We live like ants
“Colony” (detail) (ink on paper), by Catherine Chalmers, in her current show at the Lamont Gallery, Exeter, N.H.
She says:
“We have compared ourselves to ants, in our stories and fables, for thousands of years. As our cities grow larger and humanity becomes a predominantly urban species, we live more and more like ants do. The features of city life—dense urban environments, frequent physical contact, fixed homes used day after day—have countless advantages, but as we have witnessed with the COVID- 19 pandemic, they make it much easier for disease to spread to all members of a society, whether anthropoid or arthropod.’’
Llewellyn King: The agony of statelessness
Stateless children at at the Schauenstein, Germany, displaced-persons camp in about 1946. There were millions of displaced and stateless people in Europe as World War II ended.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have only known one stateless person. You don't get a medal for it or wear a lapel pin.
The stateless are the hapless who live in the shadows, in fear.
They don't know where the next misadventure will come from: It could be deportation, imprisonment or an enslavement of the kind the late Johnny Prokov suffered as a shipboard stowaway for seven years.
His story ended well, but few do.
When I knew Johnny, he was a revered bartender at the National Press Club in Washington. By then, he had American citizenship, was married and lived a normal life.
It hadn't always been that way. He told me that he had come from Dalmatia, when that area was so poor people took their clothes to a specialist who would kill the lice in the seams with a little wooden mallet, which wouldn't damage the cloth.
To escape that extreme poverty, Prokov became a stowaway on a ship.
So began his seven-year odyssey of exploitation and fear of violence. The captains took advantage of the free labor and total servitude of the stowaways.
Eventually, Prokov jumped ship in Mexico. He made his way to the United States, where a life worth living was available.
I don't know the details of how he became a citizen, but he dreamed the American dream — and it came true for him.
An odd legacy of his years at sea was that Prokov had become a brilliant chess player. He would often have as many as a dozen chess games going along the bar in the National Press Club. He always won. He had had time to practice.
The United Nations says there are 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a massive undercount. Many of those who are stateless are refugees and have no idea if they are entitled to claim citizenship of the countries they are desperate to escape from. Citizenship in Gaza?
Now the Trump administration wants to add to the number of stateless people by denying birthright citizenship to children born of illegal immigrants in the United States.
It wants to deny people — who are in all ways Americans — their constitutional right of citizenship. Their lives will be lived on a lower rung than their friends and contemporaries. They will be denied passports, maybe education, possibly medical care, and the ability to emigrate to any country that otherwise might have received them.
Instead, they will live their lives in the shadows, children of a lesser God, probably destined to have children of their own who might also be deemed noncitizens. They didn't choose the womb that bore them, nor did they sanction the actions of their parents.
The world is awash in refugees fleeing war, crime and violence, and environmental collapse. Those desperate people will seek refuge in countries which can't absorb them and will take strong actions to keep them out, as have the United States and, increasingly, countries in Europe.
There is a point, particularly in Europe, where the culture, including established religion, is threatened by different cultures and clashing religions.
But when it comes to children born in America to mothers who live in America, why mint a new class of stateless people, condemned to a second-class life here, or deport them to some country, such as Rwanda or Uganda, where its own people are already living in abject poverty?
All immigrants can't be accommodated, but the cruelty that now passes for policy is hurtful to those who have worked hard and dared to seek a better life for themselves and their children.
It is bad enough that millions of people are seeking somewhere to live and perchance a better life, due to war or crime or drought or political follies.
To extend the numbers by denying citizenship to the children of parents who live and work here isn't good policy. It is also unconstitutional.
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the administration, it will add social instability of haunting proportions.
Children are proud of their native lands. What will the new second class be proud of — the home that denied them?
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.
Nice idea, for someplace
“The MacDonald boys playing golf,’’ attributed to William Mosman, 18th Century, at National Galleries of Scotland.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
To no one’s surprise, the Westerly (R.I) Planning Board, now backed by a state court decision, rejected Winn Properties’ proposal to create a 2,300-unit housing project to replace the well-known 18-hole Winnapaug Country Club; some 30 percent are supposed to fall under that oft-nebulous term “affordable’’.
