Vox clamantis in deserto
“Earth sinks to rest’
“November Light”(watercolor with pencil on paper), by Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893-1967)
November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.
With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.
The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.
― Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893-1986), Maine-based poet and novelist
Collaborating colors
“MC#1’’ (mixed media), by Julie Dunigan, in her show “Labyrinth,’’ at Burlington (Vt.) City Works, Feb. 5 to May 8.
The gallery says:
“Julie Dunigan’s mixed media works feature motifs inspired by human-built and nature-grown architectural forms. Exploring charged yet repetitive arrangements, the artist plays with color theory and the energy of mark-making in her complex compositions. Dunigan experiments with a spectrum of hues and tints, allowing collaboration and new relationships to form between colors.’’
Arthur Allen: Now about those pills from Canada?
U.S.-Canada border at Beebe Plain, an unincorporated village partly in Stanstead, Quebec, and partly in Derby Line, Vt.
—Photo by Mike Kalasnik
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News (KFF Health News) (except for image above)
Days before it was to go into effect, the Trump administration pushed back a U.S. customs rule threatening the supply of vital prescription drugs imported by millions of Americans.
Under the rule, Customs and Border Protection and the FDA will require coding on packages that makes it easier to know what’s in them. It is aimed at collecting tariffs on even low-value imports, and at catching illegal drugs like fentanyl. It will also add costs and complex paperwork to each order.
Now the regulation, which was set to start Oct. 22, is delayed until Jan. 20.
While it is illegal to import most FDA-approved prescription drugs, the U.S. has allowed Americans to import legal medications in small quantities for personal use since 2003. The FDA rarely inspects the parcels.
“The information we have is there’s going to be a complete shutdown on Oct. 22,” Tim Smith, general manager of the Canadian International Pharmacy Association, said in an interview in early October. The 51 licensed retail pharmacies in his organization urged their hundreds of thousands of U.S. customers to file extra orders before Oct. 9 to be sure as many medications as possible arrived before the clampdown, Smith said.
“These are people in every case who have gone to the doctor, gotten a prescription for whatever, gone to the pharmacy to fill the order, seen how expensive it’s going to be, and then looked for an alternative,” he said. “Those are the people who’ve been coming to us for years.”
As Donald Trump campaigned in 2016, allowing people to import drugs was part of his platform. In his first term, President Trump let states buy cheaper drugs from Canada. He told Floridians at 2020 rallies that their state could “go to Canada” to obtain drugs for them.
But while Florida and Colorado joined the importation program, neither state has brought in any drugs yet.
Patients have, however, and they flooded authorities with at least 109,000 letters urging the FDA to clarify that the rule won’t stop personal-use drug shipments, said Ken Hunter, executive director of the Campaign for Personal Prescription Importation. And Trump ally Laura Loomer called the rule a case of stupidity or sabotage, under a headline that asked, “So Why Is Someone in His Administration Trying To Make Prescription Drugs More Expensive Before The Midterms?”
Seventy-one congressional Democrats signed an Oct. 1 petition led by Reps. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin to warn about the potential impact of the rule. Three House Republicans from Florida wrote separately to CBP and the FDA, noting that Floridians, unlike Americans in Northern states, can’t easily drive to Canada to buy medicine.
By cutting off imports, Hunter said, “they are going to lose millions, maybe billions in tariff revenue.”
“Why would you want to cut off this massive revenue source?” he asked. “Why would they want to cut people off from lifesaving medications two weeks before midterms?”
Pressure by advocacy groups may have led the agency to back off, said Lucia Mueller, president of PharmacyChecker, which helps patients find legitimate pharmacies to obtain cheaper drugs.
“Loomer’s political argument is sound,” she told KFF Health News. “We know she’s had Trump’s ear before.”
The agency’s Oct. 14 news release on the delay said it would help “avoid disruptions to certain international postal shipments.” It didn’t specifically refer to drug imports.
“This is an important short-term success,” said Gabriel Levitt, founder of Prescription Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for more-affordable drugs. “However, the underlying threat to personal prescription drug importation remains, and the next 90 days will be critical.”
A 2020 study found that 2.3 million Americans regularly imported medications from abroad, and some surveys show much higher numbers. About 4 in 10 Americans in a recent KFF survey said cost had led them to not take medications as prescribed over the past year.
