Vox clamantis in deserto
‘Chance happenings’
“Free Flowing Fossils” (acrylic on canvas), by Tim McFarlane, in his show “Another Day, Another Way,’’ at the University of Maine’s Zillman Art Museum, Bangor, through Dec. 12.
He says:
‘‘My works emphasize multi-layered systems, color (chromatic and gray scale) and process. In my paintings, overlapping forms and fractured spaces alternately support, negate and influence each other, mirroring events in everyday life. Shifts in formal relationships between layers, marks, color, and space, subtle and overt, contribute to the overall visual narrative in my work. My paintings and works on paper feature open and opaque layers that incorporate various modes of mark making including: direct painting, drawing, image transfers, stenciling and collage. My process relies on a sense of interdependence and chance happenings, which allows for multiple meanings in my work that can be explored by the viewer.’’
John O. Harney: The centrality of sidewalks
— Photo by Macrakis
Some thoughts on Michael Pollack’s Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource
Don’t overlook sidewalks, warns Michael Pollack, a professor at Cardozo Law School, in New York City. “They strengthen local economies, support critical infrastructure, and serve as “third places” where communities take root and blossom,” he says.
“They’re sites of commerce: from dining to vending, advertising, waiting in line, and even new technologies like bikeshare, scooter rentals, EV charging, and delivery robots. They’re sites of speech, protest, and public art,” he adds.
“They’re where people collect signatures for petitions and picket establishments they want to protest. They’re where unhoused people often live [more in the U.S. than in any other developed country, by the way] or at least spend time panhandling. They’re where police conduct a substantial amount of investigation, for better or worse, and they’re sites of much of modern surveillance architecture. They’re even places where we can work to manage climate change and create sustainable and resilient cities.”
In his book Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource (Harvard University Press, 2026) Pollack explores the legal, social and political significance of American sidewalks.
The book grabbed my attention perhaps because it felt somehow linked to another one I enjoyed recently, Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots, if only because these spaces— sidewalks and empty lots—(plus perhaps beaches, restaurants and cafes) are the places I interact with most. See Whose Woods These Aren’t.
As for sidewalks, I put value on those that allow long-distance walks without suddenly ending and stranding pedestrians on busy roadways. And those that offer relatively safe passage.
In fact, I’ve been scolded by my kids for losing control of the forsythia and other shrubs along the sidewalk of our side street. A complaint I dismissed until I was reminded of the impact on people with disabilities. Especially now that I know arthritis and bone breaks close up.
As Pollack notes, even one gap in navigable sidewalks from starting point to destination can negate transit for millions of people, especially those with limited mobility, resulting in something like “house arrest.”
Pollack frequently uses the attribution style of “people I spoke to said,” which sticklers might find lazy, but it makes for an easy read.
One especially interesting chapter focuses on sidewalks in Gonzales, La., a city of about 12,000 midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The city recently contracted with a company to conduct at trip-hazard removal program. The program in Gonzales documented big vertical distances between pavers, then began shaving down those gaps with financial support from the city and property owners.
The city also plugged “regional” projects wherever possible to avoid disjointed work and appeal to funders looking for more impact. Such regional approaches bring economies of scale championed by grantmakers in such other arenas as higher ed. And they make good sense on the ground where I’ve noticed sidewalks often ending abruptly at town lines.
Pollack also offers thoughtful discussion of how labor unions and others can use the sidewalks for constitutionally protected protests and pickets.
He persistently returns to a call for municipalities to establish a Department of Sidewalks—a consolidated body watching over sidewalk uses and conflicts and empowered to foster more efficient maintenance and regulation for property owners, businesses and all users who share the space.
“Sidewalks are unfortunately a terrific example of the tragedy of the commons,” writes Pollack. “The conflicting uses, the overuse, the physical damage—all of it can be traced to the fact that sidewalks are finite in space, time, and durability but open to everyone.”
In this context, Pollack tells the disturbing story of Salt Lake City handing over a stretch of public sidewalk to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), which would now follow through on its plan to regulate how people behave and dress on the newly private section.
Big real estate sites like Zillow and Redfin now reference “walkability” in their efforts to describe neighborhoods.