Of course, most Westerly folks back the idea of affordable housing – somewhere. But the proposed project would be mighty big for the town of about 23,000, which has a lot of rich people, many of them seasonal and most near or along water, as is the golf course. The richest are in the Watch Hill section. And rich people generally don’t want poorer, let alone truly poor, people near them. Further, they pay big piles of property taxes, drawing the affectionate attention of local officials.
One reason that foes presented for opposing the project was fear of pollution into Winnapaug Pond. But most golf courses, for all their verdant beauty, are sources of much pollution from fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.
In any event, I wouldn’t be surprised if the golf course eventually becomes a development of McMansions and/or some big resort spa. Maybe with a nine-hole course to aid marketing.
Still looking back
“I Carry It With Me,’’ by Pr0vidence-based Georgia native Becci Davis, in her show “Bloodstone + Home,’’ at Jamestown (R.I.) Arts Center through Nov. 8
— Image courtesy of Jamestown Arts Center
The arts center explains:
“Through a layered and striking ‘collage aesthetic,’ Davis explores her own ancestral history and, she says, documents the contradiction between the natural beauty that her ancestral land bares and the architectural beauty of historic monumental buildings built by the labor of slaves. This exhibition is shown in tandem with ‘Bohemian Ossuary,’ by artist D.S. Kinsel.’’
Chris Powell: Raising Conn. minimum wager is an expression of failure
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Gov. Ned Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo last week announced gleefully that Connecticut's minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 by 3.6%, from $16.35 to $16.94 an hour, being tied by state law to the federal employment cost index. The justifications they offered were not persuasive. Indeed, they were based on false premises.
“Nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty," the governor said, as if working full-time necessarily has some connection to the monetary value of the work.
All honest work may be honorable, but menial work -- work that can be done by anyone -- is not worth $16.94 an hour if someone can be found to do it for less. The minimum wage is government's idea of what menial work should be worth in an ideal world, an aspiration -- well-meaning in some cases, perhaps, but mostly just government's striking a pose about its own goodness.
The governor's statement about not living in poverty is just liberal blather, especially in Connecticut, as the governor should know well. That $16.94 per hour is $654 a week, even as social-work and economic research groups long have calculated that to live decently in Connecticut a single person needs an income of at least three times as much.
The governor's economic principle about the minimum wage is no more meaningful than everyone else's principle that it shouldn't rain on weekends.
Despite the minimum-wage increase, tens of thousands of people in Connecticut will keep working for pay well above minimum wage while still living in or on the edge of poverty. Part of it will be their own fault, their living beyond their means, and part of it the government's.
Lt. Gov. Bysiewicz did no better. “The minimum wage," she said, “was established to provide a fair, livable baseline of income for those who work." The lieutenant governor's pay, about $190,000 a year, is 5½ times more than Connecticut's new full-time minimum-wage salary, $34,000. If she ever did the numbers seriously, how fair and livable would minimum wage sound to her?
Bysiewicz added, “This is a fair, gradual increase for workers that ensures that as the economy grows, our minimum wage grows with it -- and that's good for everyone."
Except that the economy really isn't growing much at all. What's growing is mainly inflation, the devaluation of the money that workers earn.
At least Commissioner Bartolomeo approached this point. Raising the minimum wage, she said, “helps protect the most vulnerable earners from inflation and cost increases, and helps keeps wage gaps from widening."
Hardly. Inflation long has been underreported by the federal government, with price criteria frequently revised in the hope that people wouldn't believe the evidence of their own lives, the decline in their standard of living. Most of those voting in the last election seem to have stopped believing official inflation data. And even liberals in Connecticut acknowledge that the wage gap keeps widening.
The minimum wage was never meant to be fully supportive for a single person. It functioned as a standard of entry-level pay for the unskilled, especially teenagers, so people wouldn't be too demoralized by their first jobs and would strive to gain skills and advance.
