Mass. looks to the sun
In Massachusetts, solar installation at Newton North High School
ArnoldReinhold photo
Sun in the Bay State
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is quite right to say that generating much more solar energy, and storing it with improved batteries, is the fastest and most efficient way to address the state’s increasing energy needs. That’s especially given such gargantuan electricity consumers as more data centers, especially for artificial intelligence, come online.
Indeed, local-and-state-overseen solar energy not vulnerable to shifting federal policies/politics is becoming ever more needed in the state. That’s partly because Washington’s current rulers dislike any energy not produced by burning oil, gas and coal. (The fossil-fuel folks, based in Red States, are big Republican campaign donors.) And Trump particularly hates offshore wind projects, which he has been halting despite the billions of dollars that have been spent on them so far. Massachusetts officials had hoped that those turbines would meet much of the state’s electricity needs in the next few years.
So Ms. Healey’s administration has filed emergency regulations for the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) program to try to lower installation costs, speed up permitting and expand interconnections for solar.
The governor noted:
“Solar energy in Massachusetts, on the hottest single day of summer this year — behind-the-meter solar, which is the solar on our roofs and farms and schools — met 22 percent of statewide demand.’’ Data indicate that solar accounted for almost 27 percent of the state's electricity supply as of late 2024, up from 19 percent in 2020. It’s a very good thing it’s rising so fast: ISO New England, the region’s grid operator, predicts that power demand in New England will rise 11 percent by 2034.
But there can be big siting issues for solar farms, as opposed to rooftop installations. Cutting down trees should be avoided! Trees, by absorbing CO2 produced by fossil-fuel burning, obviously slow global warming.
Vacant developed land (such as parking areas of dead stores and malls) and roadside and median strips are good places for solar. If such facilities must be put in countryside fields, then grow plants below them. The plants of course absorb carbon dioxide. In a few farms, goats and sheep graze below high-mount solar-panel platforms. Farmers get some added revenue from selling the power to utilities.
Time is of the essence. Federal tax credits for nonresidential renewable-energy projects will expire at the end of 2027, and residential tax credits for renewable energy (which includes wind turbines but mostly involves rooftop solar) will shut off at the end of this year.
Much of the rest of the world is moving to renewable energy considerably faster than America as “green energy’’ installation cost declines and worry about global warming and pollution rises.
Big Oct. 23 event at the Newport Art Museum
“On the Veranda (The Blue Porch)’’ (1909 oil on canvas), by Howard Gardiner Cushing, in the show “Howard Gardiner Cushing: A Harmony of Line and Color,’’ through Dec. 31, at the Newport Art Museum. See this event.
Exploring presence and absence
“Grace Looking Through Hole in Log” (archival pigment print), by Scott Offen, in the show “Grace by Scott Offen,’’ at Panopticon Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 2.
The gallery says:
“The show, coinciding with the launch of Offen’s monograph with L’Artiere Edizioni, the exhibition features intimate, dreamlike portraits performed and co-created by his wife, Grace. Exploring collaboration, identity, and connection with nature, the work invites reflection on presence and absence.’’
Llewellyn King: AI could be apocalyptic for jobs
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The Big One is coming, and it isn't an earthquake in California or a hurricane in the Atlantic. It is the imminent upending of so many of the world's norms by artificial intelligence, for good and for ill.
Jobs are being swept away by AI not in the distant future, but right now. A recent Stanford University study found that entry-level jobs for workers between 22 and 25 years old have dropped by 13 percent since the widespread adoption of AI.
Another negative impact of AI: The data centers that support AI are replacing farmland at a rapid rate. The world is being overrun with huge concrete boxes, Brutalist in their size and visual impact.
Meta Platforms (of which Facebook is part) plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers; the first called Prometheus and the second Hyperion.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform: “We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”
Data centers are voracious in their consumption of electricity and are blamed for sending power bills soaring across the country.
But AI has had a positive impact on the quality of medicine, improving accuracy, consistency and efficacy, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Predictive medicine is on a roll: Alzheimer's Disease and some cancers, for example, can be predicted accurately. That raises the question: Do you want to know when you will lose your mind or get cancer?
Where AI is without downside is medical “exaptation.” That happens when a drug or therapy developed for one disease is found to be effective with another, opening up a field of possibilities.
AI also offers the chance of shortening clinical trials for new drugs from years to a few months. Side effects and downsides can be mapped instantly.
