Spring cloth

“Calico Garden” (cotton, 48 1/2x 381/2in), by Florence Peto, in the show “Varied and Alive: Rarely Seen Treasures From the Collection,’’ at the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vt., May 9 - Oct. 25.

—-Photo by Andy Duback.

Dan Kennedy: What Wash. Post-eviscerating Bezos could learn from The Boston Globe and four other papers

“Newspaper Readers” (1840), by Vienna painter Josef Danhauser.

From The Conversation, except for image above

Dan Kennedy is a professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

He is the co-leader of the “What Works: The Future of Local News” project at Northeastern University. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of CommonWealth Beacon, a digital news outlet that covers state politics and public policy in Massachusetts. Kennedy is also on the board of the Local Journalism Project, the nonprofit arm of The Provincetown Independent, which is organized as a for-profit public benefit corporation.

BOSTON

The Washington Post’s evisceration at the hands of its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, didn’t have to happen.

Following months of speculation, the Post cut at least 300 of its 800 journalists on Feb. 4, 2026, drastically reducing its international, local and sports coverage and eliminating its photo department and stand-alone book review section. The downsizing followed several decisions by Bezos that drove away hundreds of thousands of subscribers, from killing the Post’s endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris just before the 2024 election to announcing that the editorial pages would henceforth be dedicated to “personal liberties and free markets.”

But though those moves inflicted considerable damage, the paper had been floundering ever since Donald Trump’s first presidential term, when Bezos proudly added the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to its nameplate and the paper achieved both growth and profitability.

While its principal rival, The New York Times, successfully pivoted by rolling out ancillary products such as games, a cooking app and a consumer guide, the Post lost momentum – and was then pushed off a cliff as Bezos, in my view, started placing a higher value on peace with Trump than on making sure that democracy didn’t die in darkness.

I’m a journalism professor and the author of three books about the future of news. I tracked Bezos’ stewardship of the Post during better times in my 2018 book,The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century. And I’ve been watching in horror over the past several years as he’s dismantled much of what he built.

The Times, as the nation’s leading newspaper, is unique, and the extent to which other publishers can learn from its example is limited. But if Bezos ever decides he wants to take journalism seriously again, then he might take a look at a handful of large regional papers that have charted a route to sustainability against the strong headwinds that continue to buffet the news business.

5 good examples

Perhaps the most important difference between these papers and the Post – and the hundreds of other shrinking media outlets owned by corporate chains and hedge funds – is that they are rooted in the communities they cover. Whether owned by wealthy people or run by nonprofits, they place service to their city and region above extracting the last smidgen of revenue they can squeeze out.

Although I could add a few to this list, I am mentioning five large regional newspapers as examples of how it’s possible to succeed despite the long-term decline in the economics of journalism.

These papers have an array of ownership models.

The Boston Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune, both for-profits, were bought in recent years by the billionaire owners of sports teams.

The Seattle Times, another for-profit, has belonged to the same family since 1896.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was acquired by a billionaire and donated to a nonprofit foundation in 2016, making it a leading example of a hybrid for-profit and nonprofit model.

The Salt Lake Tribune, which a billionaire bought from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, was converted to a pure nonprofit – the first such paper to undergo such a transition.

Also known as major metropolitan dailies, these papers are all smaller than they were during the heyday of the 1970s and ’80s. Although the for-profit papers are privately owned and do not publish financial results, I’ve learned through years of reporting that the generous profit margins that once characterized newspapers have all but disappeared. Still, these papers have maintained substantial staffs and are their regions’ leading, though not sole, news providers.

The front page of The Washington Post on Aug. 6, 2013, announced that Jeff Bezos had agreed to buy the newspaper from the Graham family. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Common themes

It’s hard to identify specific reasons why these papers have succeeded, but a few themes emerge.

The Boston Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune, for instance, have both expanded into other geographic areas. The Globe has moved into Rhode Island and New Hampshire – with more to come in 2026.

Similarly, the Strib, as The Minnesota Star Tribune is known, now covers news across Minnesota, well beyond its base in the Twin Cities.

The Globe has also balanced experimentation with attention to the basics.

Not long after John and Linda Henry bought The Globe from The New York Times, in 2013, they started a separate digital publication called Crux, which covered the Catholic Church. It failed to attract advertisers, and the Globe spun it off; Crux continues under different ownership.