Today in Connecticut the need for a minimum-wage increase is mainly political -- to camouflage the declining skill level of much of the workforce, the fatherless urban underclass -- the increasing numbers of young people who attend schools without standards and graduate uneducated but who, it is hoped, remain full of self-esteem.
Connecticut has tens of thousands of job openings -- for skilled workers -- in manufacturing, nursing, teaching, and other fields, jobs that pay far above minimum wage, for which enough qualified applicants can't be found.
Raising the minimum wage is actually a proclamation that Connecticut has given up on a skilled workforce, a proclamation that the jobs of the state's future will be at the fast-food window -- until the robots take over.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Bycatching by ocean fishermen may imperil river herring stocks
Alewife species of river herring.
Excerpted and edited from an article by Colleen Cronin in ecoRI News. Picture above is from elsewhere.
“River herring, both the blueback and alewife species found in Rhode Island, are diadromous fish, meaning they spawn in freshwater but live their adult lives in the ocean.
“A foundational species, river herring sit at the bottom of the aquatic food chain, helping to feed larger animals like striped bass and osprey. In past generations, they swam up many New England rivers in the millions, providing a source of food and income for locals; herring are considered an important food in Narragansett culture.
“Efforts to improve their spawning habitat have brought the fish back to environments they haven’t lived in since before the Industrial Revolution. However, experts and stakeholders who spoke with ecoRI News said that what’s happening to river herring when they’re in the ocean has a huge and potentially negative impact on their survival: bycatch.’’
Abstractly granular
“Sylvia (Spring, Rocks, and Daffodils)” (acrylic paint over aquatint, with scraping, printed in dark-gray ink on wove paper) in the show “Altered States: The Etchings of Richard Pousette-Dart,’’ at the New Britain (Conn.)Museum of American Art, through next April 26.
The museum says:
“First-generation Abstract Expressionist artist Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) excelled in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. In 1979, he embarked on an extraordinary foray into printmaking, afforded by the opportunity to work with traditional etching techniques and tools at the Rockland Foundation, near his home and studio in Suffern, New York. By this time, his dense and complex abstract compositions of the 1940s and 1950s had transitioned to all-over fields composed of small gestures and marks, often organized around a central geometric or organic shape.’’
‘Place and displacement’
Work by Mike Howat, in his show “Home, Disassambled,’’ at AVA Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon, N.H., through Sept. 27
The gallery explains that the show “explores the meanings of home, place and displacement. Through his work, Howat uses architectural forms as a framework to delve into both personal and collective narratives. He is particularly interested in how built environments reflect their inhabitants and how buildings become records of those who occupy them.’’
Selling solemnity
President Calvin Coolidge in 1924. He was born in Vermont and became a Massachusetts lawyer and politician, including the governorship.
“I always figured the American public wanted a solemn ass for President, so I went along with them.’’
— Calvin (“Silent Cal”) Coolidge (1872-1933), president (1923-1929)
‘My world’
“North Haven VI’’ (oil on canvas), by Midcoast Maine painter Eric Hopkins, at Portland (Maine) Art Gallery.
He says:
"Seeing the Earth from the sky, from a plane — the boats in the water, the islands {like North Haven} — it was just my life, my world, and I was fascinated by it.”
A culinary abomination
Poseur
The real stuff
“There is a terrible pink mixture (with tomatoes in it and herbs) called Manhattan Clam Chowder, that is only a vegetable soup, and not to be confused with New England Clam Chowder, nor spoken of in the same breath. Tomatoes and clams have no more affinity than ice cream and horseradish".
-From Eleanor Early, in her 1940 book, A New England Sampler
50 years after the war, looking at Vietnamese artists shown in Greenwich
“Fish and the Forest” (oil on canvas), by Dinh Thi Tham Poong, in the show “Vietnam: Tradition Upended,” at Flinn Gallery at Greenwich (Conn.) Library, Sept. 18-Nov. 12.
