Vox clamantis in deserto
Light along the coast
“At the End” (oil on linen) by Kay Knight Clarke, in her show “Seeing Light,’’ at the New Britain Museum of American Art, through Nov. 22.
The museum says:
“Inspired by the ephemeral effects of light, color, and atmosphere along the Connecticut shoreline, Clarke’s works offer contemplative reflections on time, place, perception, and feeling. On view in the museum’s historic Landers House, the exhibition celebrates Clarke’s poetic artistry’’
A one-month season
“Sunny Autumn Day,’’ by George Inness (1825-1894), American landscape painter
“The color of September; smouldering gold, The moon goes toward the mountains and grows old.”
— Frances Frost
“September is more than a month, really; it is a season, an achievement in itself. It begins with August's leftovers and it ends with October's preparations...”
— Hal Borland
“That time of year, you know, when the summer, beginning to sadden, Full-mooned and silver-misted, glides from the heart of September, Mourned by desolate crickets, and iterant grasshoppers, crying.”
— Conrad Aiken
Julie Dobrow: How kids’ shows responded to 9/11
From The Conversation (except for image above)
MEDFORD, Mass.
On back-to-school night in 2005, I eagerly entered my youngest child’s first grade classroom. The walls were festooned with brightly colored responses to the prompt: “Draw something you remember.”
I scanned for my son’s picture and was shocked when I encountered his drawing: an airplane flying into New York’s World Trade Center.
“I saw the picture you drew up on the bulletin board,” I said to him later that night. “Do you really remember seeing planes flying into the twin towers?”
He looked me in the eyes and replied, “No, Mommy. But I do remember you crying.”
My son was not quite 2 years old on on Sept. 11, 2001. As a mother, I despaired to learn that my own reaction to that day’s tragedies had stuck with him so viscerally. As a professor and researcher of children’s media, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
My son’s memory was likely influenced not just by my emotional reaction but by the media around him that his parents and siblings consumed in the weeks and years after the attacks – a mix of TV news and content geared toward kids.
More than two decades later, children have many more ways and more platforms to encounter frightening images and stories, often without an adult nearby to help them make sense of what they see. But the ways children’s programming such as “Sesame Street” responded to 9/11 offer a useful lesson: Rather than trying to shield children completely from disturbing events, adults can help them process what they’ve seen in honest, reassuring and age-appropriate ways.
You can’t shield kids from what’s happening
Psychologist Joanne Cantor was one of the first to study what scares children about news and how they respond to it.
She concluded that what frightens children varies by their developmental stage. Younger children tend to notice and respond to stories about natural disasters and tragedies about kids or animals. Older children are afraid of stories focusing on personal injury and physical destruction, kidnapping, disease and violence. Teens express fear of stories about random acts of violence, natural disasters and foreign conflicts.
Since Cantor first published her groundbreaking research in the 1980s, kids’ media environments have changed dramatically, with more channels, screens and platforms broadcasting images and videos of natural disasters, violence and tragedies from around the world.
A child’s letter and drawing left at a memorial in lower Manhattan in the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis via Getty Images
One study found that young children’s exposure to news is often accidental but lasting, with many children recalling distressing images long after the fact. Another one found that violent news images take a cumulative toll on children’s mental and emotional health. And an international survey of over 4,000 children from 42 countries found that over half had been scared by stories about the COVID-19 pandemic.
More recently, the children’s media nonprofit Common Sense Media surveyed hundreds of children ranging in age from 8 to 18 and found that what kids are seeing and hearing in the news frequently makes them feel scared, sad, angry or depressed.
Children’s TV takes a delicate approach
On and after 9/11, millions of children like my son either saw the images of terrorist attacks or were near adults who reacted to them.
According to “Sesame Street” producer Lewis Bernstein, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, most of the episodes for the forthcoming season were already written. Yet writers and producers knew that children were not oblivious – that even the 2- to 4-year-olds comprising the core “Sesame Street” audience had some sense of what was going on.
In response, the show’s producers collaborated with experts to create additional episodes that would address children’s fears.
In 2002, Rosemarie Truglio, vice president of education and research for “Sesame Street,” explained how the show’s approach was to meet children where they were developmentally.
