“A bucket of fish,’’ Mats Hagwall
“I let down my long line; it went falling; I pulled; up came
A bucket of bad sleep in which tongues were sloshing about
Like frogs and dark fish, breaking the surface of silence….’’
— From “The Angler’s Story,’’ by American poet and Yale Prof. John Hollander (1929-2013). He lived in Woodbridge, Conn.
In Woodbridge, the Darling House Museum, built in 1774
— Photo by Jerry Dougherty
“Women in Design: The Next Decade” (Diazo lithograph on paper), by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, in her show “Community, Activism and Design,’’ at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.
— Courtesy Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
She says:
“From the start, I saw that the direct expression of a plurality of voices within each community could carry the immediacy of conversations, and that content and site combine to inform my choice of materials and processes. Over time open-ended forms, processes and materials offered me different ways to extend to others an invitation to participate in the meaning of each work. Through listening I have been able to reflect local populations and translate that connection first in ephemera and then in site specific, permanent installations integrated into specific places here in the states and abroad. The vivid forms of connection to people and place has become recognizable as my work…’’
This work by Mr. Bernbaum is in the show “Sand to Glass: The Nature of Glass,’’ at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, June 8-Sept. 22
Mr. Bernbaum says on his Web site:
“I am most interested in color, especially color relationships in the works I create in blown glass. Utilizing traditional Italian cane (or striping) techniques in new and personalized ways is the driving force behind most of my current designs.
“I consider the pieces I make to be documents along the way of a (hopefully) life-long journey of both refining the necessary skills and developing the patience one needs in order to create with this captivating and mesmerizing molten material.’’
The elegant court house In Manchester. It was built in 1822.
Cicada in Princeton, N.J., in 2014
— Photo by Pmjacoby
The article with additional graphics
John Cooley is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and Chris Simons a senior research scientist of ecology and evoluttionary biology, at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
John Cooley receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.
Chris Simon has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Geographic Society and the New Zealand Marsden Fund.
In the wake of North America’s recent solar eclipse, another historic natural event is on the horizon. From now through June 2024, the largest brood of 13-year cicadas, known as Brood XIX, will co-emerge with a Midwestern brood of 17-year cicadas, Brood XIII.
This event will affect 17 states, from Maryland west to Iowa and south into Arkansas, Alabama and northern Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Maryland. A co-emergence like this of two specific broods with different life cycles happens only once every 221 years. The last time these two groups emerged together was in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president.
For about four weeks, scattered wooded and suburban areas will ring with cicadas’ distinctive whistling, buzzing and chirping mating calls. After mating, each female will lay hundreds of eggs in pencil-size tree branches. Then the adult cicadas will die. Once the eggs hatch, new cicada nymphs will fall from the trees and burrow back underground, starting the cycle again.
There are perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 species of cicadas around the world, but the 13- and 17-year periodical cicadas of the eastern U.S. appear to be unique in combining long juvenile development times underground with synchronized, mass adult emergences. There are two other known periodical cicadas in the world, one in northeast India and one in Fiji, but these have only four-year and eight-year life cycles, respectively.
Periodical cicadas raise many questions for entomologists and the public alike. What do cicadas do underground for 13 or 17 years? Why are their life cycles so long? Why are they synchronized? Will the two broods emerging this spring interact? How can citizen scientists help to document this emergence? And is climate change affecting this wonder of the insect world?
We study periodical cicadas to understand questions about biodiversity, biogeography, behavior and ecology – the evolution, natural history and geographic distribution of life. It’s no accident that the scientific name for periodical 13- and 17-year cicadas is Magicicada, shortened from “magic cicada.”
Illinois is expected to be ground zero for the dual emergence of two periodical cicada broods in 2024.
Transformation from mature cicada nymph to adult.
As species, periodical cicadas are older than the forests that they inhabit. Molecular analysis has shown that about 4 million years ago, the ancestor of the current Magicicada species split into two lineages. Some 1.5 million years later, one of those lineages split again. The resulting three lineages are the basis of the modern periodical cicada species groups, Decim, Cassini and Decula.
