the shacks of a 13-acre junkyard located in an otherwise picturesque Maine coastal town. Purcell’s six decades of work, while brilliantly varied and resistant to easy classification, speaks eloquently to the artist’s persistent interrogation of the ways in which humanity has and continues to attempt, often fruitlessly, to understand the world around it.”
Parasite state
Terminal of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, whose name is aimed at grabbing Greater Boston business.
— Photo by MaxVT
“As part of the regional metro-Boston area, southern New Hampshire offers all the benefits typically associated with major metro areas yet maintains the advantages of being in a truly enterprise-friendly state: access to a world-class workforce, a pro-business, low-tax environment, and a streamlined regulatory environment.’’
— New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu
Omicron boosters: Is salesmanship trumping science?
Moderna headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
Last month, the Food and Drug Administration authorized Omicron-specific vaccines (with Moderna’s the best known), accompanied by breathless science-by-press release and a media blitz. Just days after the FDA’s move, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention followed, recommending updated boosters for anyone age 12 and up who had received at least two doses of the original COVID-19 vaccines. The message to a nation still struggling with the COVID pandemic: The cavalry — in the form of a shot — is coming over the hill.
But for those familiar with the business tactics of the pharmaceutical industry, that exuberant messaging — combined with the lack of completed studies — has caused considerable heartburn and raised an array of unanswered concerns.
The updated shots easily clear the “safe and effective” bar for government authorization. But in the real world, are the Omicron-specific vaccines significantly more protective — and in what ways — than the original COVID vaccines so many have already taken? If so, who would benefit most from the new shots? Since the federal government is purchasing these new vaccines — and many of the original, already purchased vaccines may never find their way into taxpayers’ arms — is the $3.2 billion price tag worth the unclear benefit? Especially when these funds had to be pulled from other covid response efforts, like testing and treatment.
Several members of the CDC advisory committee that voted 13-1 for the recommendation voiced similar questions and concerns, one saying she only “reluctantly” voted in the affirmative.
Some said they set aside their desire for more information and better data and voted yes out of fear of a potential winter COVID surge. They expressed hope that the new vaccines — or at least the vaccination campaign that would accompany their rollout — would put a dent in the number of future cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
That calculus is, perhaps, understandable at a time when an average of more than 300 Americans are dying of COVID each day.
But it leaves front-line health care providers in the impossible position of trying to advise individual patients whether and when to take the hot new vaccines without complete data and in the face of marketing hype.
Don’t get us wrong. We’re grateful and amazed that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna (with assists from the National Institutes of Health and Operation Warp Speed) developed an effective vaccine in record time, freeing the nation from the deadliest phase of the covid pandemic, when thousands were dying each day. The pandemic isn’t over, but the vaccines are largely credited for enabling most of America to return to a semblance of normalcy. We’re both up-to-date with our covid vaccinations and don’t understand why anyone would choose not to be, playing Russian roulette with their health.
But as society moves into the next phase of the pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry may be moving into more familiar territory: developing products that may be a smidgen better than what came before, selling — sometimes overselling — their increased effectiveness in the absence of adequate controlled studies or published data, advertising them as desirable for all when only some stand to benefit significantly, and in all likelihood raising the price later.
This last point is concerning because the government no longer has funds to purchase COVID vaccines after this autumn. Funding to cover the provider fees for vaccinations and community outreach to those who would most benefit from vaccination has already run out. So updated boosters now and in the future will likely go to the “worried well” who have good insurance rather than to those at highest risk for infection and progression to severe disease.
The FDA’s mandated task is merely to determine whether a new drug is safe and effective. However, the FDA could have requested more clinical vaccine effectiveness data from Pfizer and Moderna before authorizing their updated omicron BA.5 boosters.
Yet the FDA cannot weigh in on important follow-up questions: How much more effective are the updated boosters than vaccines already on the market? In which populations? And what increase in effectiveness is enough to merit an increase in price (a so-called cost-benefit analysis)? Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, perform such an analysis before allowing new medicines onto the market, to negotiate a fair national price.
