Vox clamantis in deserto
Now improved by hedge funder
“Connecticut Farmhouse’’ (medium watercolor on paper), by Warren William Baumgartner (1894-1963), at the New Britain Museum of American Art.
Gerald FitzGerald: ‘Take him to the Truro line’
Provincetown Town Hall, where the author was briefly incarcerated.
-Photo by T.S. Custadio ToddC4176
In 1966, I won the glamorous position of assistant to Armida Gaeta, the assistant of The New York Times’s foreign-news editor. Armida Gaeta was a tiny woman with enormous spectacles and the demeanor of a ticking bomb.
I was 19 and life was glamorous working exactly one step above office boy.
I had begun working for the paper as a messenger carrying advertising copy and art between agencies and the newspaper in a time long before most computers or even fax machines. My brother proofread classified ads there while attending grad school. I had just flunked out of John Carroll University, in University Heights, Ohio -- news I wouldn't tell my parents until I had a place to stay, a job, and was enrolled in evening classes somewhere.
Helen Durrell was a notable figure in The Times’s personnel operations. She hired me on as a messenger; later I was promoted to office boy. When the newsroom job opened up, she told me that I had to type 60 words per minute even to be interviewed. When I was a kid, Mom had taught me to type by drawing the keyboard of her old Underwood on a shirt cardboard and taping it to the wall in front of me.
“Never look at the keys, just the drawing, and you'll see it forever,” she said.
I thought that I could qualify, so Helen gave me the typing test.
I blew it, finishing at 40 wpm, and then asked when I could take it again. Helen told me I could when I had practiced at home and brought myself up to speed.
“How about tomorrow morning?” I asked.
Helen seemed surprised but didn't say no. That evening, I returned to East 4th St., in Greenwich Village, with beer and cigarettes and checked my typewriter's ribbon to be sure that I wouldn’t discover that I needed a new one after the stores closed. All night long, I sat typing some version of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” --- a pangram containing every letter of the alphabet. I hardly ever paused but to sip beer or to use the john. Good thing I could type and smoke simultaneously.
The next day I retook the test and clocked at better than 60 wpm. Aided further by a letter of reference from The Times’s chief legal counsel, James Goodale, secretly orchestrated by his two friendly secretaries, I got the job on the third floor’s huge open newsroom.
For a kid who'd dreamed of news writing since he was old enough to attend movies, I was in heaven. What I mostly did was to compose and distribute a list of the daily whereabouts of each foreign correspondent. My desk was next to those of Seymour Topping, the foreign-news editor, and reporter Harrison Salisbury, just back from duty in Moscow.
The newsroom was an equivalent to square city block, and with few interior walls. It was so big that microphones and loudspeakers were needed to page people to report to the metropolitan desk, the sports desk, the national desk, the foreign desk, obituaries or any other part of the operation. A row of wire-service (Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, etc.) teletype machines, constantly sounding bells and keystrokes, stood one after another after another from West 43rd St. to West 44th St.
xxx
Only my then-19-year-old mind could possibly explain why I carried just $5 for a week's stay in Provincetown, Mass. But at least I already had my ticket to Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, at the famous Provincetown Theater, along the beach. The theater’s origins go back to 1915, with the establishment of the Provincetown Players.
My tall, blond buddy, Dennis Niermann, nicknamed “The Swede” and from Ohio, would hitch with me as far as Boston. He'd been visiting my fifth-floor walk-up single-bedroom apartment at 73 East 4th St., between Second Avenue and Bowery. I had taken it over from my brother and usually had two roommates to split the $85-a-month rent three ways.
Taking the long route home to Cleveland, Dennis was doing me a favor, but he wouldn't have minded the company, either. At the time he may have been reading electricity meters for a living but, just so you know, he later became a renowned anti-discrimination lawyer. We got to Boston easily and early. We probably grabbed a burger at the Paramount, a Greek place on Charles Street, but eventually walked over to Boston Common, where we rolled out our sleeping bags in the dusk atop a grassy hill just beneath the looming column of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument and slept on the ground undisturbed through the night. You could do that back then. After coffee somewhere, Dennis and I split, he hoofing over to the Mass Pike West and I to hitchhike on Route 3 South, toward Cape Cod.
I don't remember how many rides it took to reach Hyannis, the biggest town center on The Cape, but I recall that it was getting dark and starting to rain as I walked up Main Street in search of somewhere dry. I had visited Hyannis years earlier, when New York neighbor Jack McCarthy took me deep-sea fishing with his son, Johnny. Mr. McCarthy won the boat pool for most fish; Johnny won for biggest, and I won for the first fish caught.
This time I walked past the miniature golf course, where we'd played to celebrate. Just down a cross street, I found a wooden three-sided shelter with a bench and roof. It must have been provided for those waiting for a bus or train. I snuggled into one corner and began to assess my chances of spending the night there without getting rousted by an overeager patrolman. My hand brushed something I could not see in the dark shelter.
