Edifice complex
“And They Keep Extending That Wing Farther to the Right” (graphite, ink and wax on mounted paper), by Eben Haines, in his show at Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine, July 19-Aug. 23.
Llewellyn King: The joy of friendship; a very dark Fourth; ‘customer service’ oxymoron; AI in medicine
Masked people wearing this badge made it a less than Glorious Fourth. It’s our new secret police.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I treasure the friends who share their friends. One of those friends, Virginia “Ginny” Hamill, has died.
I met Ginny at The Washington Post in 1969, and we became forever-friends.
Ginny had an admirable ascent from a teleprinter operator to an editor in The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times News Service. She was promoted again to the enviable job as the editor of the news service in London, where she bloomed — and met her future husband, John McCaughey.
Ginny brought wealth into my life — and later to that of my wife, Linda Gasparello — through the introductions to her friends from that London period. They included David Fishlock, science editor of the Financial Times; Roy Hodson, also of the FT; Deborah Waroff, an American journalist; and Guy Hawtin, a rakish newspaperman on his way to the New York Post.
They constituted what I called “The Set.” In London, New York and Washington, we worked at the journalism trade on many projects from newsletters to conferences and broadcasts.
We also partied; it went with the territory.
I once wrote to Ginny and told her how instrumental she had been in all our lives through sharing her friends. I am glad I didn’t wait until obituary time to thank her for her generosity in friend-sharing.
******
I think that for many, myself among them, it was a somber July 4. There are dark clouds crossing America’s sun. There are things aplenty going on that seem at odds with the American ideal, and the America we have known.
To me, the most egregious excess of the present is the way masked agents of the state grab men, women and children and deport them without due process, without observance of a cornerstone of law: habeas corpus. None are given a chance to show their legality, call family or, if they have one, a lawyer.
This war against the defenseless is wanton and cruel.
The advocates of this activity, this snatch-and-deport policy, say, and have said it to me, “What do these people not understand about ‘illegal’?”
I say to these advocates, “What don’t you understand about want, need, fear, family, marriage, children and hope?”
The repression many fled from has reentered their luckless lives: terror at the hands of masked enforcers.
I have always advocated for controlled immigration. But the fact that it has been poorly managed shouldn’t be corrected post facto, often years after the offense of seeking a better life and without the consideration of contributions to society.
Meanwhile, the media remain under attack, the universities are being coerced, and the courts are diminished.
America has always had blots on its history, but it has also stood for justice, for the rule of law, for freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Violations of these values dimmed the Fourth.
America deserves better: Think of the Constitution, one of the all-time great documents of history, a straight-line descendant of the Magna Carta of 1215. That was when the noblemen of England told King John, “Cut it out!”
A few noblemen in Washington wouldn’t go amiss.
I was fortunate on my syndicated television show, White House Chronicle, along with my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell III, to recently interview Harvey Castro, an emergency room doctor. Castro, from a base in Dallas, has seized on artificial intelligence as the next frontier in health care.
He has written several books and given TEDx talks on the future of AI-driven health care. I have talked to several doctors in this field, but never one who sees the application of AI in as many ways from diagnosing ailments through a patient's speech, to having an AI -controlled robot assist a nurse to gently transfer a patient from a gurney to a bed.
A man with infectious ebullience, Castro says his frustration in emergency rooms was that he got there too late: after a heart attack, stroke or seizure. He expects AI to change that through predictive medicine and early treatment.
His work has caught the attention of the government of Singapore, and he is advising them on how to build AI into their medical system.
******
Like everyone else, I spend a lot of time in frustration-agony on the phone when I need to talk to a bank or insurance company and many other firms that have “customer service.” That phrase might loosely be translated as “Get rid of the suckers!”
I don’t know whether the arrival of AI agents will hugely improve customer service, but maybe you can banter with them, get them to deride their masters, even to tell you stuff about the president of the bank.
It might be easier talking to an AI agent than talking to someone with a script in another country before they inevitably, but oh, so nicely, tell you to get lost, as happened to me recently.
You could enjoy a little hallucinatory fun with a virtual comedic friend, before it tells you to have a nice day, and hangs up.
On X: @llewellynking2
Bluesky: @llewellynking.bsky.social
Subscribe to Llewellyn King's File on Substack
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island.
Summer days can seem long but the season is short
“Boys at the Bridge,’’ by Ned Reade, in the show “From Our Eyes,’’ at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester.
— Image courtesy of Ned Reade
The show that puts the focus on the Southern Vermont Arts Center's teaching artists. The gallery says “The variety of media they employ—painting, drawing, sculpture, even circus arts—reflects the richness of their perspectives and the breadth of creative exploration they foster in the classroom.’’
Aneri Pattini: Cutbacks at federal agency might undermime workplace mental- health programs
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News (except for image above).