“Sesame Street” had already helped children process their fears through classic episodes such as “Grover’s Fear of the Dark.” Researchers knew part of what scared children on 9/11 were the loud sirens and the fact that trusted figures such as firefighters and police officers were hurt.
So the episode they developed in response to 9/11 made no mention of the terrorist attacks and instead centered on a fire at Hooper’s Store. Elmo is frightened by the noise of the fire alarm and subsequent sirens. The protective gear that the firefighters are wearing also scares him.
“Sesame Street” never mentioned 9/11 directly, but its segments addressed fears the attacks may have instilled in children.
Fortunately, a kind and kid-savvy firefighter named Bill speaks to Elmo about his fears and invites him to visit the firehouse. There, he dispels some of Elmo’s concerns and dispenses advice about what children can do if they are ever in a similar situation.
The PBS show “Arthur” took a similar approach: Its two-part episode “April 9” centers on a fire at Arthur’s school. It makes no mention of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks but explores how Arthur, Sue Ellen, Binky and Buster each process the school fire differently.
“Zoom,” the popular PBS live-action variety show, was geared toward older kids. Just 10 days after 9/11, they aired a special half-hour episode called “America’s Kids Respond.” The seven cast members, all between the ages of 9 and 14, shared their thoughts, fears and feelings. Advisers knew their audience needed more than hearing other kids talk about their feelings. So they made sure the cast also discussed constructive things kids could do, such as helping with food donations or clothing drives for affected families.
A year later, “Zoom” followed up with another special, “America’s Kids Remember,” where cast members talked about how they had coped in the months after the attacks. They also read mail from viewers, including some letters written by kids who had been targeted by anti-Muslim slurs. The episode included a segment in which a cast member visited a girl in lower Manhattan whose school had been damaged. The girl explained how she was able to cope through her art and activism.
A promotional clip for a special episode of “Zoom,” “America’s Kids Remember,” which aired in September 2002.
What’s a parent to do?
In 2001, most children under 8 were watching approximately 3.5 hours per day of television or videos on VHS.
Today, Common Sense Media reports that the amount of time kids spend watching television or videos is similar, but their total media exposure is far greater, thanks to mobile platforms and different types of media.
In a world where extreme weather events often lead local news, natural disasters routinely take place, and school shootings and acts of political violence have become all too common, parents might naturally try to shield children from these stories.
But young children pick up on the news and on cues from their parents, even when we don’t think they do.
There are many things parents and teachers can do to help mitigate children’s fears and anxieties from what they see on the news. Recognize some of the signs your child might be feeling anxious, such as sleep problems, avoidance of activities or doomscrolling. Experts suggest answering children’s questions honestly without necessarily relaying all of the gory details. It’s also OK to say, “I don’t know.”
Some of the lessons from how children’s TV dealt with 9/11 still apply.
Young children can also benefit from adults reassuring them that they are safe, by encouraging them to process a piece of news through play or art, and helping children by giving them language to express their questions and fears.
With older children and teenagers, experts suggest avoiding labels, such as blaming something on “the bad guys.” It’s important to give kids facts and context and provide them with resources to answer their questions. Older children can benefit from outlets to express their concerns and feel agency, whether through journaling or art, or the kind of volunteerism promoted on “Zoom.”
Finally, it’s important to acknowledge and explain our own emotions to our children, as I learned on that back-to-school night nearly two decades ago.
Julie Dobrow is a teaching professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, at Tufts University. 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 her academic appointment.
‘Objects may awaken as spirits’
From Lua Kobayshi’s show “The Persistence of Memories,’’ at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Mass., through Oct. 25.
The photographer says:
“In September 2025, I spent time moving through the greater Boston area, sitting with Japanese-American individuals and families in spaces where stories are held—living rooms, kitchens, and quiet corners shaped by daily life. Within these intimate settings, people shared personal histories, reflections on what it means to be Japanese-American today, and the objects that have traveled with them across generations. These conversations were generous and deeply moving, revealing how culture is preserved not only through documentation, but through care, trust, and the act of keeping.’’
“This project takes the form of a quiet, immersive installation centered on projection, shared memory, and a belief rooted in Japanese folklore: that objects, after a long life of use, may awaken as tsukumogami, or spirits. Within this tradition, belongings are not passive. They absorb touch, time, and emotion—carrying the presence of those who have lived alongside them.’’