It turned out to be one of those small leather change purses. I snapped it open. Inside were two fives and two singles and some quarters, dimes and nickels. No I.D. No phone number. Not even a scrawled nickname. My personal wealth had just catapulted from maybe two bucks to almost fifteen.
I remembered a sign for a really cheap-looking lodging back along Main Street, not a far walk from the miniature golf course on the same side of the street. I found it and purportedly clean sheets for something like $3 a night. I am sure that its exterior sign used the word “Hotel,” but, make no mistake, it was a flop house. The room was the size of an elevator, and none of its walls reached the ceiling. A flop house in Hyannis seems somehow strange, but there it was, and it was dry and I took it.
The next day, I found Route 6 North and, eventually, Provincetown, and walked to the playhouse. I had no plan other than to redeem my ticket, but that would not be for a night or so.
I know that somewhere I still have the playbill from the small wooden theater that burned down about a decade later, but as I write I cannot put hands on it.
I know I have it because I never once in my life have discarded a playbill. I always kept them, and if years later I attended a show with my wife and/or my kids, they signed my playbill. I am going to have to inspect our attic closely. In my dad's Empire book case I have all the playbills from the last nearly 50 years we have lived in our present home. The earlier ones must be boxed somewhere in the attic.
My memory of the small wooden theater along Cape Cod Bay might be distorted.
I spent the week sleeping beneath an overturned dory on a tiny strip of beach that I recall as being between the playhouse and Bradford Street. But that's crazy. The beach must have been on the harbor side of the theater. There were wooden benches inside and space to seat fewer than 200. The theater was made of wooden planks and was caressed by a salty breeze. I don't think that it was insulated at all.
Carved upside down in the port side of the bow of the wooden-plank dory were these words: “The Baron's crib.” I took this to mean that a former adventurer had escaped the elements and, possibly, the nosy, while resting concealed and dry beneath the overturned boat. So that is what I immediately decided to do.
In Provincetown I enjoyed the O'Neill play, whose lead character, Jamie Tyrone, was based on the author's ne'er-do-well older brother in a kind of expansion of the playwright's Long Day's Journey Into Night. My days were spent lazing on the beach reading while eating bread and bologna or occasionally walking through town. I was warm, dry and comfortable within The Baron's crib. Until my very last night.
In the morning blackness, at about 2 or 3 a.m., glaring light burned my face closely, held like a weapon by a uniformed police officer lifting the dory while growling about impermissibly sleeping on the beach. He ordered me to accompany him to Town Hall, a few blocks away. I don't recall that he handcuffed me. We walked to the closed building and, somewhere on the side toward its left rear entered a jail. There was one cell, two at most. A man occupied the only cot in the cell, where they placed me so that if there really were two I think I would have asked for the empty other. Anyway, the man rose as I entered. He reeked of a superhuman dose of cologne. Truly fetid.
It now being surely around 3 a.m. I asked the guy when he'd been arrested. After 10 p.m., he guessed.
“So you've had five hours on the cot,” I told him. “I guess it’s my turn.”
I stretched out on the rumpled, sickly-sweet smelling sheet and was glad to have it. I've always been able to sleep pretty much anywhere, but this was genuinely difficult. My roommate meanwhile sat on the floor, his back against the bars.
I do not recall being offered anything to eat or drink in the morning, and I think we may have been cuffed to go upstairs to the large room being used for court. I was callow enough to be mostly concerned that observers might consider me to be “with” my cellmate, whose offense I never did learn.
When my name was called, I stood before the black-robed judge sitting above the rest of us. He told me that sleeping on the beach carried a $25 fine and asked me if I had anything to say?
I looked up at him and said, quietly:
“Your honor, if I had 25 bucks I wouldn't've been sleeping on the beach.”
The judge looked at me and then turned, a bit harshly, toward a uniformed cop standing off to the side of his bench.
“Take him to the Truro line!” snapped his honor. (Truro being the next town south.)
My response to the judge was the first of hundreds, if not thousands, of responses to judges following a series of news jobs and what became close to 40 years of addressing courts as a trial lawyer. Never having paid a dime in penalty for sleeping on the beach, I guess it counts as a win.
Gerald FitzGerald’s career has included being a newspaper editor, a writer, a prosecutor, a defense lawyer and a civic leader. He lives on Massachusetts’s South Coast.
But I want to drink alone
Oil painting by Keith Thomson, at Renjeau Galleries, Natick, Mass.
The gallery says:
“Keith Thomson’s vibrant artwork showcases a masterful grasp of perspective, surrealism, and humor. He playfully juxtaposes quotidian, every-day scenery with elements of wit and satire, an homage to his career as a political cartoonist in the ‘90s. Thomson’s art is rendered via digital sketch, then transferred on to canvas and layered with oil paint for shading and added dimension.’’
