Llewellyn King: In ‘25 we lost the metaphor of America
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Come on in, 2026. Welcome. I am glad to see you because your predecessor year was not to my liking.
Yes, I know there is always something going on in the world that we wish were not going on. Paul Harvey, the conservative broadcaster, said, “In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”
Indeed. Wars, uprisings, oppression, cruelty and man's inhumanity to man are to be found in every year. But last year, the world lost something it may not get back. You see, '26 — you don't mind if I shorten your title, do you — we lost America. Not the country but the metaphor.
We were, '26, despite our tragic mistakes — including slavery and wrongheaded wars — a country of caring people, a country that cared (mostly) for its own people and those who lived elsewhere in the world.
It was the country that sought to help itself and to help the world. It was the sharing country, the country that showed the way, the country that sought to correct wrong, to overthrow evil and to excel at global kindness.
It was the country that led by example in freedom of speech, freedom of movement and in free, democratic government.
When John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, described his lover's beauty as ‘‘my America" in the 1590s, he foreshadowed the emergence of the United States a nation of spiritual beauty.
From World War II on, caring was an American inclination as well as a policy.
We helped rebuil Europe with the Marshall Plan, an act of international largesse without historical parallel. We rushed to help after droughts, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and wars.
We were everywhere with open hands and hearts. America the bountiful. We had the resources and the great heart to do good, to show our own overflowing decency, even if it got mixed up with ideology. We led the world in caring.
We bound up the wounds of the world, as much as we could, whether they were the result of human folly or nature's occasional callousness.
We delivered truth through the Voice of America and aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Our might was always at hand to help, to save the drowning, to feed the starving and to minister to the victims of pandemic — as with AIDS and Ebola in Africa.
In 2025, that ended. More than a century of decency suspended, suddenly, thoughtlessly.
America the Great Country became America Just Another Striving Country, decency confused with weakness, indifference with strength, friends with oil autocracies.
It wasn't just the sense of noblesse oblige, which not only distinguished us in the 20th Century, but also earlier. In the 19th Century, we opened our gates to the starving, the downtrodden and the desperate. They joined the people already living here to build the greatest nation — a democracy — that the world has ever seen. First in science. First in business. First in medicine. First in agriculture. First in decency.
These people brought to America labor and know-how across the board, from weaving technology in the 18th century to engineering in the 19th century to musical theater in the 20th century, along with movie-making and rocket science.
I would submit, '26, that it is all about American greatness, and last year we slammed the door shut on greatness, abandoned longtime allies and friends. We forsook people who had been compatriots in war, culture and history for the dubious company of the worst of the worst, aggressors, oppressors, liars, everyone soaked in the blood of their innocent victims.
Yes, '26, America stood tall in the world because it stood for what was right. Its system of law — including the ability to have small wrongs addressed by high courts — was the envy of foreign lands where law was bent to politics, where democracy was an empty phrase for state manipulation of the vote. The Soviet Union claimed democracy; America practiced it.
America soared, for example, with President Jimmy Carter's principled and persuasive pursuit of human rights and President Ronald Reagan's extraordinary explanation of its greatness: the “shining city upon a hill.”
It sunk from time to time. Slavery was horrific; Dred Scott, appalling; Prohibition, silly; the Hollywood blacklist, outrageous.
But '26, decency finally triumphed and America was great, its better instincts superb — and now worth restoring for the nation and for the troubled, brutalized world.
Good luck, '26. You will bear a standard that the world has looked to. Lift it high again.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Based in Rhode Island, he’s also an international energy-sector consultant and speaker.
On X: @llewellynking2
‘Coming-of-age story’
From Moe Gram’s show “Party Fouls,’’ at the Lamont Gallery, Exeter, N.H., through April 11.
The gallery explains:
‘‘‘Party Fouls’ explores the games and pains of growing up. Themes of play, frustration, empathy, and self-compassion interplay through fields of color and found objects. Featured artist Moe Gram transforms Lamont Gallery into a nostalgic birthday party with underlying subjects like maturation, responsibility, and the meandering road of life. The space brims with classic elements of celebration: sugary treats, streamers, Y2K paper games, and even a bouncy house. These playful touches, paired with sculpture, painting, and projection, craft a coming-of-age story that unpacks the trials and tribulations of growing older and losing one’s sense of play.’’