Bucolic a few miles from gritty
Site of the Russell Garrison, a 17th Century fortified area in Dartmouth, Mass.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
It was heartening to learn that MBTA train service connecting Fall River and New Bedford with Boston, which started just last year, has become quite popular. The line averages nearly 10,000 passengers a day, most of it on weekdays. That’s a lot of cars no longer on the still often clogged roads between the Massachusetts South Coast and “The Hub,’’ and it helps reduce air pollution. The folks taking that line almost universally say the trip is far less stressful than driving and gives them time for work and/or to snooze.
The service will be an economic boon for Fall River and New Bedford by drawing more skilled workers to live there, some of them in the many converted old mill buildings built in those cities’ industrial heyday, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The line will let the region become more absorbed into the Greater Boston wealth machine even as it remains less expensive than the area up north.
But some newcomers will want to live in the pricey towns nearby, especially close to Buzzards Bay, on what my friend Will Morgan calls “The Quaker Coast’’ because of the many people of that denomination who started settling there in early colonial days. Considering the density of the region’s population, there’s a surprising amount of beautiful countryside there, including vegetable farms, a few dairy farms, and some vineyards in the area’s mild microclimate. More and more people want to live there as summer folks (think The Hamptons) and as year-rounders, many of them five-day-week commuters to Boston and elsewhere.
We’ve often noted how the area looks like parts of England, with gritty cities cheek by jowl with bucolic scenes.
But will rail service sharply intensify the area’s residential-development pressures and substantially erode its beauty?
Stony show in Barre
“Ancient Deity,’’ by the late John A. Matusz, in the group show “Rock Solid,’’ at Studio Place Arts, Barre, Vt., through Oct. 24.
Studio Place Arts explains:
“This annual stone sculpture exhibit since 2000 showcases stone sculptures and assemblages by area artists. This year the show includes a group of sculptures by the late John A. Matusz, who was involved in the show for 14 years.
“View granite sculptures around downtown, historic Barre by means of the Art Stroll, a self-guided tour. Maps are available at the SPA website and in the gallery.’’
Elisabeth Rosenthal: How patients get financially hammered by ‘vertical integration,’ private equity
Though the U.S. health-care system tends to produce more innovation, it has a lower level of regulation, and almost every form of its health care costs more than in other high-income countries.
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News (KFF Health News) (not including image above)
“Antitrust laws aren’t fit for purpose at this point, and the agencies that enforce them are under-resourced.’’
— Zack Cooper, an associate professor of public health and economics at Yale University
After a failed round of in-vitro fertilization this year, Anne Hug’s fertility doctor said she had a single polyp in her uterus that should be removed to improve the chance of pregnancy. Hug, a professor of radiology, learned that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says the procedure can be done in a doctor’s office with local numbing.
Her doctor referred her to a physician at the same hospital, which is part of a large Ohio health system. That doctor’s plan was to do the procedure in a hospital operating room, with anesthesia administered by an anesthesiologist.
Hug balked at the $18,000 estimate.
So she found an obstetrician who said he would do it in the doctor’s office. And she took the required two-week course of a hormone in preparation.
But the day before the polyp removal, the doctor’s office called to say, sorry, but he had to do it in a freestanding surgery center owned by the same system. The health system had bought the OB-GYN practice in 2025, so it called the shots. The next day, Hug recalled, “I’m in a venue I didn’t need or use, with surgical techs and OR nurses running around.”
Though she was scheduled for anesthesia or sedation, she wanted none of it. The doctor numbed the cervix and removed the polyp in a few minutes, with “a few seconds of cramping,” she said. Hug remembers watching pictures of the polyp removal and “talking to the OR crew about snorkeling.”
The estimate for the in-office procedure was around $3,000. The bill when she was forced at the last minute to switch to the surgery center was around $6,000. She now wonders, “How is it legal for these hospitals to force patients to have procedures done in a hospital when professional organizations recommend differently?”
Hug’s experience is a classic example of the predicted outcome of “vertical integration” in the health-care system, when one company owns or controls multiple parts of a supply chain and can therefore direct patients to more expensive treatment options.