The updated booster vaccine formulations are identical to the original covid vaccines except for a tweak in the mRNA code to match the omicron BA.5 virus. Studies by Pfizer showed that its updated Omicron BA.1 booster provides a 1.56 times higher increase in neutralizing antibody titers against the BA.1 virus as compared with a booster using its original vaccine. Moderna’s studies of its updated Omicron BA.1 booster demonstrated very similar results. However, others predict that a 1.5 times higher antibody titer would yield only slight improvement in vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic illness and severe disease, with a bump of about 5 percent and 1 percent, respectively. Pfizer and Moderna are just starting to study their updated Omicron BA.5 boosters in human trials.
Though the studies of the updated Omicron BA.5 boosters were conducted only in mice, the agency’s authorization is in line with precedent: The FDA clears updated flu shots for new strains each year without demanding human testing. But with flu vaccines, scientists have decades of experience and a better understanding of how increases in neutralizing antibody titers correlate with improvements in vaccine effectiveness. That’s not the case with COVID vaccines. And if mouse data were a good predictor of clinical effectiveness, we’d have an HIV vaccine by now.
As population immunity builds up through vaccination and infection, it’s unclear whether additional vaccine boosters, updated or not, would benefit all ages equally. In 2022, the U.S. has seen COVID-hospitalization rates among people 65 and older increase relative to younger age groups. And while COVID vaccine boosters seem to be cost-effective in the elderly, they may not be in younger populations. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices considered limiting the updated boosters to people 50 and up, but eventually decided that doing so would be too complicated.
Unfortunately, history shows that — as with other pharmaceutical products — once a vaccine arrives and is accompanied by marketing, salesmanship trumps science: Many people with money and insurance will demand it whether data ultimately proves it is necessary for them individually or not.
We are all likely to encounter the SARS-CoV-2 virus again and again, and the virus will continue to mutate, giving rise to new variants year after year. In a country where significant portions of at-risk populations remain unvaccinated and unboosted, the fear of a winter surge is legitimate.
But will the widespread adoption of a vaccine — in this case yearly updated COVID boosters — end up enhancing protection for those who really need it or just enhance drugmakers’ profits? And will it be money well spent?
The federal government has been paying a negotiated price of $15 to $19.50 a dose of mRNA vaccine under a purchasing agreement signed during the height of the pandemic. When those government agreements lapse, analysts expect the price to triple or quadruple, and perhaps even more for updated yearly COVID boosters, which Moderna’s CEO said would evolve “like an iPhone.” To deploy these shots and these dollars wisely, a lot less hype and a lot more information might help.
Elisabeth Rosenthal (erosenthal@kff.org, @rosenthalhealth) and Céline Gounder (cgounder@kff.org) are Kaiser Health News journalists.
Bella DeVaan, Rebekah Entralgo: Skimping on schools while squandering money on the rich
Plaque on School Street, Boston, commemorating the site of the first Boston Latin School building. Boston Latin, the city’s most prestigious high school, was founded in 1635, before there were “high schools,’’ making it by far the oldest public school in America.
Via OtherWords.org
As students have been returning to the classroom, school districts across the country are facing a historic number of teacher vacancies — an estimated 300,000, according to the National Education Association (NEA), the largest U.S. teachers union.
Some states are particularly hard hit, with approximately 2,000 empty positions in Illinois and Arizona, 3,000 in Nevada, and 9,000 in Florida.
How are political leaders responding? A number of rural Texas districts have moved to a four-day school schedule, creating major hassles for working parents. A new Arizona law will no longer require a bachelor’s degree for full-time teachers. Florida is allowing military veterans to temporarily teach without prior certification. Florida’s Broward County recruited over 100 teachers from The Philippines.
These band-aid actions ignore the root causes of the teacher crisis: low pay and burnout.
A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that teachers made 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates in 2021. That’s the widest gap ever — despite the extraordinary challenges teachers have faced during the pandemic. The gap is even wider in some of the states with the largest teacher shortages, reaching 32 percent in Arizona, for example.
Across the country, real wages for public school teachers have essentially flatlined since 1996.
