Vox clamantis in deserto
Same places, different looks
“Chesterfield Gorge, Summer 2025,’’ by David Gloman, in his show “Landscapes in Flux: Studies of Place,’’ at Springfield (Mass.) Museums through Sept. 20.
The curator explains:
“For David Gloman, the process of visual distillation—in which elements of a composition, such as line and texture, are subtracted or reduced—allows the essence of his subjects to shine. By refining visual stimuli and leaving only the essentials, his technique has a clarifying effect, capturing a sense of place and the feeling of a fleeting instance. In “Landscapes in Flux’’, the artist sets his sights towards New England scenery, returning to the same locations at different times of day and seasons. The Old Dam, Westfield River, and the Chesterfield Gorge are observed over the years from different perspectives. When viewed together, Gloman’s paintings are a synthesis of past and present experiences.’’
Stephanie Lessing: How reliable are those ICE body cams?
A body camera designed for police use.
BOSTON
From The Conversation (except image above)
Stephanie Lessing is an adjunct professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
She 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.
Amid growing demands by Democrats to overhaul U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after federal immigration officials killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in early February 2026 that agents in Minneapolis will be issued body-worn cameras.
But can body cameras on federal officials provide the transparency and accountability the public is demanding from agents with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection?
As a public policy scholar, I have analyzed the existing body-worn camera policy for ICE agents. And I’ve compared this policy to dozens of other state and local body camera policies, in an effort to investigate the rationales for their use.
Whether ICE’s body camera policy can provide transparency and accountability depends, I believe, on the policy itself and the enforcement of that policy. ICE’s use of body cameras could improve the agency’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
But as I’ve seen with other police body camera policies, there’s a risk that camera footage may obscure actual events. It’s also possible that the strategic release of footage may undermine transparency.
Various body camera policies
Police body cameras were first used in the United States in 2012 by the Rialto Police Department in California. By 2020, their use had expanded to over 62% of local law enforcement agencies, covering 79% of local police officers nationwide.
That expansion was, in part, a response to growing criticism over stop-and-frisk tactics – in which police temporarily detain people for weapons searches when a crime is suspected – and police-involved shootings of people of color.
Body camera policies vary greatly between municipalities. Some policies make body cameras useful accountability tools, like those of Parker, Colorado, which uses cameras for evidence collection and ensuring officer adherence to policy rather than as surveillance technology.
Others, meanwhile, provide broad discretion for officers to choose when to activate their body cameras, such as Colorado Springs’ policy. Allowing officers to decide when to use their cameras can limit the availability of evidence.
I believe there are four crucial elements of a body camera policy that can ensure that ICE agents properly use the technology.
Activation requirements
Body camera quality has improved over the past decade. But the battery life of many models prevents continuous recording throughout a 10-hour shift.
Instead, law enforcement officials often manually activate their body cameras. Thus, to effectively promote accountability, a strong policy would require ICE agents to activate their body cameras before they interact with the public.
People attend a vigil for Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent on Feb. 1, 2026, in Minneapolis. AP Photo/Ryan Murphy
A 2016 study found that, without mandatory camera-activation policies, officers often fail to activate their cameras.
The current ICE body-worn camera policy, issued in February 2025, lists enforcement activities that require recording. They include executing arrest warrants, frisks of individuals and “responding to public, unlawful/violent disturbances at ICE facilities.”
But the list does not include mandatory activation during vehicle pursuits or the transportation of people to detention facilities. Recording inside detention facilities is strictly prohibited by the policy.
Deactivation requirements
As proposed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit that promotes policing professionalism, body cameras must continue to record until an encounter with a member of the public has concluded and agents have left the scene.
The current ICE body-worn camera policy states that agents “should only deactivate the BWC when the scene is secure as determined by the supervisor or team leader.”
While robust policies, such as that of the Chicago Police Department, require continued recording during the transportation of detained people, the ICE body camera policy does not. This creates the potential for critical moments to go unrecorded.
Facial recognition
Many body camera models come equipped with facial recognition technology. But many local police department policies prohibit its use due to privacy and surveillance concerns.