When he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation years ago, Leslie Waters learned that a 90-day supply of the blood thinner Eliquis, or apixaban, would cost $486. “Holy crap!” said the retired computer scientist, who said he lives off a monthly $1,886 Social Security check. Waters, of San Jose, Calif., learned about the Canada option on the internet and has been buying 90-day supplies from a pharmacy there for $57, including shipping
Under previous administrations, orders worth $800 or less weren’t taxed or saddled with extensive paperwork. The new rule will require shippers of even low-value international parcels to transmit detailed information about their contents to CBP, along with tariff payments, which must be transmitted through a licensed customer broker.
Zonos, a U.S.-based company that handles logistics for mail from Canada and other countries, told clients in early September that its understanding was that CBP would no longer allow in personal prescription drug packages after the rule took effect, said Smith, of the Canadian pharmacy trade group. In an Oct. 6 webinar, Zonos senior broker Angela Macke said that the company would continue to ship the drugs but that it didn’t know whether the agencies would let them reach patients.
The pharmacy announcements have frightened thousands of customers, said Bill Hepscher, whose company, Canadian Medstore, has six Florida storefronts that help patients import drugs.
“It’s really been hair on fire,” he said. “I could spend my entire day fielding phone calls from people saying: ‘Can I no longer get my Eliquis? I could have a blood clot or stroke!’”
Hepscher said about half his clients buy their drugs from Canada, with many of the others buying from Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., or Turkey. He said 2025 was his company’s busiest year ever — changes to Medicare drug plans and increased enrollment in high-deductible Affordable Care Act plans had led seniors and younger people facing higher costs and copays to seek Canadian drugs.
“I only have 23 days’ worth of pills,” Roland Hofferber told KFF Health News in early October. The retired supply chain engineer in Muscatine, Iowa, takes Jardiance, also known as empagliflozin, to slow his chronic kidney disease. “If I don’t get some through pretty soon, I’m going to have to cut back or quit.”
The drug would cost him $641 for three months in the U.S., he said. He buys a generic from an Indian pharmacy for $54.
The FDA “hasn’t given parameters as to what they will approve and what they won’t,” Zonos’ Macke said during the webinar. “We’ve been told there will not be a general ban. But we cannot reassure U.S. patients. We have to see how FDA applies. They could be lenient. They could be very strict.”
When asked whether patients could still import prescription medicines, CBP spokesperson Jessica Turner said that pharmaceuticals remained under the FDA’s jurisdiction and that the FDA “will continue to determine whether imported medication shipments are admissible.” Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard said the FDA would “continue to evaluate personal imports on a case-by-case basis.”
White House spokesperson Allison Schuster did not respond to questions about imports but said Trump “remains dedicated to lowering the cost of prescription drugs.”
Since summer 2025, patients have had to pay tariffs on brand-name medicine shipments. In 2022, the FDA said it typically checked about 1 in 2,000 medication packages passing through U.S. customs.
“A lot of products weren’t even looked at, because CBP and FDA didn’t have full visibility” into what entered the country, Prescription Justice’s Levitt said. The rule requires shippers to post a bond and fill in a complex data form for each package, he noted.
“Let’s say you’re importing 90 days’ worth of Eliquis,” Levitt said. “FDA can now look on a screen and see that. Do they let it in, or refuse it under law?”
“If they don’t, there’s going to be a cohort of people who cannot afford their drugs anymore,” he said. “And those people are going to suffer.”
Arthur Allen( Allenaallen@kff.org) is a KFF Health News correspondent
‘Chance happenings’
“Free Flowing Fossils” (acrylic on canvas), by Tim McFarlane, in his show “Another Day, Another Way,’’ at the University of Maine’s Zillman Art Museum, Bangor, through Dec. 12.
He says:
‘‘My works emphasize multi-layered systems, color (chromatic and gray scale) and process. In my paintings, overlapping forms and fractured spaces alternately support, negate and influence each other, mirroring events in everyday life. Shifts in formal relationships between layers, marks, color, and space, subtle and overt, contribute to the overall visual narrative in my work. My paintings and works on paper feature open and opaque layers that incorporate various modes of mark making including: direct painting, drawing, image transfers, stenciling and collage. My process relies on a sense of interdependence and chance happenings, which allows for multiple meanings in my work that can be explored by the viewer.’’