Early American colonists first encountered periodical cicadas in Massachusetts. The sudden appearance of so many insects reminded them of biblical plagues of locusts, which are a type of grasshopper. That’s how the name “locust” became incorrectly associated with cicadas in North America.
During the 19th century, notable entomologists such as Benjamin Walsh, C.V. Riley and Charles Marlatt worked out the astonishing biology of periodical cicadas. They established that unlike locusts or other grasshoppers, cicadas don’t chew leaves, decimate crops or fly in swarms.
Instead, these insects spend most of their lives out of sight, growing underground and feeding on plant roots as they pass through five juvenile stages. Their synchronized emergences are predictable, occurring on a clockwork schedule of 17 years in the North and 13 years in the South and Mississippi Valley. There are multiple, regional year classes, known as broods.
The key feature of Magicicada biology is that these insects emerge synchronously in huge numbers – as high as 1.5 million per acre. This increases their chances of accomplishing their key mission aboveground: finding mates.
Dense emergences also provide what scientists call a predator-satiation or safety-in-numbers defense. Any predator that feeds on cicadas, whether it’s a fox, squirrel, bat or bird, will eat its fill long before it consumes all of the insects in the area, leaving many survivors behind.
While periodical cicadas largely come out on schedule every 17 or 13 years, often a small group emerges four years early or late. Early-emerging cicadas may be faster-growing individuals that had access to abundant food, and the laggards may be individuals that subsisted with less.
If growing conditions change over time, as is happening now with climate warming, having the ability to make this kind of life cycle switch and come out either four years early in favorable times or four years late in more difficult times becomes important. If a sudden warm or cold phase causes a large number of cicadas to come out off schedule by four years, the insects can emerge in sufficient numbers to satiate predators and shift to a new schedule.
Union Village, in Thetford, Vt: Methodist church and defunct School House.
Photo by EdwardEMeyer
“I was happy, but I am now in possession of knowledge that this is wrong. Happiness isn't so bad for a woman. She gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, or they have to be famous, or everybody on the block has to look up to them from the cellar stairs.”
— Grace Paley (1922-2007), American writer. A native of New York City, she lived in Thetford, Vt., in her later years.
Thetford in 1912.
Downtown Bridgeport in 1912. Bridgeport was an industrial powerhouse for decades.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
What may prove to be Connecticut's best journalism for many years was a 44-minute video documentary of sorts posted last week on YouTube by freelancer Andrew Callaghan and brought to the state's attention by CTCapitolReport.com.
Callaghan gained the confidence of three teenage gangsters from Bridgeport and video-recorded them on their daily rampages -- breaking into and stealing cars day and night throughout the state, speeding away wildly along highways and residential streets, risking death and the death of others, defeating police pursuit, and boasting that no one can catch them.
Of course the young gangsters might be caught, insofar as Callaghan repeatedly located them and even joined them at a government housing project in Bridgeport, where, he found, stolen cars are regularly being "sold" to other young gangsters for a mere hundred dollars or so, the contents of the cars having more value than the cars themselves, which are soon abandoned since they can't be acquired legally.
Apparently the Bridgeport police were not yet aware of or interested in the use of the housing project as a stolen car market. Nor, apparently, was Mayor Joe Ganim, though his recent re-election campaign was noted for soliciting absentee ballots from public-housing residents who may have feared that keeping their apartments required such cooperation with the regime.
Despite the harm they were doing, the kids seemed more lost and nihilistic than evil, glad that someone from another world was paying attention to them. As they sat on the roof of a small abandoned house, taking a break from their mayhem, Callaghan even got them to reflect briefly on their lack of parenting and particularly their lack of present fathers.
The young gangsters call themselves the Connecticut Kia Boyz, since most of their target vehicles are Kias, which became notorious for the ease of bypassing their ignition systems with a screwdriver and USB cable.