Meanwhile, another Globe-owned startup, Stat, which covers health and medicine, grew into a successful venture during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As for the basics, The Globe charges a premium for its journalism – as much as $36 a month for a digital-only subscription. And though paid digital circulation has stalled over the past year at about 260,000, that’s considerably more than most papers in its weight class.

The Star Tribune, owned by sports mogul Glen Taylor, unveiled a new, paywall-free breaking-news blog in the midst of the sometimes deadly immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The paper also offers unlimited gift links, so that paid subscribers can share stories with others, as well as a family subscription plan. And it has a nonprofit fund to which donors can make tax-deductible contributions to support the paper’s journalism.

By the way, the idea of setting up a separate nonprofit arm was pioneered by The Seattle Times, although it has become increasingly common.

The Seattle Times recently handed off management of the paper to Ryan Blethen, who represents the fifth generation of his family to serve as publisher. In contrast to formerly family-owned papers such as the Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, and The Des Moines Register, whose large families forced their sale two generations ago, The Seattle Times has actually become more independent: In 2024, the Times bought out Chatham Asset Management, a private equity firm that had controlled 49.5% of the paper.

Chatham also owns the McClatchy chain of newspapers, which includes well-known dailies such as the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee.

In addition to the for-profit model, two other ownership structures have shown promise.

In 2016, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest donated The Philadelphia Inquirer, which he and a partner had bought just two years earlier, to a nonprofit that was renamed the Lenfest Institute following his death, in 2018.

The Inquirer itself is a for-profit public benefit corporation, a designation that eases the standard corporate requirement that it maximize earnings, while the nonprofit helps support journalism at the Inquirer and other news organizations.

The paper has thrived under the new arrangement, with the publisher, Elizabeth Hughes, writing recently that the model could be used to revive the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, on the opposite end of Pennsylvania.

The Post-Gazette’s owners, citing mounting losses, have announced that the paper will shut down in May.

And though The Salt Lake Tribune is the first – and, still, the only – metro daily to embrace a pure nonprofit model, it stands as an intriguing idea that could be emulated elsewhere.

Billionaire owner Paul Huntsman converted the paper to a nonprofit in 2019 after buying it from Alden three years earlier. Executive editor Lauren Gustus said recently that the Tribune is expanding both the size of its news staff and its coverage area, and it’s dropping its paywall in favor of voluntary payments. That’s similar to how nonprofit public radio and television stations support themselves.

A poster boy for decline

The past two decades have not been kind to the newspaper business. More than 3,500 U.S. papers have closed in that period, according to the most recent State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School. By eviscerating The Washington Post, the very institution he had previously done so much to build up, Jeff Bezos has transformed himself into the poster boy for that decline.

Yet here and there, in communities across the country, newspapers are reinventing themselves.

There are no easy fixes. But perseverance, innovation and a relentless focus on serving the public are the keys to success, regardless of ownership structure or geography. Bezos could learn from these models.

Crash in the dark

“Night Skiing” (acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas), by Julia Blake, at Portland (Maine) Art Gallery.

Boston: Where a parking space can cost more than a condo

The North Terminal Garage, at 600 Commercial Street, in Boston’s North End. Built in 1925, it’s one of the few such surviving parking facilities from that era in the United States.

Slightly edited from article in The Boston Guardian.

Photo is from elsewhere.

(Robert Whitcomb, editor of New England Diary, is chairman of The Guardian.)

By Brandon Hill

Last year, a wave of headlines drew attention to the rising cost of permanent parking in Downtown Boston when a parking space at the Brimmer Street Garage was listed for $750,000. That price, the high end of luxury parking spaces, drew attention as an outlier, but what once felt extreme for parking pricing has increasingly become normalized.

Rene Rodriguez, senior vice president at the Cabot & Company real- estate firm and the agent who eventually sold the Brimmer Street spot for $600,000, says set a record at that garage.

Just hours before being interviewed for this story, Rodriguez closed on an off-market parking sale at 74 Commonwealth Avenue for $425,000. He said he’s been working in the market for 28 years and recent years have seen the market for deeded spaces in areas like Back Bay, Beacon Hill and the South End steadily tighten.

That recent sale, he said, reflects how many high-end parking deals now happen quietly without ever being publicly listed.