John O. Harney: The centrality of sidewalks
— Photo by Macrakis
Some thoughts on Michael Pollack’s Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource
Don’t overlook sidewalks, warns Michael Pollack, a professor at Cardozo Law School, in New York City. “They strengthen local economies, support critical infrastructure, and serve as “third places” where communities take root and blossom,” he says.
“They’re sites of commerce: from dining to vending, advertising, waiting in line, and even new technologies like bikeshare, scooter rentals, EV charging, and delivery robots. They’re sites of speech, protest, and public art,” he adds.
“They’re where people collect signatures for petitions and picket establishments they want to protest. They’re where unhoused people often live [more in the U.S. than in any other developed country, by the way] or at least spend time panhandling. They’re where police conduct a substantial amount of investigation, for better or worse, and they’re sites of much of modern surveillance architecture. They’re even places where we can work to manage climate change and create sustainable and resilient cities.”
In his book Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource (Harvard University Press, 2026) Pollack explores the legal, social and political significance of American sidewalks.
The book grabbed my attention perhaps because it felt somehow linked to another one I enjoyed recently, Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots, if only because these spaces— sidewalks and empty lots—(plus perhaps beaches, restaurants and cafes) are the places I interact with most. See Whose Woods These Aren’t.
As for sidewalks, I put value on those that allow long-distance walks without suddenly ending and stranding pedestrians on busy roadways. And those that offer relatively safe passage.
In fact, I’ve been scolded by my kids for losing control of the forsythia and other shrubs along the sidewalk of our side street. A complaint I dismissed until I was reminded of the impact on people with disabilities. Especially now that I know arthritis and bone breaks close up.
As Pollack notes, even one gap in navigable sidewalks from starting point to destination can negate transit for millions of people, especially those with limited mobility, resulting in something like “house arrest.”
Pollack frequently uses the attribution style of “people I spoke to said,” which sticklers might find lazy, but it makes for an easy read.
One especially interesting chapter focuses on sidewalks in Gonzales, La., a city of about 12,000 midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The city recently contracted with a company to conduct at trip-hazard removal program. The program in Gonzales documented big vertical distances between pavers, then began shaving down those gaps with financial support from the city and property owners.
The city also plugged “regional” projects wherever possible to avoid disjointed work and appeal to funders looking for more impact. Such regional approaches bring economies of scale championed by grantmakers in such other arenas as higher ed. And they make good sense on the ground where I’ve noticed sidewalks often ending abruptly at town lines.
Pollack also offers thoughtful discussion of how labor unions and others can use the sidewalks for constitutionally protected protests and pickets.
He persistently returns to a call for municipalities to establish a Department of Sidewalks—a consolidated body watching over sidewalk uses and conflicts and empowered to foster more efficient maintenance and regulation for property owners, businesses and all users who share the space.
“Sidewalks are unfortunately a terrific example of the tragedy of the commons,” writes Pollack. “The conflicting uses, the overuse, the physical damage—all of it can be traced to the fact that sidewalks are finite in space, time, and durability but open to everyone.”
In this context, Pollack tells the disturbing story of Salt Lake City handing over a stretch of public sidewalk to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), which would now follow through on its plan to regulate how people behave and dress on the newly private section.
Big real estate sites like Zillow and Redfin now reference “walkability” in their efforts to describe neighborhoods.
Pollack notes that people in poorer people often lacking yards see their sidewalks as places to socialize. Yet their neighborhoods tend to have the worst sidewalks.
Sidewalks in my town vary between “formal” light-colored cement and rougher, but in some ways, quainter, tar.
Whatever their material, my own sidewalks know me embarrassingly well. My never-delivered presentations and ultimatums. My bad singing. My self-disparaging. But they’re always a valued companion.
John O. Harney, a writer who lives in Reading, Mass., was executive editor of the late, great New England Journal of Higher Education.
The flow of time
From Lydia Viscardi’s mixed-media show “Time Takes Time,’’ at the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Conn., through Jan. 10.