In Connecticut, construction workers in the Local 478 union who complete addiction treatment are connected with a recovery coach who checks in daily, attends recovery meetings with them, and helps them navigate the return to work for a year.
In Pennsylvania, doctors applying for credentials at Geisinger hospitals are not required to answer intrusive questions about mental health care they’ve received, reducing the stigma around clinicians seeking treatment.
The workplace is the new ground zero for addressing mental health. That means companies — employees and supervisors alike — must confront crises, from addiction to suicide. The two seemingly unrelated advances in Connecticut and Pennsylvania have one common factor: They grew out of the work of a little known federal agency called the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
It’s one of the key federal agencies leading workplace mental health efforts, from decreasing alarmingly high rates of suicide among construction workers to addressing burnout and depression among health care workers.
But after gaining considerable traction during the covid-19 pandemic, that work is now imperiled. The Trump administration has fired a majority of NIOSH staffers and is proposing severe reductions to its budget.
Private industry and nonprofits may be able to fill some of the gap, but they can’t match the federal government’s resources. And some companies may not prioritize worker well-being above profits.
About 60% of employees worldwide say their job is the chief factor affecting their mental health. Research suggests workplace stress causes about 120,000 deaths and accounts for up to 8% of health costs in the U.S. each year.
“Workplace mental health is one of the most underappreciated yet critical areas we could intervene on,” said Thomas Cunningham, a former senior behavioral scientist at NIOSH who took a buyout this year. “We were just starting to get some strong support from all the players involved,” he said. “This administration has blown that apart.”
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is a little-known federal agency that has been central to the nation’s efforts to conduct research into workplace mental health and well-being. Under the Trump administration, NIOSH offices across the country — including this one in Cincinnati — have been gutted by reorganization and staff reductions.
NIOSH, established in 1970 by the same law that created the better-known Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is charged with producing research that informs workplace safety regulations. It’s best known for monitoring black lung disease in coal miners and for testing masks, like the N95s used during the pandemic.
As part of the mass firing of federal workers this spring, NIOSH was slated to lose upward of 900 employees. After pushback from legislators — primarily over coal miner and first responder safety — the administration reinstated 328. It’s not clear if any rehired workers focus on mental health initiatives.
At least two lawsuits challenging the firings are winding through the courts. Meanwhile, hundreds of NIOSH employees remain on administrative leave, unable to work.
Emily Hilliard, a press secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, asserted in a statement that “the nation’s critical public health functions remain intact and effective,” including support for coal miners and firefighters through NIOSH. “Improving the mental health of American workers remains a key priority for HHS, and that work is ongoing,” she wrote.
She did not answer specific questions from KFF Health News about whether any reinstated NIOSH employees lead mental health efforts or who is continuing such work.
Reducing Suicides and Addiction in Construction and Mining
Over 5,000 construction workers die by suicide annually — five times the number who die from work-related injuries. Miners suffer high rates too. And nearly a fifth of workers in both industries have a substance use disorder, double the rate among all U.S. workers.
Kyle Zimmer recognized these issues as early as 2010. That’s when he started a members’ assistance program for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 478 in Connecticut. He hired a licensed clinician on retainer and developed partnerships with local treatment facilities.
At first, workers pushed back, said Zimmer, who recently retired after 25 years in the union, many as director of health and safety.
Their perception was, “If I speak up about this issue, I’m going to be blackballed from the industry,” he said.
General contractors and project owners are increasingly incorporating mental health services on-site and as a normal part of their project budgets, says TJ Lyons, a multidecade construction industry safety professional.
But slowly, that changed — with NIOSH’s help, Zimmer said.
The agency developed an approach to worker safety called Total Worker Health, which identifies physical and mental health as critical to occupational safety. It also shifts the focus from how individuals can keep themselves safe to how policies and environments can be changed to keep them safe.
Over decades, the concept spread from research journals and universities to industry conferences, unions, and eventually workers, Zimmer said. People began accepting that mental health was an occupational safety issue, he said. That paved the way for NIOSH’s Miner Health Program to develop resources on addiction and for Zimmer to establish the recovery coaching program in Connecticut.
“We have beat that stigma down by a lot,” Zimmer said.
Other countries have made more progress on mental health at work, said Sally Spencer-Thomas, co-chair of the International Association for Suicide Prevention’s workplace special interest group. But with the growth of the Total Worker Health approach, a 2022 surgeon general report on the topic, and increasing research, the U.S. appeared to finally be catching up. The recent cuts to NIOSH suggest “we’re kind of losing our footing,” she said.
Last year, Natalie Schwatka, an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Public Health’s Center for Health, Work & Environment, received a five-year NIOSH grant to build a toolkit to help leaders in labor-intensive industries, such as construction and mining, strengthen worker safety and mental health.