“The way those spaces normally work is the attendants in the garage keep a list of people who are interested in purchasing parking there, and when a seller says that they want to sell their space, they call the next person on the list,” Rodriguez said. “They’re not necessarily priced to market, and they’re not exposed to market forces.’’

It’s difficult to determine what might be considered a “market rate” for permanent parking for those in the market to buy. Two years ago, The Boston Guardian reported the sale of permanent spaces downtown ranging from $150,000 to $500,000 and that range remains broadly true, while it becomes more common for sales to creep up to and over that top end.

“Wilkes Passage Condominiums, in the South End, has a garage attached and you’re allowed to sell the spaces separate from the condominiums upstairs. However, they can only be sold to South End residents,” Rodriguez said. “Just seven or eight years ago, those spaces were trading for $50,000 to $80,000, and now the minimum purchase price is $150,000. It’s easy to sell, but those prices have gone up considerably.”

Many deeded spaces are sold with the purchase of a condo, so they can be hard to value, but Rodriguez said that’s often a deal-breaker on the sale of the property.

“In Beacon Hill, most of the houses do not have parking. You’re starting to find townhouses there priced from $10 million to $50 million and up, and at that point, people demand parking,” Rodriguez said. “It’s convenient, but at that point it’s also an investment because you could be sitting on a $15 million house and they’re going to pass it over because it doesn’t have parking.”

Still, he cautioned that these spaces are not easy investments. “You can’t finance them. You need to find cash buyers for them,” he said. “It has to have its own plot plan, a separate tax bill to be able to sell it.”

While the city had not returned a request for comment as of the date of this publication, Rodriguez said that city policies like the Downtown Parking Freeze have little to no effect on the sale prices of permanent parking spaces.

Under rules dating back to the 1970s and administered by the Air Pollution Control Commission, the freeze caps the number of off-street commercial parking spaces in the downtown area at 35,556, with 4,188 spaces available, as of July 17, 2025, that developers or property owners can allocate for new or expanded parking facilities. This reflects only a slight change from the 4,869 spaces available when The Boston Guardian reported this story in 2024.

Residential parking remains exempt from the commercial space cap, but anyone planning new shared or public commercial spaces downtown must navigate the permit process and the limited supply of “freeze bank spaces.”

“Freeze bank spaces" refer to a specific inventory of off-street parking spots held by a regulatory body—such as the City of Boston Air Pollution Control Commission— not currently in use but that can be allocated to developers or property owners for new or expanded parking projects.

Commuter caravan

“Homeward Bound” (photo), by Carol Wontkowski, in the group show “A Delicate Balance,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through March 1.

‘Discover in stone’

Cutting through granite in Waterbury,Vt., in the late Fifties as part of the construction of Interstate Route 91.

“When highway-makers cut through a granite hill, scoring

deep trench-sides with vertical drillings, they leave behind

glittering sculptures, monuments to the granite state

of nature, emblems of permanence

that we worship in daily disease, and discover in stone.’’

— From “Granite and Grass,’’ by Donald Hall (1928-2018), of Wilmot,N.H., poet and essayist. He served as U.S. poet laureate.

Here’s the whole poem:

https://folklife-media.si.edu/docs/festival/program-book-articles/FESTBK1999_12.pdf

Disaster reconfigured

“The Raft of the Medusa,’’ by Dogwood Messer, at Concord (Mass.) Art, in the group show “Homages,’’ April 2-May 10.

The gallery says:

“‘Homages’ brings together artists whose work honors the ‘masterworks’ and historical movements that preceded them, or use the act of tribute to elevate the humble and everyday into something worthy of praise.’’

“The Raft of the Medusa” (painted 1818-1819), by French artist Théodore Géricault (1791-1824)

Chris Powell: Bribing Conn. voters won’t lessen poverty

Demonstration in Washington, D.C.

- Photo by Djembayz

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont's address this week welcoming the General Assembly back to work was reminiscent of the old lament about election years -- that people in a democracy are easily bribed with their own money. 

Such a bribe was the highlight of the governor's remarks -- his proposal to issue “tax rebates," $200 for single people, $400 for married couples. Meanwhile people around the state, most of them associated with the governor's own party, are clamoring for state government to appropriate more money for social needs state government still neglects. 

Many of those needs are more compelling than the needs or wants of many of the people who will receive those “tax rebates." But who will be candid about the incongruity? 

