Chris Powell: Is infamous hedge fund Alden saving or killing newspapers?
The now closed Hartford Courant headquarters building
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Nearly everyone wanted Tribune Publishing Co. to be purchased by someone other than Alden Global Capital, since the hedge fund is seen as an "asset stripper." Indeed, months before acquiring the shares of Tribune it didn't already own, Alden had managed the neat trick of stripping the Hartford Courant of its own building, leaving Connecticut's largest newspaper homeless.
But while nearly infinite money lately has been floating around the country and zillionaires abound, nobody offered more than the $633 million Alden offered to take Tribune private. Despite the decline in the newspaper industry, Tribune is said to remain profitable and to have millions in the bank, and the eight newspapers it owns apart from The Courant include some storied names: the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Baltimore Sun.
So the lack of other bidders suggests wide scorn for the industry's future.
That's why bemoaning Alden is so hypocritical, as it was the other day when Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal joined Courant journalists at a protest rally. "Get a better buyer," Blumenthal implored, even as his own family easily could have afforded becoming a major partner in a rival bid -- but didn't.
But rich people indifferent to the public interest in sustaining newspapers are not the main culprits of the industry's decline.
Troubled as they are, newspapers remain the country's primary source for serious news, news beyond idle distraction and titillation -- news about government, community, business and life in general. Television and radio steal from newspapers shamelessly. Some state and local Internet news sites do great service but their "business model" is only charity and thus not so reliable.
The biggest problems for newspapers are the public's diminishing interest in serious news and the country's worsening demographics. Literacy and civic engagement long have been declining while poverty and violence have been increasing, especially in such cities as Chicago, Baltimore and Hartford. It takes courage enough to invest in the newspaper business generally, and heroism to invest in newspapers in disintegrating cities.
Even in Connecticut it is a matter of general indifference that half the state's high school graduates never master high school English and math and so enter adulthood unprepared to be citizens, much less newspaper readers -- or readers at all.
So horrible as it may seem, for the moment there may be nothing to do but to root for Alden, especially since before acquiring Tribune it already had acquired a hundred papers across the country and was the country's second largest newspaper chain. Alden President Heath Freeman says the company's goal is "getting publications to a place where they can operate sustainably over the long term."
Of course, to "operate sustainably" may require weakening Alden's papers more. But then the content of nearly all newspapers long has been weakening along with their circulation. For in the end the investment newspapers rely on most is not that of their owners but their subscribers, and nobody needs a newspaper just to keep up with the Kardashians.
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\If the United States is ever attacked again, nobody should seek advice from Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.
“Israel," Murphy said the other day, "has the right to defend itself from Hamas's rocket attacks, in a manner proportionate with the threat its citizens are facing.”
But no country wins a war with a "proportionate" response to attacks. Wars are won with enough force to defeat the enemy and eliminate its war-making capacity. Japan started its war with the United States by sinking a few ships at Pearl Harbor, but the United States won the war by sinking nearly all Japanese ships and leveling the whole country, concluding with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In a recent newspaper essay Murphy also wrote that schools need fewer police officers and less student discipline and more counselors and social workers. But disruptions by students in school are helping to drive the exodus from the cities. Murphy misses that problem and the underlying one, since he fails to ask:
Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Remembering the Grand Army of the Republic
The Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, a bronze relief sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1948-1907) opposite 24 Beacon St., Boston. It depicts Col. Robert Gould Shaw leading members of the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry as it marched down Beacon Street on May 28, 1863 to depart the city to fight in the South. The sculpture was unveiled on May 31, 1897 and was the first civic monument to honor the heroism of African-American soldiers.
“On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . ..’’
— From Robert Lowell’s (1917-1977) “For the Union Dead’’
Construction site
“hannah well met” (bronze and stone), by Jerold Ehrlich, in the Providence Art Club’s “Open-Air Sculpture Exhibition 2021’’ through Aug. 31
On view in the club's courtyard, this annual exhibition features seven sculptures selected by juror Gage Prentiss. Sculptors Jerold Ehrlich, Alice Benvie Gebhart, Walter Horak, Madeleine Lord, Ed McAloon, Gage Prentiss and Mark Wholey are all New England area artists, each presenting a work of art with a unique narrative and perspective. Jerold Ehrlich is a Narragansett, R.I.-based artist who previously worked in construction, leading to him use materials from construction sites in his work.