ICE uses facial recognition technology during immigration enforcement operations, but in 2020 lawmakers raised concerns that body camera facial recognition could dissuade citizens from protesting out of fear of retribution.
People gather outside Akron City Hall in Ohio on July 3, 2022, to protest after the release of body camera footage showed police fatally shooting Jayland Walker with several dozen rounds of bullets. Matthew Hatcher/AFP via Getty Images
As protests against ICE immigration enforcement continue, it’s known that the agency uses facial recognition technology on peaceful protesters and observers. Existing ICE policy prevents the use of facial recognition on “live BWC recordings,” meaning while the interaction is taking place. Facial recognition is permitted on body camera footage after the interaction has concluded.
In early February 2026, Democratic lawmakers introduced a measure that would prohibit the use of facial recognition by ICE and CBP agents. That ban would extend to facial recognition features on body cameras.
Policy compliance
Policy is only as strong as its enforcement.
Policymakers could consider strengthening submission forms for ICE use-of-force and civil rights violation complaints.
Thorough investigation of complaints and reviews of body camera footage could be handled by an external review board. The Office of the Inspector General, responsible for investigating allegations of excessive force by ICE agents, could also conduct reviews.
Body cameras will not deter violence committed by ICE agents unless policies clearly dictate their use. For body cameras to function as transparency and accountability tools, I believe wrongdoing would have to be swiftly and consistently penalized. This would highlight the consequences of noncompliance with body-worn camera policies.
Author
Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, UMass Boston
Disclosure statement
Stephanie Lessing 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.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.7egv5cakd
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Llewellyn King: How Trump might sabotage the mid-term elections
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
After some long, dark months, there is an optimism afoot among Democrats, many independents, and a few old- school Republicans that the clouds will part and the sun will shine brightly again on Nov. 4.
Most votes in the midterms will be counted, and Democrats believe that the House will have flipped Democratic with a decent majority. They are daring to hope that the Senate, too, will be theirs.
The Trump presidency, its opponents hope, will be firmly marked “lame duck.” Better, they hope that the years of Trump raging, as they see it, outside of his constitutional authority and acting illegally will be over.
It is fantasized that he will be trussed and restricted from authoritarian governance; that his claims of having a mandate will have been repudiated.
But Trump isn’t a man who takes reversal easily. So there is widespread fear that he will find some way of negating the results of the ballot on Nov. 3 and that Nov. 4 will see him crowing, declaring victory, and being more determined than ever to act as an authoritarian.
Two of the most revered and admired members of the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, Tim Wirth, who represented Colorado for 12 years in the House before entering the Senate, and Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri for 26 years in the House and rose to become majority leader, have been studying the emergency powers they fear might be used to obstruct the midterms.
The Democratic graybeards state: “Over the past several months we have been examining the structure of presidential emergency authorities, particularly presidential emergency accurate action documents (PEADs) and related to continuity of government provisions. These authorities have existed for decades. What has changed is the context in which they might be used.”
It is these documents, and how they might be used with new intent by Trump and his allies, which alarms the senior Democrats.
They point out that the cadre of Trump loyalists that supported his lie that he won the 2020 election are seeking ways to overcome Democratic victory in the midterms.
Wirth and Gephardt state: “Actors involved in efforts to contest the 2020 election remain active and are again discussing the use of a national emergency to justify federal intervention in election administration.
“At the same time, federal law enforcement has been used directly in relation to contested election processes, and the president has called for federal control over aspects of voting while describing domestic opponents in terms that go well beyond ordinary political language.”
Wirth and Gephardt wonder if “taken together” these developments raise the question of “whether emergency authorities of uncertain scope, capable of rapid implementation and subject to limited oversight, could be brought to bear in a domestic political context before Congress or the courts can respond effectively.”
Clearly the former members of Congress believe that the administration will find pretexts to either subvert the vote, challenge the result or set aside the entire election on emergency grounds.
The first moves are underway to limit mail-in voting, and not to count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. The SAVE America Act before Congress would impose what its opponents say is excessive voter- identification requirements, including proof of citizenship, supposedly to prevent non-citizen voting. No evidence that this is a problem has been produced.