The show considers the passage of time and the cycles of the seasons in the natural world. The artist says:
“I grew up immersed in the stories and theatrical pageantry of Catholicism, absorbing both the beautiful and horrific, emerging from this with a paradoxical equanimity that informs all of my work. I explore the tension between nature, human society, especially the rhythms of everyday life, and the human soul returning to themes of mortality and its constant presence, loss, memory, particularly childhood memory, and our complex relationship to the natural world.’’
Shahnaz Bashir: Sometimes scary speed, power and the AI race
Grave of an unknown person killed in the American bombing of Nantes, France.
From The Conversation, except for image above
AMHERST, Mass.
With the race to build artificial intelligence systems smarter than any human has come a boom in “accidents.” In a safety test run by the company Anthropic, its own AI agent blackmailed an engineer to avoid being shut down. Criminals have used AI agents for data-extortion campaigns and to hack government agencies, banks and technology companies. In other tests, models have escaped from test environments into real organizational systems.
Several researchers who resigned from leading AI companies in 2026 have accused their employers of not taking the dangers seriously enough. In September, Bill Gates told “Meet the Press” that AI is “powerful enough to drive events that can cause a billion deaths.”
Paul Virilio, a French philosopher, spent his career analyzing the relationships between technology, speed and power. He died in 2018, well before generative AI and the fears about it reached their present pitch. But I doubt much would have surprised him.
As a researcher who studies AI-generated media and how people make sense of it, I find that three of Virilio’s ideas explain today’s AI moment better than anything written since. He argued that every new technology brings a new kind of accident into the world; that speed takes away our time to think; and that globally connected systems can fail everywhere at once.
Technology of speed\
Virilio was born in Paris in 1932. When World War II began, his family moved to Nantes, a port city near the Atlantic. During the Nazi occupation of France, Germany began building the Atlantic Wall, a series of defensive fortifications stretching along the coast from Spain to Norway.
But in September 1943, when he was 11, Virilio saw what the wall could not keep out. American bombers aiming for Nantes’ port hit the city center instead, killing about 1,400 people and destroying more than 700 buildings in two raids.
The remains of a library stand in Nantes, France, after the bombing on Sept. 19, 1943. Keystone-France\Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
“War was my university,” he told an interviewer. “Everything has proceeded from there.”
As a young man, Virilio spent years photographing the abandoned bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. The lesson he drew from them was about speed: The Germans had built a massive military fortification, yet the Allies had gone over and around it; the wall barely slowed them.
Walls were a technology of space, and the bombers were a technology of speed – inspiring his philosophical approach to understanding the world.
The ship and the shipwreck
As an adult, Virilio studied many more examples of technological failures, such as the Chernobyl power plant meltdown of 1986, the worst nuclear accident in history.
In his 2005 book The Original Accident, Virilio summed up his main idea in a simple sentence: “To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.” The train invents derailment; the airplane, the crash; the nuclear plant, the meltdown. Every invention, not just dangerous ones, carries a specific kind of failure that did not exist before it.
In Virilio’s telling, the “accident” is not the result of bad luck added afterward. It is born at the moment of invention, even if the inventor cannot see it, because the invention will be used in ways they never imagined.
Virilio did not think such accidents could be avoided. But by carefully watching, he believed, people could contain failure and prevent catastrophe. He argued that societies tend to treat each disaster as a one-off, grieve it on television, and forget it, so that the next technology’s accident arrives as a surprise.
In 2002, he staged a Paris exhibition as a trial run for his plan to build a “Museum of Accidents.” Collecting information about shipwrecks, plane crashes, industrial disasters and financial crashes side by side, he argued, would show the pattern: that every invention has its failure and that failure can be anticipated.
AI has invented not one accident but several. Tech companies’ own incident reports form a sort of “museum” – but not an objective one.
Rule of the fastest
Virilio’s second key idea came from the Cold War. In 1977, he published Speed and Politics, written in a world where nuclear missiles could cross the planet in minutes.
He named the idea “dromology,” derived from the Greek word for a racecourse: “dromos.” Every age runs at the pace of its fastest machine, Virilio wrote, and whatever cannot keep up – including law, deliberation and conscience – drops out of the picture. There is “no democracy, only dromocracy”: the rule of the fastest.