What it means to remember
“Collaboration 35 (Angel 1)” (oil on linen), by Damian Stamer, in his show “Angels & Ghosts,” at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, in Middlebury, Vt. He calls it part of his “photographic childhood memory exploring the bedroom of an abandoned rural North Carolina house filled with old junk. Hoarder, floor to ceiling. Mildewed sheets, stained blankets, strong tonal shifts. Old painting hanging on the wall.’’
The museum says:
“Born in 1982 in Durham, North Carolina, where he continues to live and work, Damian Stamer explores the intricacies of time, memory, and existence through his paintings. His work addresses fundamental questions about what it means to remember, create, and be human, offering reflections on our relationship with technology and its impact on our perception of self and the world.’’
Ski trip with Undertones
Cannon Mountain Ski Area and Echo Lake seen from Artist's Bluff.
Photo by David W. Brooks
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
This time of year reminds me of spring skiing in Vermont and New Hampshire, bouncing down the mountain on that melting granular stuff, called “corn snow,’’ in the warming sunshine.
Back around 1957 I joined several of the kids of a large family and their very vivacious and seemingly very married mother on a trip to Cannon Mountain (home of such wonderfully named trails as “Polly’s Folly”) and the broader northern New Hampshire/Vermont area. When we got up there, a dashing man in an MG joined our group. While he was very nice to all, I sensed something, er special, was going on between him and the mother.
The mother eventually got divorced and married this rich, apparently charming, and handsome, man; her previous husband was merely rich. But this marriage didn’t last either. I visited her many years later, when she was running an inn she had converted from a mansion near the village center of a beautiful and affluent New England town, apparently with the help of a boyfriend she was living with. She was mellow, still very funny and, in a way, sexy.
Another highlight of the trip was our tour of what seemed to be the world’s maple syrup and maple candy manufacturing capital – St. Johnsbury, Vt. -- during the height of sap season. Rich aromas! (Visit the wonderful Fairbanks Museum in that town:
But my sharpest memory is how we were accompanied by that mysterious man. I thought of it many years later when reading L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, with its haunting opening: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’’ Or is it more William Faulkner’s line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” from his novel Requiem for a Nun.
The wonderful Fairbanks Museum, in St. Johnsbury, Vt.
A use of adversity
Nineteenth century depiction of Anne Bradstreet by Edmund H. Garrett. No portrait made during her lifetime exists
“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."
— From Anne Bradstreet’s (1612-1672) “Meditations Divine and Moral." The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritan was the first major poetic voice in British colonial America.
rodenticides imperil a wide range of wildlife
Barred Owl
—Photo by Mdf
Excerpted from an article by Rob Smith in ecoRI News
PROVIDENCE — Earlier this year, the head of Brown University’s bird-watching club called Sheida Soleimani.
The student had found a barred owl, usually a nocturnal creature, in the middle of the day, sitting on the pavement near the Faculty Club on Bannister Street. Next to the owl, said Soleimani, was a rodenticide box, filled with anticoagulant poison designed to kill rats and mice.
Soleimani is one of the state’s few wildlife rehabilitators, and the only one that focuses mainly on Rhode Island’s bird population. For the state’s bird-lovers, when they find a sick or dying bird, Soleimani is the 911 call.
When she picked up the barred owl, it was limp and trembling. Its eyes were half open, its entire body bruised, and blood was dripping from its beak. The owl died within hours, another casualty of an accidental poison in its food supply.
‘the power of Pattern’
Left, “Tulips Pop Up in the Forest” (mosaic) by Lisa Houck, and right, “Solar Spin” (encaustic) by Ross Ozer, in their joint show “Patterned Worlds,’’ at Concord (Mass.) Art, April 2-May 3.
The gallery says:
“The works of Lisa Houck and Ross Ozer meet through a shared commitment to color, pattern, and the handmade.
“Houck’s mosaics evoke living landscapes—birds, leaves, pods, and currents built from thousands of tesserae that shift subtly in hue and rhythm. Her compositions reflect the organic logic of nature: flowing, intertwining, and filled with movement.
“Ozer’s geometric encaustic paintings offer a structured counterpoint. Created dot-by-dot in wax, his works explore circles, arcs, grids, and nested forms inspired by quilting traditions and Bauhaus design. Each composition uses repetition and precise color harmonies to create a sense of balance and architectural clarity.
“Presented together, these two bodies of work reveal parallel ways of constructing visual coherence from tiny incremental units. One is organic, one geometric; one narrative, one abstract. Their dialogue celebrates the beauty of craft, the power of pattern, and the expressive possibilities of color.’’
Do it in the open
The famous shipyard is on Seavey Island, in Kittery, Maine, adjacent to Portsmouth, N.H.
“All officers of the Intelligence Community, and especially its most senior officers, must conduct themselves in a manner that earns and retains the public trust. The American people are uncomfortable with government activities that do not take place in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review.’’
Dennis C. Blair (born 1947 in Kittery, Maine, and son of a Navy captain) was director of national intelligence under President Obama.