KFF Health News agreed not to publish some identifying details about Hug and her health-care providers, to protect her patient privacy and ongoing relationship with the hospital system.
In any case, such health-care integration is occurring at a breakneck pace all across the nation, with endless permutations: Hospitals are buying doctors’ practices and surgery and imaging centers. Insurers are buying doctors’ practices and specialty pharmacies and sometimes merging with pharmacy chains. Hospitals are buying or creating insurers. Private-equity firms are behind many of the deals, buying practices, reorganizing operations, paring costs, then selling at a profit in a few years to a hospital or insurer higher up the health-care food chain.
And while the stated purpose is generally greater efficiency, studies have shown that for patients the net result has been higher prices and no benefit, or worse health outcomes. That’s in part because the purchases have been driven by financial efficiency, not more seamless and attentive care, said Soroush Saghafian, an associate professor at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. What’s more, these transactions occur in a gray zone of competition law, and regulators’ tools to examine or stop them are plodding and not up to the task.
“Antitrust laws aren’t fit for purpose at this point, and the agencies that enforce them are under-resourced,” said Zack Cooper, an associate professor of public health and economics at Yale University who has sounded the alarm about the trend. The tools at the agencies’ disposal are limited — warning letters, lawsuits, and consent decrees modifying the terms of a merger to restore competition — and often slow to get results. Meanwhile, the dealmaking is galloping ahead.
Patients like Hug are often directed to a higher-priced location for procedures. They are effectively required to buy from their insurers’ specialty or retail pharmacy, which may not stock the drug the doctor prescribes or provide it at the lowest price.
The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department together police mergers in healthcare to protect competition and patient choice. Generally, the FTC oversees hospitals and doctors, while the Justice Department scrutinizes insurers, though their territories overlap and there are gaps. Middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers fall somewhere in between, though in recent years the FTC has taken the lead in this arena. But federal regulators are playing a tough game of catch-up.
Over the past decade, the number of doctors working for hospitals rather than in private practice has more than doubled. Today 82% of physicians are employed by hospitals, other corporate entities (like insurers), or private equity firms. For example, UnitedHealth Group’s then-CEO said in 2024 that it employed around 10,000 primary care physicians. That did not include UnitedHealth’s 80,000 “affiliated” physicians.
Many of these vertical transactions are too small for the regulatory agencies to spot. Under the 1976 Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, mergers valued over a certain dollar threshold set annually — this year it’s $133.9 million — must be reported for antitrust scrutiny. Many hospital mergers or insurer mergers exceed the threshold. But mergers involving doctors’ practices often do not, leading to consolidation and monopoly by slow accretion.
Cooper and his group, the Health Care Affordability Lab, studied hospital acquisitions of physician practices and found that over 99% of the more than 275 deals examined fell below the reporting threshold. “I’m really struggling with this,” Cooper said. “What you’re talking about is sort of like death by a thousand paper cuts.”
The FTC has brought eight actions or suits against health-care mergers and acquisitions in President \Trump’s second term. “The FTC has made health-care competition one of our top priorities,” said Daniel Guarnera, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. Nonetheless, he said the agency relied on complaints and news reports to learn about smaller mergers.
The Justice Department has brought only two cases, both challenging hospital-insurer contracts rather than mergers. It has also settled a suit brought by the Biden administration that sought to block UnitedHealth’s $3.3 billion acquisition of Amedisys, a home health-care agency. The 2025 settlement required the divestiture of 164 home health and hospice locations across 19 states.
After KFF Health News requested an interview, the department’s press office replied in an unsigned email: “You’ve emailed the Department of Justice. Please reach out to FTC’s media team to set up an interview.” Further requests went unanswered.
Guarnera, at the FTC, noted that the agencies’ task is to enforce regulations, limiting the challenges they can bring.
“Some of the market distortion is caused by regulations that have anticompetitive effects,” he said.
For example, countless health-policy experts have proposed regulations mandating “site-neutral payment,” a system in which providers would get the same amount for a procedure no matter where it was performed. That would prevent predicaments like Hug’s, in which a vertically integrated system effectively backs doctors into directing patients to a more expensive venue for treatment.