That is, the “tax rebates" are needed most to help re-elect the regime so that it can hold power for another four years in the name of addressing all those unmet social needs, though those needs seem only to increase as more is spent in the name of alleviating them. Seldom are any problems actually  solved.

The governor's address inadvertently acknowledged that poverty has been worsening in Connecticut during his administration. 

Once upon a time in Connecticut most parents could feed their children before sending them to school. Indeed, once upon a time most children in Connecticut had two parents. Now many children in Connecticut -- most children in the cities -- have only one parent, if that, and many arrive at school unfed and distracted by hunger. It's a big problem. So the governor would have all public schools provide free breakfasts.

Not long ago most working people in Connecticut had jobs requiring a skill level, and their compensation included adequate employer-sponsored medical insurance. Not anymore. Today many young people in Connecticut graduate from high school largely uneducated and qualified only for menial work. As a result more adults are working in minimum-wage jobs once considered entry-level. So the governor wants state government to offer a “public option" program of medical insurance for people who don't qualify for Medicaid, insurance for the destitute.

The governor said he will appoint a special commission to study the funding of elementary and high school education. It would have been better to study why poverty is worsening. For everyone in state and local government already knows that funding lower education is always a tug of war between state taxes and municipal property taxes, with most of the money ending up with members of teacher unions, who control most municipal spending by virtue of the binding arbitration of their contracts.

Nearly every legislative session tinkers with school funding formulas without ever improving student performance. Formula tinkering is just the illusion of concern and action, since student performance is not a matter of per-pupil spending at all, but almost entirely a matter of per-pupil  parenting, which can't be discussed though it is at the center of the poverty problem.

The governor noted that Connecticut's high housing prices are impoverishing people who don't own their housing. But he seems to expect far more housing construction than is likely to result from the state's new law restricting municipal zoning. With 169 cities and towns in charge of housing development, there will be little urgency and accountability. What's needed is a state housing development agency to acquire and take control of the sort of vacant or underused city and inner-suburb properties the governor cited in his address, and to contract for middle-income housing to be built on them urgently.

Instead the other day the governor proposed to apply rent control to apartments owned by out-of-state landlords, a demagogic form of expropriation that will inhibit  housing creation.

As most legislative sessions do, the new one will produce a lot more spending, which will be euphemized, as the governor did in his address, as ‘‘investment," a presumption that government spending is always productive. It isn't. After all, as the Lamont administration's most recent scandal has shown, state government lately has “invested" hundreds of thousands of dollars in Hartford Sen. Douglas McCrory's girlfriend.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).

Heat pumps help

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

What a boon the rapidly spreading use of heat pumps is for heating and cooling in places like New England. As expensive as our being at the end of natural-gas pipelines now is, heat pumps, solar, wind, and geothermal systems offer hope for the region gaining energy independence within the next couple of decades.

Meanwhile, under a $180 million deal with utilities, the administration of Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy, who is running for re-election, Bay Staters will pay around 10 percent less for natural gas and electricity in February and March. Then they’ll make up for that in the warmer months to follow. Sounds reasonable. But imagine how much cheaper and more reliable energy would be if all the state’s energy came from such local sources as solar, wind, geothermal and so on. It is technologically possible.

For success, ignore the facts

Henry Adams at work.

“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but education and politics are two different and often contradictory things.’’

— Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), American historian and memoirist and scion of the famous Massachusetts Adams family. His book The Education of Henry Adams is considered one of the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th Century.

Yes, it does end

“The Passing of Winter’’ (1923), by Paul Bernard King (1867-1947), at the Westerly (R.I.) Museum of American Impressionism.

He was a prominent American Impressionist painter and illustrator known for rural landscapes and maritime subjects.

‘Lingers into uneasiness’

“what could have flickered (on the cusp of a verge of reality)”, by Kal Hart (installation view), at Unbound Visual Arts, in the Brighton section of Boston, through Feb. 15.

— Image courtesy of Unbound Visual Arts

The gallery explains:

This interactive exhibition is a “collection of seemingly innocuous objects that evoke curiosity; one that lingers into uneasiness. Visitors are encouraged to indulge their curiosity and offer their ‘input’ by interacting with objects in the exhibition.’’

Llewellyn King: The energy sector and government are inconstant lovers

U.S. energy consumption in 2023.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Politics and science are always falling in love, but they seldom live happily ever after. Quick to embrace, messy to separate is the pattern.