Carolina Rossini: Why lawsuit involving Instagram is so important
From The Conversation (not including image above.)
Carolina Rossini is a professor of practice and director of the Public Interest Technology Initiative at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
She was a staffer at organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, which were funded by various foundations and companies. See https://www.carolinarossini.net/bio
A Los Angeles courtroom is hosting what may become the most consequential legal challenge Big Tech has ever faced.
This is an inflection point in the global debate over Big Tech liability: For the first time, an American jury is being asked to decide whether platform design itself can give rise to product liability – not because of what users post on them, but because of how they were built.
As a technology policy and law scholar, I believe that the decision, whatever the outcome, will likely generate a powerful domino effect in the United States and across jurisdictions worldwide.
The case
The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified by her initials, K.G.M. She said she began using YouTube around age 6 and created an Instagram account at age 9. Her lawsuit and testimony allege that the platforms’ design features, which include likes, algorithmic recommendation engines, infinite scroll, autoplay and deliberately unpredictable rewards, got her addicted. The suit alleges that her addiction fueled depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia – when someone see themselves as ugly or disfigured when they aren’t – and suicidal thoughts.
TikTok and Snapchat settled with K.G.M. before trial for undisclosed sums, leaving Meta and Google as the remaining defendants. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the jury on Feb. 18, 2026.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in court in a lawsuit alleging that Instagram is addictive by design.
The stakes extend far beyond one plaintiff. K.G.M.’s case is a bellwether trial, meaning the court chose it as a representative test case to help determine verdicts across all connected cases. Those cases involve approximately 1,600 plaintiffs, including more than 350 families and over 250 school districts. Their claims have been consolidated in a California Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding, No. 5255.
The California proceeding shares legal teams and evidence pool, including internal Meta documents, with a federal multidistrict litigation that is scheduled to advance in court later this year, bringing together thousands of federal lawsuits.
Legal innovation: Design as defect
For decades, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shielded technology companies from liability for content that their users post. Whenever people sued over harms linked to social media, companies invoked Section 230, and the cases typically died early.
The K.G.M. litigation uses a different legal strategy: negligence-based product liability. The plaintiffs argue that the harm arises not from third-party content but from the platforms’ own engineering and design decisions, the “informational architecture” and features that shape users’ experience of content. Infinite scrolling, autoplay, notifications calibrated to heighten anxiety and variable-reward systems operate on the same behavioral principles as slot machines.
These are conscious product design choices, and the plaintiffs contend they should be subject to the same safety obligations as any other manufactured product, thereby holding their makers accountable for negligence, strict liability or breach of warranty of fitness.
Judge Carolyn Kuhl of the California Superior Court agreed that these claims warranted a jury trial. In her Nov. 5, 2025, ruling denying Meta’s motion for summary judgment, she distinguished between features related to content publishing, which Section 230 might protect, and features like notification timing, engagement loops and the absence of meaningful parental controls, which it might not.
Here, Kuhl established that the conduct-versus-content distinction – treating algorithmic design choices as the company’s own conduct rather than as the protected publication of third-party speech – was a viable legal theory for a jury to evaluate. This fine-grained approach, evaluating each design feature individually and recognizing the increased complexities of technology products’ design, represents a potential road map for courts nationwide
.
What the companies knew
The product liability theory depends partly on what companies knew about the risks of their designs. The 2021 leak of internal Meta documents, widely known as the “Facebook Papers,” revealed that the company’s own researchers had flagged concerns about Instagram’s effects on adolescent body image and mental health.
Internal communications disclosed in the K.G.M. proceedings have included exchanges among Meta employees comparing the platform’s effects to pushing drugs and gambling. Whether this internal awareness constitutes the kind of corporate knowledge that supports liability is a central factual question for the jury to decide.
Tobacco companies were eventually held to account because what they knew – and hid – about the addictiveness of their products came to light. Ray Lustig/The Washington Post via Getty Images
There is a clear analogy to tobacco litigation. In the 1990s, plaintiffs succeeded against tobacco companies by proving they had concealed evidence about the addictive and deadly nature of their products. In K.G.M., the plaintiffs here are making the same core argument: Where there is corporate knowledge, deliberate targeting and public denial, liability follows.
K.G.M.’s lead trial attorney, Mark Lanier, is the same lawyer who won multibillion-dollar verdicts in the Johnson & Johnson baby powder litigation, signaling the scale of accountability they are pursuing.
The science: Contested but consequential
The scientific evidence on social media and youth mental health is real but genuinely complex. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) does not classify social media use as an addictive disorder. Researchers like Amy Orben have found that large-scale studies show small average associations between social media use and reduced well-being.
Yet Orben herself has cautioned that these averages might mask severe harms experienced by a subset of vulnerable young users, particularly girls ages 12 to 15. The legal question under the negligence theory is not whether social media harms everyone equally, but whether platform designers had an obligation to account for foreseeable interactions between their design features and the vulnerabilities of developing minds, especially when internal evidence suggested they were aware of the risks.