— Photo Credit: Art Vietnam Gallery
The curators explain:
“In collaboration with Art Vietnam Gallery in Hanoi, this exhibition features nine interdisciplinary artists who work in a variety of mediums and styles. These artists all take time-honored traditions and materials and rework them in a modern context, acknowledging the past while simultaneously breaking away. With 2025 marking exactly half a century since the end of the Vietnam War, and 30 years since the normalization of relations between Vietnam and the U.S., this is an opportune time to acquaint ourselves with the art and culture of a country that has undergone extraordinary change; a country with one of the most interesting and vibrant art scenes in Southeast Asia.’’
Paula Span: When I go, I’ll go biodegradable
Green burial site
(Except for images above, from Kaiser Family Foundation Health News)
Our annual family vacation on Cape Cod included all the familiar summer pleasures: climbing dunes, walking beaches, spotting seals, eating oysters and reading books we had intended to get to all year.
And a little shopping. My grandkid wanted a few small toys. My daughter stocked up on thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles at the game store in Provincetown. I bought a pair of earrings and a couple of paperbacks.
And a gravesite.
It’s near a cluster of oaks, in a cemetery in Wellfleet, on the Cape, where some mossy Civil War-era headstones are so weathered that you can no longer decipher who lies beneath them. The town permits nonresidents to join the locals there, and it welcomes green burials.
Regular summer visitors such as us often share the fantasy of acquiring real estate on the Cape. Admittedly, most probably envision a place to use while they’re still alive, a daydream that remains beyond my means.
Buying a cemetery plot where I can have a green burial, on the other hand, proved to be surprisingly affordable and will allow my body, once no longer in use, to decompose as quickly and as naturally as possible, with minimal environmental damage. Bonus: If my descendants ever care to visit, my grave will be in a beloved place, where my daughter has come nearly every summer of her life.
“Do you see a lot of interest in green burials?” I asked the friendly town cemetery commissioner who was showing me around.
“I don’t think we’ve had a traditional burial in two years,” he said. “It’s all green.”
Nobody can count how many Americans now choose green or natural burials, but Lee Webster, former president of the Green Burial Council, is tracking the growing number of cemeteries in the United States that allow them.
The first, Ramsey Creek Preserve, began its operations in Westminster, S.C., in 1998. By 2016, Webster’s list included 150 cemeteries; now she counts 497. Most, like the one in Wellfleet, are hybrids accommodating both conventional and green burials.
Although a consumer survey conducted by the National Funeral Directors Association found that fewer than 10% of respondents would prefer a green burial (compared with 43% favoring cremation and 24% opting for conventional burial), more than 60% said they would be interested in exploring green and natural alternatives.
“That has to do with the Baby Boomers coming of age and wanting to practice what they’ve preached,” Webster said. “They’re looking for environmental consistency. They’re looking for authenticity and simplicity.”
She added, “If you nursed your babies and you recycle the cardboard in the toilet paper roll, this is going to appeal to you.” (I raise my hand.)
Aside from their environmental concerns, many survey participants attributed their interest in green burial to its lower cost. The median price of a funeral with burial in 2023 was about $10,000, including a vault but not including the cemetery plot or a monument, according to the NFDA.
Although advocates of green burials, such as Webster, decry cremation’s toxic emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, the method now accounts for nearly two-thirds of body disposals in the United States, the association reports. One reason is its median cost of $6,300, without interment or a monument.
Such numbers vary considerably by location. I live in Brooklyn, where real estate is pricey even for the dead, and where Green-Wood Cemetery — a jewel and a National Historic Landmark — charges $21,000 to $30,000 for a plot. Burial in its new, green section is a comparative bargain at $15,000.
About 40 miles outside Nashville, Tenn., though, a green burial at Larkspur Conservation costs $4,000, including the gravesite and just about everything else, except, if the family wants one, a flat, engraved native stone.
Larkspur is one of 15 conservation burial grounds in the nation operating in partnership with land trusts — The Nature Conservancy, in this case — to preserve the space. “It’s what keeps forests from becoming subdivisions,” said John Christian Phifer, Larkspur’s founder.
