Vox clamantis in deserto
Llewellyn King: Air-conditioning costs might threaten catastrophe
Through-the-wall air-conditioning units, at the University Motor Inn, in Philadelphia.
WEST WARWICK,R.I.
The summer of our discontent is at hand. When I asked a professional weather forecaster what we might expect this season, he said, “Hades.”
That was as disturbing as everything else in this disturbing year.
America has a summer culture. You could say the whole of the Northern Hemisphere has one but there is a special reverence, a profound intimacy that Americans have with summer. It is a happy place for healing hurts, meeting old friends, making new ones, and the extraordinary joy of just basking, even romancing.
The British usually make jokes about summer. One goes, “I missed summer. I went to a movie and when I came out, it was over.”
Clearly, they aren’t making jokes like that this summer when temperatures have set historic records, and forced people to do extreme things to cool off. Untold deaths have resulted.
The French have always had their own reverence for summer and, as a nation, down tools in August and head to the beach, often in the South.
But they, like the British, are suffering in the current heat wave because there isn’t a lot of air conditioning — almost none in homes and a limited amount in public buildings. Only one in five British homes have air conditioning. In France there is more in the south, but not in the north around Paris. It was never needed.
I have been in London when it is hot, but not as hot as it has been so far this summer. Sitting in a theater in London in summer was excruciating, made the more so because Britain is humid.
Anyone who lives in America’s coastal regions, especially the South, knows the awful combo of heat and humidity.
Deaths from heat in Europe are widespread and are still being reported.
Air conditioning has shaped America for the last seven decades. It has made living with year-round comfort possible in the South, the Southwest and the West.
If it weren’t for our ability — with enough electricity — to reverse the climate in places like Florida, Texas and Arizona, the migration from the north wouldn’t have happened. Once there was air conditioning, people felt they could live comfortably anywhere in the nation.
Even so, all isn’t well. Indeed, this may be the summer of catastrophe, and deaths from heat and uncontrolled fires. The prognosis isn’t good.
The impending social pushback was pointed up by my colleague Herman K. Trabish, writing in Utility Dive. He was attending the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Las Vegas in early June, and wrote in a brief, “Protesters shouting affordability claims and chanting slogans interrupted a speech by NV Energy President and CEO Brandon Barkhuff.”
Trabish continued, “The confrontation shows the extent to which rising energy costs have stoked public anger, raising pressure on utilities and their regulators.”
The protests were directed at a demand charge approved by the utility commission that wouldn’t take effect until next year, but it opened up deep anxiety in southern Nevada about the cost of electricity in weather that is getting hotter and hotter.
Protest leader Leslie Vega told the media, after the protesters were escorted out of the meeting, “In Las Vegas, one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, you cannot live without electricity.”
Vega’s remarks might well reflect a truth for the whole of the South, Texas, and the Southwest. Cheap electricity has been a factor in the migration of tens of millions from the northern states to the South and West. It was never mentioned, it was just there.
Now the price of electricity is rising inexorably as temperatures appear to rise with equal, threatening vigor.
The natural response from those facing disaster in the heat zones will be to blame the electric utilities, and the ubiquitous data centers. There will be calls to nationalize the investor-owned ones, like NV Energy, and calls will go out to curb those utilities that are already publicly owned, which includes the rural electric cooperatives and those owned by towns and cities.
Additionally, residents in many states which have wildfire exposure will from time to time have their power cut off entirely for periods to reduce the danger of new fires being started by sparks from line shorting. That will cause new anger.
Most of the world accepts that aberrant weather, which is now common, is associated with global climate change, blamed in part on greenhouse-gas emissions.
That isn’t accepted by the Trump administration, which favors further use of greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. The president has said that global warming is a “hoax.”
Hot people have short tempers. They can be expected to have something to say as they suffer, and death tolls rise.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Mollusk magic
Painting by David Dunlop, in the group show “Landscapes: Intimate and Infinite,’’ at the Lily Pad East Gallery, Watch Hill, R.I.
The gallery says that David Dunlop “is a modern-day master whose luminous landscape paintings draw from both Renaissance techniques and contemporary science.”
The leading art of America is business?