Life expectancy is predicted to increase substantially because of AI. Omar Hatamleh, an AI expert and author, told me, “A child born today can expect to live to 120.”
Likewise, predictive maintenance with AI is already useful in forecasting the failure of industrial plants, power station components and bridges.
Oh, and productivity will increase across the board where AI and AI agents — the AI tools developed for special purposes — are at work.
The trouble is AI will be doing the work that heretofore people have done.
Pick a field and speculate on the job losses there. This may be fun to do as a parlor game, but it is deeply distressing when you realize that it could happen in the very near future — such as in the next year.
Most are low-skilled white-collar jobs, such as those in call centers, or in medical offices checking insurance claims, or in an accounting firm doing bookkeeping. In short, if you are a paper pusher, you will be pushed out.
Look a little further — maybe 10 years — and Uber, which has invested heavily in autonomous vehicles, will have decided that they are ready for general deployment. Bye-bye Uber driver, hello driverless car.
Taxis and truck drivers might well be the next to get to their career-end destinations quicker than they expected.
By the way, autonomous vehicles ought to have fewer accidents than cars with drivers do, so the insurance industry will take a hit and lots of workers there will get the heave-ho. And collision repairs may be nearly outdated.
These aren't speculation; they are real possibilities in the near future. Yet the political world has been arguing about other things.
As far as I am aware, when the leadership of the U.S. military gathered at the Marine Corp Base Quantico in Virginia on Sept. 30 to get a pep talk on shaving, losing weight and gender superiority, they didn't hear about how AI is transforming war and what measures should be taken. Or whether there will be work for those who leave the military.
The Big One is coming, and the politicians are worrying about yesterday's issues. That is like worrying about your next guest list when an uninvited guest, a tsunami of historic proportions, is coming ashore.
On X: @llewellynking2
Bluesky: @llewellynking.bsky.social
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island.
Brandeis will revamp its curriculum
The rather bizarre Usen Castle, at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass.
Edited from a New England Council report
Brandeis University will revamp its curriculum to center it around career-readiness. The university’s president, Arthur Levine, recently introduced ‘‘The Brandeis Plan for Reinventing the Liberal Arts,’’ which aims to give students new skills and the opportunity to enter the workforce early.
The new plan’s key elements include a redesigned core curriculum, a focus on career development from day one of a student’s time at Brandeis, a career-competency second transcript, and a unified academic structure that combines liberal arts with professional education.
‘‘We’re choosing a bold path forward, one that invests in Brandeis’s academic future and reaffirms our leadership in higher education,’’ said Lisa Kranc, chairwoman of the Brandeis Board of Trustees.
Or just realism
“Apathy” (plastic, wire, wood, PVC pipe, cement block), in Sally B. Moore’s show “Human/Beast” at Boston Sculptors Gallery, through Nov. 2
Chris Powell: Enough with Conn. basketball!
Connecticut Sun logo
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Why are Connecticut Gov, Ned Lamont and state Treasurer Erick Russell so enthusiastic about using state pension money to make state government a minority owner of the Mohegan tribe's Connecticut Sun women's basketball team and move it to Hartford from the tribe's reservation in rural eastern Connecticut?
Though questions abound, the governor and the treasurer don't seem to have conducted even a basic analysis of the team's current and likely future finances.
On the Mohegan reservation the Sun plays for free at the tribe's beautiful arena. Do the governor and treasurer suppose that the team also could play for free at the People's Bank Arena, in Hartford, which is overseen by the Capital Regional Development Authority? Has the authority been asked if it would forego revenue and incur only expenses from a major new tenant?
Playing in Hartford, the Sun would face intense competition from the University of Connecticut men's and women's basketball teams, which play most of their games at the People's Bank Arena, not on campus in rural Storrs. Such competition almost certainly would impair the profitability of all three teams. Have the governor and treasurer factored this into whatever informal calculations they have made?
For eight years Hartford has had a beautiful minor-league baseball stadium downtown. Yet the stadium is still making only financial losses for the city, and the city is heavily subsidized by state government. Does state government want to subsidize the city indefinitely for another big entertainment project?
The Hartford office-building project called Constitution Plaza was built in the early 1960s in the hope of reviving downtown and the city generally. It didn't. Today Constitution Plaza is sleepy.