Trump has added to uncertainty in one statement, suggesting that his administration is so successful that no election is needed. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked that back, but the intimation lingers.
My belief is that in no way will there be a smooth transfer of power if the Democrats win in the midterms, and that the full apparatus of emergency powers could be employed to negate the result.
The president has produced an extraordinary convulsion in the country, and it is unlikely to be corrected as easily as by the midterm elections.
Trump, who can widely be inconsistent in what he says, even in the same speech, remains consistent in his lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. No evidence of this has ever been found despite exhaustive investigations, but he remains firm on that allegation.
He will at least make that assertion about the midterms result if it goes against him.
Of course, a lot happens in a single month of the Trump administration, and there are seven months until the elections.
What is certain is that if the Democrats triumph in the midterms, Trump will use every tool of the executive to frustrate the new Congress. A wild elephant is a dangerous creature when antagonized.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com , and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Post-human nature
“Together at Last”(Japanese mineral pigments and plastic on mulberry paper), by Yuko Oda, in her show “Decaying into Bloom,’’ at the Brodigan Gallery at Groton School, Groton, Mass., through May 10.
The Tokyo-born artist writes that she creates "works on paper and sculpture that explore a speculative, post-human future, where organisms self-destruct, adapt, and intertwine." This series of symbiotically connected bugs and plants explores "our perceived superiority over nature. Within these works, I invent moments where plants and animals mutate or hybridize." Oda also likened her work to her own experiences growing up as an immigrant "oscillating between [the] cultures" of Tokyo and Manila.’’
1831 map
He wrote about heroes
In Tracy Kidder’s hometown, Williamsburg, Mass.
— Photo by John Phelan
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GolocalProv.com
Tracy Kidder, who died March 24 at 80, started to become famous as the author of brilliant nonfiction books with The Soul of a New Machine (1981), about the development of a new superminicomputer by a team of engineers at Data General Corp. (based in Westboro, Mass.), one of many now long-dead tech companies. Other famous extinct ones include Digital Equipment Corp., based in Maynard, Mass., and Wang Laboratories, based in Lowell, Mass.
Mostly because of the technology complex in the Boston area spawned by its universities, Massachusetts became one of the world’s greatest centers of the digital revolution. Though it mostly missed the boat on the personal-computer revolution, which was based on the West Coast – in Silicon Valley and Seattle – the region continues to be a key area for digital development. That will continue, whatever the Trump regime and other malign forces do to try to hurt our region. While Kidder’s book was published long ago, it still provides an encouraging look at why New England continues so good for innovation.
Much of his writing involved very admirable, even heroic, individuals and their institutions in New England, particularly in western Massachusetts, where he lived. But his reporting about local situations had/has universal resonance.
Now, at a time when so many of our leaders wallow in selfishness, to read about Kidder’s compassionate and visionary characters (though they were tough when they had to be) is edifying.
Keep them away
Work by Rachel Loischild in her show “Quarantine Islands,’’ at the Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, Mass., through May 24.
She says that the show “delves into the historical intersection of immigration and public health policies, tracing a narrative that spans from the 14th to the 21st Century. Developed over more than a decade of research, this body of work uses large-format color photography to capture the landscapes of former quarantine stations, pest houses, and quarantine hospitals across the U.S., where immigrants, the poor, and people of color were forcibly isolated to protect the broader population. These sites, imbued with invisible histories, serve as a tangible link to a past where public health measures, while crucial in controlling diseases like smallpox, disproportionately burdened those quarantined.’’
Trump vs. Electric buses
An electric bus in New York City.
Excerpted and edited from an ecoRI.org news story
The Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) planned to introduce electric buses to operate on Aquidneck Island in the spring of this year, but federal funding for the project is being held up by the Trump administration.
President Trump inherited an “unprecedented backlog” of unobligated U.S. Department of Transportation grants when he took office in 2025.
One of those grants belongs to RIPTA. The transit agency’s CEO, Christopher Durand, told Rhode Island House Finance subcommittee members on March 10 that he doesn’t know if the funds will be released.
Nearly four years ago, RIPTA announced it would remove diesel-powered buses rolling along Aquidneck Island’s streets, following a U.S. Department of Transportation award of $22.37 million in federal funding to Rhode Island through the Biden administration’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity grant program.