He listed the common elements of green burials: “No chemical embalming, no steel casket, no concrete vault. Everything that goes in the ground is compostable or biodegradable.” A small industry has evolved to produce artisanal woven caskets, linen shrouds, and other eco-friendly funerary items.
Green funerals often feel different, too. Mourners at Larkspur tend to walk the trail to the burial site wearing denim and hiking boots, not black suits.
“Instead of observing, they’re actively participating,” Phifer said. “We invite them to help lower the body into the grave with ropes, to put a handful or shovelfuls of soil into the grave,” and to mound soil, pine boughs, and flowers atop it afterward. Then, they might toast the departed with champagne or share a potluck picnic.
When Larkspur began operating in 2018, with Phifer as its only employee, 17 bodies were buried on its 161 acres. Last year, a staff of eight handled 80 burials, and the burial ground is acquiring more property.
Other alternatives to conventional burial have emerged, too. The company Earth Funeral has facilities in Nevada, Washington state, and, soon, Maryland, for so-called human composting. In this process, a body is heated with plant material for 30 to 45 days in a high-tech drum, where it all eventually turns into a cubic yard of soil.
That’s 300 pounds, more than most families can use, so local land conservancies receive the rest. The cost: $5,000 to $6,000.
Alkaline hydrolysis, which is legal in almost half of all states, dissolves bodies using chemicals and water, leaving pulverized bone fragments that can be scattered or buried and an effluent that must be disposed of.
Environmentally, when you include standard cremation, “there are ramifications for all three processes that we can avoid by simply putting a body in the soil” and letting microbes and fungi do the rest, Webster said.
Cemetery acreage near major population centers is limited, however, and increasingly expensive. “I don’t think there’s a perfect option, but we can do a hell of a lot better than the traditional methods,” said Tom Harries, founder of Earth Funeral. Debates about comparative greenness will certainly continue.
But green burial made sense to Lynne McFarland and her husband, Newell Anderson, who heard about Larkspur through their Episcopal church in Nashville. “The idea of returning to the earth sounded good to me,” McFarland said.
Her mother, Ruby Fielden, who was 94 when she died, was one of the first people buried at Larkspur in 2018, in an open meadow that attracts butterflies.
Last spring, Anderson, who had Alzheimer’s, died at 90 and was buried a few yards away from Fielden, in a biodegradable willow casket. A dozen family members read prayers and poems, shared stories and sang “Amazing Grace.”
Then they picked up shovels and filled the grave. It was exactly what her outdoorsy husband, a onetime Boy Scout leader, would have wanted, said McFarland, 80, who plans to be buried there, too.
I’m not sure if my survivors will undertake that much physical labor. But my daughter and son-in-law, though probably decades from their own end-of-life decisions, liked the idea of green burial in a place we all cherish.
The prices in what I now think of as my cemetery were low enough — $4,235, to be precise — that I could buy a plot to accommodate myself and seven descendants, if I ever have that many.
I hope this plan, besides minimizing the impact of my death on a fragile landscape, also lessens the familial burden of making hurried arrangements. At 76, I don’t know how my future will unfold. But I know where it will conclude.
Paula Span is a Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reporter.
‘Off balance there’
Gibbous moon
“Unheralded, the gibbous moon
arrives too late, if not too soon,
a goblet neither full nor empty,
off balance there, like Humpty Dumpty….’’
— From “Gibbous Moon,’’ by Alfred Nicol, Massachusetts-based poet
As time speeds up
“Marking Time” (intaglio, relief collage, drawing on player piano scroll), by Randy Garber, in the show “So Late So Soon’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Sept. 28.
The gallery explains:
“‘So Late So Soon’ is a collaboration and dialogue between mother and daughter artists Randy Garber and Rachel Garber Cole. The work explores the concept of time: how it speeds up and lengthens, how the climate crisis catapults us simultaneously into the future and into our geological past. As humanity sits at the edge of our own geological era (the Holocene), and as our planet warms rapidly to a world unrecognizable to 10,000 years of human consciousness, the artists ask: How do we weave the passage of time (and timescale) into the fabric of our daily lives? How do we attend to the micro when the macro is shifting around us in unexpected ways?’’