First, a manufacturer has a duty to exercise reasonable care in designing its product, and that duty extends to harms that are reasonably foreseeable. Second, the plaintiff must show that the type of injury suffered was a foreseeable consequence of the design choice. The manufacturer doesn’t need to have foreseen the exact injury to the exact plaintiff, but the general category of harm must have been within the range of what a reasonable designer would anticipate.
This is why the Facebook Papers and internal Meta research are so legally significant in K.G.M.’s case: They go directly to establishing that the company’s own researchers identified the specific categories of harm – depression, body dysmorphia, compulsive use patterns among adolescent girls – that the plaintiff alleges she suffered. If the company’s own data flagged these risks and leadership continued on the same design trajectory, that would considerably strengthen the foreseeability element.
Why it matters
Even if the science is unsettled, the legal and policy landscape is shifting fast. In 2025 alone, 20 states in the U.S. enacted new laws governing children’s social media use. And this wave is not only in the U.S.; countries such as the U.K., Australia, Denmark, France and Brazil are also moving forward with specific legislation, including mandates banning social media for those under 16.
The K.G.M. trial represents something more fundamental: the proposition that algorithmic design decisions are product decisions, carrying real obligations of safety and accountability. If this framework takes hold, every platform will need to reconsider not just what content appears, but why and how it is delivered.
Getting to know you
Work by Samantha Modder in her show “Of All the Worlds We Could Have Dreamed,’’ at 3SArtspace, Portsmouth, N.H., April 3-May 31.
The gallery says:
“Samantha Modder's work feels like stepping into a fairytale drawn in ballpoint pen and then blown up to the scale of a building. The artist creates large-scale, digitally manipulated drawings printed on adhesive paper — murals that reshape the entire space.
“‘Of All the Worlds We Could Have Dreamed’ follows a single Black woman and her alter-egos moving through a world built entirely from her imagination. It’s part storybook, part dreamscape, and part test lab — a place where she explores power, resistance, rest, and the realities Black women navigate every day. Black hair becomes a protagonist here, driving the narrative in curls, coils, and shapes that feel both soft and defiant.’’
Chris Powell: Democrats want to nullify more; parks won’t save cities
Closed-circuit TV cameras like these can be used to take the images scanned by automatic number-plate recognition systems.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Most Democratic officials in Connecticut insist that theirs is not a "sanctuary state," a state that obstructs enforcement of federal immigration law, even as nearly every week they call for more such obstruction.
The latest scheme of the nullification Democrats is legislation to prevent the use of Connecticut license-plate camera data for immigration-law enforcement in other states. The bill would forbid Connecticut police departments from contracting with license-plate-reader companies without a guarantee that Connecticut data wouldn't be shared with anyone helping to enforce immigration law.
Such a law may please the nullification crowd but it's hard to imagine any guarantee that would be effective and enforceable. An out-of-state police department might give such an assurance, but who from Connecticut would be assigned to monitor how that department shares it?
Besides, federal immigration agents aren't going to arrest any illegal immigrant for having been in Connecticut at any particular time. Illegal immigrants are arrested for being anywhere in the country. License-plate reader data are most likely to be used simply to narrow the search for an illegal immigrant, and immigration agents aren't likely to use such data in pursuit of ordinary illegals but mainly in pursuit of illegals suspected of more serious offenses.
The leader of the state Senate's Democratic majority, Bob Duff , of Norwalk, says, "The more you learn, the more concerned you get about these license-plate readers and the trouble they can cause." What "trouble"? That immigration law might be enforced?
Do Duff and other advocates of the legislation really mean to prevent sharing license-plate-reader data even in pursuit of an illegal wanted for murder, rape, or robbery? It seems so.
Journalism in Connecticut seldom puts serious questions to the immigration-law nullifiers -- nor any questions, really -- so mere posturing on the issue usually gets a free ride here.
How can advocates of the license-plate reader data legislation deny that it will make Connecticut even more of a "sanctuary state"? They won't have to deny it, because they won't be asked.
Many liberals long have scorned suburbs for environmental degradation – for chewing up the countryside with roads, houses, and cars and increasing air pollution via commuting. Yes, the common desire for a little space, peace, and privacy at home comes with a cost.
But now some liberal Democratic groups -- the Center for American Progress, Justice Outside, and Conservation Science Partners -- are lamenting that most members of minority groups live in cities that are "nature-deprived" areas, suffering greater pollution from industry and highways, along with oppressive heat, flooding, and crowding, which, all together, pose greater risks to physical and mental health.
Yes, city life has its disadvantages. But it has its advantages too, like less expensive housing, cultural and entertainment amenities, and public transit. If cities didn't have their advantages, they wouldn't have so many residents.