The same aspiration was behind the predecessor of the People's Bank Arena, the Hartford Civic Center, which opened in 1975. The civic center came with a shopping mall. But Hartford continued its decline demographically and economically anyway, and with few customers the shopping mall went out of business.
Twenty years ago state government decided to push downtown Hartford around for the third time in 40 years with the Adriaen's Landing project -- a convention hall, hotel, museum, and restaurant district. But it too is sleepy and has yet to do much for the city.
Indeed, a decade ago the Hartford area's shopping, restaurant, and entertainment focus shifted to West Hartford because of the better demographics there and the greater amount of housing nearby.
The arena in downtown Hartford has served a great purpose for Connecticut, in large part because the UConn teams have played there so often, much closer to the state's center of population than Gampel Pavilion.
But does anyone really believe that the big problem of the Hartford area is the lack of a professional women's basketball team when there is already so much great basketball and some good minor-league baseball in the city?
A century ago Hartford was believed to be the richest city in the country. Today it is among the poorest. Why it changed is yet to be examined officially, but all the games played at the downtown arena and the baseball stadium haven't yet persuaded middle-class people to return to the city to live. Most people at the games go home to the suburbs.
Only more middle-class housing and middle-class schools are likely to restore the city -- schools with academic tests for admission and advancement, not schools like Hartford's, which happily advance and graduate illiterates without apology. All other undertakings in the name of reviving Hartford are mere distractions.
With luck the Women's National Basketball Association will disabuse the governor, the treasurer, and state legislators out of using pension money to become a powerless minority owner -- a prisoner -- of an undertaking that risks becoming a long-term loss. The league and the Mohegans know that Connecticut is a much smaller market than Boston and Houston and a team in those cities would be much more profitable. The league and the Mohegans want only to make money, which is fine, especially since state government often seems to want only to lose it.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
The circle route
“Topography No.2’’ (acrylic on canvas) by Christopher O’Connor, at Portland (Maine) Art Gallery.
‘Even toward dark’
Archibald MacLeish in 1944.
“We are as great as our belief in human liberty—no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves: liberty, as Mr. Lincoln put it, ‘not alone to the people of this country but hope to the world.’ We must become again his ‘last, best hope of earth’ if we wish to be the great Republic which his love once saved. We know that we must say so even now, even toward dark, without voice to lead us, without a leader standing to come forth. We must say it for ourselves. No one else will say it for us
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), poet, playwright, essayist, government official and lawyer. He lived much of his adult life in Conway, Mass. This was in a column he wrote for The New York Times of July 3, 1976. He referenced the Watergate scandal.
Very good and very bad
Henry Ward Beecher
“Perhaps nowhere in the world can be found more unlovely wickedness — a malignant, bitter, tenacious hatred of good — than in New England. The good are very good and the bad are very bad.’’
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), Congregational minister, reformer and writer in his 1868 novel, Norwood, or Village Life in New England. His adultery trial transfixed the nation.
Monica Duffy Toft: Eisenhower wouldn’t have agreed with bombastic Hegseth
President Eisenhower delivering his televised farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961.
From The Conversation, except for picture above.
Monica Duffy Toft is professor of international politics and director of the Center for Strategic Studies at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.’
She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
MEDFORD, Mass.
Hundreds of generals and admirals converged on Quantico, Va., on Sept. 30, 2025, after being summoned from across the globe by their boss, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, for a session that, as expected, covered what Hegseth often describes as the “warrior ethos.”
Listening quietly, they heard Hegseth promise to make the military “stronger, tougher, faster, fiercer and more powerful than it has ever been before,” and declare that he would fix “decades of decay” in the military.
President Donald Trump spoke for more than an hour in a political speech that derided presidents who came before him. He asserted that “political correctness” would be banished from the military.
The meeting came soon after Trump’s Sept. 5 executive order renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” With that change, Trump reverted the department to a name not used since the 1940s.
The change represents far more than rebranding. It signals an escalation in the administration’s embrace of a militaristic mindset that, in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address, and that the nation’s founders deliberately aimed to constrain.
The timing of this name change feels particularly notable when considered alongside recent reporting revealing secret U.S. military operations. In 2019, a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs crept ashore in North Korea on a mission to plant a listening device during high-stakes nuclear talks. The risks were enormous: Discovery could have sparked a hostage crisis or even war with a nuclear-armed foe.