Pollack notes that people in poorer people often lacking yards see their sidewalks as places to socialize. Yet their neighborhoods tend to have the worst sidewalks.
Sidewalks in my town vary between “formal” light-colored cement and rougher, but in some ways, quainter, tar.
Whatever their material, my own sidewalks know me embarrassingly well. My never-delivered presentations and ultimatums. My bad singing. My self-disparaging. But they’re always a valued companion.
John O. Harney, a writer who lives in Reading, Mass., was executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education (RIP).
The flow of time
From Lydia Viscardi’s mixed-media show “Time Takes Time,’’ at the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Conn., through Jan. 10.
The show considers the passage of time and the cycles of the seasons in the natural world. The artist says:
“I grew up immersed in the stories and theatrical pageantry of Catholicism, absorbing both the beautiful and horrific, emerging from this with a paradoxical equanimity that informs all of my work. I explore the tension between nature, human society, especially the rhythms of everyday life, and the human soul returning to themes of mortality and its constant presence, loss, memory, particularly childhood memory, and our complex relationship to the natural world.’’
Shahnaz Bashir: Sometimes scary speed, power and the AI race
Grave of an unknown person killed in the American bombing of Nantes, France.
From The Conversation, except for image above
AMHERST, Mass.
With the race to build artificial intelligence systems smarter than any human has come a boom in “accidents.” In a safety test run by the company Anthropic, its own AI agent blackmailed an engineer to avoid being shut down. Criminals have used AI agents for data-extortion campaigns and to hack government agencies, banks and technology companies. In other tests, models have escaped from test environments into real organizational systems.
Several researchers who resigned from leading AI companies in 2026 have accused their employers of not taking the dangers seriously enough. In September, Bill Gates told “Meet the Press” that AI is “powerful enough to drive events that can cause a billion deaths.”
Paul Virilio, a French philosopher, spent his career analyzing the relationships between technology, speed and power. He died in 2018, well before generative AI and the fears about it reached their present pitch. But I doubt much would have surprised him.
As a researcher who studies AI-generated media and how people make sense of it, I find that three of Virilio’s ideas explain today’s AI moment better than anything written since. He argued that every new technology brings a new kind of accident into the world; that speed takes away our time to think; and that globally connected systems can fail everywhere at once.
Technology of speed\
Virilio was born in Paris in 1932. When World War II began, his family moved to Nantes, a port city near the Atlantic. During the Nazi occupation of France, Germany began building the Atlantic Wall, a series of defensive fortifications stretching along the coast from Spain to Norway.
But in September 1943, when he was 11, Virilio saw what the wall could not keep out. American bombers aiming for Nantes’ port hit the city center instead, killing about 1,400 people and destroying more than 700 buildings in two raids.
The remains of a library stand in Nantes, France, after the bombing on Sept. 19, 1943. Keystone-France\Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
“War was my university,” he told an interviewer. “Everything has proceeded from there.”
As a young man, Virilio spent years photographing the abandoned bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. The lesson he drew from them was about speed: The Germans had built a massive military fortification, yet the Allies had gone over and around it; the wall barely slowed them.
Walls were a technology of space, and the bombers were a technology of speed – inspiring his philosophical approach to understanding the world.
The ship and the shipwreck
As an adult, Virilio studied many more examples of technological failures, such as the Chernobyl power plant meltdown of 1986, the worst nuclear accident in history.
In his 2005 book The Original Accident, Virilio summed up his main idea in a simple sentence: “To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.” The train invents derailment; the airplane, the crash; the nuclear plant, the meltdown. Every invention, not just dangerous ones, carries a specific kind of failure that did not exist before it.
In Virilio’s telling, the “accident” is not the result of bad luck added afterward. It is born at the moment of invention, even if the inventor cannot see it, because the invention will be used in ways they never imagined.
Virilio did not think such accidents could be avoided. But by carefully watching, he believed, people could contain failure and prevent catastrophe. He argued that societies tend to treat each disaster as a one-off, grieve it on television, and forget it, so that the next technology’s accident arrives as a surprise.