Felicia Nimue Ackerman: Two takes on happiness
The poet’s cat, Winston.
— Photo by Monique Doherty (Photo was misattributed in earlier editions.)
How happy is the little cat
Who thinks my lap is where it's at
And doesn't see what lies beyond
So isn't ready to abscond
Until he glimpses, proud and free,
A bird perched nicely on a tree.
He'd try to catch it, have no doubt,
If I would only let him out.
“Child With Dove” (1901), by Pablo Picasso
How happy is the little child
Whose parents are indeed beguiled
And rush to meet her every need
With unabating love and speed,
Who never has to do a chore,
Or spend her time with any bore,
Whose days are filled with fun and glee --
Oh, how I wish that I were she!
Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a Providence-based poet and a professor of philosophy at Brown University.These poems first appeared in the Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin.
Before the looters took over
George H.W. Bush (1924-2018) in 1989.
“The government is here to serve, but it cannot replace individual service. And shouldn't all of us who are public servants also set an example of service as private citizens? So, I want to ask all of you, and all the appointees in this administration, to do what so many of you already do: to reach out and lend a hand. Ours should be a nation characterized by conspicuous compassion, generosity that is overflowing and abundant. And you can help make this happen outside of your workplace, in your communities and your neighborhoods, in any of the unlimited opportunities for voluntary service and charity where your help is so greatly needed.’’
—George H.W. Bush, 41st U.S. president, from 1989 to 1993. He was born in Massachusetts and grew up in affluent Greenwich, Conn. These remarks were in a speech to members of the Federal Senior Executive Service on Jan. 26, 1989.
Everything is surreal now
“The Last Heartbeat” (oil on canvas), by Lucia Maya, in the show “Legacies of Surrealism: Works from the Museo de Arte de Ponce,’’ at the Springfield (Mass.) Museums, through Sept. 6.
The museum explains:
“This exhibition, generously loaned from the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, highlights painters working throughout Latin America and exemplifies the deep influence of Surrealism in the region.
“Although created in the latter half of the 20th Century, these works emphasize thematic and stylistic features that first appeared in the region during the 1930s and developed over the following decades. Through their exploration of the unconscious mind, they give form to dreamlike landscapes, ominous creature-like entities, and strange, non-representational organic shapes that seem inspired by nature.’’
Generously lent by Museo de Arte de Ponce as part of Art Bridges’ Partner Loan Network. Exhibition sponsored locally by Connecticut Public Television.
Outer shape to inner world
“Scenes from a Walk” installation (digital collages of a year of daily walks printed on silk), by Eileen de Rosas, in her show at Boston Sculptors Gallery this April 2-May 3.
She says:
“My work, light and changeable, shifts in space and tone, altering the viewer’s perception of the object and the surrounding space. I use the qualities of light, color, form, and texture to give outer shape to emotions and ideas from my inner world.
‘‘Repetitive physical processes–such as wire crochet, walking, collaging, or casting–ground the work in daily rhythms. Incremental accumulation – of stitches, of photographs, of objects – adds up to a body of work and the days of a life.”
Chris Powell: ‘Gender-affirming care’ is a euphemism
Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989)was an American actress, singer and transgender activist. She was the first person to become widely known in the United States for having sex-reassignment surgery.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Propaganda is often a matter of names and terminology. For as the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed, if you label something well enough, you don't have to argue with it or about it. The label itself may settle the matter politically.
For many years in politically correct places like Connecticut calling people “racist" has been enough to shut most of them up or defeat a proposed course of action. This racket is starting to fail from overuse in part because indignation about supposed racism has failed to lift up the state's minority population, which remains nearly as poor and segregated as ever even as the people who denounce racism have been running the state for decades.
The propagandistic labeling most in use in Connecticut now involves the Trump administration's proposal to forbid hospitals from using federal Medicare and Medicaid money for sex-change therapy for minors.
“This is not medicine," U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says. “It is malpractice. Sex-rejecting procedures rob children of their futures."