It is hard not to see the Kia Boyz as the country's future -- the vanguard of the ever-growing urban underclass, products of the family-destroying welfare system; of schools that pay their employees well but fail to educate because they can't educate when their primary policy is social promotion and parents are no help; and of a criminal-justice system that pretends that social work actually works and is preferable to imprisoning young repeat offenders, giving them what feckless state legislators call "the help they need" without ever defining or delivering it.
What the Kia Boyz and the hundreds of thousands like them around the country need most is parents. But no one in authority in Connecticut dares to inquire into what has happened to parents and particularly to fathers, and why. That's because such an inquiry might distress the many government employees and others who make their livings doing what doesn't work or even makes things worse.]
Anyone daring to inquire into the collapse of the family would also risk accusations of racism, since fatherlessness and poverty are racially disproportionate,.
So the country's nearly comprehensive abandonment of behavioral standards continues, worsened by the crushing pressure imposed on schools, hospitals, welfare agencies and government budgets by the millions of immigrants illegally entering the country in recent years.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the social scientist who became a great U.S. senator from New York, saw it all coming in the famous 1965 report that bears his name.
Moynihan wrote: "From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder -- most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved."
Six decades later Moynihan's prophecy is still ignored even as new horrors fulfill it almost every day.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
The old steel mill in Weirton, W.Va., from which a Massachusetts company’s perhaps revolutionary iron-air batteries will be shipped.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Since electricity was first deployed, there has been a missing link: storage.
The lead-acid battery was first developed in 1859 and has been refined to the effective, utilitarian box we have in cars today. Gone are the days when you sometimes had to top up the car battery with sulfuric acid and, often, distilled water.
These batteries, these workhorses, never made it far beyond their essential role in automobiles. Although early car manufacturers thought that the future of the automobile would belong to electricity, it was the internal-combustion engine that took over.
While battery research continues unabated – especially after the energy crisis that unfolded after the fall of 1973 -- it wasn’t until the lithium-ion battery arrived in the 1980s that batteries became a transformative technology. From cell phones to Teslas, they have upended the world of stored electricity.
Lithium-ion was the clear winner. It is light and suitable for transportation. It has also been the primary battery for utilities, which have been installing them at breakneck speed. But they are costly, and lithium is at the end of a troubled supply chain.
Batteries are essential to realizing the full potential of electricity generated from wind and solar. They provide power when the sun has set or the wind isn’t blowing. They can capture surplus production in the middle of the day when states like California and Arizona already have overproduction of solar power and it becomes negative energy, wasted.
Enter iron-air batteries. That is right: Iron with an “r,” which is the basic material in steel and one of the most plentiful elements on Earth.
Iron-air batteries use rusting as their central technology. In an iron-air battery, iron, water and air are the components. The iron rusts to discharge power and the rusting is reversed to charge the battery.
Form Energy, based in Somerville, Mass., will be shipping these revolutionary batteries to utilities late this year or early next from their manufacturing plant at the site of the old steel mill on the Ohio River in Weirton, W.Va. This means transportation infrastructure for heavy loads is already in place.
Form Energy got started with two battery experts talking: Mateo Jaramillo, the head of battery development at Tesla, and Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor at MIT who devoted his career to the study of batteries, primarily lithium. Indeed, he told me when I met with him in Somerville, that he fathered two successful battery companies using lithium.
But clearly, iron-air is Chiang’s passion now — a palpable passion. He is the chief scientific officer at Form Energy and remains professor of materials science and engineering and professor of ceramics at MIT.
Chiang, Jaramillo and three others founded Form Energy, in 2017. Now it has contracts with five utilities to provide batteries and appears to be fulfilling the dearest wish of the utilities: a battery that can provide electricity over long periods of time, like 100 hours. Lithium-ion batteries draw down quickly — usually in two or four hours, before they must be recharged.
An iron-air battery is capable of slow discharge over days, not hours. Therefore, it can capture electricity when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing — which tends to drop in the afternoon just when utilities are beginning to experience their peak load, which is early evening.