In 2002, he staged a Paris exhibition as a trial run for his plan to build a “Museum of Accidents.” Collecting information about shipwrecks, plane crashes, industrial disasters and financial crashes side by side, he argued, would show the pattern: that every invention has its failure and that failure can be anticipated.
AI has invented not one accident but several. Tech companies’ own incident reports form a sort of “museum” – but not an objective one.
Rule of the fastest
Virilio’s second key idea came from the Cold War. In 1977, he published Speed and Politics, written in a world where nuclear missiles could cross the planet in minutes.
He named the idea “dromology,” derived from the Greek word for a racecourse: “dromos.” Every age runs at the pace of its fastest machine, Virilio wrote, and whatever cannot keep up – including law, deliberation and conscience – drops out of the picture. There is “no democracy, only dromocracy”: the rule of the fastest.
Virilio’s writing about speed, power and technology bears remembering today.
AI can squeeze months of work into hours. In September 2026, Open AI announced that 10,000 of its AI agents had produced a proof of a math problem that had stood for a century – a problem two human mathematicians had spent a year trying to solve.
Virilio’s deepest fear about speed was not that people would fall behind machines, but that they would be absent from decision-making. Even when people attempt to stay in the loop, AI agents execute so quickly that human workers often fail to spot problems or malicious requests.
Everywhere at once
Virilio’s third idea is the “integral accident”: a failure that, because the same technology runs everywhere, happens everywhere at once.
During the 1990s, Virilio watched how satellite television, the Internet and electronic markets let an event anywhere, such as a financial crash, be felt everywhere. He later predicted that in a networked world, integral accidents, not war, would be “the continuation of politics by other means.”
AI has intensified how tightly connected the world is. It’s being used to help balance power grids, manage ships and harbors, and write hospital patient records.
Consider Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model, which finds security flaws in banking software faster than banks can fix them. Many financial institutions use the same software, so a criminal with such a model could break into multiple banks at the same time.
Hand on the lever
Virilio wrote that a society that lives only in the present makes accidents more likely. A society too busy to keep records of its past, or to think ahead, cannot learn from its failures and so repeats them.
I’d argue that that sentence points to three things worth keeping in mind.
The first is the record, kept by someone independent. Documents analyzing AI accidents should not be left only in the hands of the companies whose failures they document.
The second is the pause. Regulators, researchers and companies need the time and the authority to deliberate – and to halt a system, if needed, before it is released.
The third is skill. A skill is the present result of past practice. The more work people hand to AI because it is faster, the more they need to keep the ability to do that work themselves: to write the first draft, to check the sum by hand. These are the habits that let people verify what AI produces.
Virilio’s lesson is not to smash the machines, but to keep a hand on the lever – improving the chances that the accident, when it comes, can be seen, understood and reversed. Speed does not take the controls away, but it makes it harder for people to keep hold.
Shahnaz Bashir is a PhD candidate in communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
UMass Amherst provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.
Tortured portability?
Street car in Amherst, Mass., in 1901.
“My outer world and inner make a pair.
“But would the two be always of a kind?
“Another latitude, another mind?
“Or would I be New England anywhere?’’
— From “New England Mind’’, by Robert Francis (1901-1987), American poet. He spent most of his life in the college town of Amherst.
Dour Puritans’ election cake
Read this New England Historical Society article about election cake.
It starts off with:
“Election Cake was a highlight of the Puritan celebration of Election Day, one of the important colonial holidays along with Commencement Day and Training Day.’’
Interstellar domestic and proud of it
“Cosmic Dust” (oil on canvas), by Mark Ruddy, at Glimpse Gallery, Concord, N.H.
A very New England drink
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.
It’s apple cider time in New England. I remember when we did our best to turn it into an alcoholic drink. Anyway, we savored the bite of it as it aged. I like that New Hampshire-based poet Maxine Kumin called gray and brown November "that time of year the Lord created and forgot.’’ On the upside, it’s probably the quietest month and the breezy countryside, now looking more open, has an austere charm.
Let’s enjoy it while we can. An early polar vortex is predicted, or not -- followed by 70 degrees in February? Maybe.
Whatever, most of the last few days have been about as golden as it gets around here, but Thanksgiving looms.