Of course cities could be nicer. But their main problem isn't being "nature-deprived." In Connecticut the main problems of the cities arise from the poverty of most of their residents, which is a matter of their lack of parenting, education, and job skills. Poverty in Connecticut has been worsened lately by state government's failure to reduce the cost of living by facilitating housing construction and economizing.
The more job skills that people gain, the more likely their incomes are to rise and to enable them to live in areas that are less "nature-deprived." There will be similar results if more housing is built, more businesses locate in the state, and government cuts costs.
Obvious as that may be, it isn't happening in Connecticut, and in any case there is so much more to prosperous, healthy cities than re-integrating them with nature, as the state has a reason to know well. Because of good urban planning a century ago, Bridgeport has 45 parks comprising 1,800 acres and is nicknamed "the Park City" -- but it is also the Connecticut's poorest and most troubled. More nature isn't going to help.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Llewellyn King: Electronics is robbing Us of much Human contact
1897 photo
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
You don’t have to be sitting by yourself on an island to be lonely. Loneliness is everywhere.
Studies from universities, governments and public health groups find that the world is in the grip of a loneliness pandemic. More than half the U.S. population is said to be suffering from loneliness. It is classified globally as a mental health problem.
Paradoxically, the studies place most of the blame on our interconnected society and social media: If we communicate electronically, we isolate ourselves. The COVID-19 pandemic also increased our social isolation, and working from home accelerated the trend.
I would suggest that we have been drifting toward loneliness for a long time. Years ago, I wrote about what I called the “box culture.”
In the box culture, people live in a box (apartment), ride down in a box (elevator), get into a box with wheels (car), drive to a stack of boxes (building), ride up in a box (elevator), enter another box (office), and stare into a box (computer).
That, I believe, led to greater isolation. No common dwelling; no common transportation, like a bus or train; and little common work habitat.
The phrase “my space” began to be part of the conversational language. A social networking service named Myspace was launched in 2003.
Email and texting gave isolation a boost even before COVID-19 gave it a massive steroid shot. Now we might be inhabiting “my isolated space.”
Adding to this world of paradox is perhaps the biggest paradox of all — the death of the telephone for the purpose it was invented: talking.
Not only has the telephone declined to near-oblivion as a way of talking to others, but it has also become something of a burden. I find that when I suggest a telephone call, the recipients want to set a time.
When did setting times for calls creep into our lives? It wrings the pleasure out of the telephone, which was always a spontaneous instrument.
When Irving Berlin wrote the song “All Alone by the Telephone” in 1924, he didn’t envisage that people would make appointments to talk.
We have robbed ourselves of the glorious spontaneity, or heartbreak, of the telephone. I have always thought of it as the instrument that can transmute life’s leaden metal into gold unexpectedly, as Omar Khayyam wrote, or as a ray of sunshine you didn’t expect to break through the fog, as Noel Coward wrote. Even just the laughter of an old friend can break out the sunlight on a dismal day.
I can’t catch the laughter in a text. Email is fine for a joke, but it fails where the telephone succeeds: catching the sublimity of laughter, the warmth of love.
Another source of isolation has been the conversion from shopping — the operative part of that word is “shop” — to online buying, a different experience. Or rather, another way of removing the warmth of human interchange from the transaction.
If you are among the legions of the lonely, I would like to suggest, aside from the highly recommended places people meet, like volunteering at a charity or an amateur theater group, going to a pub or to church, do something radical: Speak to a stranger.
My wife and I became friends with two people and their families because I spoke to a stranger in a hotel in Washington, and we spoke to one at a concert in Rhode Island.
We have friends who met while standing in line at an ATM and married not long after. Weight Watchers, when they held meetings, was recommended among the cognoscenti as a place to meet people.
These suggestions may sound trivial, but they are the commerce of life, some of which we have shelved in favor of electronic communications.
In particular, I feel for those who are shut-in by disease and suffer terrible loneliness. They are the loneliest of the lonely.
For many years, I have written and broadcast about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It is a terrible disease whose victims have no energy, get no refreshment from sleep, and suffer a plethora of pain, usually for life.
Electronics may have robbed us of much human contact and caused a pandemic of loneliness, but not for those sentenced to loneliness by disease.
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.
Branching out
“Bifurcated Tree” (oil), probably in north-central Massachusetts, by Gamaliel Waldo Berman (1852-1937).
Contradiction in terms?
Then Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney announcing a Save America's Treasures historic-preservation grant for the Old North Church, in Boston, 2003
“Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.’’
— Mitt Romney (born 1947), the Bay State’s Republican governor in 2003-2007. By current MAGA standards, he’s a liberal. A fiscal conservative and a businessman, he’s also a father of Massachusetts’s near-universal health-insurance system, a model for the Affordable Care Act.
‘Time, space and Energy’
“The Red Piece” (cut, carved, bent painted wood), by Mario Kon, in his show “visions on wood, at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through March 29.