While many companies connect people to treatment, few focus on preventing mental illness, Schwatka said. NIOSH funding “allows us to do innovative things that maybe industry wouldn’t necessarily start.”
Her team planned to test the toolkit with eight construction companies in the coming years. But with few NIOSH employees left to process annual renewals, the funds could stop flowing anytime.
The consequence of losing such research is not confined to academia, Zimmer said. “Workers’ health and safety is very much in jeopardy.”
Health Care Sector Braces for Fallout From NIOSH Cuts
For a long time, clinicians have had troubling rates of addiction and suicide risk. Just after the height of the pandemic, a NIOSH survey found nearly half of health workers reported feeling burned out and nearly half intended to look for a new job. The agency declared a mental health crisis in that workforce.
NIOSH received $20 million through the American Rescue Plan Act to create a national campaign to improve the mental health of health workers.
The Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation, named after an emergency medicine physician who died by suicide during the covid pandemic, has partnered with NIOSH to improve the mental health of health care workers. Foundation CEO Corey Feist recently appeared on Capitol Hill with Noah Wyle, who plays an emergency medicine doctor on the TV series The Pitt, to advocate for Congress to renew funding for this work.
The results included a step-by-step guide for hospital leaders to improve systems to support their employees, as well as tips and suggested language for leaders to discuss well-being and for workers to advocate for better policies.
Cunningham, the behavioral scientist who left NIOSH this year, helped lead the effort. He said the goal was to move beyond asking health workers to be resilient or develop meditation skills.
“We’re not saying resilience is bad, but we’re trying to emphasize that’s not the first thing we need to focus on,” he said.
Instead, NIOSH suggested eliminating intrusive questions about mental health that weren’t relevant to keeping patients safe from hospital credentialing forms and offering workers more input on how their schedules are made.
The agency partnered on this work with the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation, named after an emergency medicine doctor who died by suicide during the pandemic. The foundation extended the campaign by helping health systems in four states implement pieces of the guide and learn from one another.
Foundation leaders recently appeared on Capitol Hill with Noah Wyle, who plays an emergency physician on the TV series “The Pitt,” to advocate for renewed federal funding for this work.
Corey Feist, foundation CEO and co-founder, said renewing that funding to NIOSH is crucial to get this guide out to all hospitals.
Without those resources, “it’s just going to really delay this transformation of health care that needs to happen,” he said.
Who Can Fill the Gap?
TJ Lyons, a multidecade construction industry safety professional who has worked at big-name companies such as Gilbane, Turner, and DPR Construction, is confident that workplace mental health will remain a priority despite the NIOSH cuts.
Lyons has worked at big names in the field such as Gilbane, Turner, and DPR Construction. He is confident that such companies will keep workplace mental health front and center, despite cuts to federal agencies and staff.
General contractors and project owners have been incorporating budget lines for mental health support for years, he said, sharing an example of a $1 billion project that included a mental health clinician on call for four hours several days a week. Workers would make appointments to sit in their pickup trucks during lunch breaks and talk to her, he said.
Now when these big companies subcontract with smaller firms, they often ask if the subcontractors provide mental health support for workers, Lyons said.
But others are skeptical that industry can replace NIOSH efforts.
Several workplace safety experts said smaller companies lack the means to commission research studies and larger companies may not share the results publicly, as a federal agency would. Nor would they have the same credibility.
“Private industry is going to provide what the people paying them want to provide,” said a NIOSH employee and member of the American Federation of Government Employees union, currently on administrative leave, who was granted anonymity for fear of professional retaliation.
Without federal attention on workplace mental health, “people may leave the workforce,” she said. “Workers may die.”
Aneri Pattani is a Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reporter.
Aneri Pattani: apattani@kff.org, @aneripattani
Making and breaking monuments in American
“Pulling Down the Statue of King George III’’ (oil on canvas), by Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, in the show “Monuments: Commemorations and Controversy,’’ Sept. 19-Dec. 20, at the Fairfield (Conn.) University Art Museum.
The museum says the show “explores monuments and their representations in public spaces as flashpoints of fierce debate over national identity, politics and race that have raged for centuries. Offering a historical foundation for understanding today’s controversies, the exhibition includes, besides the image above, such things as “a souvenir replica of a bulldozed monument by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, and a maquette of New York City’s first public monument to a Black woman, Harriet Tubman, among other objects from The New York Historical's collection. The exhibition reveals how monument-making and monument-breaking have long shaped American life as public statues have been celebrated, attacked, protested, altered and removed.
Marc Zimmer: Trump policies are causing brain drain that threatens U.S. security and economy
Yale University’s Science Hill, in New Haven. The area is primarily devoted to the physical and biological sciences. The old Winchester Repeating Arms Factory is at top right. (Connecticut for many years was a major firearms maker.)