That such an operation was approved by Trump in his first term at all exemplifies an increasingly reckless militarism that has defined American foreign policy for decades. That militarism is the very subject of my book, “Dying by the Sword.”
Further, the name change was announced just days after Trump authorized a U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan boat that the administration claimed was carrying drug-laden cargo and linked to the Tren de Aragua cartel. The strike killed 11 people. The administration justified the killings by labeling them “narcoterrorists.”
The U.S. has beefed up military exercises in Puerto Rico during a campaign in the Southern Caribbean against boats suspected of transporting illegal drugs. Miguel J. Rodríguez Carrillo/Getty Images
Abandoning restraint
The Department of War existed from 1789 until 1947, when Congress passed the National Security Act reorganizing the armed services into the National Military Establishment. Just two years later, lawmakers amended the act, renaming the institution the Department of Defense.
Officials disliked the “NME” acronym – which sounded uncomfortably like “enemy” – but the change was not only about appearances.
In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. leaders wanted to emphasize a defensive rather than aggressive military posture as they entered the Cold War, a decades-long standoff between the United States and Soviet Union defined by a nuclear arms race, ideological rivalry and proxy wars short of direct great-power conflict.
The new emphasis also dovetailed with the new U.S. grand strategy in foreign affairs – diplomat George F. Kennan’s containment strategy, which aimed to prevent the expansion of Soviet power and communist ideology around the world.
Kennan’s approach narrowly survived a push to a more aggressive “rollback” strategy of the Soviet Union from its occupation and oppression of central and eastern Europe. It evolved instead into a long game: a team effort to keep the adversary from expanding to enslave other peoples, leading to the adversary’s collapse and disintegration without risking World War III.
On the ground, this meant fewer preparations for war and more emphasis on allies and intelligence, and foreign aid and trade, along with the projection of defensive strength. The hope was that shaping the environment rather than launching attacks would cause Moscow’s influence to wither. To make this strategy viable, the U.S. military itself had to be reorganized.
In a 1949 address before Congress, President Harry S. Truman described the reorganization sparked by the 1947 legislation as a “unification” of the armed forces that would bring efficiency and coordination.
But a deeper purpose was philosophical: to project America’s military power as defensive and protective, and for Truman, strengthening civilian oversight.
The wisdom of this restraint is clearest in Eisenhower’s farewell address, of January 1961.
In less than 10 minutes, the five-star general who had commanded Allied forces in Europe as they swept to victory in World War II cautioned Americans against the rise of a “military-industrial complex.” He acknowledged that the nation’s “arms must be mighty, ready for instant action,” but warned that “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
New enemies, destabilizing regions
The risky North Korean team mission by the Navy SEALs illustrates how America’s militaristic approach often produces the very dangers it aspires to deter.
Rather than enhancing diplomacy, the operation risked derailing talks and escalating conflict. This is the central argument of my book: America’s now-reflexive reliance on armed force doesn’t make America great again or more secure. It makes the country less secure, by creating new enemies, destabilizing regions and diverting resources from the true foundations of security.
It also makes the U.S less admired and respected. The State Department budget continues to be dwarfed by the Department of War’s budget, with the former never reaching more than 5.5% of the latter. And the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, once the leading arm of U.S. soft power as quiet purveyor development aid around the world, is now shuttered.
Today’s Pentagon budget exceeds anything Eisenhower could have imagined.
Trump’s rebranding of the Department of Defense into the Department of War signals a shift toward framing U.S. power primarily in terms of military force. Such a framing emphasizes the use of violence as the principal means of solving problems and equates hostility and aggression with leadership.
Yet historical experience shows that military dominance alone has not translated into strategic success. That’s the mindset that lost the U.S. endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and failed in interventions in Libya and Syria – conflicts that altogether cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives while leaving the country less secure and eroding its international legitimacy.
“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Eisenhower said, can compel the proper balance between military power and peaceful goals.
The very title of my and my co-author’s book comes from the Gospel of Matthew – Chapter 26, verse 52 – that “to live by the sword is to die by the sword.”
Throughout modern history, true security has come from diplomacy, international law, economic development and investments in health care and education. Not from an imaginary “warrior ethos.”
America, I would argue, doesn’t need a Department of War. It needs leaders who understand, as Eisenhower did, that living by the sword will doom us all in the end. Real security comes from the quiet power that builds legitimacy and lasting peace. The U.S. can choose again to embody those strengths, to lead not by fear but by example.