Within the government, the FTC has advocated for new pro-competitive regulations, suggestions that are now under review by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. They are not public, and Guarnera wouldn’t say whether site-neutral payment is included. Meanwhile, the Trump administration in July proposed instituting site-neutral payments for some services for Medicare beneficiaries.
The economic theory adjudicating the pros and cons of vertical integration is “nuanced,” Cooper said.
It is far easier to assess the effects of horizontal integration — when a hospital merges with a hospital or an insurer with an insurer — on patient care and cost. If two hospitals merge and become the only care provider in town, that leaves patients with less choice and can make it easier for the new monopoly to skimp on care and raise prices. There is no way “to walk with your feet” to another hospital system for care, Cooper said.
But with vertical integration, for example, a hospital merger with an insurer and doctors’ practices could in theory diminish friction, compared with a disaggregated system in which every bill is haggled over by different sectors trying to maximize their piece of the pie. Some successful and popular hospital-insurer combinations, such as Kaiser Permanente, are vertically integrated. So merely taking a “sledgehammer” to such mergers could backfire, Cooper said.
But with money on the table and business interests governing healthcare, studies have shown that cons of vertical integration — opportunities for gaming away those beneficial arrangements and raising revenue — prevail.
When Harvard researchers sought to assess the effect of hospital purchases of gastroenterology physician groups on colonoscopy care, the negative impact was clear. “It changed the way they did business,” said Saghafian, the paper’s main author.
All told, quality went down and prices as well as complication rates rose. “What improves is ‘operational throughput,’” or the efficiency with which the system could move patients through colonoscopies fastest with the least staff involvement, Saghafian said. “That’s a financial metric.”
‘It Feels Like Double-Dipping’
While health economists are studying the impacts to help regulators figure out when to act, the horse is out of the barn. All the biggest health insurers have already merged with pharmacy benefit managers, specialty and commercial pharmacies, as well as new lines of businesses that insurers require members to use to manage copay assistance from pharmaceutical companies. For example:
CVS acquired Aetna in 2018, meaning Aetna subscribers are directed to the CVS Specialty pharmacy through Caremark, its pharmacy benefit manager.
Cigna owns Accredo (a specialty pharmacy), Express Scripts (a pharmacy benefit manager), and EviCore (which does preauthorization for prescription requests).
UnitedHealth includes Optum Rx (a pharmacy benefit manager), Optum Specialty Pharmacy, and Optum Infusion Pharmacy.
So when patients change insurers, their steady access to longtime drugs at a predictable price can go out the door.
In Florida, Ari H.’s family uses three high-priced specialty drugs for chronic conditions. All three had long been subsidized by patient assistance programs from their manufacturers. KFF Health News agreed to only partially identify him, because he works for a government contractor where policy has become political and he fears retaliation.
Signing up for a $3,000-deductible plan with a new insurer, Aetna, put a new strain on his family’s finances. On his new plan, he was signed up for all Aetna’s pharmacy-related products, too. He could not choose to order elsewhere. Most importantly, his old insurance counted the copay assistance money toward his deductible, but his new insurer did not, scooping up his patient assistance money from pharmaceutical firms.
“I pay substantial premiums, and I pay my deductible and my out-of-pocket maximum — that’s all paid by me,” Ari H. said. “But now all the copay assistance goes back to them. It feels like double-dipping.”
Ethan Slavin, an Aetna spokesperson, said the company “is committed to helping members choose and use health plans that best meet their health, financial, and lifestyle needs.” He added that the insurer offers “supports that may lower out-of-pocket expenses.”
Ari H. is right, said Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor who in 2022 launched the Cost Plus Drugs site, which sells mostly generic drugs to cash-paying patients at a discount — often for less than what they would pay using insurance. “It’s crazy stuff,” he said of vertical integration. “The right pocket gives to the left pocket.”
In July the FTC reached a settlement in a suit against Caremark, requiring it to be more transparent and give patients and pharmacies more choice. It had previously reached such an agreement with Express Scripts and is working on one with Optum.
Academics like Cooper are trying to help clarify “which of these vertical deals are bad.” A clearer economic theory, he said, might help regulators make the patient experience just “a little less worse.”
Elisabeth Rosenthal (erosenthal@kff.org) is a KFF Health News reporter.