From The Conversation, except for picture above.
Marc Zimmer is a professor of chemistry at Connecticut College, in New London. He has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Despite representing only 4% of the world’s population, the United States accounts for over half of science Nobel Prizes awarded since 2000, hosts seven of The Times Higher Education Top 10 science universities, and incubates firms such as Alphabet (Google), Meta and Pfizer that turn federally funded discoveries into billion-dollar markets.
The domestic STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) talent pool alone cannot sustain this research output. The U.S. is reliant on a steady and strong influx of foreign scientists – a brain gain. In 2021, foreign-born people constituted 43% of doctorate-level scientists and engineers in the U.S. They make up a significant share of America’s elite researchers: Since 2000, 37 of the 104 U.S. Nobel laureates in the hard sciences, more than a third, were born outside the country.
China, the U.S.’s largest competitor in science, technology, engineering and math endeavors, has a population that is 4.1 times larger than that of the U.S. and so has a larger pool of homegrown talent. Each year, three times as many Chinese citizens (77,000) are awarded STEM Ph.D.s as American citizens (23,000).
To remain preeminent, the U.S. will need to keep attracting exceptional foreign graduate students, budding entrepreneurs and established scientific leaders.
Funding and visa policies could flip gain to drain
This scientific brain gain is being threatened by the Trump administration, which is using federal research funding, scholarships and fellowships as leverage against universities, freezing billions of dollars in grants and contracts to force compliance with its ideological agenda. Its ad hoc approach has been described by higher education leaders as “unprecedented and deeply disturbing,” and a Reagan-appointed judge ruled that 400 National Institutes of Health grants be reinstated because their terminations were “bereft of reasoning, virtually in their entirety.”
Experts caution that these moves not only risk immediate harm to scientific progress and academic freedom but also erode the public’s trust in science and education, with long-term implications for the nation’s prosperity and security.
Citing national security concerns, the White House has also targeted visas for Harvard University’s international students and instructed embassies worldwide to halt visa interviews for all international students, citing national security and alleged institutional misconduct. Against a backdrop of court injunctions and legal appeals, the government continues its heightened “national-security” vetting, so thousands of international scholars remain in limbo.
These measures, combined with travel bans, intensified scrutiny and revocations of existing visas, have disrupted research collaborations and threaten the nation’s continued status as a global leader in science and innovation.
What US misses with fewer foreign scientists
The U.S. research brain gain starts with the 281,000 foreign STEM graduate students and 38,000 foreign STEM postdoctoral scholars who annually come to the U.S. I am one of them. After earning my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in South Africa, I left in 1986 to avoid the apartheid‑era military service, completed my chemistry doctorate and postdoc in the U.S., and joined the United States’ brain gain. It’s an opportunity today’s visa climate might have denied me.
Some other countries are eager to scoop up STEM talent that is unwelcome or unfunded in the U.S. Clement Mahoudeau/AFP via Getty Images
Incentives for the best and brightest foreign science students to come to the U.S. are diminishing at the same time its competitors are increasing their efforts to attract the strongest STEM researchers. For instance, the University of Hong Kong is courting stranded Harvard students with dedicated scholarships, housing and credit-transfer help. A French university program, Safe Place for Science, drew so many American job applicants that it had to shut the portal early. And a Portuguese institute reports a tenfold surge in inquiries from U.S.-based junior faculty.
Immigrants import new ways of thinking to their research labs. They come from other cultures and have learned their science in different educational systems, which place different emphases on rote learning, historical understanding and interdisciplinary research. They often bring an alternative perspective that a homogeneous scientific community cannot match.
Immigrants also help move discoveries from the lab to the marketplace. Foreign-born inventors file patents at a higher per‑capita rate than their domestic peers and are 80% more likely to launch a company. Such firms create roughly 50% more jobs than enterprises founded by native-born entrepreneurs and pay wages that are, on average, one percentage point higher.
The economic stakes are high. Growth models suggest that scientific advances now account for a majority of productivity gains in high‑income countries.
L. Rafael Reif, the former president of MIT, called international talent the “oxygen” of U.S. innovation; restricting visas chokes that supply. Ongoing cuts and uncertainties in federal funding and visa policy now jeopardize America’s scientific leadership and with it the nation’s long‑term economic growth.
Ununionized work site
Work by Newburyport, Mass., artist Jennifer Day, in her show “Scaffold: Construction Sites in Miniature,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through July 27
The gallery explains:
“Jennifer Day departs from her practice as a painter to return to sculptural work in found materials. The artist follows her life-long quirk for making 3-dimensional facsimiles in miniature and for giving old things new life.