T.R.: Bribery strikes at the foundation of all law
“There can be no crime more serious than bribery. Other offenses violate one law while corruption strikes at the foundation of all law. Under our form of Government all authority is vested in the people and by them delegated to those who represent them in official capacity. There can be no offense heavier than that of him in whom such a sacred trust has been reposed, who sells it for his own gain and enrichment; and no less heavy is the offense of the bribe giver. He is worse than the thief, for the thief robs the individual, while the corrupt official plunders an entire city or State. He is as wicked as the murderer, for the murderer may only take one life against the law, while the corrupt official and the man who corrupts the official alike aim at the assassination of the commonwealth itself. Government of the people, by the people, for the people will perish from the face of the earth if bribery is tolerated. The givers and takers of bribes stand on an evil pre-eminence of infamy. The exposure and punishment of public corruption is an honor to a nation, not a disgrace. The shame lies in toleration, not in correction…. If we fail to do all that in us lies to stamp out corruption we can not escape our share of responsibility for the guilt. The first requisite of successful self-government is unflinching enforcement of the law and the cutting out of corruption.
— Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), U.S. president (1901-1909)
Hopping and scotching
Mixed media by Sharon Kaitz, in her show “Dancing on the Edge,’’ Nov. 5-Nov. 29, at Kingston Gallery, Boston
She says:
“As a child, the best part of playing hopscotch for me was the first white chalk line that I set down on the asphalt in front of my home. The game has been with us for three hundred years, its name derives from two activities, to hop which everyone knows means to jump, and to scotch, which means to cut or scratch a line in the dirt. That line has followed me throughout my life as a painter. I am always, in one way or another, scratching lines in the dirt, whether making marks on canvas, burlap, linen, clay or in the earth itself. My painted lines are conduits of connection both from past to present and across geographic spaces: they are passages, threads, trails, footprints. As with hopscotch there is a journey out and a return journey where the numbers are upside down and messages are scrambled. The squares contain the story like the edges of a canvas but sometimes the line is blurred, the flung stone misses its mark, breaks free from the borders drawn to contain it, as if to call into question the legitimacy of borders themselves by revealing their arbitrary nature. In my paintings, fabric, color and shape express a desire for unbounded harmony, but desire is always caught by the tail, the lines must be drawn.’’
What are billionaires so afraid of?
Guilford Country Store, built in 1817 as Broad Brook House.
Via OtherWords.org
GUILFORD, Vt.
Americans overwhelmingly support taxing billionaires more. But some of those billionaires, including those who’ve seen their wealth balloon in recent years, have been spending big to stop it.
Voters in California, for example, are considering a ballot initiative called Prop 40 — a one-time, 5 percent wealth tax exclusively on the state’s 200 plus-billionaires. But a few dozen billionaires are ponying up tens of millions to fight the tax and threatening to run away if they lose.
In an analysis for Tax the Ultra Rich Now (TURN), the Institute for Policy Studies identified 22 Golden State billionaires who have contributed substantial funds or been outspoken opponents of Prop 40. This group has seen their combined wealth increase 64 percent in the last 20 months. Yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.
The 22 billionaire snowflakes include a bunch of tech bros and crypto barons making billions off developing an AI future for the rest of us.
Several are chums of Jeffrey Epstein, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27 percent, from $14.8 billion to $32.6 billion. That puts his wealth at 11,319 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000. To protect his gains, Thiel has given $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. (Thiel himself recently moved to Argentina.)
Venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, and DoorDash, gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97 percent, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025, to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times that of the median Californian.
Google’s Sergey Brin has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. From the deck of his $450 million yacht, the Dragonfly, Brin has seen his personal wealth grow a whopping 70 percent in the last 20 months, from $148 billion to $253 billion. Brin’s wealth is a stratospheric 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household.
Not all the billionaires are cowering in the corner.
Billionaire Tom Steyer said he would vote for the billionaire wealth tax and wished it went further to reduce inequality. Jensen Huang, the cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, is worth an estimated $190 billion and supports the one-time wealth tax. He told CBS News that “it’s a privilege, it’s a responsibility” to pay taxes — and that “nothing would give me more joy” than to pay more.