Todd McLeish: Strengthening plant and animal diversity by planting native plants
Purple coneflowers, a native plant, on a ‘‘pollinator pathway’’ that helps boost populations of wide range of wildlife.
—Photo by Frank Carini/ecoRI News)
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
Rhode Island gardeners in Cranston and Barrington are joining a national effort to install native plants in their gardens. The idea behind the effort is to link their yards with native habitat on protected lands and create what organizers are calling “pollinator pathways” to boost populations of bees, butterflies, birds and other wildlife.
In the Edgewood section of Cranston, Suzanne Borstein is leading the effort to get her neighbors and friends to plant native plants in what she calls the “tree lawn” — the area between the sidewalk and the road. Since last November, she has hosted a series of online meetings to discuss the initiative, and nearly three dozen Cranston households had agreed to participate by the beginning of May, with more signing on every week.
“The connectability of the garden spaces is what’s especially important,” Borstein said. “If you have a great yard but nobody else in the neighborhood does, then the pollinators won’t be attracted or sustained.”
Planting native plants and restoring native habitat is vital to preserving biodiversity, according to the National Audubon Society. The habitat created by native plant gardens helps to nurture and sustain insects, birds and other creatures.
The idea for the Pollinator Pathways program emerged from a popular book written by University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy called Bringing Nature Home. According to Borstein, Tallamy’s idea was to get people to replace half of their lawns with native plants that would support native insect populations, which in turn support bird populations. If enough people participated, the pollinator pathways would link properties that, when combined, would total more acreage than all of the country’s national parks.
Borstein, a clinical psychologist, said the goal of her effort is to “raise awareness of the importance of choosing native plants. I’m making it as local as I can so we can build community, neighbor to neighbor. I want to increase the availability and use of native plants.”
But where to buy native plants for local use is a considerable problem.
“There’s a new awakening that we should plant natives, but native plants are hard to find,” said Sally Johnson, vice president of the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society board of directors. “I don’t think the commercial market has responded yet to the need.”
The Rhody Native program, launched by the Rhode Island Natural History Survey in 2009, was initially successful at growing native plants from seeds collected locally, but it couldn’t be sustained by a nonprofit with limited staff and funding.
When Borstein contacted Johnson for help in sourcing native plants for her Edgewood gardeners, Johnson eventually identified about 10 native plant species that could be acquired from a commercial nursery in New Jersey.
“It’s called the Garden State for a reason,” Johnson said.
The Barrington Land Conservation Trust is also finding it difficult to find native plants for participants in its pollinator effort.
“Many local nurseries carry plants listed as native, but native to where? New England? The Midwest? Are they true natives or cultivars?” asked Cindy Pierce, one of the organizers of the Barrington project. “It can be daunting for a new gardener or even an experienced gardener new to natives.”
Pierce noted Blue Moon Farm Perennials, in South Kingstown, R.I., specializes in native plants, but the Barrington group is also working with the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society to acquire native plants. The Land Conservation Trust is also asking local nurseries to stock natives, and it plans to hold its own native plant sale in the fall.
The Barrington gardeners aren’t just focusing their efforts on planting natives in the tree lawn, however. They are instead encouraging their neighbors to take whatever steps they can to diversify their gardens with native plants.
“Whether it’s adding a few container plants, adding native plants to an existing garden, or creating a meadow,” Pierce said. “Eliminating the use of fertilizers and lawn chemicals is another important step everyone can take, along with reducing the size of your lawn, mowing less often and leaving the leaves in your garden. Every little bit helps.”
Assuming that interest in native plants and the Pollinator Pathways program continues to build, organizers in Barrington and Cranston hope additional communities will join and extend the corridors being built for pollinators. Those that add native plants to their gardens can add their properties to an online map of native plant gardens called Homegrown National Parks that author Tallamy has established.
“Even if you only have three feet of natives, you can get on the map and it hooks you up to a lot of resources,” Borstein said.
After the planting season, Borstein hopes to organize a neighborhood walk so residents can “see what’s possible.” She hopes such an event will lead to additional participants and further discussions about expanding the project.
“I don’t have anything formal planned, but I’d like to create some way that all of the other organizations in Rhode Island could communicate to share information,” Borstein said. “And I’d like to see it grow beyond pollinators and help people to understand the role of shrubs and trees as well. It will help gardeners understand more about the issues from a holistic point of view.”