Don Morrison: My strange long-ago encounter with conspiracy theorist RFK Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this year.
Back in 1982, I got invited to a reception at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy family spread in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C. The event had something to do with the opening of the Vietnam War Memorial, and I was there as a journalist.
I was thrilled at the opportunity to meet the grande dame of the estate, Robert F. Kennedy’s indomitable widow, Ethel (clever and charming), as well as a passel of current and future public officials (many of them Kennedys).
My most vivid memory of the event is getting cornered by Robert Kennedy Jr., who was fresh out of law school and eager to save the world — in particular, through legalizing psychedelic drugs for treating mental illness, a far-fetched idea in those war-on-drugs days.
I didn’t know about his own substance abuse back then {he was a long-time heroin addict}, or else I might have suspected an underlying influence. In any case, he hinted darkly that big drug companies were undermining his crusade. The more that he talked — and, boy, did he talk — the less sense he made.
I think of that conversation whenever I read about RFK Jr.’s rocky tenure as our 26th secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Why Donald Trump chose a longtime crusader against vaccines and other proven tools of public health, we’ll never know — though there is a strong anti-science strain among the MAGA crowd.
Kennedy has wasted little time dismantling the nation’s public-health system. He has cut medical-research budgets, fired qualified administrators and scientists; replaced them with inexperienced amateurs and fellow anti-vaccine activists; and made it harder to get the shots that protect children from such lethal threats as measles and polio — and all of us from COVID. Why, I wonder, is he trying to kill us?
I have a theory, based largely on RFK Jr.’s history and slightly on my encounter with him: He exhibits all the symptoms of a chronic conspiracy theorist.
For decades, Kennedy has been pushing far-fetched notions about election interference, unproven links between wireless technology and cancer, as well as between childhood vaccines and autism. He has touted the alleged benefits of raw (i.e., unpasteurized and thus highly risky) milk and the COVID-fighting properties of the horse deworming drug Ivermectin. He has warned darkly about the power of big pharmaceutical firms to block low-cost cures for illness.
The best conspiracy theories contain just enough truth to be intriguing. (RFK Jr.’s suspicions about “Big Pharma” seem at least modestly plausible).
But even the worst ones are emotionally satisfying, especially to people who are insecure, hungry for meaning in a confusing world or recovering from some unexplainable trauma.
RFK Jr.’s trauma was losing his father at 14 to an assassin’s bullet, five years after losing his uncle John the same way. Even for people who merely read about such puzzling tragedies, alternative theories are compelling. Indeed, RFK Jr. subscribes to the unproven notion that two gunmen, not one, took part in his father’s killing, which would suggest a larger conspiracy.
Moreover, some people get an ego boost by thinking that they possess inside knowledge others don’t. Finding fellow believers is especially pleasing, a phenomenon that explains the popularity of online conspiracy echo-chambers.
Psychologists say that humans are hard-wired for conspiracy thinking. We’re subject to what is known as confirmation bias: overvaluing facts that confirm our prior suspicions. Then there is “intentionality bias,” believing that things happen on purpose rather than by chance; and “proportionality bias,” the notion that big events must have big causes.
Besides, conspiracy theories are often more interesting than mundane reality. They have stronger storylines, more coherent plots and compelling villains. “The moon landing was faked” makes for a better movie than “the moon landing went fine.” And if your life, like mine, happens to be on the quiet side, it’s hard to resist a good story.
Hmmm. I’m beginning to wonder whether my attempt to paint RFK Jr. as a conspiracy nutcase doesn’t itself exhibit some of the above-mentioned symptoms. Maybe I’m a closet conspiracy theorist. After all, my narrative does make for a better story than “RFK is a just a normal, boring bureaucrat.”
Interestingly, his crusade to legalize psychedelic drugs for treatment of mental illness has been bolstered lately by some positive research results. Medical experts are starting to take the idea seriously.