California’s 231 billionaires held approximately $2.3 trillion as of Sept 22, 2026, and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches. According to economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15 percent per year, they paid on average just 0.26 percent of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and his fellow Google co-founder Larry Page paid even less — just 0.07 percent of their wealth annually.
We can see why these billionaire snowflakes don’t want anything to change. Still, the one-time wealth tax would be just a small fraction of their gains in the last few years — and nevermind of their overall wealth, which will remain massive.
When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK. You’ll have 95 percent of your billions and tens of thousands of your neighbors will have health care. You will get over this one quickly.”
Californians will decide their fate in November: a vote for oligarchy or a first step toward rebalancing our democracy? And Americans elsewhere will be watching.
Chuck Collins, who lives in Vermont, directs the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits its Inequality.org website. He’s a coauthor of the report California’s Billionaire Wealth Surge and author of the book Burned By Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.
Super realism in The Pine Tree State
“Eggemoggin Reach’’(oil on linen), by Joel Babb, in his show “Shifting Visions: Joel Babb’s Painted Universe,’’ at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, through Jan. 31.
The Deer Isle Bridge spans Eggemoggin Reach, on the Maine Coast.
Does Boston need a ‘rat czar’?
From The Boston Guardian, article by Brandon Hill
(Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Guardian.)
District 2 City Councilor Ed Flynn challenged the city’s claims of progress in controlling its rat population at a recent City Council hearing. The councilor argued that successes celebrated by city officials contrast sharply with constituents’ lived experiences.
Councilor Flynn chaired the hearing, which he co-sponsored with District 9 City Councilor Liz Breadon, where residents gave testimony and questioned representatives of the Inspectional Services Department (ISD), the mayor’s Operations Cabinet, the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT), and the Boston Housing Authority (BHA).
“There’s some disconnect between what [the city] has highlighted on how things are going well and what residents are experiencing,” Councilor Flynn said after testimonies were given at the hearing. “It has not improved. It’s gotten worse. It’s a major public health, public safety, quality of life issue.”
The hearing examined the Boston Rodent Action Plan (BRAP), where officials highlighted new technology, sanitation improvements and the September National Urban Rat Summit as indicators of success.
But residents from Back Bay, Chinatown, Bay Village, Allston-Brighton and other neighborhoods testified about persistent infestations, inadequate trash collection and difficulty holding property owners and developers accountable.
One recurring demand, echoing the recommendation of Councilor Flynn, called for the appointment of a dedicated “rat czar” to oversee and coordinate the city’s rodent control across departments.
“Somebody needs to own this problem,” one resident testified. “Someone has to be the name and face of the solution. With 20 committees and agencies and departments, it’s very difficult.”
Residents also urged the city to reconsider allowing trash to sit out on sidewalks overnight, providing rats with an easily accessible food source.
Currently, trash is allowed to be curbside after 5pm the night before pickup. Residents said that schedule encourages leaving bags outside overnight. In downtown neighborhoods where space is limited, bagged trash is a particularly accessible food source for rats, but residents also testified that rodents even chew through hard plastic trash cans.
“Over the last year, we've been working to better understand the different options that are available to us,” said Luke Hines from the Operations Cabinet. “We've been in coordination with the streets team in identifying those different options, working with community partners to better understand what they would support and then working with the trash contractors to see what would be feasible for them.”
Another major concern was enforcement against landlords and developers whose buildings or construction sites contribute to rodent problems.
ISD Assistant Commissioner John Ulrich said construction projects subject to the city’s community sanitation requirements must provide pest control documentation before receiving permits. His department has conducted approximately 210 construction sanitation inspections since January and reported 785 violations this year. However, residents said that penalties are too lenient and are treated by developers as a cost of doing business.
Councilor Flynn closed out the hearing in disagreement with the city’s assessment of public health risks posed by Boston’s rat population. One resident, who identified himself as John and said he has lived on Acadia Street in South Boston for 23 years, testified that his son contracted Leptospirosis earlier this fall, a bacterial infection that can spread through contact with urine from infected animals, including rats.
“He was in the hospital for two weeks and ICU for a week and suffered serious liver and kidney injuries,” John said.