Todd McLeish is a nature writer and ecoRI News contributor.
Phil Galewitz: Biden seems in no hurry to allow import of Canadian drugs
U.S. and Canadian customs officers
The Biden administration said Friday it has no timeline on whether it will allow states to import drugs from Canada, an effort that was approved under former President Trump as a key strategy to control costs. {Many New Englanders, especially those in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, have long sought to be able to easily get pharmaceuticals from Canada for obvious reasons of price and proximity.}
Six states have passed laws to start such programs, and Florida, Colorado and New Mexico are the furthest along in plans to get federal approval.
The Biden administration said states still have several hurdles to get through, including a review by the Food and Drug Administration, and such efforts may face pressures from the Canadian government, which has warned its drug industry not to do anything that could cause drug shortages in that country.
The Biden administration said the lawsuit was moot because it’s unclear when or if any states would get an importation plan approved.
Drug importation has been hotly debated for decades, with many states and advocates believing it would help lower the prices Americans pay while the drug industry contends it would undercut the safety of the U.S. drug supply. Critics note most brand-name drugs sold in the U.S. are manufactured abroad.
Friday’s court filing had been eagerly anticipated, as it was the first time the Biden administration weighed in on the issue. Promises to curb high drug prices have been a standard sound bite of political campaigns, and importation enjoys broad public support. Supporters of importation range the political spectrum from progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Florida’s conservative Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. They argue Americans should not pay more for drugs than consumers in other countries.
Rachel Sachs, a health law expert at Washington University, in St. Louis, said the rhetoric in the court filing is probably “disheartening” to DeSantis and other supporters hoping that states’ importation programs would be approved soon. “They are laying out that there is no time limit on the FDA and there are many steps that states have to undergo before approval,” she said.
Supporters of drug importation say they still have hope, especially if the court agrees to the administration’s effort to throw out the suit.
“While articulating possible hurdles that may prevent state drug importation programs from moving forward, the Biden administration’s motion to dismiss PhRMA’s lawsuit keeps alive opportunities for more Americans to benefit from drug importation,” said Gabriel Levitt, president of Pharmacychecker.com, which verifies online foreign pharmacies for customers.
Importing drugs from Canada, where government controls keep prices lower, has been debated for decades in the U.S. A 2003 federal law gave the executive branch permission to do it, but only if certified as safe and cost-effective by the HHS secretary. Then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced in September that he would become the first to do that, and the department issued its rule in October.
Florida, Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Vermont are pursuing efforts to import drugs.
PhRMA filed its suit in November in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In the court filing late Friday, the Biden administration said the FDA could reject state importation plans for many reasons, including safety concerns and lack of significant savings for consumers.
In an e-mailed statement, PhRMa spokesperson Nicole Longo said: “We continue to believe the Trump Administration violated federal law when it finalized its rule permitting state-sponsored drug importation from Canada without proper certification and, in doing so, putting the health and safety of Americans in jeopardy.”
Canada has opposed efforts to send its drugs to the United States, fearing that it could exacerbate shortages there. Last year, Canadian health regulators warned companies against exporting any drugs that could lead to shortages.
During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden supported drug importation. His HHS secretary, Xavier Becerra, voted for the 2003 Canadian drug importation law as a member of Congress.
In most circumstances, the FDA says it’s illegal for individuals to import drugs for personal use.
Yet, for nearly 20 years, storefronts in Florida have helped people buy drugs online from pharmacies in Canada and other nations at typically half the U.S. price. The FDA has periodically cracked down on the operators but has allowed the stores to stay open.
The Florida legislature in 2019 approved the state drug importation program, and the state submitted its proposal to the federal government last year. While DeSantis has boasted of the strategy at news conferences in the retiree-heavy community of The Villages, the state program would have little direct effect on most Floridians.
That’s because the state effort is geared to getting lower-cost drugs to state agencies for prison health programs and other needs and for Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor. Medicaid enrollees already pay little or nothing for medications.
Florida has identified about 150 drugs — many of them expensive HIV/AIDS, diabetes and mental health medicines — that it plans to import. Insulin, one of the most expensive widely used drugs, is not included in the program.