First gradually, then suddenly
“Touch of Autumn” (encaustic on panel), by Dale O. Roberts, at Portland Art Gallery.
He can’t fake it in Vt.
Strafford, Vt., Meeting House, built in 1799
“Even when I play shows, I'm more nervous to play a show in Vermont or New Hampshire than I am to play a song about New England in Missouri because they assume that I've captured the experience, whereas in Vermont, they know what this place is like.’’
— Noah Kahan (born 1997), American singer-songwriter. He was born in Strafford, Vt.
Soporific in the sun
“Bathers on Rocks” (watercolor and pencil on paper), by Herbert Mayer (1882-1960), at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art, Burlington.
Making one’s way in society
“Mariages d’aventure’’ (pieces of old book jacket, endpapers and encaustic paint), by Nancy Whitcomb, a Providence-based writer.
And they didn’t have Labor Day
The Cordwainer statute in the City of London.
In 1860, an uprising by shoemakers across New England became the largest labor strike in the United States before the Civil War. The walkout spread to more than two dozen towns, including Natick, Mass., and involved about 20,000 workers. Although the strike lasted only six weeks, it captured national attention and signaled the growing power of organized labor.
In Natick, shoemaking began as a “putting out” or “cottage industry” in the early 19th Century. Cordwainers (shoe artisans) made shoes by hand in their homes and in “ten-footer” workshops all over town. They sent the finished shoes to Boston on wagons. However, after the Boston & Worcester Railroad arrived in Natick in 1834, the shoe industry boomed. By the mid-19th Century, 1,050 Natick men and women—almost 20 percent of the population and about 75 percent of the workforce—were employed in the shoe industry.
Most of the shoes produced in Natick were heavy work shoes, including the “brogan,” which was first designed by Asa Felch in 1827. Southern planters purchased brogans in large quantities for enslaved people. In 1858, a shoe sewing machine was patented, and the shoemaking business model changed drastically. Machine stitching greatly enhanced production capability, but it minimized the function and cut the pay of the shoe workers in their homes. In some cases, every family member was employed in making shoes, and pay cuts made their situation bleak.
The 1857 nationwide financial panic hurt commerce everywhere, and Natick shoe factories were hit hard. Many workers lost their jobs and borrowed money to pay their bills. When the economy grew stronger again, they were rehired, but with more extended workdays and reduced pay. For 16-hour days, men earned $3 a week, and women were paid only $1. It wasn’t enough to support a family.
In February 1860, crowds of more than 500 Natick workers met several times in the Universalist Church. They formally resolved “that in our opinion the late reduction in the prices for bottoming shoes was uncalled for, oppressive, and unjust, therefore believing that no first quality shoe can be made for less than [20 cents] without injuring the laborer, and the best interests of the community.”
Across Massachusetts and New Hampshire, strike committees formed rapidly. By March 10, with long-distance support from Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, 517 Natick shoemakers joined workers in other towns to go on strike. Although some manufacturers were ready to boost wages, most stonewalled the strikers. By mid-April, workers returned to factories. Though they succeeded in getting national attention, the strikers did not win concessions to their demands. A letter published in the Natick Observer on May 9, 1860, claimed, “The shoe business of our village is once more in full blast. Some firms are doing more business than ever before and will soon bridge the gap caused by the recent strike.” The following spring, everyone’s attention turned to the new Civil War.
‘A tree becomes a gesture’
From the late Wolf Kahn’s (1927-2020) “Pastels” show at Morrison Gallery, Kent, Conn., Sept. 12-Oct. 25.
The gallery says of the artist’s work:
“These works are less concerned with describing a particular place than with capturing the experience of seeing it. A landscape can feel quiet and familiar in one moment, then strange, luminous, or almost dreamlike in the next. Kahn finds that shift through color, reducing the landscape to its essential elements while leaving room for something more intuitive to emerge.
“Wolf Kahn ‘Pastels’ invites a closer look at the space between representation and abstraction, where a field becomes a field of color, a tree becomes a gesture, and the familiar begins to feel newly seen.’’
‘Poor race in a land of dollars’
W.E.B. DuBois in 1918
The title page of Du Bois's Harvard dissertation.
“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’’
— W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), in his 1903 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk
The African-American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil-rights activist was born and raised in Great Barrington, Mass., in The Berkshires, a relatively tolerant and integrated community, compared to much of the United States at the time.