At new museum in Westerly
“Autumnal Landscape,’’ by Harriet Randall Lumis (1870-1953), at the new Westerly (R.I.) Museum of American Impressionism.
At least close to ground
The nearly complete South Station Tower in August. The station building was constructed in 1899 to replace the downtown terminals of several railroads. Today, it’s a major intermodal domestic transportation hub.
— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
“At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station and not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation.’’
— Ogden Nash (1902-1971), American poet famous for his light verse.
When government is a lawbreaker
Louis D Brendeis (center) in his Boston office in 1916
“Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
xxx
“[T]he only title in our democracy superior to that of President [is] the title of citizen.”
—Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), Boston lawyer and civic reformer who was a U.S. Supreme Court justice in 1916-1939.
ICE rule on students would slam education and economy
Northeastern University’s Ell Hall, on Huntington Avenue, Boston. Part of Northeastern success and contributions to the New England economy can be attributed to its drawing so many highly accomplished students from abroad.
Edited from a report by The New England Council
“The council has submitted comments on the proposed rule ‘Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure for Nonimmigrant Academic Students, Exchange Visitors, and Representatives of Foreign Information Media.’
In its letter, the council expressed significant opposition to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) proposed rulemaking due to concerns that the rule would create unnecessary fear, confusion, and procedural roadblocks for international students, exchange visitors, and universities.
“The comment letter further noted that the rule will impede institutions of higher education in New England and across the United States from attracting and retaining the best and brightest minds to study and engage in research for issues and fields critical to our nation’s prosperity and well-being.
“In New England, international students have a significant positive economic impact, totaling $5.148 billion, and supporting 47,425 jobs during the 2023-2024 academic year. During that academic year, 115,086 international students were enrolled at higher educational institutions in the region.
“For more information on this issue or the Council’s Higher Education Committee, please contact Mariah Healy, director of federal affairs at mhealy@newenglandcouncil.com.’’
Putting his fingers on the city
“City Lights” (9000 fingerprints), by Benjamin Archibald, who is showing at Glimpse Gallery, Concord, N.H., Oct. 9-Nov. 9. He’s based in Bristol, N.H.
Downtown Bristol, N.H.
Ken Gallager photo
‘Encroaching on each side’
Babson Farm granite quarry, Halibut Point State Park, in Rockport, on Cape Ann.
User:Chensiyuan photo
“{Cape Ann} is a singular region. If a little orchard plot is seen, here and there, it seems rescued by some chance from being grown over with granite….The granite rises straight behind a house, encroaches on each side, and overhangs the roof, leaving space only for only a sprinkling of grass about the door, for a red shrub or two to wave from a crevice, and a drip of water to flow down among gay weeds.’’
— Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), English writer and sociol0gist
‘Wildly divergent depictions’
“After the Fall” (oil and acrylic on canvas), by Allison Gildersleeve, in her show “Here Somewhere,’’ at the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Conn., Oct. 11-Jan. 18.
The museum says:
“Places are not inert; they are repositories for all that has passed through them. In Allison Gildersleeve’s work, time is not sequential and location is not fixed. Gildersleeve picks apart and reassembles the familiar, using the variability of memory as her guide. As she puts the pieces together, her work skips through time at an erratic pace, shuffling the monumental with the mundane and twisting landscapes and interiors into compositional mazes. Gildersleeve grew up in the southeastern corner of Connecticut in a colonial farmhouse surrounded by acres of woods. She returns again and again to the settings of her childhood – wooded areas, home interiors, open highways, back country roads – to show that repeated visits to the same place invariably result in wildly divergent depictions.’’
Embracing grief
“Double Sorrow Double Joy” (double-headed sunflower from farm, planted after 2023 Vermont floods) (embalming thread, resin, dyed ribbon, wood), by Lydia Kern, at Burlington (Vt.) City Arts, in the group show “Do We Say Goodbye?Grief, Loss and Mourning,’’
-Image courtesy Burlington City Arts.
The gallery says the show explores “personal and collective encounters with grief" through the work of artists Peter Bruun, Bethany Collins, Jordan Douglas, Mariam Ghani, Lydia Kern, John Killacky, Nirmal Raja, and Jamel Robinson. Through photography, painting, video, and installation, these eight artists challenge “the finality of loss, inviting us to embrace grief as a shared yet deeply individual journey."