Noting that the administration's action is only a proposal, Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong replies: “Gender-affirming care remains legal and protected in Connecticut. Donald Trump is not a doctor, and we're not going to let his cruel political agenda dictate access to healthcare or decimate our hospitals. We are exploring all legal options to protect Connecticut families and our medical providers."
Yes, Trump and Kennedy are not doctors. But then neither is Tong, and many doctors agree with Trump and Kennedy. Indeed, medical opinion increasingly holds that most children will get over their gender dysphoria if they are not locked into it by “puberty blockers," hormone injections, and surgeries. Even people who aren't sure about the best response to gender dysphoria may concede that irreversible treatment is best postponed until children can decide as informed adults.
Contrary to the attorney general's suggestion, the Trump administration has not proposed to make gender dysphoria treatment illegal. It has proposed only to prevent life-altering treatments for minors from being federally financed. States could spend their own money on such treatments.
Maybe it will come to that in Connecticut. At least Tong has joined nearly all news organizations in the state in the propaganda war over gender dysphoria. That's what their terminology -- “gender-affirming care" -- is about.
The neutral and accurately descriptive term here is “sex-change therapy." Calling it “gender-affirming care," as the attorney general and the news organizations do, euphemizes it to presume that there is really no controversy at all, nothing to be questioned -- that the desire of minors to change their sex should automatically be “affirmed" with “care."
After all, who could be against “care" except people who, as Tong says, have a “cruel political agenda"? People who disagree with him on this issue couldn't be sincerely concerned about troubled children, could they? They must be drooling MAGA freaks, and maybe racist too -- right?
Or else the attorney general is a demagogue and is being sustained by news organizations that prefer politically correct demagoguery to being fair.
NEW HAVEN'S BRAZEN CONTEMPT: New Haven city government's contempt for the public interest in accountable government has gotten more brazen.
A few weeks ago Mayor Justin Elicker, who is also a member of the city's Board of Education, defended the board's decision not to perform a written evaluation of the school superintendent, only an oral one conducted in secret. The mayor said it wouldn't be productive if city residents knew much about how she was doing.
Now, according to the New Haven Independent, the Elicker administration is mocking the public interest again. It is performing written evaluations of city department heads but only insofar as the evaluations say “satisfactory" or “unsatisfactory." There are no specifics.
Should the department heads improve in some way? The public isn't to know or have any way to judge.
New Haven is proudly the most liberal jurisdiction in the state, and this is what liberalism has come to.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Some structures and moods of an old city
“Storage Facade Belden Ct.,” in New London, Conn., in the show “Facades of New London: Photos by G. Roger Clements,’’ at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, Feb. 7-April 12
The museum says the exhibition “reflects Clements’s interest in local architecture and history, with photographs that capture New London’s striking buildings and spaces. Clements’s keen eye for composition can be seen in photographs that document geometric forms, light and shadow, and dynamic contrasts in surface and texture. Doors, windows, and other architectural details often capture Clements’s attention and his images reveal how structures can change over time. In addition to photographs, several of the artist’s 3-D maquettes are included in the exhibition, recreating and imagining historic façades with lively elements.
“In his photographs, Clements also explores the social and historic aspects of buildings and public spaces, attentive to historic preservation and documentation.
“Working with New London Landmarks, he has photographed numerous local buildings threatened with destruction, producing images for the Federal HABS/HAER survey program, which preserves data about historic buildings across the United States.”
The weather was worse then, and no down parkas
“The Snow Storm’’ (1859), by William Morris Hunt (1824-1879), at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp & violent & subject to cruel & fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast.’’
— William Bradford (1590-1657), the second (after the very brief tenure of John Carver) governor of the Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620, in his Of Plimouth Plantation.
Climate historians say that 17th Century New England was significantly colder than today. It fell within the Little Ice Age (roughly 1300-1870), a period of widespread cooling.
William Morgan: Ruminating on the mysteries of the wasteland outside Savers
My wife, Carolyn, and I go to a Savers thrift store at least once a week. The five stores around Providence vary in quality, but the mother ship is the Savers on Branch Avenue, tucked between Interstate 95, the main line railroad tracks, and a scrap-metal yard. Carolyn goes in search of fabric, and I go to the bookshelves (what we call “The Library”) to find suitable reading that I will enjoy on an old couch in the furniture department (“The Lounge”).