Virilio’s writing about speed, power and technology bears remembering today.
AI can squeeze months of work into hours. In September 2026, Open AI announced that 10,000 of its AI agents had produced a proof of a math problem that had stood for a century – a problem two human mathematicians had spent a year trying to solve.
Virilio’s deepest fear about speed was not that people would fall behind machines, but that they would be absent from decision-making. Even when people attempt to stay in the loop, AI agents execute so quickly that human workers often fail to spot problems or malicious requests.
Everywhere at once
Virilio’s third idea is the “integral accident”: a failure that, because the same technology runs everywhere, happens everywhere at once.
During the 1990s, Virilio watched how satellite television, the Internet and electronic markets let an event anywhere, such as a financial crash, be felt everywhere. He later predicted that in a networked world, integral accidents, not war, would be “the continuation of politics by other means.”
AI has intensified how tightly connected the world is. It’s being used to help balance power grids, manage ships and harbors, and write hospital patient records.
Consider Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model, which finds security flaws in banking software faster than banks can fix them. Many financial institutions use the same software, so a criminal with such a model could break into multiple banks at the same time.
Hand on the lever
Virilio wrote that a society that lives only in the present makes accidents more likely. A society too busy to keep records of its past, or to think ahead, cannot learn from its failures and so repeats them.
I’d argue that that sentence points to three things worth keeping in mind.
The first is the record, kept by someone independent. Documents analyzing AI accidents should not be left only in the hands of the companies whose failures they document.
The second is the pause. Regulators, researchers and companies need the time and the authority to deliberate – and to halt a system, if needed, before it is released.
The third is skill. A skill is the present result of past practice. The more work people hand to AI because it is faster, the more they need to keep the ability to do that work themselves: to write the first draft, to check the sum by hand. These are the habits that let people verify what AI produces.
Virilio’s lesson is not to smash the machines, but to keep a hand on the lever – improving the chances that the accident, when it comes, can be seen, understood and reversed. Speed does not take the controls away, but it makes it harder for people to keep hold.
Shahnaz Bashir is a PhD candidate in communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
UMass Amherst provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.
Tortured portability?
Street car in Amherst, Mass., in 1901.
“My outer world and inner make a pair.
“But would the two be always of a kind?
“Another latitude, another mind?
“Or would I be New England anywhere?’’
— From “New England Mind’’, by Robert Francis (1901-1987), American poet. He spent most of his life in the college town of Amherst.
Dour Puritans’ election cake
Read this New England Historical Society article about election cake.
It starts off with:
“Election Cake was a highlight of the Puritan celebration of Election Day, one of the important colonial holidays along with Commencement Day and Training Day.’’
Interstellar domestic and proud of it
“Cosmic Dust” (oil on canvas), by Mark Ruddy, at Glimpse Gallery, Concord, N.H.
A very New England drink
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.
It’s apple cider time in New England. I remember when we did our best to turn it into an alcoholic drink. Anyway, we savored the bite of it as it aged. I like that New Hampshire-based poet Maxine Kumin called gray and brown November "that time of year the Lord created and forgot.’’ On the upside, it’s probably the quietest month and the breezy countryside, now looking more open, has an austere charm.
Let’s enjoy it while we can. An early polar vortex is predicted, or not -- followed by 70 degrees in February? Maybe.
Whatever, most of the last few days have been about as golden as it gets around here, but Thanksgiving looms.
T.R.: Bribery strikes at the foundation of all law
“There can be no crime more serious than bribery. Other offenses violate one law while corruption strikes at the foundation of all law. Under our form of Government all authority is vested in the people and by them delegated to those who represent them in official capacity. There can be no offense heavier than that of him in whom such a sacred trust has been reposed, who sells it for his own gain and enrichment; and no less heavy is the offense of the bribe giver. He is worse than the thief, for the thief robs the individual, while the corrupt official plunders an entire city or State. He is as wicked as the murderer, for the murderer may only take one life against the law, while the corrupt official and the man who corrupts the official alike aim at the assassination of the commonwealth itself. Government of the people, by the people, for the people will perish from the face of the earth if bribery is tolerated. The givers and takers of bribes stand on an evil pre-eminence of infamy. The exposure and punishment of public corruption is an honor to a nation, not a disgrace. The shame lies in toleration, not in correction…. If we fail to do all that in us lies to stamp out corruption we can not escape our share of responsibility for the guilt. The first requisite of successful self-government is unflinching enforcement of the law and the cutting out of corruption.
— Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), U.S. president (1901-1909)
Hopping and scotching
Mixed media by Sharon Kaitz, in her show “Dancing on the Edge,’’ Nov. 5-Nov. 29, at Kingston Gallery, Boston
She says:
“As a child, the best part of playing hopscotch for me was the first white chalk line that I set down on the asphalt in front of my home. The game has been with us for three hundred years, its name derives from two activities, to hop which everyone knows means to jump, and to scotch, which means to cut or scratch a line in the dirt. That line has followed me throughout my life as a painter. I am always, in one way or another, scratching lines in the dirt, whether making marks on canvas, burlap, linen, clay or in the earth itself. My painted lines are conduits of connection both from past to present and across geographic spaces: they are passages, threads, trails, footprints. As with hopscotch there is a journey out and a return journey where the numbers are upside down and messages are scrambled. The squares contain the story like the edges of a canvas but sometimes the line is blurred, the flung stone misses its mark, breaks free from the borders drawn to contain it, as if to call into question the legitimacy of borders themselves by revealing their arbitrary nature. In my paintings, fabric, color and shape express a desire for unbounded harmony, but desire is always caught by the tail, the lines must be drawn.’’
What are billionaires so afraid of?
Guilford Country Store, built in 1817 as Broad Brook House.
Via OtherWords.org
GUILFORD, Vt.
Americans overwhelmingly support taxing billionaires more. But some of those billionaires, including those who’ve seen their wealth balloon in recent years, have been spending big to stop it.
Voters in California, for example, are considering a ballot initiative called Prop 40 — a one-time, 5 percent wealth tax exclusively on the state’s 200 plus-billionaires. But a few dozen billionaires are ponying up tens of millions to fight the tax and threatening to run away if they lose.
In an analysis for Tax the Ultra Rich Now (TURN), the Institute for Policy Studies identified 22 Golden State billionaires who have contributed substantial funds or been outspoken opponents of Prop 40. This group has seen their combined wealth increase 64 percent in the last 20 months. Yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.
The 22 billionaire snowflakes include a bunch of tech bros and crypto barons making billions off developing an AI future for the rest of us.
Several are chums of Jeffrey Epstein, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27 percent, from $14.8 billion to $32.6 billion. That puts his wealth at 11,319 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000. To protect his gains, Thiel has given $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. (Thiel himself recently moved to Argentina.)
Venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, and DoorDash, gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97 percent, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025, to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times that of the median Californian.
Google’s Sergey Brin has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. From the deck of his $450 million yacht, the Dragonfly, Brin has seen his personal wealth grow a whopping 70 percent in the last 20 months, from $148 billion to $253 billion. Brin’s wealth is a stratospheric 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Not all the billionaires are cowering in the corner.
Billionaire Tom Steyer said he would vote for the billionaire wealth tax and wished it went further to reduce inequality. Jensen Huang, the cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, is worth an estimated $190 billion and supports the one-time wealth tax. He told CBS News that “it’s a privilege, it’s a responsibility” to pay taxes — and that “nothing would give me more joy” than to pay more.
California’s 231 billionaires held approximately $2.3 trillion as of Sept 22, 2026, and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches. According to economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15 percent per year, they paid on average just 0.26 percent of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and his fellow Google co-founder Larry Page paid even less — just 0.07 percent of their wealth annually.
We can see why these billionaire snowflakes don’t want anything to change. Still, the one-time wealth tax would be just a small fraction of their gains in the last few years — and nevermind of their overall wealth, which will remain massive.
When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK. You’ll have 95 percent of your billions and tens of thousands of your neighbors will have health care. You will get over this one quickly.”
Californians will decide their fate in November: a vote for oligarchy or a first step toward rebalancing our democracy? And Americans elsewhere will be watching.
Chuck Collins, who lives in Vermont, directs the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits its Inequality.org website. He’s a coauthor of the report California’s Billionaire Wealth Surge and author of the book Burned By Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.