From The Boston Guardian, article by Brendan Cassidy
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
Over the last two decades Boston’s Seaport has transformed into a bustling neighborhood filled with commerce and commotion.
The neighborhood also has become a hub for arts spaces, exhibits and museums.
The latest museum coming to the Seaport is the Museum of American Finance (MAF), set to open in July.
The MAF was in Manhattan from 1989 until 2017. After a hiatus, its artifacts and exhibits will soon be back on display with no cost of admission.
Museum Deputy Director Kristin Aguilera said the museum focuses on educating people on certain aspects of finance, from the founding of the United States through the present day.
“We’re very focused on providing information and keeping people educated,” said Aguilera. “A driving factor was that we wanted it to be free.”
Aguilera said the Seaport neighborhood was an attractive location for bringing the museum back to life.
“We’re very excited about the area,” said Aguilera. “It’s really becoming a big tourist destination. We’re excited to be in a location that will attract a lot of families, tour groups and people involved with finance.”
The Seaport is also home to the Boston Children’s Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art’s Boston location, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum and the Boston Fire Museum.
When the MAF opens to the public on Friday, July 3, there will be seven initial exhibits on display.
The seven exhibits are Personal Finance, Alexander Hamilton Experience, Investing in US Financial History, Hub of Innovation, The Future of Finance, A Financial Revolution and America in Circulation will all offer something different to attendees.
The Hub of Innovation exhibit will focus specifically on Boston. It will feature an interactive map and will allow guests to read documents and stories regarding finance around the city and state.
Aguilera said the museum should have something for everyone. For the younger audience, The Future of Finance could be a main appeal, focusing on topics like cryptocurrency.
“A lot of words people have heard recently but may not be so sure what they mean,” said Aguilera.
Other items on display will be checks signed by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, counterfeiting and anti-counterfeiting displays and original financial material from the Revolutionary War era.
Aguilera said the museum is excited to welcome in classes of students from middle and high schools around Boston. Education programs will be a priority and should help students learn more about certain aspects of finance.
The MAF will be open Wednesday through Sunday and is at 200 Seaport Blvd.
‘Creation and dissolution’
“Interface” (oil), by Elsie Kagan, in her show “the drop falls,’’ at 3S Artspace, Portsmouth, N.H., through Sept. 27.
The gallery says:
“Elsie Kagan's lush, gestural oil paintings begin with her hand but evolve through collaboration with AI. Her layered landscapes are never real places — they explore climate anxiety, cultural upheaval, and the tension between material mark-making and algorithmic processing. Water is a recurring metaphor in her work, reflecting life, reflection, and the cycles of creation and dissolution.’’
‘My little kingdom’
Famous amusement ride at Revere Beach in 1961.
“I held a memory of the old Revere beach in my mind’s eye, the Dodgems, the Wile Mouse, the Cyclone, the smell of fried dough and pepper steak, the families who used to come down here by the tens of thousands on a warm Saturday morning like this and spread out their blankets and chairs. It was my little kingdom, this three-mile stretch of sand.’’
— Roland Merullo (born 1953), American writer
James T. Brett: New England faces risk as USMCA trade pact review looms
On a bridge on the Maine and New Brunswick border crossing.
— Photo by Marty Aligata
BOSTON
In New England, our manufacturers, technology firms, financial and insurance institutions, and countless small businesses depend on trade relations and the rules that govern the free flow of goods and services in order to ensure prosperity. For our region, economic ties need to be strengthened in order to ensure continued growth across our six states. It is why it is imperative that our nation remains committed to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Prior to the USMCA being negotiated, there were few who would dispute that an update to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was needed to bring our trade relations with Canada and Mexico into the 21st Century. The USMCA has done so: The updates brought on by the treaty have provided stability to the trade relationship we have with our neighbors, which in turn supports broad-based growth among all three nations.
The importance of our region’s trade partnerships with Canada, in particular, cannot be denied. The U.S. Department of Commerce has identified Canada as a No. 1 or No. 2 export market for New England businesses, and our overall level of trade with Canada has increased since the implementation of the USMCA. Indeed, our region exported nearly $8.8 billion in goods to Canada in 2025. Data from Canada shows that in 2025, service exports from our six-state area to our northern neighbor totaled approximately $6.25 billion. Further, it is not an overstatement that, overall, hundreds of thousands of jobs in New England rely in some part on trade and investment with our USMCA partners.