“The scaffold asks why. Is something going up, coming down or just being fixed? Omnipresent in our landscape, scaffolding is more than something to walk under, or to be shrouded by tarps, but the scaffold is a symbol of our time and of all times. It suggests progress to be sure, the structure necessary for us to build upward and to be safe while doing so. But consider its temporal nature and the world it leaves behind once it comes down. New projects call again for help, repair or renewal and the endless cycle begins again. This exhibition of miniature sculptures addresses the absurdity of finish in a world that wants and needs to believe in its possibility.’’
State Street, Newburyport, circa 1906. Except for automobiles and trucks, and the disappearance of trolleys, the street now looks remarkably the same.
Will it kill jobs in the long run?
Amazon warehouse robot.
Edited from a New England Council report
Amazon recently held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new 2.8-million square-foot, $300 million robotics fulfillment center in Charlton, Mass. The facility has about 1,000 full-time employees and can store up to 32 million items. The facility also uses robotic drive units capable of lifting 1,500 pounds.
Amazon has committed to a $10.2 million community partnership with Charlton to support transportation infrastructure upgrades, STEM education initiatives, and provide more resources for public-safety equipment and recreational facilities.
Fertile and fearsome
“After the Rain” (pastel on paper), by Marilyn Ruseckas, in her joint show “Terra Chroma,’’ with Kileh Friedman, at Frog Hollow Vermont Craft Gallery, Burlington, through July 28
— Image courtesy Marilyn Ruseckas
The gallery says:
Ruseckas works in a “modern realism" style and through her work, captures “intensely personal interpretations" of the Vermont landscape. Friedman, a ceramic artist, creates organic patterns and builds an “intimate connection to the land itself. "
“At the heart of this exhibition lies a profound connection to the earth itself. Marilyn Ruseckas’s luminous pastels, pigments born from the earth, share a malleable material kinship with Kileh Friedman’s ceramics, crafted from the very clay beneath our feet.’’
Don Morrison: We must declare independence from this power-mad criminal
LENOX, Mass.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with their President, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all men — and women — are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever any President becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people peaceably to replace him.
Prudence will dictate that Presidents should not be changed for light and transient causes. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce a free people to absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such a leader.
The history of the current President is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute personal Tyranny. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
— He has systematically attempted to undermine the prestige and credibility of the Congress, the Judiciary, the Military, the Press, the Scientific Community, the Federal Reserve and other mediating Institutions necessary for a free and democratic Society.
— He has attempted to withdraw Health Coverage from tens of millions of his fellow citizens in order to provide tax breaks for the wealthiest among them.
— He has coarsened the National Discourse and, by his own example, encouraged his supporters to engage in displays of incivility and even violence, including violent insults upon the very seat of democratic government, the Capitol. For that, and for myriad other attempts to impose his will upon a free People, he has so far escaped sanction.
— He has chosen, through words and actions, to divide the people of the Nation rather than unite them.
— He has undermined the laws for Naturalization of Foreigners and brought open warfare on Immigrants to a country that was in fact founded by Immigrants and, as a result of their patriotic service, has prospered for years as a Beacon of Freedom in the world.
— He has appointed Cabinet Ministers distinguished by their lack of qualifications and their determination to subvert the very purpose of their Agencies.
— He has accepted Emoluments from self-interested parties both foreign and domestic, and he has enriched himself and his family at the public expense, to a degree heretofore unseen in these States.
— He has offered praise and encouragement to murderous Dictators and undemocratic human rights Abusers around the world, many of whom have rewarded him for his patronage with personal gifts.
— He has turned a blind eye to the efforts by certain hostile foreign Powers to subvert our nation’s Electoral Process on his behalf, meanwhile showing contempt for traditional Allies and Alliances that have long embodied our democratic Values.
— He has disrupted our Trade with all parts of the world through the imposition of tariffs and threats thereof, thus undermining our hard-earned reputation as a beacon of Free Trade.
— He has belittled and insulted friendly nations, withdrawn from Treaties commercial, environmental and military, thereby diminishing the influence and reputation of our Nation as a reliable partner in international affairs.
— He has, in his preference for insults, unreliable behavior and a smirking contempt for integrity and consistency in his personal affairs, as well as his chaotic conduct of the affairs of state, proven lacking in dignity for the Office of the Presidency.
We, therefore, the citizens of these United States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do solemnly publish and declare that we of right deserve leadership better than this and are determined to obtain it.
For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Proclaimed this day in the Spirit, and the great Tradition, of 4 July 1776.
From Don Morrison, a Berkshire Eagle columnist.
Without A/C
“Couch on the Porch” (1914), by Childe Hassam (1859-1935)
Childe Hassam lived in New York during the winter but he went to various artist colonies in the summer.
Beginning in the 1890s he began visiting the Cos Cob art colony, in Greenwich, Conn. Later, he also stayed at Florence Griswold’s Old Lyme art colony.