Indeed, what if we mainstream critics have got it all wrong? What if RFK Jr. is not just correct in his beliefs but also the mastermind of a secret Trump-backed operation to discredit the naysayers by luring us into ludicrous excesses of denial — a plot the current HHS secretary might have hatched back at Hickory Hill decades ago after a chat with some obnoxious journalist?
And what if, any day now, he and his boss in the White House pull the rug out from under us doubters with some documented, irrefutable, headline-grabbing disclosures: “Big Pharma caught suppressing cheap drugs!” “Horse dewormer really does prevent COVID!” “Raw milk cures cancer!”
This movie would no doubt end with me bound and gagged in a dank basement room at Hickory Hill. RFK Jr. approaches with a gleam in his eye and, in his hand, a large syringe full of Ivermectin. Now there’s a plot for you. Call my agent!
Don Morrison, partly based in western Massachusetts’s Berkshire Hills, is an author, editor and university lecturer. A longtime former editor at Time Magazine in New York, London and Hong Kong, he has written for such publications as The New York Times, the Financial Times, Smithsonian, Le Monde, Le Point and Caixin. He is currently a columnist and advisory board co-chair at The Berkshire Eagle, a podcast commentator for NPR’s Robin Hood Radio and Europe editor for Port Magazine.
As long as they stay up there
“Leaf Children” (oil on canvas), by Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957), in the show “Green Mountain Magic: Uncanny Realism in Vermont,’’ at the Bennington Museum, through Nov. 2.
Dan Howells/Todd Larsen: The hefty price of ‘free’ AI tools
A rendering of a proposed artificial intelligence data center in Westfield, Mass., according to Servistar Realties’ application from 2021. The $4 billion “hyperscale" data center campus is planned near the Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport, in western Massachusetts. A new state law provides sales- and use-tax exemptions to lure more data centers.
Via OtherWords.org
Artificial intelligence is everywhere. But its powerful computing comes with a big cost to our planet, our neighborhoods, and our wallets.
AI servers are so power-hungry that utilities are keeping coal-fired power plants that were slated for closure running to meet the needs of massive servers.
And in the South alone, there are plans for 20 gigawatts of new natural-gas power plants over the next 15 years — enough to power millions of homes — just to feed AI’s energy needs.
Such multibillion-dollar companies as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta that previously committed to 100 percent renewable energy are going back to the Jurassic Age, using such fossil fuels as coal and natural gas to meet their insatiable energy needs. Even nuclear- power plants are being reactivated to meet the needs of power-hungry servers.
At a time when we need all corporations to reduce their climate footprint, carbon emissions from major tech companies in 2023 have skyrocketed to 150 percent of average 2020 values.
AI data centers also produce massive noise pollution and use huge amounts of water. Residents near data centers report that the sound keeps them awake at night and their taps are running dry.
Many of us live in communities that either have or will have a data center, and we’re already feeling the effects. Many of these plants further burden communities already struggling with a lack of economic investment, access to basic resources, and exposure to high levels of pollution.
To add insult to injury, amid stagnant wages and increasing costs for food, housing, utilities, and consumer goods, AI’s demand for power is also raising electric rates for customers nationwide. To meet the soaring demand for energy that AI data servers demand, utilities need to build new infrastructure, the cost of which is being passed onto all customers.
A recent Carnegie Mellon study found that AI data centers could increase electric rates by 25 percent in Northern Virginia by 2030. And NPR recently reported that AI data centers were a key driver in electric rates increasing twice as fast as the cost of living nationwide — at a time when one in six households are struggling to pay their energy bills.
All of these impacts are only projected to grow. AI already consumes enough electricity to power 7 million American homes. By 2028, that could jump to the amount of power needed for 22 percent of all US households.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
AI could be powered by renewable energy that is non-polluting and works to reduce energy costs for us all. The leading AI companies, who have made significant climate pledges, must lead the way.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have all made promises to the communities they serve to tackle climate and pollution. They all have climate pledges. And they have made significant investments in renewable energy in the past.