DeSantis said the importation plan would save the state between $80 million and $150 million. The state has a $96 billion budget, he said.
“It’s been under review enough,” DeSantis said Friday, hours before the Biden administration’s court filing. “We have followed every regulation. We’ve met every requirement that we were asked to meet, and we want now to be able to get this final approval so that we can finally move forward.”
Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for DeSantis, said the governor was disappointed by the Biden court filing.
“Governor DeSantis calls on the Biden Administration to step out of the way of innovation and act immediately to approve Florida’s plan that provides safe and effective drugs to drive down prescription costs,” she said in an email to KHN.
The governor appeared at LifeScience Logistics in Lakeland, Florida, where state regulators worked with the company to construct an FDA-compliant warehouse to process pharmaceuticals from Canada.
“We’re ready, willing and able, and I think that this could be really, really significant,” DeSantis said.
He said the warehouse could begin receiving drugs from Canada within 90 days if the state were to get approval from Washington.
LifeScience Logistics officials said they are working with Methapharm Specialty Pharmaceuticals, which has offices near Toronto and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to act as its Canadian wholesaler. Quality checks would be done on the drugs in Canada and again in Florida, said Richard Beeny, CEO of LifeScience Logistics.
LifeScience has begun early talks on negotiating prices with drug manufacturers that would deliver medications to Methapharm, which in turn would send drugs to the Lakeland warehouse. “There is broad interest in the program,” Beeny said about drug companies wanting to participate. “But the pending suit is a bit of a roadblock, so we have to wait and see how that pans out.”
Unlike Florida’s plan, Colorado’s Canadian importation program would help individuals buy the medicines at their local pharmacy. Colorado also would give health insurance plans the option to include imported drugs in their benefit designs.
Mara Baer, a health consultant who has worked with Colorado on its proposal, said the Biden decision leaves open the question of whether state importation plans might eventually be approved. “HHS could have let the rule fall and they did not, which is important given the challenges facing Congress in moving major drug pricing reform in the short term,” she said.
Phil Galewitz is a journalist for Kaiser Health News
Campobello Island is an exclave of Canada’s Province of New Brunswick , but with land access to the mainland being only to Maine.
Useful then artistic
The Connecticut River Walk in Forest Park, in Springfield, Mass., one of many parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who’s considered the father of American landscape architecture. His most famous work is New York’s Central Park. Forest Park, at 735 acres, is one the largest urban parks in American and dates from the late 19th Century, when Springfield was a major manufacturing center.
“Service must precede art. So long as considerations of utility are neglected or overridden by considerations of ornament, there will not be true art.’’
— Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), landscape architect
Elegant order
“Amaryllis” (archival photograph) by Carol Wontkowski, in her show “Blooming,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, June 4-27.
Ms. Wontkowski comments:
“‘The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.’
— Dorothea Lange
"My work reflects the beauty in common things. Though we live in a world marred by human influence, there is still order, design and beauty around us. It is my desire to capture the more tranquil and serene images of this world, mirroring their Designer.
“This is an amaryllis bud beginning to open. The process is both elegant and exciting to see. I captured this image just before it began to fully emerge to show its unusual process."
That one face
When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.
“Young and Old,’’ by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), English writer and Anglican priest
Sam Pizzigati: Treating workers as disposable is bad for business
— Photo by Ramon F. Velasquez
Via OtherWords.org
BOSTON
McDonald’s workers in 15 U.S. cities recently staged a weeklong strike demanding a $15 hourly wage for every McDonald’s worker. McDonald’s resisted, pledging only to raise average wages to $13 an hour.
In the meantime, the profits keep rolling in. The fast-food giant registered $4.7 billion in 2020 earnings. CEO Chris Kempczinski personally pocketed $10.8 million last year, 1,189 times more than the $9,124 that went to the company’s median worker.
Executives at McDonald’s seem to think they can outlast the Fight for $15 campaign. More to the point, they think they know everything. Nothing happens at Mickey D’s without incredibly intensive market research: “Plan, test, feedback, tweak, repeat.” More hours may go into planning the launch of a new McDonald’s menu item than Ike marshaled planning the D-Day invasion.
All this planning has McDonald’s executives supremely confident about their business know-how. But, in fact, these execs do not know their business inside-out. They don’t know their workers.