The author reading at Savers.
_ Photo by Gabs Choinière. All other photos by William Morgan
The best part of my Savers experience, however, is taking a ramble around the parking lot and the scruffy land behind the store. This is a nasty patch of ground, yet its detritus – discarded wrappers, toys, bits of metal, and unrecognizable bits of trash – suggests a surreptitious nocturnal community. While not the ruins of Pompeii, say, these artifacts speak of an urban wasteland and plain American sloth. Surely, there are stories to be told here.
What of the child’s potty at the edge of the tracks where the MBTA and Amtrak trains roar past? This has been in the same spot for several months – presumably the child is now toilet-trained. Was it thrown from the train over the barbed wire from behind the Savers loading dock?
Depressing and sad, one expects a certain amount of drug paraphernalia. But then there are inevitably those little mouth harps on the asphalt. Is there a strong urge among Savers patrons to floss their teeth in the parking lot? Or, as I have been told, do these flossers have something to do with the partaking of illegal substances?
A recent perambulation lead me a stove top jammed up against the chain link fence separating Savers from the highway. Was the 4-top burner tossed from a speeding automobile, in the hopes that it might bounce as far as the store’s donation platform? Was it, perhaps, a dream prop for a homeless person?
And then there are ever-curious of bits of clothing. How exactly do jeans and a blue shirt get here? Perhaps someone, undressed for a tryst on the grass, fled suddenly when a flying stove top came sailing through the air?
Aside from fabric that comes into Carolyn’s workshop from Savers, not to mention almost my entire wardrobe of L.L. Bean, J.Crew, and Brooks Brothers castoffs, the store’s jetsam and flotsam could attract sociologists or archaeologists looking for suitable master’s thesis topics. Or perhaps there’s a new genre of Providence mystery writers waiting to spring out of the contaminated soil on Branch Avenue.
William Morgan, a Providence-based writer and photographer, has been contributing stories on cultural artifacts to the New England Diary for many years. He is the author of numerous books, including The Cape Cod Cottage, Monadnock Summer and Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States.
Even better with heat
“On Fire” (photograph), by Sharon Schindler, in the group show “Winter Solstice,’’ at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Mass.
— Image courtesy of Griffin Museum of Photography
The museum says the show aims to beat back the winter blues (seasonal affective disorder?) by “lighting up the museum with images, ideas, and boundless creativity, celebrating the works of our photo community in all of its splendor.”
An old joke
DePasquale Fountain, in the heart of Providence’s Federal Hill section, whence the New England Mafia used to be run.
“Question: How can you tell the recession has hit Rhode Island hard?
“Answer: The Mob had to lay off six judges.’’
— James Dodson, in “The Battle for the Soul of Rhode Island,’’ in the September 1993 Yankee magazine.
xxx
But the joke is long outdated. The “Mob” ( aka Mafia) is no longer much of a presence in the Ocean State or in Massachusetts, where it was run out of Boston’s North End. Mafia-thick neighborhoods tended to have good restaurants!
Austerity
“Coastal Rivers Walking Trail” (acrylic on panels diptych), by Jane Dahmen, at Portland (Maine) Art Gallery.
Gary W. Yohe: In America, how skepticism, dogma and big money respond to evidence for climate change
From The Conversation (not including image above).
Gary W. Yohe is a professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn.
He 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 his academic appointment.
Scientists are trained to be professional skeptics: to always judge the validity of a claim or finding on the basis of objective, empirical evidence. They are not cynics; they just ask themselves and each other a lot of questions.
If they see a claim that a finding is true, they will ask: “Why?” They may hypothesize that if that finding is true, then some related findings must also be true. If it’s unclear whether one or more of those other findings is true, they will do more work to find out.
It is no wonder that science moves so slowly, especially on really important topics such as climate change.
Dogmatism is the opposite of skepticism. It is the proclivity to assert opinions as unequivocally true without taking account of contrary evidence or the contradictory findings. It is why public debate over scientific findings never seems to go away.