From the outset of the first Trump Administration, trade leaders in the Senate, House of Representatives, and in the administration worked in good faith to make improvements as they were putting together the USMCA to ensure bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. The final product did not contain all of what business interests wanted in a trade agreement, however it reached a consensus that has allowed our economy to continue to flourish.
The USMCA has also ensured that businesses in our region have the advantage of rules-based investment and trade. The continued reliance on this level of predictability can only serve to maintain and even grow business opportunities for New England for years to come. There are also numerous benefits to be had by engaging in trade with our neighbors especially as we look to solidify supply chains among our six states at a time of unpredictability around the globe.
For New England, the choice is clear: We need the USMCA to help solidify our regional commerce and provide companies of every size the confidence to invest, hire and sell across North America. While policymakers consider the future of trade, they should listen to the businesses that depend on it every day. And as we face a July 1 deadline for the Joint Review of USMCA, strengthen it, enforce it, modernize it — but do not forgo it. Lasting benefits will continue under the auspices of the USMCA and New England’s economy will remain stronger for it.
James T. Brett is president and chief executive of The New England Council.
Where are the screams of yesteryear?
“Rooted” (photograph), by Ruth Skinner, in the group show “Curiouser and Curiouser,’’ at the Hopkinton (Mass.) Center for the Arts, through June 26.
Painful powerful pollinators
From the show “Birds, Bees, Flowers, and Trees: Images of Nature Past and Present,’’ at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., through Sept. 20.
Apiarist John L. Byard, at the Massachusetts Agriculture College’s bee-research center in 1915.
Philip K. Howard: Reclaiming ownership of America
What does America stand for? Pausing to reflect on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America’s self-conception seems to be in disarray. Americans no longer believe that the future will be brighter. Trust is near all-time lows, not only low trust of governing institutions but low trust of the moral character of other Americans.
I have a hypothesis: America is out of our control. Like a giant wind tunnel, the “system” propels us forward with little opportunity for human direction. Law is everywhere, even in ordinary daily interactions. Instead of discussing what’s right, or practical, Americans worry about legal ramifications. Billboards by lawyers promise riches in retribution for any tragedy or disappointment. Instead of upholding law as a shield for freedom, our leaders wield law as a weapon for self-interest. Of course Americans feel fear and distrust. The land of opportunity is a legal minefield.
What’s needed, I think, is to reclaim ownership for how we do things. Pull law back into a framework of outer boundaries, not as an arbiter of daily decisions. Law is not supposed to be central planning. Let principals run schools. Let officials make tradeoff judgments needed to modernize infrastructure. Let people in a free society decide for themselves what’s right and wrong, and judge and be judged accordingly. That’s what freedom is supposed to offer.
For a project on making government manageable, I’ve recently revisited some early organizational theorists. One of these, Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), is known for her insights on giving employees “authority all down the line,” so workers are free to collaborate and to adapt to “the law of the situation.”
Follett was also a prescient critic of modern democracy, which she felt was disempowering people from being able to collaborate and take ownership for local affairs. Follett saw politics as a process of manipulating “a crowd,” with little opportunity for human growth and fulfillment. Follett was a sharp critic of the conception of freedom as individual rights: “You may as well break a branch off the tree and expect it to live.”
People find meaning and growth, Follett argued, in working in groups. That’s how people learn, and develop mutual commitment and pride. Follett’s analysis aligns with the pluralistic traditions of America—where people of similar interests and backgrounds form communities with high social capital. Follett echoes Tocqueville’s description of why Americans take ownership for community activities—it’s in their “self-interest, rightly understood.”
As part of a series in The Free Press on great Americans not featured in history books, I’ve written this brief bio of Follett. I think Follett has something to say to us. The mistake we made was to delegate decisions to systems. No centralized system can make things work fairly or sensibly. No system of atomized rights can achieve fairness. Law can’t govern; law is a framework for people to govern. Law can’t decide what’s sensible and fair in daily dealings. Law can’t make us trust each other. Only people, working with other people, can develop trust and bonds needed for, you name it, good schools, energetic public agencies, moral standards, and hope for the future.