Workers remain, for McDonald’s executive class, a disposable item. Why pay them decently? If some workers feel underpaid and overstressed, the McDonald’s corporate attitude has historically been “good riddance to them.” Turnover at McDonald’s was running at an annual rate of 150 percent before the pandemic.
The entire fast-food industry rests on a low-wage, high-turnover foundation. And at those rare moments — such as this spring — when new workers seem harder to find, the industry starts expecting its politician pals to cut away at jobless benefits and force workers to take positions that don’t pay a living wage.
But if leaders were really doing their research, they’d learn very quickly that this makes no sense. Instead of treating workers as disposable and replaceable, businesses ought to be treating them as partners.
Who says? The Harvard Business Review, hardly a haven for anti-corporate sloganeering. Employee ownership, the journal concluded recently, “can reduce inequality and improve productivity.”
Thomas Dudley and Ethan Rouen reviewed a host of studies on enterprises where employees hold at least 30 percent of their company’s shares. These companies are more productive and grow faster than their counterparts, Dudley and Rouen found. Cooperatives are also less likely to go out of business.
Enterprises with at least a 30-percent employee ownership share currently employ about 1.5 million U.S. workers, just under 1 percent of the nation’s total workforce. If we raise that number to 30 percent, Dudley and Rouen calculate, the bottom half of Americans would see their share of national wealth more than quadruple.
Elsewhere, enterprises with 100-percent employee ownership already exist. Spain’s Mondragon cooperatives, The New York Times noted earlier this year, have flourished since the 1950s. They aim “not to lavish dividends on shareholders or shower stock options on executives, but to preserve paychecks.”
At each of Mondragón’s 96 cooperative enterprises, executives make no more than six times what workers in the network’s Spanish co-ops make. In the United States, the typical rate runs well over 300 to 1.
We’re not talking artsy-crafty boutiques here. Mondragón co-ops, including one of Spain’s largest grocery chains, currently employ 70,000 people in the country.
Mondragón has had a particularly powerful impact on the Basque region in Spain, the network’s home base. By one standard measure, the Basque region currently ranks as one of the most egalitarian political areas on Earth.
“We want to transform our society,” Mondragón International president Josu Ugarte told me in a 2016 interview. “We want to have a more equal society.”
So do workers at McDonald’s.
Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, is a co-editor of Inequality.org and author of The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.
And I learned to sail there
The Community Boating clubhouse on the Charles River in Boston
“Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.” –
Leonard Nimoy ( 1931-2015), American actor, filmmaker photographer, author, singer and songwriter best known for playing Spock in the Star Trek franchise
And the lichens keep eating
Stone wall at what had been Robert Frost's farm in Derry, N.H., which he describes in his famous poem "Mending Wall"
"Many New England stone fences built between 1700 and 1875 were laid by gangs of workers who piled stone at the rate of so much a rod. Edwin Way Teale says that in the latter years of the 19th Century, before economic and social developments began obliterating some of the walls, there were a hundred thousand miles of stone fences in New England. Even today, for many of them, the only change has been the size of the lichens, those delicate rock-eating algae that can live nine hundred years."
William Least Heat Moon, in Blue Highways
Fear and wonder at the Fuller
“Nesting’’ (concrete, wood, bronze, steel and ashes), by Elizabeth Helfer, in the group show “Beyond the Walls: Sculptures from the New England Sculptors Association,’’ at the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Mass., through Sept. 12.
This exhibit uses the museum's 22-acre outdoor space, with sculptures throughout the property.
The museum says:
"Nesting’’ uses “a muted color palette and a combination of natural and manmade materials to convey an admiration for nature that is equal parts fear and wonder.
Don Pesci: Of husbandry, debt, 'investing' and politics
VERNON, Conn.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry”
– Shakespeare, in Hamlet
Most people in the United States – indeed, in the world – are either 1) buyers or 2) sellers, or 3) people who facilitate buying and selling.
Politicians consider themselves service providers. Their opening, invariably, is “We’re here to help.” As a general rule, politicians collect money from some people, launder it through bewildering, little understood administrative ganglions, and give it to those who, they determine, need help. A sizable chunk of the gift is devoted to the labor costs of the administrative apparatus, and other parts are parceled out to grease the political machine.