An example of the difference is the reaction to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s finding in 1995 that “evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The IPCC’s assessment reports involve hundreds of researchers from around the world who reviewed the global scientific understanding of the planet’s changing climate.
It’s an instructive case in the differences between skepticism and dogmatism, and it’s something to think about as you hear people talk about climate change.
Origins of a dogmatic response
Shortly after the IPCC released that finding in 1995, persistent and well-organized attacks on the science began. Many came from groups supported by the owners of Koch Industries, a conglomerate involved in oil refining and chemicals.
Their strategies mimicked earlier assaults on science and scientists who had warned the public that smoking posed a serious threat to their health. This time it was a warning about fossil fuels’ impact on the climate.
The similarity should not be a surprise. Science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in their 2011 book Merchants of Doubt, and American historian Nancy MacLean, in her 2010 book Democracy in Chains, have explained how the strategy was written by some of the same people who had tried to stop efforts to tighten tobacco regulations a decade or so earlier.
The dogma presented to the public for fighting regulation held that personal freedoms are paramount and that they are not to be diminished by any efforts designed explicitly to improve the general welfare.
What a skeptical response looks like
Climate scientists understood in 1995 that they must provide more than laboratory results, which go back to Svante Arrhenius’ work in 1895 demonstrating a causal correlation between increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and rising temperatures.
They also accepted the challenge of exploring collections of associated effects that should also be true if human activity was changing the climate.
Scientists have since examined dozens of different independently monitored aspects of climate change and confirmed the expected fingerprints of climate change all around the world.
Since the upper layers of the oceans absorb 90 percent of the atmosphere’s excess heat, they should be persistently warming as global temperatures rise. Has that happened? Yes, it has.
Since land-based ice melts when temperatures get too warm, global sea level should rise. And it should rise by more than would happen with thermal expansion of warming ocean water alone. Is it? Data shows that it is.
The major contributors to sea level rise. NOAA Climate.gov
Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald argued in 1967 that the upper atmosphere should cool while surface temperatures rise in response to higher carbon dioxide concentrations. Has it cooled over the past 50 years? Yes, it has, just as Manabe predicted.
The upper atmosphere has been cooling while the lower atosphere, close to Earth’s surface, has warmed over the past two decades. The gray line marks the tropopause, between the lower troposphere and higher stratosphere. IPCC 6th Assessment Report
By 2021, as the evidence piled up, the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment stated: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the global climate system since pre-industrial times. Combining the evidence from across the climate system increases the level of confidence in the attribution of observed climate change to human influence and reduces the uncertainties associated with assessments based on single variables. Large-scale indicators of climate change in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and at the land surface show clear responses to human influence consistent with those expected based on model simulations and physical understanding.”
Convincing the public
But has the public been convinced? The data on this are mixed.
Annual surveys conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication have found that the percentage of Americans “alarmed” about climate change rose over the past 11 years – from 15 percent in 2014 to 26 percent in 2024. And they show that much of that increase came from an increase in concern among Americans who earlier considered themselves “concerned” or “cautious.”
Over the same time period, though, the proportion of citizens in the survey who considered themselves “disengaged,” “doubtful” or “dismissive” shrank only modestly, from 29 percent to 27 percent.
Other surveys suggest that personal experience likely plays a significant role in how people understand climate change.
Many local and national news stations have mentioned climate change as a contributing factor in their extensive coverage of destructive wildfires in Los Angeles and Hawaii, flash floods in North Carolina and Texas, persistent drought across the Southwest, extreme heat waves and very destructive hurricanes.
Some of their viewers could certainly be coming around to believing what evidence shows: that climate-related disasters have become more frequent and more intense.
Americans are also directly experiencing other effects of climate change on their homes, health and wallets. For example:
Doctors in the North are seeing increasing cases of Lyme disease. Those in the South have been witnessing a rising number of cases of dengue fever. Both are spread by insects whose ranges are expanding as temperatures rise.
Lobster populations have collapsed in Long Island Sound and flourished farther north in Canada’s Bay of Fundy.
Residents in southern New England now enjoy feeding bluebirds in winter.