He says:
“I have an affinity for the visual tension that transforms space geometrically. I draw lines, curves and shapes to divide the flat plane in order to create movement and depth. Negative and positive spaces are held together by the way light touches the surfaces, achieving balance between opposing forces.
“I work on wood because of its organic qualities, and approach my work with a spontaneous yet focused curiosity about the mysteries held on the surface as well as deep within. Drawing, painting and sculpture, are some of the techniques I use as the tools for navigation during the process of creation. Much of my work seeks to express the interaction of time, space and energy as it exists in the universe.’’
Halle Parker: in R.I. and elsewhere, federal cutbacks threaten anti-lead programs
Lead paint flaking off porch.
Via Kaiser Family Foundation Health News
Tighter regulations and an influx of federal money in recent years have helped communities across the U.S. initiate efforts to clean up lead contamination in soil, drinking water, and older homes. But Congress and the Trump administration have partially rolled back those rules and resources, potentially making it more challenging for cash-strapped cities and towns to undertake sweeping lead remediation programs.
That’s the case in New Orleans, where an investigation by Verite News found high lead levels in about half of the playgrounds on city property and found detectable levels of the toxic metal in most homes that tested their drinking water in a voluntary program.
No level of lead exposure is safe, according to federal environmental officials, but undertaking a comprehensive cleanup can be financially prohibitive. New Orleans is facing a $220 million budget deficit that has led to city employee furloughs and layoffs.
Congress allocated $15 billion over five years to lead pipe replacement under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a Biden-era measure set to expire at the end of this year. In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency also tightened the standards for lead-contaminated soil for the first time in 30 years and mandated that water systems replace all lead service lines by late 2037.
But a spending package passed by Congress and signed by President Trump in January redirected $125 million of that lead remediation money to wildfire prevention. And since October, the EPA has partially rolled back protections against soil contamination, raising the federal hazard level in urban areas and the threshold for removing contaminated soil.
Tom Neltner, the national director of the nonprofit advocacy group Unleaded Kids, said it was the first time an administration had loosened the limits on lead in soil.
“ We’ve seen the Trump administration say positive things about its commitment to lead but then take actions that undermine that,” Neltner said.
But, he added, progress is still being made in some communities.
EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch said the changes made under the Trump administration have reduced confusion and uncertainty that could hamper cleanup efforts.
“The Trump EPA’s record on protecting Americans — especially American children — from lead is unmatched,” Hirsch said in an emailed statement. “In just the last year, the Trump EPA backed up its commitment to reducing lead exposure in children with BILLIONS of dollars and historic action.”
She cited a November EPA announcement of $3 billion available to pay for water pipe replacement. That money is from the 2021 infrastructure law passed during the Biden administration.
Verite News spoke with people in Michigan, Indiana, and Rhode Island to learn how they addressed their lead pollution, with the aim of finding options that could be applied in New Orleans and other cities.
“ We don’t need to do research on lead anymore,” said Tulane University professor Felicia Rabito, an epidemiologist who researches the toxic metal and its sources. “What we need are policies to get the lead out of the environment.”
Benton Harbor, Michigan: Lead Pipes Begone
Benton Harbor, a predominantly Black beach town of about 9,000 people on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, spent three years out of compliance with federal drinking water standards. The concentration of lead in the water remained dangerously high until residents and organizations petitioned the EPA in 2021, drawing responses from state and federal officials.
“Nobody should be drinking lead in their water for this long,” said Elin Betanzo, an engineer who provided the petitioning residents with technical support.
That year, federal officials issued an enforcement order for the Michigan city to bring its water supply into compliance, and the state required Benton Harbor to replace all its lead pipes within 18 months. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, committed to securing funding in the state budget for the $35 million effort, which included bottled water distribution and paying outstanding water bills for low-income residents. The state, alongside the city, allocated money from its general fund, secured regional water loans, and cobbled together grants from several federal programs to cover the total.
By the end of 2023, city officials had completed the project. Now it’s one of 21 municipalities in Michigan that have replaced all their lead pipes. Benton Harbor had more than 4,500 pipes to replace.
The Trump administration has said it would defend the Biden-era mandate for lead-pipe replacement by 2037 against a lawsuit challenging it.
Betanzo recommended that utilities in other cities reduce barriers to line replacement to increase efficiency, as Benton Harbor’s water system did.
City officials saved time after assuming most pipes would be lead. They decided to go street by street, digging up, inspecting, and replacing nearly every pipe. If the pipe wasn’t lead, it wasn’t replaced, but nearly all were, Betanzo said.
Concentrating the mass replacement in one zone at a time made the contracts more cost-effective, Betanzo added. Contractors bid on zones in the city, and multiple contractors worked in different neighborhoods simultaneously. For transparency, progress was published on a public database.
The city also passed a law requiring lead lines be replaced, including those on customers’ side of the water meter. All residents had to allow the contractors onto their property or face disconnection. The residents didn’t pay for the line replacements.