Philip K. Howard: On social trust and accountability
We mostly start with trust…
…but can end up without much.
“The Visit of the Plague in Milan’’ (F. Jenewein, 1899), a painting of a man stoned on suspicion of spreading the plague.
Social trust is a barometer for the health of society. A trusting society is more energetic, more collaborative, and more hopeful. America, unfortunately, is going in the wrong direction. Only one in five Americans trusts governing institutions, and only one in three trusts other people. America is now in a downward spiral of distrust, defensiveness, polarization, and greater distrust.
Social distrust is a kind of cancer, causing gears to grind ever more slowly. David Brooks, in his farewell New York Times column, connects Americans’ “loss of faith” in each other with their loss of hope for the future—over two-thirds of Americans say they no longer believe in the American dream.
How does America pull out of this downward spiral of distrust? Accepted wisdom is that America is just too diverse. But America has thrived with diversity since the latter half of the nineteenth century, and surveys suggest that Americans of diverse backgrounds still share basic values such as truthfulness, reciprocity (“Do unto others …”), and respect for the common good.
Why don’t Americans just do what they think is right? Brooks argues that selfishness eroded trust after “four decades of hyperindividualism.” But Brooks doesn’t explain where hyperindividualism came from. Americans did not suddenly wake up with selfish values. What happened is that, trying to avoid bias, Americans were disempowered from making “value judgments” about other people. An unintended effect was that people learned they could get away with selfishly gaming the system.
The key to social trust is accountability. Trust erodes when people no longer feel others will abide by norms of fair dealing. Selfishness grows as people see it succeeding. What’s been lost is not our values of right and wrong, but confidence that other Americans will also be held to those values.
Social values can’t be sustained unless they are enforced—not by law, but by judgments of other people. Individuals in a free society are free to be rude, selfish, untruthful, irresponsible, and immoral, constrained only by the broad boundaries of law. But the rest of us are free to judge them accordingly. People who act selfishly are no longer respected, or excluded from positions of respect, or lose their jobs.
For most of American history, mutual trust in the values of honor, integrity, and community was taken for granted because good character was an asset, not just virtue for its own sake, but a condition for success. People succeeded, as economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “according to what others think.”
American culture provided a marketplace for good character as well as individual achievement—“a most conspicuous Theatre,” as George Washington predicted in 1783, “which seems to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.”
America became the strongest society in human history not just because it unleashed the initiative of each individual. Atomized individuality soon bogs down in a society riven with distrust. America was supercharged by unleashing individual initiative within a culture of responsible values, or what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest, rightly understood.”
These shared values allowed America to reap the benefits of high “social capital”—greater cooperation and social bonds, innovation, and hope for the future. But shared values evaporate, like a kind of dark magic, when people realize those values are no longer enforced. Mutual trust vanishes when people can act irresponsibly with impunity.
David Brooks is hardly the first observer to lament “the loss of a shared moral order,” in which Americans no longer act on what is “true, beautiful and good.” Almost three decades ago, political scientist Alan Wolfe found that Americans had “lost the distinction between right and wrong and desperately want it back.”
Americans lost the freedom to uphold core social values because of a deliberate change in legal and social philosophy. Coming out of the 1960s, the urge to avoid bias and unfairness became a top social priority. Civil rights laws were vital to end systemic segregation and other indefensible practices. But reformers wanted to go further and create a new system where unfairness would be no more.
The new idea was to replace human judgment with law. Thick rulebooks would prescribe exactly how to do things, and elaborate procedures would require officials to justify decisions with objective evidence. But people can still be unfair, so reformers had one more innovation: A new concept of individual rights that allowed any person to challenge decisions that affected them. Decisions about people in the workplace and elsewhere became fraught with legal risk. Supervisors were put to the proof that someone isn’t pulling their weight, or has bad character.
The freedom to live our values, and to associate with those who share our values, is a core strength of America’s pluralistic society. Each community needs its own moral integrity.