The Cos Cob art colony began when one of the first American Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman, moved to a farmhouse in Greenwich in 1886.
Chris Powell: Bears more likely to triumph in Conn. than ‘affordable’ housing’
A Black Bear, of the species found in New England.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
With Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont's veto of the wide-ranging housing bill recently passed by the General Assembly, the state’s towns aren't likely to reach the ‘‘fair share" quotas of ‘‘affordable" housing the bill set for them. But the legislature's failure to approve other legislation may ensure that each town ends up with another quota -- a quota of bears.
Confrontations with bears in Connecticut have been increasing rapidly, and according to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, there were more than 3,000 last year. These included two attacks on people and 67 of what might be called ‘‘bearglaries," in which the hungry creatures broke into people's houses. Bear attacks on livestock are up too.
A few days ago a bear attacked a man as he walked with his dog on his property in North Canaan. He escaped with scratches.
According to the environmental department, Connecticut has far more bear confrontations than neighboring states, though neighboring states are estimated to have more bears than Connecticut's 1,200 or so. Maybe Connecticut has so many more bear confrontations because, except for Rhode Island, Connecticut's neighbors allow bear hunting while Connecticut doesn't.
The increasing conflicts with bears prompted some legislators in the recent session to propose authorizing bear hunting. But the bears have a lobby organization as influential as the government employee unions, and it also frightened the legislators out of protecting the public.
The bear lobby argues that people who put bird feeders in their yards or fail to secure their trash barrels are to blame for the increasing confrontations. Certainly bird feeders and trash barrels are attractions, but as the many “bearglaries" show, removing feeders and securing trash barrels has little deterrent value.
Providing access to bird feeders and trash barrels may actually discourage bears from breaking into houses for food.
In any case, the bears are already rampant in Connecticut and won't be going away on their own. Unmolested and having no natural predators, they will reproduce at an estimated rate of more than two cubs per year per mother. A doubling of the state's bear population every three years seems possible, with the population pushing steadily into the eastern part of the state. As long as Connecticut's feckless policy toward bears is only to shoo them into a neighbor's yard, more confrontations are inevitable, with or without bird feeders and trash cans, and within a decade every town in Connecticut could have a dozen bears as permanent residents.
Unlike housing developers, bears don't observe zoning regulations. So odds are that, if state law doesn't change, bears will be disrupting many suburbs and rural towns long before those towns get their first “affordable" housing.
It's understandable why government employees come first in Connecticut, far ahead of the public interest. They are numerous and politically organized and have their own political party, so politicians are afraid of them. But why do bears have to come second, still far ahead of the public interest?
Unlike taxpayers, bears are not an endangered species. Other states manage to stand up to them. Except for the political timidity of the state's elected officials, why should bears be any more protected in Connecticut than coyotes and poisonous snakes?
WHO NEEDS “BABY BONDS”? A month ago Hartford Mayor Arunam Arulampalam announced he had rounded up an extra $3 million in city funds and various grants for the city's ever-dysfunctional school system.
Aleysha Ortiz wants that money instead. She's the recent graduate of Hartford Public High School who is suing the city because, despite the diploma the school gave her, she was illiterate. She's suing for damages, and last month her lawyers offered to settle for ... $3 million.
If Ortiz wins she'll have invented a great racket for indifferent students and their neglectful parents. Fail to learn in school, say nothing about it publicly until social promotion graduates you, and then sue and cash in for life. By comparison the “baby bonds" about which state government is so proud will be chump change.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Mass. merchants’ revolution
The British prepare to evacuate Boston on March 17, 1776.
“The American Revolution was a remarkably successful revolution. It did not fall into chaos and violence, nor did it slide toward dictatorship. It produced no Napoleon…. It achieved its goals. It was also, as revolutions go, extremely unromantic. The radicals, the real revolutionaries, were middle-class Massachusetts merchants with commercial interests, and their revolution was about the right to make {lots of} money….
“The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their economy.’’
Mark Kurlansky, in his book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
Architectural ennui
Work by Joan O'Beirne, in her show “Detachments,’’ on display at the Vermont Center for Photography, Brattleboro
— Image courtesy Vermont Center for Photography
The center says:
“Much of O'Beirne's work is ephemeral and dream-like, often using pinhole cameras and printing or projecting on unconventional surfaces. Collage and reusing found objects and old photos also play a role in her artistic practice.’’
Lee Drutman: How ruthlessly cynical Republicans keep pulling off reverse Robin Hoods in spite of unpopular policies
Republicans just contorted their coalition to pass regressive tax and spending legislation that polling shows Americans oppose 2-to-1. It is bad, incoherent policy that most voters did not want. It is full of gimmicks. And yet. They still rushed to pass it.
Why?