Another resident testified that their dog had also contracted Leptospirosis.
The Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) was not present at the hearing, but Ulrich characterized the number of rat-to-human infections as “relatively low” based on the word of Dr. Kathryn Himmelstein from the BPHC.
Dr. Himmelstein testified at a March 16 City Council hearing that, “contracting Leptospirosis in Boston is extremely rare, and the last reported case was in 2021.” Prior to 2021, the next most recent reported case was in 2018.
‘The beauties she so truly sees’
“Moody November Evening” (oil), by Carl Scherres (1833-1923)
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
“My November Guest,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1983)
Why won’t they head south?
“Alewife Jerry’s Pond,’’ by Vicki Kocher Paret, in her show “Color Conversations,’’ at the Arlington (Mass.) Center for the Arts, through Dec. 11
Although there’s not that much money in it
“The Artist at Work” (oil on canvas), by George Ault (1891-1948), at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Chris Powell: Some core lessons about how to help public education; but where are the parents?
The 19th Century public school, since demolished, as it appeared on a 1911 postcard.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
There’s so much wrong with public education in Connecticut generally and with the
school system particularly that criticizing them doesn’t require making up stories. But that’s what the U.S. education secretary, Connecticut’s own Linda McMahon, did the other day to try to score a political point.
McMahon said the infamous case of the Hartford Public High School girl who was graduated illiterate and innumerate two years ago was the result of the school system's spending too much on "diversity, equity, and inclusion" initiatives, political correctness the Trump administration has been trying to stamp out.
McMahon's accusation is nonsense. Hartford did spend a little money on those things while the girl was going to high school but that wasn’t why she was graduated uneducated.
First, she was graduated uneducated because schools in Connecticut advance and graduate students uneducated as a matter of policy, social promotion. Schools in Connecticut have no academic proficiency requirements.
Second, school management in Hartford was incompetent and indifferent.
And third, the girl's parent didn’t make a public stink about her daughter's lack of education until she was given a high school diploma and there was money to be made with a lawsuit against the school system.
Of course school and union officials attribute the girl’s ignorance to a lack of money in Hartford’s school system. Yes, the system has thousands of "high needs" students who are more expensive to educate. But the school system also has been badly managed, as the Yankee Institute showed last year with its report about a "paraeducator" who is also president of the local paraeducators union and secretary-treasurer of the Connecticut AFL-CIO and who took nearly a full year of days off in her previous three years of employment, many of the days with pay for doing union political work, not school work.
Instead of making up a story about "diversity, equity, and inclusion," McMahon could have done some good by noting the school system's negligence and incompetence and the union official so frequently absent from her school job.
McMahon also could have noted that when the scandal about the uneducated girl broke in the press, the state education commissioner and the Hartford school superintendent promised to investigate and report about the case. They may have investigated but they never reported to the public and no one has ever been held accountable.
Gov. Ned Lamont, whose re-election campaign broadcasts commercials boasting that Connecticut has "the best schools in America," never demanded an explanation about the uneducated Hartford graduate, nor has he amended his commercials to acknowledge that Connecticut also has some of the worst schools in America.
Secretary McMahon could have pushed the governor, the state Education Department, and the Hartford school system to account for what happened with the uneducated graduate, who is hardly the only Connecticut student who has been graduated uneducated in recent years. Indeed, many if not most Connecticut students emerge from high school without high school-level proficiency, and that has nothing to do with DEI either. It’s state government’s lack of political will to enforce educational standards and require parents to take more responsibility for their children.
Expect More and Get More
Most educational achievement in Connecticut, as elsewhere, is a matter of parenting and household wealth. If children have two parents whose income can support their home without much stress, the kids will tend to get more upbringing, be healthier mentally and physically, and be more engaged in school.
Where children are raised by a single parent in poverty and live more neglected under financial and emotional stress, they tend to be indifferent students or, worse, demoralized, troubled, and disruptive. That is what is signified by the catastrophically low proficiency test scores and high chronic student absenteeism in the schools of the poorest municipalities.