Americans no longer feel free to judge others. There’s hardly any cultural value more ingrained in modern America than the proscription against being “judgmental.” Political correctness is enforced ruthlessly, but judgments about personal character are taboo. Making decisions about someone’s moral character is tantamount to a violation of their rights. The evil to be purged is subjectivity, which is a synonym for bias. Who are you to judge?
Human judgment is indeed subjective. Judgment emerges from the black box of the human subconscious as an amalgam of perceptions, instincts, values, experience, biases, and more. Judgment is fallible—that’s why most organizations run important decisions by other people, and why psychologist Daniel Kahneman urged more reflective thinking.
But the only way to avoid the subjectivity of human judgment is to eliminate judgment altogether. How do you prove that someone has poor character? Even harder, how do you disprove that your judgment isn’t tainted by implicit bias?
So Americans abdicated making judgments about other people. There was “a massive redefinition of freedom,” historian Eric Foner found, “as a rejection of all authority.” The goal was virtuous—to enhance freedom by eliminating any possibility of unfairness. Instead, letting people “come up with their own individual values,” as Brooks observes, infected society with debilitating distrust.
Leadership is a hollow concept without the authority to uphold shared values. Those values are activated mainly in supervisory decisions about personnel.
People judging people is the main mechanism for a moral culture. Otherwise, morality is just words. Does this person act in a way we respect and trust? Or is he self-serving? People who are selfish or antisocial should lose our votes, or lose their jobs, or lose our friendship. To rebuild a moral culture, Americans must be free to make these judgments.
But what if the leader is unfair? Or plays favorites? Law can certainly safeguard against patterns of discrimination. But extruding every personnel decision through a legal sieve has not enhanced fairness and human understanding. It has instead made candor extinct and exacerbated bias by chilling honest interaction.
Fairness in decisions about particular people is beyond the capacity of law. Fairness to one person is unfairness in the eyes of another. Making these judgments is an unavoidable necessity of collective activity. Scrutinizing personal judgments through the lens of objective proof does not enhance relations, but fosters a mindset of grievance and entitlement.
Morality has little connection to legality. The law protects against conduct so bad that it should be banned. Morality, on the other hand, is the practice of doing good. A society works because people come together in groups to achieve common goals, in business and in a wide variety of communal activities. How well those groups succeed depends in large part on adherence to shared norms. People must be free to associate based on their evaluation of moral character.
Rebuilding the framework for a moral society requires removing law from most social interactions—not devaluing moral judgments with legal bickering. Except for tortious conduct, such as sexual harassment and other misconduct, law should have nothing to do with how people get along—no lawsuits for individual personnel decisions, no lawsuits when someone says something offensive or makes someone feel “unsafe.”
Letting people interact freely should not be considered a novel risk for a society organized on the principle of individual freedom. Honest feedback causes pain, but failure is also the main way people learn. Letting people be spontaneous means some will put their feet in their mouths, but their authenticity is also a basis for trust. Let them apologize. Yes, all humans have implicit biases. But, for most people, biases diminish when we get to know each other. Any healthy organization strives to avoid unfairness. Good workers and helpful colleagues tend to do well, whatever their identity group or background.
But what about individual rights? The legal spotlight shines on the predicament of the one employee who may lose a job. But whose rights? What about the 28 students learning nothing from an indifferent teacher? Or co-workers discouraged by someone shirking his responsibility? How about the freedom of the supervisor? Making personnel choices is his job.
The post-1960s concept of rights against others’ choices should be abandoned as a mutant subversion of freedom, not an enhancement. Instead of a shield protecting everyone’s freedom against state power, this new concept of rights is a sword by one self-interested person against the freedom of other free citizens. That’s why so many Americans react viscerally against it, and why it engenders pervasive distrust.
Too much law has suffocated America’s moral culture. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1978 cautioned that “a society with no other scale but the legal one … is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”
Pulling law away from daily interactions will be a historic change. Like victims with Stockholm Syndrome, many Americans will have a hard time imagining how to take moral responsibility. Law everywhere absolves us from making hard choices. But that’s legal servitude, not freedom, and causes cultural rot.
The freedom to live our values, and to associate with those who share our values, is a core strength of America’s pluralistic society. Each community needs its own moral integrity. The resulting trust in shared values within these groups is like rocket fuel for human initiative. That’s what America is losing, and can only be regained by letting us interact freely again.