Iron is very heavy and so the use of iron-air technology would appear to be limited to utilities where weight isn’t a problem and where the need for long, long drawdown times are needed; for example, when the wind doesn’t blow for several days.
Jaramillo told me the company has finished its funding and is well-set financially. It has raised $860 million and was given $290 million by the state of West Virginia,
The smart money has noticed: Early funders include Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Is a new Iron Age at hand?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email address is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
“Angry Nimbus” (limited edition fine art photograph), by Robert Thomas, at Spectrum Art Gallery, Centerbrook, Conn., a village in the town of Essex.
Early 20th Century postcard.
Playing at the Huntington Avenue field in the early 20th Century.
Excerpted from The Boston Guardian
“The Huntington Avenue American League Baseball Grounds was one of the most popular and well-attended baseball fields in Boston in the early 20th Century. The large open-air field was on Huntington Avenue, just west of Massachusetts Avenue and opposite the Boston Opera House. It was the first home of the Boston Red Sox.
“In 1901, ground was officially broken in the Fenway area of the city for the new baseball field, with a covered grandstand and high wood fences, that was to have a capacity of 11,500 spectators….
“The baseball field was the site of the World Series game between the current American and National Leagues in 1903, the first perfect game in the modern era, thrown by Cy Young in 1904.’’
Hit this link to read the whole article, by historian Anthony Sammarco
A series of fungi.
— Collage by BorgQueen
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Anything we can do to get off many manmade toxic chemicals the better, in small and large places. Researchers and business have been stepping up efforts to get off problematical chemicals by turning to natural solutions.
Boston’s WBUR reports that one quirky example is on Nantucket, which is experimenting with “MycoBuoys,” made from the root-like part of mushrooms (which, of course, are fungi), to replace petroleum-based Styrofoam buoys used in scallop, oyster, and mussel aquaculture to hold up spat collectors. The Styrofoam degrades, releasing microplastics that pose health risks to animal life in general. In this case, they may have been harming shellfish reproduction.
When shellfish reproduce, they spawn tiny larvae that move in the water until they find a structure to settle on. Once the larvae permanently attach to a surface, they are known as spat and, hopefully, grow to harvestable-sized shellfish.
The hope is that the buoys will last five to eight months. Town officials will see if their use can increase the number of scallops. If so, that could be an economic boon. Scallops sell for a pretty price.
Fungi can be used in a wide variety of ways to reduce the use of manmade chemicals. These include medicine, fuel, fertilizers, cosmetics, clothing and footwear. And reducing the production of manmade chemicals reduces the burning of fossil fuels.
“The Woods Maine” (grid-based painting), by Rhode Island artist Kristin Lamb, at the Jennifer Terzian Gallery, Litchfield, Conn., April 27-June 15.
—Image courtesy of the gallery
The gallery promotes Ms. Lamb’s labor-intensive grid-based paintings {that} focus on the beauty of lush, green New England forests. Ms. Lamb says her work is a“blur between a focused photorealism, a computer-generated pattern and a fetishized repetition of an acrylic paint mark.’’
Photos, except for the picture of the author himself, by William Morgan
Savers (“make secondhand, second nature”) is the largest for-profit thrift retailer in the country, serving 29 states. There are a half dozen Savers close to us in Rhode Island and Massachusetts that we frequent, but the one on Branch Avenue at Interstate 95 in Providence is the motherlode. Since we discovered Savers, I cannot remember buying an item of clothing anywhere else. Where else could I find a Harris tweed jacket from Edinburgh for $9.99 or a university scarf from a Glasgow department store that closed in 1943 for $3.99?
That said, I hate to shop. So, when my wife, Carolyn, is in Savers in search of fabric with which to make clothes, tchotchkes to incorporate in art, or household furnishings for young newlyweds, I roam the bookshelves there (or what we call The Library). Then with a couple of British murder mysteries (mystery reading is an addiction, said W.H. Auden, like smoking or alcohol), I head for a comfortable chair or sofa in the furniture section (which we call The Lounge), where I settle in for some reading and likely a nap.
The author reading in Savers.