Why did Republicans make this their signature achievement, despite the unpopularity and internal resistance? Will they actually pay any exceptional electoral penalty?
And most importantly: If Republicans don't pay any exceptional penalty for legislation that's both massively unpopular and internally divisive, what does that tell us about American politics.
I don't think Republicans will pay any exceptional penalty for this legislation (beyond the usual midterm penalty for the party in the White House).
I think there are three main reasons, all of which tell us important things about our politics. Let’s dive in.
Participation Gap: Who Votes vs. Who Gets Hurt
There will almost certainly be no lower-income voter backlash. Those most harmed by regressive policies participate least in electoral politics.
Roughly one in five Americans benefit from Medicaid. To qualify for Medicaid, your income needs to be pretty low—a little over the poverty level. And here in the United States, low-income voters participate at much lower rates than higher income voters. Much lower.
Hit this link to see my chart on this gap.
What explains the income-turnout gap?
Well, as a general rule, across countries, the more unequal the society, the higher the gap. Mostly, this is because the more unequal the society, the more low-income voters think: What’s the point? It doesn’t matter whether I vote or not, nothing changes.
This creates a vicious cycle Republicans exploit.
And the U.S. is a real outlier here in the income-turnout gap. American Exceptionalism, indeed. The figure below comes from an informative paper by Matthew Polacko, “Inequality, policy polarization and the income gap in turnout”
However, this doesn't fully explain Republican confidence. Some middle-class voters do participate regularly and care deeply about these programs. The challenge is that even engaged voters face genuine difficulties tracing policy effects to political decisions.
Policy Design Magic: Timing and Traceability.
Republicans have done something clever with this bill: Frontload the popular stuff, delay the unpopular stuff. Tax benefits go into effect first. Social-spending cuts go into effect later. In 2026, when voters file their taxes, they'll see the benefits. Trump and fellow Republicans will talk up these benefits. Most will go to the very rich, but if most taxpayers get something, they'll see the benefits in their own returns. People generally like paying lower taxes.
By contrast, the most unpopular parts—the cuts to Medicaid—won't go into effect until after the 2026 mid-terms. Until the cuts happen, it's harder to campaign against them.
Long timing also confuses “traceability." Apparently, Republicans have read R. Douglas Arnold's political science classic, The Logic of Congressional Action, which explains the importance of policy design: Make the benefits visible and obscure the costs. The less traceable the costs, the harder for the public to know who to blame. Who knows, by 2026, Republicans might be blaming Democrats for the cuts!
Even more: The connection between federal Medicaid cuts and recipients’ care isn't immediately obvious, especially since states often don't call their programs “Medicaid, instead using names such as SoonerCare in Oklahoma, Apple Health in Washington, or TennCare in Tennessee. Nearly all states use private insurance companies to run their Medicaid programs, meaning beneficiaries hold insurance cards from UnitedHealth or Blue Cross Blue Shield, further obscuring the federal program's role.
Confusing policy makes traceability hard.
Politics is more about status than materialism
Democrats are constantly talking about money and benefits and costs. But one of the funny things about us humans is that we don't actually care that much about how much money we have in the abstract. We care about how we're doing relative to others who we think are below us. We're deeply wired for status. What we care about is: Are we doing better than the people we should be doing better than? We're much more motivated to avoid falling below others than we are to rise above them.
So we don't vote in our economic self-interest—we vote in our status interest. (Tali Mendelberg has a great essay on the centrality of status in politics, “Status, Symbols and Politics”)
The more we feel like we're in a zero-sum contest for resources, the less we care about absolute numbers, and the more we care about relative status. This is the conflict Republicans are driving. It's compelling because it's a story. It grabs our attention. It's far more compelling than wonky policy details.
As Vice President J.D. Vance wrote on X: "Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions."
And he’s probably right. This is the Republican playbook under Trump. It's one of the oldest political stories: the barbarians are at the gates, and unless we fight back, they will undermine everything good about our civilization. It plays on deep-seated fears about identity and status and freedom.
It may not be “rational" in the way highly educated liberals like me are taught to think about rationality. But it is a story in which “ordinary Americans" get to feel like heroes, preserving American greatness for future generations. It promises something greater than materialism. It promises a boost in status.
Democrats often call out this chicanery and try to get people to focus on details. But people don’t care about details, unless they fit into a larger story. But Democrats lack a competing narrative or defining conflict. They talk in abstract numbers about this many people who will be knocked into poverty, or have their Medicaid cut off. It’s all very clinical.
I think this explains why Republicans can confidently pass unpopular legislation. They understand that voters respond to status signals and moral categories more than policy outcomes. When the immigration narrative promises to restore proper hierarchies and defend cultural boundaries, it overwhelms concerns about health-care cuts or tax inequity. The psychology of relative position trumps the math of absolute benefits.