Philip K. Howard, a lawyer, is chairman of Common Good, a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to simplifying laws. He is a best-selling author, a New York civic leader and a photographer. His most recent book is Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America(2025). This piece, not including the images above, first ran on the Website of Law + Liberty,
Abstract ice
“Polarized Ice” (photo), by Julie Parker, in the show “Zero Celsius,’’ at Mad River Valley Arts, Waitsfield, Vt., through April 23.
William Morgan: An Arts & Crafts response to Industrial revolution
Leila Ross Wilburn, Carr House, Atlanta (1919).
Maureen Meister, an architectural historian from Boston, and sometime Tufts and Northeastern professor, published a book a dozen years ago on the New England followers of Williams Morris, John Ruskin, and the English Romantics who believed that a reverence for nature, simplicity, and a return to craftsmanship could offset the ills of the Industrial Revolution. Late 19th-Century Boston was the crucible of the Arts and Crafts movement in this country, led by architects such as H.H. Richardson, Henry Vaughan, and Ralph Adams Cram, and supported by a remarkable coterie of furniture and glass, textile and ceramic designers. In her latest volume, Arts and Crafts Architecture Across America (Yale University Press, 2025), Meister gathers Tudor revival, Prairie School, Spanish revival, and further offshoots under a broad Arts & Crafts umbrella.
Ralph Adams Cram, St. George’s School Chapel, Middletown, R.I., 1924-28
“There is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England”
The Boston Society of Arts & Crafts, founded in 1897, inspired similar reform-minded idealists and artisans in places such as Detroit, Minneapolis, and San Diego. Meister weaves in such humble designers as Gustav Stickley and Elbert Hubbard, in western New York, while embracing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House, in Buffalo. Making the case that Wright’s Prairie Style is a fundamental part of the Arts & Crafts movement, Meister includes Wright’s Chicago works, along with Jane Addams’ Hull House and Bertram Goodhue’s Gothic chapel at the University of Chicago in The Windy City. The heartland also includes the Edenic handcraft educational community at the Cranbrook design complex, in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen mentored generations of notable designers. (His son was the famous architect Eero Saarinen.)
M.H. Baillie-Scott, The Close, Short Hills, N.J., 1912-13.
The Arts & Crafts represented a cozier, gentler side of the Gilded Age
The scope and ultimate unity of handcraft mindset is demonstrated in Collegiate Gothic campuses, in rustic inns and dude ranches in the Rockies, and the adobe of the so-called Spanish Colonial and Native American style of Texas and the Southwest. In California the “fresh air and fresh thinking” produced a blossoming of handcrafted houses, in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. All of the delightful houses, churches, and civic structures that Meister presents are “myriad responses to a question was once all-important: What native materials, landscapes, and histories will serve us when we build, to suit the special places where we live, in the United States of America.”
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, California Building, San Diego, 1911-15.
Erstwhile partner of Ralph Adams Cram, Goodhuewas a native of Pomfret, Conn.
Significant scholarly books, such as Professor Meister’s, were also once all-important, but serious architectural history has all but disappeared in the current era of idiocracy and illiteracy. Thus, university presses, such as Yale, are the keepers of the flame, champions of deserving treatises that might not be “monetizable”.
Providence-based architectural historian William Morgan is the author of, among other books, The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan (MIT) and Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States (Abbeville).
‘Physicality and emotional resonance’
“Gathering #11: An Open Book’’ (horse chestnut leaf stems and waxed linen thread, woven), by Ann Wessmann, in her show “Twig Leaf Husk Thorn,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through April 26.
The artist says:
“In my studio practice, I explore themes relating to time, memory, beauty and the ephemeral, with a focus on the strength and fragility of human beings and the natural world. With a background in fiber and textile processes, I develop objects and installations through repetition and the accumulation of a variety of materials. Over the years materials have been chosen for their expressive potential; translucent vellum, various personal mementos such as locks of hair from family members, texts from family journals and letters, or collections of natural materials such as plants, shells, stones, or bones. The works have a strong relationship to text and textiles, pattern, transformation, order and chaos, landscape and the body.