Politicians call this “investing.” They imagine that they are doing what millionaires do effectively in what is still laughingly called, here in the un-United States, a “free market.” A free market may be defined correctly as an unregulated selling floor, where people who want goods and services are free to purchase them from sellers without undue interference from third parties not directly involved in buying and selling.
In our Coronavirus cancel-everything era, we have seen autocratic governors swollen with plenary powers shut down the whole economy -- schools, restaurants, businesses, even the legislative and judicial branches of government.
The political universe, in which politicians invest additionally in their own continuance in office, is not at all like a public marketplace where goods and services are freely exchanged. In fact, in many ways, the political trade is just the opposite of a free market. It is where regulations are made that encumber the free flow of goods and services, sometimes in the interests of the general public.
The Shakespearian line quoted above is spoken by Polonius, who is giving fatherly advice to his son Laertes before his trip to Paris. Do not borrow or lend, the father advises, “for loan oft loses both itself and friend.”
Modern banking has solved the problem of lost friendship owing to imprudent borrowing because, as we all know, bankers are not friends. One who refuses to pay a loan from a bank quickly loses his credit, but never a true friend.
We know, either from bitter experience or hearsay, the dangers of imprudent getting and spending – assuming we are not profligate spenders like the majority of politicians in the so called “land of steady habits.” It is the special mission of progressives to unsteady habits. Here in Connecticut, governmental debt is $67 billion as of September 2020. Nationally, the debt is much larger, about $26.70 trillion as of August 2020, but one cannot expect a small state to keep up with so large a spendthrift neighbor.
Polonius tells his son that imprudent borrowing “dulls the edge of husbandry.”
Whatever can Shakespeare mean by that? What was husbandry in the Elizabethan era, and how is the sharp edge of it dulled by borrowing and imprudent spending?
When Banquo says in Macbeth, “There’s husbandry in heaven; Their candles are all out,” he means that the angels are illuminating fewer stars in order to economize.
It turns out that Shakespeare was a notorious borrower of the literary labor of others and, at some point, Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry may have fallen under his eyes. The book was very popular in its day.
“Husbandry,” we learn from Tusser and others, was a term that had developed from the word “husband.” It was used to refer to the ordering and management of the household. The term, used more broadly, applied as well to animal and agrarian management. The farmer who excelled at husbandry was, in a word, thrifty, which was why women in Shakespeare’s day were attracted to good husbands. Nowadays, a different alchemy, occasionally involving cosmetics and minor surgery, is used by non-farm women to catch wanted “partners”, not necessarily husbands, in their subtle nets. A good Hollywood husband, a gym rat and buff as a new penny, is one who leaves you in material comfort after the divorce.
Divorce and household management aside, the question of good husbandry –thriftiness and economizing -- is conspicuously absent in both Tinseltown and politics, because husbandry in the Shakespearian sense and marriage in the post-modern period are both regarded as steps backwards and a lamentable indication that one has failed to “move forward,” whatever horrors the future may hold for us, some of which may be glimpsed in urban fatherless families and politicians who little care what sprouts from their spendthrift progressive soil.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
The math of Vermont
Looking south from the summit of Mt. Mansfield, at 4,396 feet the highest point in the Green Mountain State
“It takes trigonometry, solid geography, and calculus to get at Vermont.’’
— Charles Edward Crane (1884-1960) in Let Me Show You Vermont
Art on the Greenway
“Summer Still Life with Lobsters and Fern,’’ by Daniel Gordon, in the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, Boston
The Greenway, in downtown Boston, has several art installations along its walking path. The newest is “Daniel Gordon on The Greenway,’’ which marks the first time in the park's history that a single artist is featured in various works along The Greenway. These include a mural, tapestries, large-scale sculpture and many photographic still-lifes.
Llewellyn King: Welcome to summer -- the American season
Old Orchard Beach, in Maine
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The calendar opines that summer starts on June 20, but we know better. Metaphorically, it starts on Memorial Day, when we give thanks to those we honor, those who gave their lives for their country. Then it is, “Beach, ahoy!”
Memorial Day weekend signals the beginning of summer as if a flaming taper were applied to black powder and a cannon fired, joyously marking the sun’s reascendance to its throne.
Summer is important everywhere: to the British who try to catch a few elusive rays under their perfidious sun; to the French who shut their country down in August, and claim their spots on the crowded Mediterranean and Atlantic beaches; or to the Germans who take the summer break as a time to earn bragging rights on how far away and in which unlikely places they took their generous six weeks of vacation.