Nowhere has this been clearer than with energy, where projects are dependent on some form of government approval, endorsement, funding and sometimes direct involvement — for example, when the Army Corps of Engineers designs a hydroelectric project or the government’s commitment to take nuclear waste.

The late Financial Times science editor, David Fishlock, with whom I collaborated for many years, advised me to be wary of government falling in love with science, because of the catastrophe that ensues when government falls out of love with it.

Consider the love affair between successive U.S. presidential administrations, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and nuclear power. The administration of Jimmy Carter was cold to nuclear — a cooling that lasted long after he left office.


Carter, a nuclear engineer himself, delivered the lethal kiss when he described nuclear as the choice of last resort. He favored coal and conservation as the best energy policy, and created the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corp. to exploit coal. Carter envisioned a time when coal would answer most energy needs: coal in the form of synthetic gas, liquid fuel for transportation, and plenty of coal-fired electricity.

Options were few.

I had worked with the Atomic Energy Commission’s Gorman Smith — who later became executive director of the U.S. Energy Association — on a study for President Richard Nixon on the crisis after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, and we found the energy cupboard bare. At that time, only nuclear and coal were options. Natural gas was believed to be a resource of the past — the first deputy energy secretary, Jack O’Leary, described it as “a depleted resource.”

Wind and solar were in the dream stage, although the national laboratories were doing yeoman’s work on them.

What wasn’t known was the extent to which technology would upend the energy ecosystem and take it from dearth to abundance.


While Ronald Reagan’s heart was with nuclear, his energy secretary, John Herrington, spooked the debate with his constant leaking to The New York Times about the problems with nuclear waste, and particularly with the large nuclear reservation in Hanford, Wash., where defense waste is stored, dating back to the early days of the Cold War.

Reagan significantly advanced natural gas by deregulating the market and easing the restrictions imposed on it.

Deregulation primed the pump for the explosion that was to come with the perfection of an old technology, fracking, and other technological breakthroughs, particularly horizontal drilling and 3D seismic imaging in gas and oil exploration. A final tech boost to gas was the surge in deployment of aeroderivative turbines — jet engines on the ground — in the late 1980s. They burn gas far more efficiently than placing it directly under boilers, a so-called thermal gas system.

The Joe Biden administration was committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, primarily carbon. It shifted dramatically away from coal and gas and embraced renewables. That administration’s embrace was part of a worldwide transition to renewables, sometimes with aggressive encouragement through loans and tax breaks.

Now with Donald Trump, we have an administration that worships gas, venerates coal, and has come down heavily against wind, especially offshore turbines, even as the world — including China and Europe — has embraced them. It has also criticized solar power, but with less vehemence than its criticism of wind generation.

Nuclear is a favorite now with Democrats and Republicans. However, the Trump administration continues to hamper wind energy, going so far as to cancel offshore leases, while trying to resuscitate the coal industry.

Politics is at work, orchestrating what the administration hopes will be the end of wind and solar.

It also puts them at odds with the big tech companies, which are desperately seeking more green power for their data centers.

Another victim of the administration’s energy policy is hydrogen, a darling of the environmental movement.

The utilities have been here before and have developed a quiet skill in appearing to go along even while they plan — which they do in 25-year cycles — against the four-year political horizon. They have chosen not to challenge the administration’s position with a collective voice.

At present, the administration’s official line is that there is no global warming. The president has called it a hoax and a con. However, utilities are struggling with extremes of winter cold and summer heat that they haven’t historically experienced.

Keep quiet and keep the lights on is the undeclared utility strategy.

On X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.

Renuka Rayasam: What to do if you lose medical coverage because of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’

From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News (except for image above)

“If my patient tells me, ‘Doc, I’m gonna have to pay for this out-of-pocket,’ I’m gonna make a different risk calculus.’’

— Ateev Mehrotra, physician and researcher at Brown University, in Providence.

Health policy changes in Washington will ripple through the country, resulting in millions of Americans losing their Medicaid or Affordable Care Act coverage. But there are still ways to find care.

Over the next decade, the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to slash nearly $1 trillion in spending from Medicaid, the state-federal program for people with low incomes and disabilities. The implementation of new work rules will cause some beneficiaries to lose their Medicaid coverage.