“I hope to engage the viewer through the physicality and often the emotional resonance of materials, and through the use of scale. Viewers often confront works which mirror the human body. Larger scale installations may surround the viewer. In some cases small pieces are made requiring the viewer to look from a very close perspective.’’
‘Yes, the tunnel is safe’
Storrow Drive at approach to its tunnel
Solarapex photo
From The Boston Guardian, article by Jules Roscoe
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian)
The Storrow Drive Tunnel will begin undergoing regular construction in April to strengthen and repair the roof, as part of a $10 million project to extend the tunnel’s life until it can be fully rehabilitated.
“Closures of Storrow Drive eastbound and Soldiers Field Road eastbound will be implemented nightly beginning the first week of April, Sunday night through Thursday night, from 8 pm to 5 am. the following morning,” MassDOT spokesperson John Goggin said.
These closures begin April 5. There will be posted detours in place. The department will also send out official traffic advisories before work begins and is working on a website to host information and updates about the project. “MassDOT and DCR have been meeting with legislators, neighbors and other stakeholders, and will continue to communicate all closures and any modifications to work schedules in advance,” Goggin said.
These interim repairs will focus on the concrete of the internal ceiling of the tunnel. The last major repair project took place in 2008, and there have been piecemeal repairs like this one since then. Goggin said that future repairs would include “structural mitigation measures.”
“This is phase one,” said State Rep. Jay Livingstone, who serves the Back Bay and Beacon Hill where Storrow Drive is located. Livingstone attended a briefing on the project for officials and community members on March 26.
“There’s a potential phase two in September, depending on if they find additional issues in this phase. They’ve done some preliminary work over the last few weeks.”
The tunnel was originally constructed in the early 1950s, and it requires constant maintenance to keep the infrastructure safe for the public. Two weeks ago, Livingstone noticed a series of lane closures in the tunnel, and asked Kendra Amaral, the deputy commissioner of policy for the state’s conservation department, if it was safe to use.
“I was first told 13 years [ago] that the tunnel needed to be replaced in the near term,” Livingstone wrote in the message. “It seems like it has been a priority to replace at times over my tenure of representative, but nothing has happened.”
“Yes, the tunnel is safe,” Amaral wrote in response. “DCR [the conservation department] and MassDOT are working on a $10 million project to make repairs and improvements to the Storrow Drive Tunnel to extend its useful life until a major tunnel rehabilitation/ replacement project can be implemented, which likely could be up to 10 to 15 years in the future. The last major Interim Repair Project in 2008 was completed for $15 million, and there have been no significant repairs since.”
Livingstone said after the community official briefing last Thursday that the repairs planned this year would extend the life of the tunnel by about eight to 10 years, and that the repairs from the Interim Repair Project in 2008 were holding well.
There’s no clear end timeline for this next slew of repairs, but both Goggin and Amaral wrote that the department would take the number of celebrations in Boston this summer, and likely the tourism they bring with them, into account. Amaral said the work would be conducted “ahead of Massachusetts’ big spring and summer of events.”
“Work restrictions will be implemented as necessary to minimize impacts during significant local events, such as concerts and events at Fenway, TD Garden, as well as during the FIFA World Cup and MA250 celebrations,” Goggin said.
Making good neighbors?
“Fence” (oil on canvas), by Francis Colburn, in the group show “Leaning Into Summer,’’ at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester May 19-July 19
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
— “Mending Wall,’’ by Robert Frost
Our wheel of the seasons
“Nowhere in the United States of America does the wheel of the seasons turn more brilliantly than in New England. Winter’s blankets of white, the long-awaited buds of spring accompanied by the run of maple sap, summer’s bouquets, and the magnificent palette of autumn: all are feasts for the senses, and lead to the characteristic New England feeling of existing in tandem with, and often at mercy of the great mercy of, the great forces of nature.’’
— Tom Shachtman, in The Most Beautiful Villages of New England (1997)
Chris Powell: Lamont and Sharpton
Al Sharpton, still pal of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Twenty years ago Ned Lamont accomplished what may have been the neatest trick in Connecticut political history. He won the primary for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator, defeating the incumbent, Joe Lieberman, and lost the election on the same night.