Homeowners across the U.S. are seeing their property insurance premiums quickly rise as disaster risks increase. Many others can’t get coverage from insurance companies at all because of their area’s disaster risks.
Stories like these do not make the national news very often, but they do show up in conversations around the kitchen table.
Reaching those with dismissive views
So, how can those Americans who are dismissive of climate change be reached? Some dogmatically believe claims that “climate change is a hoax” despite ever-growing evidence to the contrary.
Talking about personal experiences with extreme weather events, wildfires or droughts and their connections to rising global temperatures can help.
It might also help to remind them of failed dogma from the past that was disproved by science, yet people continued for years to believe them. For example, we know today that the Earth is not flat, the Sun does not circle the Earth, and living organisms cannot materialize spontaneously from nonliving matter.
The shift in public perceptions of climate risks leaves me hopeful that more people are acknowledging the scientific understanding of climate change and catching up with the climate scientists who have produced, questioned, reexamined and reaffirmed their findings through rigorous application of the scientific method.
Up in smoke
— Photo by Tomasz Sienicki
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.
I remember with some distaste the adult New Year’s Eve parties of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s in my rather John Cheeverish Boston suburb.
My siblings and I and other young people were deputized to pass canapes to folks, some of whom were getting wasted on whiskey and gin drinks (hardly anyone drank wine then) as the ashtrays filled up (most adults smoked), and somebody played a piano, occasionally accompanied by off-key and sometimes funny, sometimes maudlin, singing. Or they just put on an LP record.
But I don’t remember seeing people wearing lampshades on their heads – the classic idiotic figures at a too-long Christmas party as presented in the movies and on TV back then.
The next morning, the bitter smell of cigarette smoke still hung in the living room. No matter how cold a New Year’s Day morning was, it was good to get outside and hope that the new year would be cleaner than the last.
The parties faded as the 60’s deepened and AA recruited more than a few of the celebrants.
Short but important
The summit of Mt. Monadnock, in Jaffrey, N.H., one of the world’s most climbed mountains and beloved by New England writers.
It’s only 3,166 feet high but dominates its region of southern New Hampshire. It gave the term “Monadnock’’ to geologists to describe any isolated mountain formed from the exposure of a harder rock from the erosion of a softer one once surrounding it (a landform termed “inselberg" (“island-peak") elsewhere in the world).
— Photo by LegalSmeagolian
Contemplating genius
“Vermeer: Woman Writing a Letter With Her Maid,’’ by Joe Fig, in his show “Contemplating Vermeer,’’ at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art through Jan. 11.
The museum explains:
“In 2023, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hosted a monumental exhibition of Johannes Vermeer, showcasing 28 of the 35 masterpieces attributed to the enigmatic Dutch painter. Drawing on his own visit to this historic show, artist Joe Fig created a body of new paintings. In these works, featured in ‘Contemplating Vermeer,’ Fig not only pays homage to the 17th-Century painter’s mastery of light, color, and verisimilitude, but also reflects on the aesthetic experience in the Rijksmuseum’s galleries. Expanding on his decade-long ‘Contemplation’ series, he captures his subjects—artworks and their viewers—and their surroundings, exploring how people engage with or contemplate artworks in public spaces.’’
Taking education to the woods
URI students in the university’s North Woods program.
Excerpted (except f0r picture above) from an ecoRI News article by Bonnie Phillips
KINGSTON, R.I. — What do you get when you take a 300-plus-acre parcel of undeveloped woodlands with a walking trail and add high-tech flourishes such as an augmented reality walking tour and explanatory maps?
You get the North Woods at the University of Rhode Island — an outdoor classroom used to teach ornithology, herpetology, entomology, wetland ecology, environmental writing, art, and science communications.
“Really, everything is studied here,” said Madison Jones, an associate professor in URI’s departments of Professional & Public Writing and Natural Resources Science.
On a recent walk along the Blue Trail in the woods, which are in the northern part of the campus off Flagg Road and make up 25% of the university’s 1,200-acre total, Jones was almost evangelical about the educational possibilities of the North Woods.
Here’s the whole article.
Ghosts
‘‘Untitled’’ (oil, conté crayon, pastel on paper), by Norman Lewis (1909-1979), at The Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.