Millions of Americans are facing enormous increases in their out-of-pocket costs for ACA coverage. So far, 1.2 million fewer people have signed up for Obamacare plans compared with last year, and health policy analysts estimate more will lose coverage as they fail to pay their premiums.

Health costs are a top concern for Americans. Two-thirds of the public say they are somewhat or very worried about affording health care, more than express the same worries about utilities, food, housing, or gas, according to a January poll from KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

“All of this pain just doesn’t have to be there,” said Cheryl Fish-Parcham, director of private coverage at the health consumer group Families USA.

Doctors and health policy researchers say health coverage, of any kind, is the best protection against major medical debt.

Caitlin Donovan, a senior director at the Patient Advocate Foundation, recommends exhausting every available option for health coverage before going uninsured.

Even a high-deductible plan can protect patients from medical bankruptcy “if the absolute worst-case scenario happens,” she said.

Here are five ways that the uninsured can find affordable care.

1. Don’t be afraid to talk with your doctor about money.

Patients can be hesitant to tell their doctors they’re uninsured or be wary of expressing concern about being able to afford care.

But some hospitals, physicians, and other providers offer cheaper cash pay options, said Cynthia Cox, a senior vice president and the director of the Program on the ACA at KFF.

Often prices are negotiable. “Always ask,” she said.

Health-care providers can make adjustments if they know patients are worried about money, said Ateev Mehrotra, a doctor and researcher at Brown University.

“If my patient tells me, ‘Doc, I’m gonna have to pay for this out-of-pocket,’ I’m gonna make a different risk calculus,” Mehrotra said.

That doesn’t mean a patient won’t get the care they need, he said. A doctor, for instance, might order an ultrasound instead of an MRI, which is more expensive.

2. Search for providers that specifically work with uninsured patients.

If your usual provider won’t budge on prices, then search for providers that cater to patients without insurance.

Federally qualified health centers, or FQHCs, and other community clinics offer routine and non-emergency care, such as treatment for flu or infection, for low-income residents and the uninsured. Community health centers charge based on a sliding scale and see 52 million patients annually in some of the country’s most underserved areas, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.

The Trump administration has made funding cuts that might lead some of the country’s approximately 1,500 FQHCs to close or cut services. But the administration still maintains a site to find a local center.

Planned Parenthood also accepts uninsured patients. Its centers test for sexually transmitted diseases, provide birth control options, and offer postpartum and gender-affirming care and other services.

And the National Association of Free & Charitable Clinics also offers a tool to help people find free or low-cost care.

Most community clinics don’t offer specialty care, but they can usually refer patients who need more intensive services to providers willing to work with uninsured patients.

And academic medical centers tend to have more charity care programs that help uninsured patients lower their bills.

“If you’re uninsured or even underinsured, you might be able to qualify for a significant discount on the cost of your care,” Cox said.

Still, be wary of heading to the emergency room, which is the most expensive place to get care. While ERs are federally required to stabilize all patients regardless of their ability to pay, they can still leave you with a big bill — and often do.

3. Call your local health departments.

Health services vary widely from county to county, but many offer free vaccinations, family planning services, and testing for sexually transmitted infections, as well as for flu, covid, and tuberculosis.

Some county health departments also offer more advanced care, such as dental services and mental health or substance abuse programs. And some states have consumer assistance programs that can guide residents in finding care, Fish-Parcham said.

In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program makes free or low-cost breast and cervical cancer screenings available to low-income women in all states and territories. And some states cover screenings for other types of cancer as well.

4. It’s easier to shop around for drugs than doctors.

Don’t just fill your prescription at the closest pharmacy. Instead, research generic drug options and look around for the best price on brand names.

A handful of sites such as GoodRx and WellRx offer comparison shopping tools and information on other ways to get drug discounts.

And some retailers offer low-cost access to common prescription drugs — at prices cheaper than you would find if you had insurance. Walmart, for instance, sells 90-day prescriptions of dozens of generic versions of drugs for $10. As do Target, Costco, and a new site called the Cost Plus Drug Company.

Many drugmakers also offer patient assistance programs, coupons, and rebates on some medications. Check their websites for details on how to apply.

States also offer drug assistance programs. The steps to qualify and types of drugs vary, but this tool has a list of programs and how they work.

Joining a clinical trial is another way to access treatment. The National Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute have lists, but patients must first meet the criteria. Clinical trials aren’t necessarily free, even with insurance, Donovan said, so be sure to ask about any associated costs.