One way Democrats could respond: make politics more explicitly about morality
But what if Democrats approached politics differently? What if they framed the conflict much more explicitly in moral terms. Moral appeals can be more powerful than economic appeals. Research shows moral appeals generate pride, hope and enthusiasm that inspire political mobilization.
When people have given up on politics because “nothing changes," a story about fundamental dignity and respect might cut through fatalistic assumptions in ways that policy promises never could.
Outrage at cruelty and indignity doesn't require understanding complex policy mechanics or waiting for delayed implementation. It's immediately comprehensible and emotionally compelling, potentially disrupting the careful attention management that Republicans depend on. When voters feel their fundamental values are under attack, policy complexity becomes irrelevant.
Fighting for “dignity and decency" reframes political conflict as “dignity vs. cruelty" and “decency vs. indecency.” If Democrats engage in a real moral fight here, they could link regressive economic policy to harsh treatment of immigrants to Trump’s grotesque White House corruption.
The hard part is to make it authentic, to channel outrage into a compelling story that disengaged voters can get excited about.
This goes against the main current in the Democratic Party — an overly intellectualized framework that treats politics as fundamentally rational, backed up by a consultant-polling complex that optimizes individual messages while missing the larger narrative. Individual policy messages don’t land if they don’t fit a larger narrative conflict.
The problem is that moral conviction can't be A/B tested. Moral conviction requires the kind of political risk-taking that threatens both consultant fees and carefully managed coalitions.
But I do think Democrats should lean into “Dignity and Decency” – it feels right to me.
Something fundamental about electoral democracy is operating differently than we thought.
So yes, this monstrosity of a bill Republicans passed is widely unpopular. It's also bad policy. But if I had to guess, Republicans will not pay any exceptional electoral penalty for it. By October 2026, political attention will be elsewhere. Democrats may win back the House, but it won't be a wave. Republicans will probably hold the Senate.
So, to get back to my original question: if Republicans indeed do not pay any exceptional electoral penalty for a massively unpopular and regressive tax and spending bill, what does that tell us about American politics?
I think this tells us that individual policies and their popularity matter very little to how voters decide, and far less than we think they should. It may also tell us that tax and spending policy matter very little to how voters decide. It should also tell us that materialism matters much less than we think. And if so, it means we need to think about politics in different ways than we have been.
I think it means that we need to think about politics in terms of master narratives and dominant conflicts. And in terms of how our brains actually make sense of reality. And not the ways in which a generation of economists and economics-envying social scientists have tried to fit our brains into one-dimensional simplifications of ideology.
When a carnival barker salesman candidate can survive scandals, criminal indictments, policy unpopularity, and institutional opposition while mobilizing millions of voters, something fundamental about electoral democracy is operating differently than we thought. We should figure out what.
http://newamerica.org › our-people › lee-drutman
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He’s the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.
College priorities
The former Ames mansion was the first building of the Stonehill College campus. The Ames family money came from its shovel factory.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Citizens in other “advanced” nations are astounded by how much money, energy and attention is expended at American colleges and universities on sports. Some of the bigger of these institutions are far more identified as sports-team businesses than as places for scholarship, with some “student athletes’’ paid for playing. More cultural corruption.
Consider tiny Stonehill College, in Easton, Mass. The largest gift in the nice little Catholic school’s history -- $15 million from alumni Thomas and Kathleen Bogan -- will go to helping to build new basketball and hockey arenas in a complex to be named for the Bogans, not to academics.
Stonehill seems to be in pretty good shape, financially and otherwise. But what’s going to happen to all those bucolic campuses around America as colleges close as the number of potential students continues to shrink with a declining birth rate and, sadly, as so many doubt the advantages of a liberal-arts education.
Christian Koulichkov is a managing director at Hilco Real Estate, where he helps closed colleges sell their campuses. He told Bloomberg News: “This is the next big land grab in the United States. There’s going to be thousands and thousands of acres with no plan. People never thought these things could disappear.”\
Far from the maddening crowd
“I Walked Far Down the Beach” (oil on canvas), by Shirley Cean Youngs, at Lily Pad East gallery, in very rich summer place Watch Hill, R.I.
‘Brief moments of clarity’
“Eco+Terrestre,’’ by Hillel O’Leary, at Boston Sculptors Gallery, through July 13.
The artist says:
“My sculpture, installation and public works are snapshot accretions capturing brief moments of clarity in a continuing process of navigating an increasingly turbulent world. They are an attempt to make meaning between the familiar and otherworldly, while provoking gut-feelings of tension, connection, loss, and wonder, through obfuscation, abstraction and interpretation of material history and culture. This work centers precarity as the coming state of everything, and with it, I hope to bring a level of urgency to a sense of self-reflection that is needed if we are to look beyond the way things have always been.’’