Weaving complexity
Work by Jeffrey Nowlin in his show at Boston Sculptors Gallery, through Sept. 27.
He says:
“My recent work imagines the complexities of human experience through weaving and embroidery. I am making connections between traumatic experiences such as illness and addiction, and the psychological and somatic responses engendered by these experiences. These works incorporate conscripted objects---wooden frames, bottle caps, vessels and ephemera---which I combine with various forms of weaving, sewing and quilting. These identifiable objects imbue my work with a sense of the common and the particular, a means of intersecting and highlighting what everyday events prove to be---highly regular but unique to the individual. In this process, I render the experience through a visual format, unifying the perceptual fragmentation which occurs into coherent art objects.’’
Chris Powell: State’s concern about social-media harm to kids is laughably hypocritical
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Every individual and business in news and entertainment media tries to entice an audience to return -- to addict it, more or less. Meta Platforms, operator of the Facebook and Instagram social-media outlets, has agreed to pay nearly $17 billion to settle multi-state federal lawsuits charging that the company has been too successful enticing young people, addicting them and causing a national epidemic of mental illness.
Since they are by nature self-absorbed, insecure, and neurotic, young people surely would do better to be less involved with social media. But almost any product can be abused, and blaming social-media companies for the abuse of their products is a stretch that disregards First Amendment rights even as the best solution is close to home.
After all, social-media companies don't give mobile telephones, computers, and Internet connections to minors and then fail to monitor what they make of them. Their parents do. The settlement with Meta Platforms is essentially a substitute for parenting.
The likely disposition of the $265 million Connecticut is expected to receive from the settlement suggests as much. Gov. Ned Lamont says the money will be spent on "mental-health and crisis intervention, after-school and summer school programming, and implementation of phone-free school zones."
There is much mental distress among young people in Connecticut, but with about a third of the state's children living in single-parent households -- in the cities the figure is 60 percent or more -- little of that distress begins with social media. Rather, youthful obsession with social media may be more a consequence of that distress, a consequence of parental neglect.
In any case state government's concern about social-media addiction is laughably hypocritical.
Connecticut has legislated some restrictions on how social-media companies engage with minors but they will have little effect if parents fail to monitor their children's activity on social media and internet. The restrictions that Connecticut has enacted are just substitutes for parenting.
Meanwhile, state government itself has thrown itself into the addiction business -- first with casino gambling and Internet gambling, from which it collects tens of millions of dollars each year through tribute from Connecticut's two Indian tribal casinos, and second through licensing retailers of marijuana products and taxing their sales.
Gambling addiction has devastated thousands of lives in the state and has caused much embezzlement and theft.
Frequent use of marijuana is addictive and often leads to addiction to more dangerous drugs.
But now that state government itself is in the gambling and drug businesses, the only addiction about which the governor, Atty. Gen. William Tong, and state legislators get indignant is addiction to social media. With the settlement of the Meta lawsuit, state government soon will be making money off social media addiction as well.
The most timely and compelling question in American society may be: Where are all the disturbed kids coming from? Some of Connecticut's windfall from the Meta lawsuit settlement could be used to investigate that issue -- or maybe to hire some parents for the many kids who lack them.
ELICKER's COWARDICE: Another New Haven police officer accused of misconduct and hastily fired for his role in the Randy Cox case four years ago, Luis Rivera, has been reinstated by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, which found that the officer was not to blame for Cox's crippling injury. The board already had reinstated Officer Oscar Diaz for the same reason. The appeal of a third fired officer is pending while the firing of a fourth has been upheld.
The board found that Cox's injury almost certainly had nothing to do with how he was handled by police after his arrest but was entirely a matter of the lack of seatbelts in the police van in which he was being transported when it stopped abruptly to avoid a crash.
Cox is Black and there were false shrieks of racism when he was injured, and Mayor Elicker lacked the courage to stand up to them and insist on due process.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Turning green landscapes into feed lots
“Mato Grosso (Brasil)’’ (detail), (Epson Ultrachrome K3 pigment print on Hahnemuhle William Turner paper), by Daniel Beltrá, at the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, N.H., in the “New Amazon Landscape” series.