“ The health benefits of lead service line replacement are greatest the sooner you get it done,” Betanzo noted, referencing a 2023 study she co-authored. “If you do it wrong, you can absolutely increase exposure to lead through a lead service line replacement.”
Completion of full pipe replacement is rare in the U.S., because of the cost, poor service line tracking, the time it takes, and the prioritization of other issues. In New Orleans, the process could require up to $1 billion of investment over 10 years, according to the city’s Sewerage and Water Board.
Adrienne Katner, an associate professor at the LSU Health School of Public Health, demonstrates how to sample water for lead testing in New Orleans in February.(Christiana Botic/Verite News and CatchLight Local/Report for America)
Indianapolis: Safe Dirt for Kids
It’s not just lead pipes that are problematic. In 2024, a study published in the academic journal GeoHealth estimated that nearly a quarter of homes in the U.S. have unsafe levels of lead in the soil on their properties.
To that end, Indianapolis has taken some actions that other cities can learn from, said Gabriel Filippelli, a professor at the Indiana University-Indianapolis School of Science who led the study and has researched the risk of lead exposure through soil for years.
The Indy Parks & Recreation department partnered with Filippelli’s team to test a dozen parks relatively close to the contaminated site of a shuttered lead smelter.
Out of all the parks tested, Filippelli’s team found only one hot spot, beneath an old bench from which lead-based paint had flaked off into the surrounding soil.
The parks department followed Filippelli’s suggestion to replace the bench and add concrete and a thick layer of mulch and plants on the ground, so kids wouldn’t be able to play directly in the contaminated dirt.
“It was a relatively low-cost intervention,” he said, estimating it cost a few thousand dollars. The ground wasn’t excavated, and new dirt wasn’t brought in. “If you deal with it by dilution and by capping, remove the source, you’re solving the problem for today and probably many, many years to come.”
The contaminated dirt may need to be removed in some cases and replaced with clean soil, such as after severe, widespread pollution from industrial sources. But Filippelli said such extensive remediation can be impractical and too expensive for cities to undertake on their own.
Where full remediation is cost-prohibitive, Filippelli said, there are more creative solutions, like landscaping, covering the area with new dirt, or mulching. These methods won’t eliminate the lead entirely, but they will significantly reduce exposure risk.
“You can eliminate the hazard at a fraction of the cost,” he said.
Cities could also look to New York City’s free Clean Soil Bank program, which places uncontaminated soil left over from construction projects in neighborhood-level banks for volunteers to distribute, he said.
Rhode Island: Stopping Lead at the Source
New England, home to some of the nation’s oldest homes, has led the U.S. in mitigating one of the largest ongoing sources of lead contamination: paint.
In 2023, the state legislature in Rhode Island, where most of the homes were built before lead paint was banned in 1978, passed a package of laws strengthening the state’s ability to enforce tenant protections.
Prior to 2023, the state had long required most landlords to have their property inspected to ensure it met “lead safe” guidelines, said DeeAnn Guo, a community organizer for the Childhood Lead Action Project. Although no level of lead is considered safe, replacing windows and doors that have lead paint, painting over all interior and exterior walls, and mitigating contaminated soil significantly reduce the risk of exposure.
But for years “there was no incentive to do it,” Guo said, “aside from it being the right thing to do.”
Now, landlords can be fined if they don’t have an active lead certificate on file for homes built before 1978, and the property has to be inspected every two years to remain in compliance. Before the new law, less than 15% of rentals were certified. In late 2025, that had increased to 40%, Guo said.
The state has also seen a steady decline in the levels of lead found in children’s blood.
Guo said it helps that the state has federal funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to subsidize its LeadSafe housing program. If a homeowner or landlord owns an old house, they can apply for the state to send an inspector. If lead is found, the state will then send a certified contractor to address the problem at little to no cost to the property owner.
Rhode Island prioritizes low-income households and homes with pregnant women or children under 6 years old, because of the heightened health risk. It can also help pay to remediate homes if a child living there has elevated levels of lead in their blood.
States and communities looking to start a successful lead paint abatement program using HUD money should combine strong enforcement, public education, and offers of subsidies, Guo said. It also helps to include community members in the planning process, she said.
Under the Trump administration, however, it might become harder for more communities like New Orleans to receive money for a “lead safe” program. Last year, HUD asked Congress to eliminate new funding for its lead hazards program, stating it would be restored in 2027. But advocates for more lead protections argue that once funding is lost, it is unlikely to be approved again.
“It shows the White House’s hypocrisy, where they talk about lead as being important and then propose eliminating the funds that are essential to cleaning up affordable housing,” said Neltner, the Unleaded Kids director. “This administration talks about the importance of children and then seems to be careless about children’s brains.”
This article was produced in collaboration with Verite News. The four-month investigation was supported by a Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting grant funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute. It was also produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship fund and Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
Halle Parker is a reporter for Verite News: hparker@veritenews.org