— Photo by Gabs Chioniere
Sometimes a napping man causes a stir, and once someone asked if I were dead. Other times, I may head outside to get away from the pervasive used-clothes smell. There’s not much room around our Savers to walk safely; still, beyond the cigarette butts, dental-flossing devices, and candy wrappers, the parking lot can yield some treasures. A recent perambulation suggested that there’s darker side to Savers: unsolved mysteries.
Why the abandoned trousers? An after-hours tryst interrupted and the pants left behind?
A dismembered ear? Presumably a discarded part of a Halloween costume (Halloween is huge at Savers). Although, at first glance, there is a suggestion of violence, as with the blue jeans. Instead of behind a bar in Arles, a contemporary Van Gogh and Gauguin had a knife fight outside of the thrift store.
Most mysterious of all was a single high-heeled shoe abandoned at the edge of the Savers parking lot.
Was this pump left behind by a hasty Cinderella fleeing a wee hours ball held on the asphalt?
William Morgan is a Providence-based architectural writer. His latest book is Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States.
Western face of Camel's Hump Mountain (elevation 4,079 feet), in Vermont.
— Photo by Niranjan Arminius
“….You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March….’’
— From “Two Tramps in Mud Time,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
“Uproot III” (charcoal on paper), by Julie Comnick, in the group show RISE: Trees; Our Botanical Giants, at Mad River Valley Arts, Waitsfield, Vt., through April 26.
The gallery says the show “features 20 artists paying homage to the tree in the creative process. Artists salute their relationship with wood materials reclaimed or formally crafted and in doing so push the conversation between man-made and nature into one of collaborative celebration.’’
The Mad River.
Boynton Hall, WPI's main administrative building, built in 1868.
— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
Edited from a New England Council report
“Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has announced that it will establish America’s first PhD program in financial technology (fintech). WPI already offers both bachelor’s and master’s programs in fintech, making the school the first in the nation to offer fintech programs for all three degree options.
“According to a press release from WPI, the curriculum will ‘offer a comprehensive, multidisciplinary education that bridges finance, mathematics, computer science, and ethics.’ Students will study various topics in these areas, such as AI, analytics, data science and applied statistics, as well as material on ethical challenges within the industry, such as data privacy.
“‘Introducing a doctoral degree program in FinTech exemplifies how WPI is a global innovator at the intersection of business and technology,’ said WPI President Grace Wang.
“‘Graduates of this program will emerge as academic and industry leaders who will shape the future of financial technology education and the financial services sector.”’
“Waking Up” (photomontage on aluminum), by Deer Isle, Maine-based artist Jeffrey C. Becton, in his show “Framing the Domestic Sea,’’ at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, through May 5.
— Image courtesy of Mr. Becton
The museum says the show “evokes New England’s varied histories, the maritime world and the impacts of climate change on coastal communities.’’
Federal Reserve System headquarters, in Washington, D.C.
— Photo by DestinationFearFan
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Before my column, called Economic Principals, goes monthly, I want to revisit what now seems to be its single most important misjudgment in forty years. While it occurred fifteen years ago, it has relevance to the present day.
The Jan, 25, 2009, edition of the weekly, “In Which George W. Bush Enters History,” I began:
George W. Bush left Washington last week amid a hail of jeers. “The Frat Boy Ships Out” headlined The Economist. “Serially incompetent,” declared the Financial Times. “Worse than Hoover,” concluded Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley.
Bush arrived in Midland, Texas, to find a cheering crowd of 20,000.
I was a little more temperate. Bush’s admirers for years had for years portrayed him as resembling Harry Truman – unpopular when leaving office, later remembered with “a tincture of admiration and regret.” A more re-illuminating comparison, I suggested, citing expert opinion, was to Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), the last president with a faith-based foreign policy.
I said nothing about the apartheid policy that Wilson, a Virginian, reinstalled; this was before the Third Reconstruction gathered steam, George Floyd (1973-2020) and The New York Times’s 1619 project. It was a pretty good column, worth reading today, emblematic of the weekly’s style, before, a year later, I began writing the book that has preoccupied me ever since.