5. Your diagnosis might lead you to specialized resources.

Patients with a specific diagnosis might have additional options for specialty treatment.

For example, someone with breast cancer should check with the American Cancer Society and the nonprofit Susan G. Komen organization, Cox said.

The Patient Advocate Foundation hosts a list of vetted foundations that can help offset the cost of medical bills and provide other resources such as transportation and lodging, Donovan said. Just type in basic information such as age, location, and diagnosis to see what is available.

Disease-specific foundations such as those for lupus or irritable bowel syndrome can also steer patients to free or low-cost resources or cover some costs of care, Donovan said.

“Everything is out there,” she said.

As you research affordable care options, don’t be tricked by plans that look like health insurance but don’t offer guaranteed protection against big bills.

Some short-term plans and health care sharing ministries might seem like good deals, but read the fine print. Some red flags to look for: too-good-to-be-true monthly payments; no coverage for preexisting conditions; morality clauses such as those prohibiting the use of alcohol or drugs; or a lack of coverage for benefits such as mental health counseling that are required in ACA plans.

Renuka Rayasam is a KFF correspondent.

KFF Health News correspondent Sam Whitehead contributed to this report.

Beloved elm tree turned into sculptures

William Penn and Indians with treaty under a large elm in 1683, as shown in a painting by Benjamin West.

Excerpted (but not image above) from article in ecoRI News.

PROVIDENCE — Eiden Spilker’s adventure turning a 100-year-old elm tree into art was “sort of happenstance,” he said, or perhaps a series of happenstances.

Spilker, who graduated from Brown University in 2024, is a technical specialist and maker-in-residence at the Brown Design Workshop, where students and members of the community have access to sewing machines to 3D printers.

The artist had studied architecture and visual art at Brown and worked at the Design Workshop as a monitor when he was a student.

“I basically stayed on to sort of build out the woodworking area and be a resource for community members if they have questions about projects, to do more specialized workshops,” Spilker said.

While Spilker was studying at Brown and setting himself up for his first post-grad job, an elm tree with a gigantic canopy, a fixture on the university’s Main Green, was dying.

Estimated to be between 80 and 120 years old, the elm had escaped Dutch elm disease, the illness that had hit Brown and Providence’s other historic trees almost a decade earlier, and was instead falling victim to things greater than itself: time and humankind.

Here’s the whole article.

Air cover

At the Thorne/Sagendorph Art Gallery, Keene, N.H. opening Feb. 5

Boston & Maine Railroad freight yard in Keene, in 1916.

For Minn. street demonstrations; pay extra for gas mask

“Armor for Field and Tilt, of Count Franz von Teuffenbach (1516–1578) (steel, brass, lampblack, restored leather), in The John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection, at the Worcester Art Museum.

Denis O’Neill: ‘Melania,’ the ‘documentary,’ is cinematic sleaze worthy of Trump’s squalor

It’s exciting for me to know that the American president historians have ranked as the absolute worst can now add his first lady to that singular honor. With the release of Melania, the former Eurotrash party girl has leaped to the bottom of the First Lady Barrel, a perfect match for her bottom-of-the-barrel husband.

It is heartwarming that they met on Epstein Island. It was grifter love at first sight. He hadn’t become a convicted pervert in the State of New York at that point, but his pedophile instincts in Florida were no doubt known to Melania, and money and power to many has a romantic glow of their own.

And who wouldn’t want JePrey Epstein to be their cupid?

Just to get you up to speed on a few reviews of the documentary, The Hollywood Reporter called it “Two hours of endless hell.” The Atlantic described it as “A Horror Movie.” Maureen Dowd, in the NYT, said, “Some theaters showing Melania were so empty that wags suggested that undocumented Immigrants should hide out there.”

The Guardian described the movie this way (under the headline, “Trump film is a gilded trash remake of the Zone of Interest’’:

“...No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It is one of those rare unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not sure it even qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and … like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”

Reviewers weren’t the only ones appalled by the on-screen dumpster fire. Rolling Stone reported that two thirds of the New York film crew asked not to be credited. In Australia, a country of 40 million people, reportedly one ticket was sold.

Knowing that humiliation is the Achilles tendon of the presidential criminal as much as praise is the balm, the universal mockery of the documentary cannot be enjoyed deeply enough.