Philip K. Howard is founder and chairman of Common Good, and an author, lawyer, New York civic leader and photographer.His books include The Death of Common Sense. Common Good is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates simplifying government regulations and cutting red tape to promote personal responsibility and accountability.
Don Morrison: Learning how to father
“Paternal Advice,’’ by Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans
PITTSFIELD, Mass.
Sonora Smart Dodd was 16 years old when, in 1898, her mother died in childbirth. The baby survived, and Sonora helped her beleaguered father raise the boy and his four older brothers on a farm outside Spokane, Wash.
One Sunday morning, after sitting through a church sermon praising the new Mother’s Day celebrations popping up around the country, she decided that fathers deserved equal recognition.
Sonora began lobbying local church leaders, and on June 19, 1910 — her father’s 68th birthday — Spokane marked America’s first Father’s Day. The idea caught on, and in 1972 President Richard Nixon established the third Sunday in June as a national holiday in honor of dads.
This Sunday, once again, Americans will come together to salute their family patriarch with gifts of neckties and power tools as he grills various meat products to cinders. The day also gives us an opportunity to reflect on what fatherhood has become in this age of fractured families, shifting gender roles and proliferating views of masculinity.
Everybody has a father — present, absent or long gone — so nearly all of us can claim some familiarity with the job, regardless of how it was handled. My own dad was a man of his time. To him, a father’s main role was as family breadwinner. He focused on running his retail store while our mom raised the little ones. Eventually, the business faltered, and she began working alongside him, entrusting us kids to a shifting pageant of paid help.
That wasn’t rare in our dying little town. So I almost didn’t notice when, a few decades later, mothers began joining the U.S. workforce in record numbers as their spouses took on more child-rearing and housekeeping responsibilities.
My own wife went back to work shortly after our first son was born. She found a terrific babysitter, who remained with us for years, and I got to learn a few domestic skills.
In truth, I was never good at diaper-changing, skinned-knee disinfecting, bedtime storytelling and other elements of effective parenting, but I did find such chores surprisingly satisfying. Only later did I realize why.
Neuroscientists have found that the brains of new fathers are altered by the birth of their first child. Neuronal patterns change and dormant hormones stir. Testosterone-fueled assertiveness is crowded out by oxytocin-infused feelings of tenderness and generosity. Touching or merely being near their kids brings unaccustomed pleasure. Not for nothing did God and evolution make the little nippers so adorable.
Thus, I was not surprised when the role of paterfamilias began shifting a few decades ago from my dad’s mostly hands-off approach to a deeper male involvement in the details of child-raising.
Not every father is OK with that change. Traditionalists see the blending of parental roles as troublingly “woke,” or inefficient, or bad for children. Some husbands are uncomfortable with the idea of wives working outside the home, and some moms simply aren’t interested in doing so.
That’s fine. The world of kid-raising has room for multiple approaches, and children can thrive under a variety of family arrangements — provided these offer love, safety and stability. For a father, psychologists say, being a presence in his kids’ lives is crucial, even if he and their mom eventually split.
One of the nice things about Father’s Day is that it honors all who have taken up that responsibility. The celebration doesn’t favor some theories over others, new fathers over veterans, live-in dads over separated ones. What counts is that the guy stays in the picture.
That’s why the third Sunday of June is one of my favorite holidays. It’s an equal-opportunity, non-judgmental celebration. If you’ve fathered, you qualify.
When my first son was born, I consulted books and articles about how to raise him. Yet the recommendations seemed simplistic, sometimes confusing. So I winged it, made stuff up as I went along, even borrowed some moves from my dad — like trying to make each kid feel special. I no doubt committed a few mistakes, such as assuming their world was similar to the one in which I grew up. Still, both of my sons turned out better than fine.
I recently recalled the moment when, in the maternity ward, I gazed into the eyes of my firstborn. He seemed remarkably self-asssured. I realized that much of who he would become was already present, and that my ask was less to shape him than to support him. The best I could ever do was keep him safe and make him feel valued.