Those investments make sense, since renewables are the most affordable form of electricity. These companies have the know-how and the wealth to power AI with wind, solar, and batteries, which makes it all the more puzzling that they’re relying on fossil fuels to power the future.
If these corporate giants are to be good neighbors, they first need to be open and honest about the scope and scale of the problem and the solutions needed.
As these companies invest billions in technology for AI, they must re-up investments in renewables to power our future and protect our communities. They must ensure that communities have a real voice in how and where AI data centers are built — and that our communities aren’t sacrificed in the name of profits.
Dan Howells is the Climate Campaigns director at Green America. Todd Larsen is Green America’s executive co-director.
Boston car thieves’ favorite
2023 Honda Accord LX
Boston Guardian article by Mariah Alanskas
(Full disclosure: Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s publisher and editor, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
BOSTON
Honda Accords continue to be Boston car thieves’ favorite vehicle, while many of the rest of the nation’s auto criminals target the Hyundai Elantra.
In Massachusetts, the two vehicles tied for the most stolen vehicles across the state, with 241 each being stolen in 2024, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB).
The remaining top five spots consisted of other Honda models and Toyotas, following national trends.
In previous years, full size pickup trucks topped the list of most stolen vehicles, but it seems that car thieves in Boston and across America now favor sedan models that have inadequate anti-theft and security features. In any event, Boston’s auto thefts have been decreasing compared to last year.
According to data from the Boston Police Department’s (BPD) daily journals, there have been roughly 420 reported auto thefts since the start of the year. In comparison, around 600 thefts were reported as of September 2024.
The data suggest a continued decline in auto thefts across the city since 2023. Over 2024, a reported 1,141 vehicles were stolen, 17% down from 1,381 in 2023.
It’s the first time that the city has seen a decline since 2019.
These trends are seen in national data.
The NICB shows that 850,708 vehicles were stolen nationwide last year, down from 1,020,729 in 2023, marking the largest decrease in auto thefts in 40 years. They suggest the reason for the sudden decline could be attributed to automakers implementing new anti-theft softwares and strategies such as “turn-to-key-to-start” ignitions.
While it remains unclear whether Boston car thieves are going to continue to shrug off national car thieving preferences by preferring Hondas to Hyundais and Kias, it is clear that Boston continues to hold its place as one of the big U.S. cities safest from auto theft. The most unsafe cities so far this year include Washington, D.C., where 3,056 vehicles have been stolen so far this year. In 2024, D.C. had the highest vehicle theft rate per capita.
Massachusetts also continues to hold its ranking as the fourth-safest state from auto thefts with Maine securing the top spot, and New Hampshire and Vermont following in second and third place.
In any event, BPD suggests preventive measures should still be taken to ensure belongings and vehicles are safe. Owners should keep their vehicles locked, remove valuables and install such anti-theft devices as steering-wheel locks and car alarms to deter thieves.
‘A quiet tension’
“FOGGY PEA” (combined media on linen), by Renée Khatami, in her show “Somewhat High Key,’’ at Prince Street Gallery, New York City, through Sept. 27.
The gallery says of this show:
“The artwork is composed of textured translucent layers that shift through space emanating a quiet tension. These pieces are created with paint, media, cut marks, and pencil on paper, wood, and canvas – evoking a subtly rendered atmosphere. The title refers to the muted palette – continuing the theme from her two previous solo shows at Prince Street Gallery, ‘Under Color’ and ‘Behind the Pale’.
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Mary Sargent, in “Two Coats of Paint”, said of Ms. Khatami:
“Her work perhaps conjures cross sections of geological strata, in which fragments of different shapes and colors float together until the aggregate hardens and settles into a lively new pattern. Ultimately, focusing on Khatami’s glimmering multilayered surfaces, the viewer begins to rise above the challenges of everyday life.”
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For many years Ms. Khatami worked as an art director/book designer, specializing in artist’s monographs, and has authored/designed two multisensory color books for children.