The results of the few proficiency tests Connecticut administers to its public school students long have shown income and the extent of parenting as clearly as federal census data can. State government has long cynically misinterpreted the data to mean that the problems of poverty and inadequate parenting can be solved by throwing more money at schools and their unionized and politically active employees, though little if anything ever changes educationally. As a result most Connecticut students are not proficient in English and math when they graduate from high school, but school employees can afford nicer cars and remain loyal to the political regime.
Two months ago, in response to marginal improvements in the latest state proficiency test scores, the state Education Department's chief performance officer, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, offered one of the department's empty pieties. "Success is possible in any district and for any child," he said. "All students should be achieving these standards."
No one at the state Capitol asked: So why aren't they?
Pursuing that question would be too sensitive politically. It would indict neglectful parents and government policy that encourages neglect. It would call attention to all the money spent without educational improvement. It might even prompt people to wonder how the country can survive as a democracy amid ever-worsening literacy and ignorance.
But this doesn't mean that since the state education bureaucracy is timid and ineffectual, schools with impoverished students are helpless. To the contrary, an excellent account published two weeks ago by Connecticut's Hearst newspapers, written by a member of the Report for America organization, Colin Tiernan, provided insight about how East Hartford's schools have begun to improve proficiency despite a student population poverty rate of 60 percent.
In 10 years East Hartford's student proficiency in English has risen to 40 percent from 30 percent while proficiency in math has risen from to 34 percent from 17 percent. While these rates remain below the state average, they are markedly better than those in Connecticut's cities.
School Superintendent Thomas Anderson says "there is no magic" about it, no single factor. But the Hearst report found important hints.
East Hartford's immediate past superintendent, Nathan Quesnel, who ran the system from 2012 to 2023, says, "When we expect more, we get more from kids." Teachers echo the theme of expecting more and holding all students to a higher standard.
East Hartford state Rep. Jason Rojas, the House Democratic majority leader, thinks the unusual stability and longer tenure in the system's superintendent position in recent years has helped. Many superintendents in Connecticut are relatively short-termers.
East Hartford teachers say they are involving students more in class exercises, requiring them to work with classmates to find correct answers, which keeps them attentive, and teachers try not to go easy on students. But some students are troubled and sometimes need to be handled gently lest school lose them.
One student, a teacher said, "comes to me every morning not wanting to be here. I say, 'Thank God you're here. I would be so upset if you weren't here.' It's the hardest thing for her to have gotten here today, and here I am loading her down with fractions."
But, the teacher added, "If they know you love them, they'll do anything for you."
In that respect teachers, as always, often make up for what many children don't get at home -- the problem government can't bring itself to address: expecting more from parents.
MORE OMBUDSMEN, PLEASE: Recent days have shown Connecticut that it needs many more independent monitors of state government agencies and programs.
First the Correction Department’s ombudsman, DeVaughn Ward, exposed an abusive, incompetent, and unqualified prison doctor who had been chased away from medical jobs in two states before being hired to treat Connecticut’s prisoners. With an annual salary of $260,000, the doctor has been placed on paid administrative leave, presumably forever.
Then Mairead Painter of the nursing home ombudsman program in the state Department of Aging and Disability Services exposed a nursing home in East Windsor for having left the wound on a patient’s head swarming with maggots. Now he’ll probably need skin grafts. The failure was blamed on a lack of staffing, a problem at many nursing homes.
What might more ombudsmen might find in and around state government?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government, politics and culture for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
And they undermine democracy
What happens when managers no longer have the authority to manage? When managers can’t terminate an employee who is inept? When they can’t assign the best employees to a hard task? Or when they can’t consolidate near-empty facilities? Any business would soon fail.
Welcome to the sinkhole of American public administration. Government supervisors and school principals in most states and cities are more like compliance officers, lacking rudimentary management powers, because public-union collective-bargaining agreements—often several hundred pages long—dictate how to do almost everything.
The harm of unmanageable government is not a matter of degree. Nothing much works as it should. American citizens are burdened with poor services and schools, often at twice the reasonable cost, plus massive unfunded benefits that could bankrupt our children.
Yet new governors or mayors can’t do anything about it because they come to office bound by pre-existing union agreements. The legislatures won’t help because they rely on public-employee unions as their main source of campaign support.