When the NEA surveyed teachers earlier this year, 55 percent reported they plan to leave the profession sooner than planned. An overwhelming 91 percent pointed to burnout as their biggest concern, with 96 percent supporting raising salaries as a means to address burnout.
Some states are getting the message: In New Mexico, lawmakers have instituted minimum teacher salary tiers based on experience — beginning at $50,000 and maintaining a $64,000 median wage. They’re also aiming to codify annual 7 percent raises so that teachers don’t lose ground to inflation.
“These raises represent the difference of being on Medicaid with your family, the difference of having to have a second or third job or doing tutoring work on the side, the difference of driving the bus during the day and having to take extra routes just to make ends meet,” said New Mexico teacher John Dyrcz in a recent interview with More Perfect Union.
In other areas, teachers are harnessing their collective bargaining power to make their demands heard. Thousands of teachers in Ohio, Washington state, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., went on strike during the first weeks of the academic year.
The educators’ union in Columbus, Ohio, demands a simple, public “commitment to modern schools”: not only pay raises but also smaller class sizes, decent air conditioning, adequate funding for the arts and physical education, and caps on numbers of periods taught in a row.
Read one picketer’s sign: “You think we give up easy? Ask how long we wait to PEE!”
Meeting such demands requires public investment. And unfortunately, too many lawmakers favor lining the coffers of the wealthy instead of funding our school systems.
In 2021, the Columbus Dispatch estimates schools in the city lost out on $51 million to local real estate developers. In New York, an over $200 million reduction in school budgets has provoked public outcry in a city where luxury builders have pocketed well over $1 billion in tax breaks each year.
The Columbus teachers union soon came to a “conceptual agreement” with the city’s schools, ending their strike. Let’s hope this is a sign of a turning tide. Through a relentless pandemic, vicious censorship of curricula, and surging inequality, we cannot continue to skimp on education while squandering our resources on the wealthy.
Rebekah Entralgo (@rebekahentralgo) is the managing editor for Inequality.org. Bella DeVaan (@bdevaan) is the research and editorial assistant for Inequality.org.
‘September rain’
Jack Korouac’s grave in Edson Cemetery, Lowell
— Photo by DanielPenfield
“And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?”
― Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), American novelist and poet, in his novel The Town and the City, The novel is set in the early Beat Generation circle of New York in the late 1940s and on Galloway, Mass., based on Lowell. The experiences of the young "Peter Martin" struggling for success on the high school football team are largely those of Jack Kerouac (he returns to the subject again in his last work, Vanity of Duluoz, published in 1968).
David Warsh: Blame Harvard
The Taubman Building at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
A “Freudian slip,” according to Wikipedia, is “an error in speech, memory, or physical action that occurs due to the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought.” Slips of the tongue are classic examples, but other manifestations include “misreadings, mishearings, mis-typings, temporary forgetting, and the mislaying and losing of objects.” The insight is a vivid reminder of what was learned from the 20th Century discipline known as psychoanalysis: some, definitely, but perhaps not as much as they thought.
I committed an act of misstatement that requires more explanation than mere correction when I recently wrote that “[Boris] Yeltsin…presided over a decade of ‘shock therapy,’ a massive helter-skelter privatization of government-owned Russian assets based largely on ideas propounded in College Park, Md., and Cambridge, Mass.”
College Park had nothing to do with what happened next.
Its IRIS Center, an economic strategy and development advisory service based at the Beltway campus of the University of Maryland, was founded in 1990. Even the source of its acronym, if there was one, is now lost to history. IRIS was the loser to Harvard University in a brief, bitter contest for State Department patronage at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Among IRIS founders were Mancur Olson, who might have been recognized with a Nobel Prize had he lived long enough, and Thomas Schelling, who lived long enough to collect one. The director was Charles Cadwell, a lawyer with plenty of experience with deregulation. Mostly involved in articulating proposals for Russia was theorist Peter Murrell, who advocated a considerably more cautious approach to industrial privatization and nation-building than the so-called “shock therapy” approach that carried the day.