Wilson’s case is a good illustration of the fact that every president makes so many decisions about so many polices that it is difficult, if not impossible to single out in his day the one for which he’ll be remembered decades later, depending on the decade. Bush’s great achievement grew out of two decisions he made during the final quarter of his administration.
The second half had started badly enough with his Second Inaugural Address.
[I]t is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
Then came the Hurricane Katrina flood, the plan to privatize Social Security, the two-thousandth American death in Iraq, Vice president Dick Cheney shooting a fellow fowler during a Texas partridge hunt. An old friend dates the low point as Bush’ s attempt to appoint one of his staffers to the Supreme Court.
After that, things improved. After heavy losses in the mid-term election, Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, turned away from Cheney in favor of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He appointed corporate attorney and former appellate court judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court. A year later he picked Goldman Sachs chief executive Henry Paulson as Treasury secretary.
Most important, in October 2005, Bush chose Ben Bernanke an expert on the Great Depression, to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Bernanke, a former Princeton University professor, had spent four years of his administration as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, then two as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. The joke at the time was that Bush chose Bernanke because he wore white socks with his dark suits to White House briefings.
Bernanke had a relatively peaceful first year as chairman, but by 2007 was preparing measures behind the scenes to defuse or at least contro a slowly building crisis. By the summer of 2008, the banking system was on the verge of collapse. Even after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in September, Paulson continued to argue that a combination of lending and takeovers by a consortium of big banks could resolve it. Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said no. After three days, Paulson folded his hand. Government lending to stop the crisis would be required. A day of meetings with legislators followed.
And on that Friday Bush made his second crucial decision. He walked out with the others to the Rose Garden to make an out-of-the blue plea for a something called a Troubled Asset Relief Program. Nobody seemed to know quite what it might do. Never mind that five weeks of negotiation were required to clarify the matter. By October the panic had been quelled. Last-minute lending by the Fed Reserve, backstopped by the U.S. Treasury, and ten other central banks around the world, had prevented what otherwise virtually certainly would have turned into a second Great Depression had a lawsuits race to the bottom begun.
Bush got little credit for his courage. Barack Obama defeated John McCain in November and attention quickly shifted to blame, and the steep recession that had already begun. Unemployment climbed to 10 percent, not the twenty or more that had been feared in those five desperate weeks. Ahead lay Obamacare and the Tea Party.
Like the rest of the press, I mostly missed the story at the time. Bush’s admirers turn out to have been right. That was my single worst miscalculation. Second, of course, was America’s invasion of Iraq. Like most of the rest of the mainstream press, I was for the war before it was against it. It took about four weeks to change its mind.
And the significance to the present day? It is two-fold.
The first has to do with is the carom shot that today’s is war in Ukraine. Instead of committing American forces to free the world from tyranny, the U.S. has offered intelligence and arms, and otherwise depended on the willingness of Ukrainian soldiers to repel the invaders of their homeland. Tens of thousands have died.
As Fareed Zakaria writes in the current Foreign Affairs, “America shouldn’t give up on the world it made.” Mike Johnson’s willingness to risk his speakership to build a bipartisan coalition ensure that America keeps its promises, as best it can. His choice is the true beginning of the end for Donald Trump.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com
1922 road map
Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a Modernist.
Jose Andres (born 1969), Spanish-American chef, restaurateur and teacher. Beginning in the fall of 2010, Andrés taught a culinary physics course at Harvard University with Ferran Adrià.
“Blue Water” (oil on canvas), by Patricia Crotty, in her show “Sky Water: Reflections on Walden Pond”, at Walden Pond State Reservation Gallery, Concord, Mass., through April 30.
The gallery says:
“The colorful abstract paintings and collages of local artist Patricia Crotty are inspired by the connection with nature that Walden Pond {made internationally famous by Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden} provides visitors. They celebrate the beauty of nature in all of its forms and seasons. Co-sponsored by Friends of Walden Pond. The exhibit is free; parking fees apply.’’