Public-union controls are a cancer in American democracy. Without managerial powers, the executive branch in many states and cities is an empty shell. Democracy is now in the grips of a new spoils system—serving public employees instead of the American public.
In Burning Money, Philip K. Howard, shows why the public-union stranglehold must be broken, and how that will unlock massive public resources and human initiative.
Burning Money will be published by Rodin Books on Jan. 19, 2027. Read the press release here.
“Continuing his important work on sources of public-sector inefficiency, Philip Howard's Burning Money takes a big step—demonstrating harm to public management and even democracy of entrenched public-sector unions. Anyone interested in advancing agency and taking back control should read this book.’’
— Glenn Hubbard — professor of economics and finance at Columbia University and former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers
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“The role of public-employee unions in delivering government services is massively concerning yet poorly understood. The unions have an outsized influence on electing the government officials with whom they have to deal and, as a result, those officials do what the unions want, not what the public needs. This process makes government services—things like schools, police, transit, etc.—substantially more expensive and less good than they should be.
“Philip Howard shines a spotlight on this debilitating arrangement and shows how badly the public is being hosed. He will be vilified for being anti-union but, as this book irrefutably demonstrates, he should be heralded for being pro-democracy.’’
—Joel Klein, former chancellor, New York City Department of Education
Workers' agitation as portrayed in “Strike,’’ by Mihály Munkácsy (1895).
Robert Whitcomb: John & Yoko in candids
Roger Farrington
From The Boston Guardian
The tiny new book Starting Over with John and Yoko is a look at the last months, in 1980, of ex-Beatle John Lennon, shot to death on December 9 that year, about the social, technical and other aspects of pre-digital photography, and the ethics and anti-ethics of public relations.
The work, with text by Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack and photos by famed Boston photographer Roger Farrington, centers on the celebrity couple’s activities at a New York recording studio and outside The Dakota, the famous Upper West Side apartment building where the couple lived. Lennon, in collaboration with his wife, Yoko Ono, was recording what turned out to be his last album, Double Fantasy, sometimes erroneously called Double Fantasies, which was released on Nov. 17, 1980.
The duo had taken a five-year hiatus from recording starting in 1975 and rumors that they might be planning a return to production were constantly circulating. I remember those rumors, though I wasn’t a Beatles World obsessive. Anyway, on August 7, 1980, John Lennon and Yoko Ono walked into the Hit Factory to secretly begin work on a new album.
At the studio and outside The Dakota, Farrington, who was 27 at time, took some memorable candids of the couple, some of which are in this book, all the while having to deal with an irascible and sometimes crooked, or at least “colorful,’’ Boston-based press agent called Charles Cohen. He almost seemed like a guy in a ‘40’s Film Noir. Lennon himself was widely seen as arrogant and irascible but doesn’t seem that way in the book.
To say the least, Farrington was a surprise choice to visually record the couple in the studio. In 1980, he was performing a variety of jobs for owner Jack Sugrue at The Charles Playhouse, in Boston.
The book memorably evokes the times and places of that era, including the urban seediness of Boston and New York.
It reminded me of my experiences in school, developing film in darkrooms, especially the strong smell of the chemicals! Also later on my watching news photographers and photo editors I worked with at newspapers sometimes create memorable work in the face of big obstacles, some even dangerous. And then there was the challenge to editors to properly size and crop the images.
The book’s descriptions of what Farrington had to do to create those pictures act as a solid first lesson in the glories, disasters, unpredictability and occasional chaos of pre-digital professional/commercial photography and, so far as any photography goes, what goes into the decision of when to shoot a picture, whatever the gear. But when a photographer does get great pics, sometimes by accident, what an addition to the historical record!
Mr. Womack notes at the end of the book that Yoko’s Summer of 1980 anthology, which she compiled in 1983, “pointedly featured John in happier times, when the world was brighter {for some anyway} and the idea of making music again seemed a worthy cause for coming out of retirement. {Yoko’s} husband had been, as always, a visionary of the highest order, and the photos from that fate-filled summer redound with optimism and hope. Life is indeed what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’’
Robert Whitcomb is chairman of The Boston Guardian.