It isn’t that we Americans don’t travel. But it is here, at home, that we worship summer with the adulation of the sun. It is here we celebrate warmth, sand, water and barbecues. It is here that summer is most adored, most longed for, and most remembered for everything from young love to wraparound family togetherness.
All the world celebrates summer, but Americans exalt in it; treasure it as no others around the world.
Summer is woven into our culture, from those beach movies of the 1950s to its endless evocation in popular songs.
Growing up in Africa, I was bemused and confused by all of this summer worship coming out of the radio. We took summer for granted. It incorporated our rainy season and was a little less lovely than winter -- when the weather was so fair that the radio station (there was but one, and no television station ) didn’t announce the weather for six months. How many ways can a weather forecaster, even the most creative, say “perfect”?
Yes, on the Zimbabwe plateau (highveld), close to the equator, the weather is perfect and, if I might say so, perfectly boring.
No, give me the change of season. Let me join other Americans in celebrating the euphoria that breaks out every June when we say goodbye to dull care and embrace the bounty of summer, of cookouts and hikes, of shorts and tank tops and of going sockless.
From the beaches to the lakes, summer draws us to the water; some just want to bake their winter-ravaged bodies in the hot sand, others want to take to the water in or on everything from canoes to paddle boards, and from dinghies to great schooners.
The call of the water is loud in summer for many Americans but so, too, is the call of the mountains, and the glory of the National Parks beckons with a seductive finger.
The American summer is inextricably tied up with coming of age, of first love – indeed, the first of many first things. But it also enchants the oldsters. It is the time for family integration, when grandchildren and even great-grandchildren can be indulged from Portland, Maine, to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and from the Upper Michigan Peninsula to San Diego.
Summer thrills, stocks the memory bank, as even Alaska turns from the epitome of winter to a lush and tempting land where the outdoors offer a cornucopia of joys.
I have been lucky enough to spend summers around the world, so I can report that nowhere is summer embraced with such near-religious fervor as it is here in the United States; nowhere is the sun’s return to full raiment of majesty so celebrated and adored.
Remember this Memorial Day those who fell so that we might be free to fire up the grill and soak up the sun. It shines so lovingly on America.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
How about a weather museum with water view?
Beavertail Lighthouse
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ at GoLocal24.com
The Coast Guard has decided that it no longer needs famous Beavertail Lighthouse, on a dramatic headland in Jamestown. So the government is offering the site for free to other federal, state and local government agencies and to nonprofit agencies.
How about turning it into a museum of coastal weather and ecology with lots of scientific and historical information, especially what can be illustrated? One thinks of hurricanes and other big storms and of the animals that frequent the New England coast as well as plants, such as kelp forests. Perhaps the University of Rhode Island’s famed Graduate School of Oceanography could be brought into the project.
But dignified
“Nonetheless II” (oil on canvas), by Youngsheen A. Jhe, in her show “Nonetheless.’’ at Galatea Fine Art.
The South Korea-born, Boston-based artist says:
"What kind of world do we live in? As the COVID-19 pandemic pushes us to a disconnected life, every one of us are seemingly stuck in our own world, although humans are social animals. We are forced to walk this path alone and with our masks covering our faces. An invisible glass film (and sometimes visible) blocks us from another. Solitude and loneliness were forced upon our lives and all we can do is to walk this lonely road without a companion.
“My starting desire was to depict the reality of the human beings through the inanimate mannequins, helplessly stuck in their own solitary world.
“From this series, I started to describe living fashion models instead of mannequins. They walk away from other models with expressionless and inanimate faces, but nonetheless their steps are always confident and they walk on a bright path full of light, not bleak hopelessness. It seems to be the image of us living in a pandemic. We have to walk with social distancing, but there is always a bright light for us."
Always looking for work
Newly plowed field in Bethel. Vt., in the spring
“Hard work was not only necessary, but it was also noble; and to avoid it would lead to disgrace, dishonor, and probably, eventually, to Hell itself. If a true Yankee ran out of work, he was expected to look for more.’’
Lewis Hill, in Fetched-Up Yankee: A New England Boyhood Remembered, a memoir of the author’s growing up on a Vermont farm in the 1930s