Murrell’s 1990 book, The Nature of Socialist Economies: Lessons from Eastern European Foreign Trade (Princeton), had the advantage of being closely related to ideas espoused by Hungarian economist Janos Kornai, another member of the Nobel nomination league who died without recognition. Murrell is more than ever worth reading today.
What might have happened if independent businessman H. Ross Perot had stayed out of the 1992 presidential race? Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote, enough to tip victory to the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. Had George H. W. Bush been re-elected, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and James Baker and National Security adviser Brent Scowcroft and their team would have directed U.S. policy towards Russia for the next four years. Talk about NATO expansion “not one inch east” might have become carefully qualified. Russia’s proposed “big bang” transition might have taken a different path. But Clinton won the presidency. He and his advisers had ideas of their own.
I followed Murrell for a time but became swept up in the excitement surrounding the incoming Clinton administration, among other matters. Would-be Harvard advisers to Russia seemed to be everywhere in those days. They included Kennedy School Dean Graham Allison and economists Marin Feldstein, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrei Shleifer. But it turned out that a 1989 conference in Moscow of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the tripartite National Bureau of Economic Research from the U.S. had formed relationships that led to the deal. In 1992, Harvard’s Institute for International Development obtained a State Department contact to advise Yeltsin’s government.
Five years later the U.S. Department of Justice sued HIID, after Shleifer, a Russian expatriate, and his wife, hedge-fund manager Nancy Zimmerman, were caught trying to enter the Russian mutual-fund industry on their own. The government got its money back, and HIID was extinguished, just as was IRIS. A few years later I began Because They Could: The Harvard-Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years (2018, Create Space).
Next week, back to the grim present day.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.
From order to chaos
“My Cup Runneth Over “(oil on aluminum panel), by West Newton, Mass.-based artist Marian Dioguardi, in her show “At the Edge of Seeing,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through Oct. 7
She says: "When does ‘looking’ become ‘seeing’? In this series of observational paintings, I am asking ‘Where is that edge of observational order and where does it dissolve into visual chaos?’’’
Overwrought fears of a Providence bike trail
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The controversy over setting up a bike and walking lane (sometimes called an “urban trail”) in a commercially successful and charming stretch of Hope Street on Providence’s East Side has raised the inevitable issue of parking, which upsets some merchants and shoppers alike.
See:
The proposal would replace some of the street-side space now allocated to parked cars. Big parts of the fight come both from too many Americans’ unwillingness to walk more than a few feet from their cars to shop (and you can see the results in their physiques) and residential neighbors not wanting cars crowding nearby streets.
This gets me to think that the strip needs some sort of attractive (faced with brick or wood?) parking garage to take off some of the pressure.
Meanwhile, a big problem with bike lanes in some places is the failure of bicyclists to learn and obey basic traffic rules, e.g., signaling, and of police to enforce them. Time for Providence Police and other officials to work on that, including with signs and hefty fines!
Some of the local merchants want the city to call off a trial of the trail set for Oct. 1-8. No, the experiment should go forward! Let’s see how it unfolds and then either drop the idea or, if the project is to become permanent, adjust as needed. Of course, any change like this brings out Nimbyism and anxiety in people who have operated in a setting that has changed relatively little over the years.
But read what’s happened elsewhere.
https://thesource.metro.net/2017/11/20/biking-is-good-for-business/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/biking-lanes-business-health-1.5165954
https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/the-latest-evidence-that-bike-lanes-are-good-for-business-f3a99cda9b80
Bicycle parking at the Alewife subway station, in Cambridge, Mass., at the intersection of three cycle paths.
— Photo by Arnold Reinhold
‘Not so awful as that elsewhere’
Factory scene in Fall River in 1920.