Nor more richly deserved. I don’t know which country he will decide to bomb to decoy attention away from this social-media catastrophe, but the world’s ever deepening loathing for Donald Trump can only help peel away a few more inexplicable Trump admirers.

For the record, Melania’s first efforts as First Lady included paving over Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden. When I think of how many gracious and interesting First Ladies America has had in recent decades, and their admirable causes... from Jackie O (historic preservation) to Lady Bird Johnson (conservation) and Barbara Bush (family literacy), from Rosalynn Carter (mental-health advocacy) and Laura Bush (education, literacy and youth development) to Michelle Obama (reducing youth obesity) and Jill Biden (supporting military families)... the cementing of Melania Trump’s status as the worst of all time — a match for the fat felon she at least tries to avoid as often as possible – only makes the reaction to this spectacle all the more satisfying.

Denis O’Neill is a screenwriter, memoirist and the author of Whiplash.

Chris Powell: Corrupt is corrupt, no matter how many games UConn wins

Logo of the University of Connecticut’s athletic teams.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Secret payments are contradictions of open, accountable and democratic government. They are the essence of government corruption.

Yet last year the Connecticut General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont authorized such secrecy. Why? Because it was sought by the University of Connecticut, which is often considered the fourth branch of state government and entitled to whatever it wants.

UConn's rationale for secret payments was ridiculous.

At issue are the de-facto salaries that UConn, like many other schools, has begun paying its varsity student-athletes amid the professionalization of college sports. That professionalization may be fair but it is destroying respect for the college game. The secrecy claimed by UConn will corrupt it.

At UConn's request the legislature and governor enacted an exemption to Connecticut's freedom-of-information law for the payments made by the university to varsity student-athletes as part of sports revenue sharing and for use of their “name, image, and likeness" in advertising. The university says it will disclose the total of these payments and the number of student-athletes receiving them but not individual payments.    

“This exemption," UConn Athletic Director David Benedict told the legislature, “will allow student-athletes to maintain their privacy, increase compensation opportunities, and avoid the competitive disadvantages that would occur if Connecticut universities were required to share contract details."

Privacy? How can there be privacy for student-athletes who play before huge crowds, often on television, become the subjects of news reports about their performance, and are followed and admired by millions? 

How can there be privacy for student-athletes who hope to parlay their publicity into even more lucrative opportunities in commercial endorsements and the big leagues?

Actual privacy would kill college sports and student-athlete careers.

As for “competitive disadvantages" to UConn if its payments to student-athletes are disclosed, the same argument could be made in respect to  all other  government employees in Connecticut, whose salaries, thankfully, have not yet been concealed in the name of “privacy." Everyone in government might like his/her salary to be secret. The government itself might like it too, since concealing salaries and other payments would prevent ordinary accountability.

For example, UConn might not want the public to know how its payments to men and women student-athletes compare, nor how payments among members of the same team compare, lest the public sense bad judgment, unfairness, or nepotism and demand answers.

UConn doesn't want to conceal its payments to student-athletes for their sake but for its own.

The university's new exemption from FOI law will facilitate unfairness, unaccountability, and corruption and be a disastrous precedent. The legislature and the governor should repeal it. Corrupt will be corrupt no matter how many games UConn teams win.

THE UNREAL McCOY: Having given up on politics across the state line, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey -- pronounced “McCoy" -- has declared her candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor of Connecticut, where she grew up and to which she has returned, insofar as Greenwich is technically still part of the state.

McCaughey's political life has been erratic. Her governor in New York, George Pataki, a Republican, dumped her, whereupon she became a Democrat and challenged him, only to lose the Democratic primary and then run on the Liberal Party line with even less success. She has supported President Trump and lately has hosted a program on the conservative cable television network Newsmax.

There is speculation that with Trump's endorsement McCaughey could win the Republican primary for governor, whereupon Trump's enthusiasm for her would doom her in the election, but might win her a job in Washington.

In any case McCaughey's opening gambit is tedious. She pledges to repeal Connecticut's income tax, which raises about half the state government's revenue. Voters have dismissed such pledges before, since they are easy to make and impossible to fulfill without massive cuts in state and municipal spending.

Specifying such cuts is where McCaughey should start if she wants to be taken seriously, and even then it will be hard.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).

Watchful in winter

“Blue Dogs” (encaustic painting), by Nancy Whitcomb, a member of New England Wax.