Super realism in The Pine Tree State
“Eggemoggin Reach’’(oil on linen), by Joel Babb, in his show “Shifting Visions: Joel Babb’s Painted Universe,’’ at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, through Jan. 31.
The Deer Isle Bridge spans Eggemoggin Reach, on the Maine Coast.
Does Boston need a ‘rat czar’?
From The Boston Guardian, article by Brandon Hill
(Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Guardian.)
District 2 City Councilor Ed Flynn challenged the city’s claims of progress in controlling its rat population at a recent City Council hearing. The councilor argued that successes celebrated by city officials contrast sharply with constituents’ lived experiences.
Councilor Flynn chaired the hearing, which he co-sponsored with District 9 City Councilor Liz Breadon, where residents gave testimony and questioned representatives of the Inspectional Services Department (ISD), the mayor’s Operations Cabinet, the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT), and the Boston Housing Authority (BHA).
“There’s some disconnect between what [the city] has highlighted on how things are going well and what residents are experiencing,” Councilor Flynn said after testimonies were given at the hearing. “It has not improved. It’s gotten worse. It’s a major public health, public safety, quality of life issue.”
The hearing examined the Boston Rodent Action Plan (BRAP), where officials highlighted new technology, sanitation improvements and the September National Urban Rat Summit as indicators of success.
But residents from Back Bay, Chinatown, Bay Village, Allston-Brighton and other neighborhoods testified about persistent infestations, inadequate trash collection and difficulty holding property owners and developers accountable.
One recurring demand, echoing the recommendation of Councilor Flynn, called for the appointment of a dedicated “rat czar” to oversee and coordinate the city’s rodent control across departments.
“Somebody needs to own this problem,” one resident testified. “Someone has to be the name and face of the solution. With 20 committees and agencies and departments, it’s very difficult.”
Residents also urged the city to reconsider allowing trash to sit out on sidewalks overnight, providing rats with an easily accessible food source.
Currently, trash is allowed to be curbside after 5pm the night before pickup. Residents said that schedule encourages leaving bags outside overnight. In downtown neighborhoods where space is limited, bagged trash is a particularly accessible food source for rats, but residents also testified that rodents even chew through hard plastic trash cans.
“Over the last year, we've been working to better understand the different options that are available to us,” said Luke Hines from the Operations Cabinet. “We've been in coordination with the streets team in identifying those different options, working with community partners to better understand what they would support and then working with the trash contractors to see what would be feasible for them.”
Another major concern was enforcement against landlords and developers whose buildings or construction sites contribute to rodent problems.
ISD Assistant Commissioner John Ulrich said construction projects subject to the city’s community sanitation requirements must provide pest control documentation before receiving permits. His department has conducted approximately 210 construction sanitation inspections since January and reported 785 violations this year. However, residents said that penalties are too lenient and are treated by developers as a cost of doing business.
Councilor Flynn closed out the hearing in disagreement with the city’s assessment of public health risks posed by Boston’s rat population. One resident, who identified himself as John and said he has lived on Acadia Street in South Boston for 23 years, testified that his son contracted Leptospirosis earlier this fall, a bacterial infection that can spread through contact with urine from infected animals, including rats.
“He was in the hospital for two weeks and ICU for a week and suffered serious liver and kidney injuries,” John said.
Another resident testified that their dog had also contracted Leptospirosis.
The Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) was not present at the hearing, but Ulrich characterized the number of rat-to-human infections as “relatively low” based on the word of Dr. Kathryn Himmelstein from the BPHC.
Dr. Himmelstein testified at a March 16 City Council hearing that, “contracting Leptospirosis in Boston is extremely rare, and the last reported case was in 2021.” Prior to 2021, the next most recent reported case was in 2018.
‘The beauties she so truly sees’
“Moody November Evening” (oil), by Carl Scherres (1833-1923)
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
“My November Guest,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1983)
Why won’t they head south?
“Alewife Jerry’s Pond,’’ by Vicki Kocher Paret, in her show “Color Conversations,’’ at the Arlington (Mass.) Center for the Arts, through Dec. 11
Although there’s not that much money in it
“The Artist at Work” (oil on canvas), by George Ault (1891-1948), at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.