“I cannot praise some aspects of the Yankee city. Such ulcerous growths of industrial New England as Lowell, Lawrence, Lynn, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, and Chelsea seem the products of nightmare. To spend a day in Fall River is to realize how limited were the imaginations of poets who have described hell. It is only when one remembers Newark, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, West Philadelphia, Gary, Hammond, Akron, and South Bend that this leprosy seems tolerable. The refuse of industrialism knows no sectional boundaries and is common to all America. It could be soundly argued that the New England debris is not so awful as that elsewhere – not so hideous as upper New Jersey or so terrifying as the New South. It could be shown that the feeble efforts of society to cope with this disease are not so feeble here as elsewhere. But realism has a sounder knowledge: industrial leadership has passed from New England, and its disease will wane. Lowell will slide into the Merrimack, and the salt marsh will once more cover Lynn — or nearly so. They will recede; the unpolluted sea air will blow over them, and the Yankee nature will reclaim its own.’’
— From “New England: There She Stands,’’ by historian, essayist and editor Bernard De Voto (1897-1955) in the March 1932 Harper’s Magazine. The article, written during the Great Depression is a fair and very resonant paean to the region. It’s still well worth reading.
1905 postcard
Same places, different scenes
Harry Adler travels every morning as dark yields to dawn. He’s always on foot, running through Pawtuxet Village (straddling Cranston and Warwick, R.I.), where he lives. Along the way, he photographs that day’s magnificence.
Deep blue cove water melding into powder-blue sky. Snow frosting feathered reeds. Geese with orange feet waddling up a boat ramp. Trees mirror-imaged in the silvery Pawtuxet River. Historic houses in silhouette.
Adler began posting his village photos on Facebook and Instagram three years ago, and more so since the COVID pandemic erupted. Legions of admirers recognize his talent.
“The eye of the morning is winking at you,” writes one Facebook friend of a sunrise photo. “Your eye sees things that most don’t,” writes another. Many thank Adler for brightening their mornings and sparing them from waking up when he does – at 4:13 a.m. (in time to feed the five cats and run three to five miles).
Adler’s photographs will be displayed at “Traveling in Place,” an exhibit at the Aspray Boat House, 2 East View St., Warwick, R.I., in partnership with The Edgewood Village. Friends, including artist Bert Crenca, suggested that Adler exhibit his work: Adler agreed so long as part of the proceeds go to The Village Common of Rhode Island.
The exhibit’s title stems from Adler’s observation: “When I started running in the Pawtuxet Village area, I was noticing that every day was dramatically different. And that became the thought behind ‘Traveling in Place.’ I’m still in the same place, but feel like I’m traveling because I’m not seeing the same things all the time. Each day is brand new.’’
Adler, co-owner of Adler’s Design Center & Hardware, on Wickenden Street in Providence, is familiar to many Rhode Islanders. Customers know him as the pleasant font-of-knowledge guy behind the paint counter.
Adler sets out just after 6 a.m. from the 1857 Greek Revival house he owns with his partner, Suzy Box. He runs while searching the skies and scoping out the light. If the light is right, he clicks the shutter on his IPhone 12 Pro.
He shoots his images from the same spots at the Pawtuxet Cove Marina, Stillhouse Cove and the Rhode Island Yacht Club -- same locales but ever-changing beauty.
Opening reception and “Meet the Artist” on Saturday, Sept. 17, at 5 to 8 p.m. Show continues Sunday, Sept. 18, at 12-3 p.m. Refreshments, live music and free parking. For more information, please contact Sorrel Devine at eirehead1@gmail.com
‘Doctor of the dead’
“Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission.’’
Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., Indian-American physician, biologist and writer
‘The life of objects’
“Picking the Bones” (assemblage and painting), by Boston-based Eben Haines, in his show “In the House of Empire Everything’s Fine,’’ at Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine, through Sept. 11.
“His work investigates the life of objects through works that emphasize the constructed nature of history. Haines’s paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations employ various techniques and materials to suggest the passage of time and volatility. Many works explore the conventions of portraiture, through figures and objects pictured against cinematic backdrops or in otherworldly scenes.’’
At the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, in Wells, 2,250 acres of protected land based at a restored saltwater farm called Laudholm. As a National Estuarine Research Reserve, the staff at the reserve works to expand knowledge of coasts and estuaries, engage people in environmental learning, and involve communities in conservation, all with a goal of protecting and restoring coastal ecosystems around the Gulf of Maine.