How did it happen?
While being a good liberal Democrat in most respects, Lieberman was in trouble with many Democrats for supporting the war in Iraq that was being waged by the administration of President George W. Bush, a Republican, in pursuit of imaginary "weapons of mass destruction." Lamont mobilized anti-war Democrats and narrowly won the primary, 52-48 percent.
But as he claimed victory on live television, Lamont was standing next to a supporter from New York, Al Sharpton, who back then was known less for being a "civil rights leader" than a race hustler, a perpetrator of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, an income-tax evader, a violator of federal campaign-finance law, a defaulter on a libel judgment arising from the hoax, and an all-around grifter. In a general election Sharpton was the kiss of political death and so, standing next to him that night, Lamont kissed the moderate vote goodbye. Running as an independent Lieberman easily defeated Lamont and a token Republican nominee, drawing both Democratic and Republican votes.
Now governor and seeking re-election to a third term, Lamont is somewhat in the position that Lieberman was in 20 years ago: He is the moderate or somewhat less liberal candidate in what likely will be a Democratic primary with far-left Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott. So the other day Lamont seemed to see political benefit in paling around with Sharpton in the governor's office at the state Capitol. Sharpton and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump had just spoken at the funeral of a mentally ill Black man who had been fatally shot by police during a psychotic episode in Hartford. They were there to racialize the incident.
For as Lenin and other totalitarians are supposed to have said: If you label something well enough, you don't have to argue with it. No matter how unsubstantiated, accusations of racism still put people on the defensive in Connecticut.
The governor may have been confident that he wouldn't have to worry about being tarnished by Sharpton's misconduct, since most of it happened long ago and Connecticut's politically correct journalists would never bring it up even if they knew about it.
Instead the journalists reported that the governor and Sharpton agreed that police need more training in handling mentally ill people who are threatening others. The journalists did not report that while Hartford two years ago created a special squad of social workers to respond to such troubled people, city government lately has much reduced the squad's funding and has been relying more on intervention by the police to handle the dozens of psychotic episodes that occur in the city every week.
Sharpton didn't bring that up either. Of course he probably didn't know about it, nor about the $70 million deficit being run by Hartford's school system, nor about the system's incompetence in the face of the enduring poverty and neglect at home of its heavily minority student population.
But then why bother? Everyone was having such a good time in Lamont's office, with Sharpton sitting in the governor's chair and remarking, "He's one of the best governors in the country."
Polls suggest that Connecticut well may concur in November, since most people have concluded that nothing can be done about the poverty of the cities except to increase their residents' dependence on welfare and keep raising city government salaries.
Indeed, poverty is big business for many people now, including Sharpton himself, whose non-profit "civil rights organization," the National Action Network, pays him annual salaries of between $600,000 and $1 million, money drawn in part from donations made by corporations afraid of being targeted by boycotts staged by the group. Such extortion may be what the group means by its slogan: "No justice, no peace."
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
‘Preserving the emotional temperature’
Work by Michael Guinane in his show “That Feeling of a Place and Time,’’ at Lily Pad East gallery, Westerly, R.I., through April 1
The gallery says:
“Michael Guinane transforms past and current observation into art. His paintings don't merely depict scenes—they preserve the emotional temperature of specific moments in time. His work depicts figures caught in contemplation and action, and the collective energy of crowds set in often historical settings. These works ask us to remember a place long out of time, creating an intimate dialogue between the artist's memory and our own.The emotional capture of a single moment in time is what motivates Michael Guinane to paint. Michael creates an atmosphere for the viewer to feel. Whether it be a moment in history, the artist's personal experience, a lake scene, a trip to Cuba, or a busy city street, these works capture the feeling and mood of being present in a certain place or time.Everyone experiences the world uniquely. Michael's work creates the opening to read a scene in our own way and see and connect with the characters and places caught in a moment of suspension, sparking the imagination of what has happened and what is to come next.’’
Bare heads would be tacky
Boston Episcopalians on their Easter Parade on March 24, 1940, after leaving services at Trinity Church, on Copley Square.