That’s not such an easy task for a stressed-out dad in a high-pressure job, and my joys were tempered with doubt and anxiety. But the years flew by, and the kids have retained their self-assurance. They are now raising their own cubs.
I resist giving advice. Though staying engaged is important, fatherhood is ultimately a journey each man must navigate for himself. He may falter, but he plods on.
As Sonora Smart Dodd understood more than a century ago, being a dad is one of the most demanding, most rewarding jobs in the world. Sure was for me and, I hope, fellow dads everywhere. Happy Father’s Day to us all.
Don Morrison is a veteran international editor, writer and lecturer. He’s also co-chairman of The Berkshire Eagle editorial advisory board.
Don’t tread on it
‘‘Still Life With Eel’’ (oil on canvas), by Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), in the show “Looking for America,’’ at the Ogunquit (Maine) Museum of American Art, through July 19.
The Ogunquit River exits the Rachel Carson Preserve on the left and flows into the Gulf of Maine.
Chris Powell: Conn. anti-ICE law is a fraud; so is ‘believe all women’
Fuzzy federal photo of masked ICE agents seizing an alleged illegal alien in Connecticut.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
The most recent politically correct charade of Connecticut's nullifiers -- including Gov. Ned Lamont, Atty. Gen. William Tong, and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly -- has been quickly exposed. It's the new state law, enacted with the governor's signature a month ago, purporting to prohibit federal immigration agents from wearing masks while on duty in the state. It's a fraud.
News organizations have reported video recordings of masked immigration agents being challenged about the law by bystanders in Hartford and Danbury, with the agents telling the bystanders, in effect, to drop dead. One agent replies: "Who's going to arrest me?" Another says: "We're federal. We're over state. Go back to social studies."
The Trump administration is suing in federal court for an injunction against the new law and in the meantime the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is openly defying it.
Despite supporting the legislation, Governor Lamont has not ordered the state police to try enforcing it. Chest-thumpers among the nullifiers, like state Attorney General Tong, are nowhere to be seen amid the defiance. If the nullifiers really thought that the law was legitimate, they'd be demonstrating a little physical courage on its behalf or at least be erecting barricades to keep immigration agents out of Connecticut.
So was the law just a scheme to please the far-lefties who control Connecticut's Democratic Party and keep them riled up in an election year? That's one of many fair political questions about illegal immigration that won't be answered because it won't be asked.
Of course, this doesn't mean that federal agents shouldn't be unmasked and identified by name and badge number whenever they make arrests, just as state and municipal police officers are. That is basic accountability and public safety. You're entitled to resist arrest if you don't know who is arresting you. But this is for Congress and the president to legislate. Democrats in Connecticut won't comply voluntarily with the Constitution's supremacy clause until their party regains power in Washington.
* * *
Two years ago many Democrats purported to be unable to understand how some sane, decent, and politically moderate people could support Donald Trump for president over the incumbent, Joe Biden, and then, when Biden's senility exploded on national television and he was compelled to withdraw, how they would not support his cackling airhead of a vice president, Kamala Harris. After all, many of those sane, decent, and politically moderate people have acknowledged Trump's repulsiveness.
Maybe the U.S. Senate campaign in Maine will help those Democrats understand.
For the party in Maine has just nominated a faux populist, Graham Platner, who had himself tattooed with a Nazi SS death's head, who purported not to know what it stood for, who has called himself a communist, and who has abused a number of women. So what used to be the party of "believe all women" has just discovered an exception. Women now may be disbelieved or disrespected if believing or respecting them might cost the party control of the Senate.
This is fair enough if one thinks, as was thought by some of those sane, decent, and moderate people who reluctantly voted for Trump two years ago, that certain policy issues -- such as illegal immigration, late-term abortion, and the erasure of gender differences in restrooms, sports, and prisons -- outweigh a candidate's character defects. Two years ago many of those sane, decent, and moderate people thought that stopping illegal immigration, late-term abortion, and erasure of gender differences in law and policy were more important than preventing Trump's return to the White House. They thought awful Trump was right on the biggest issues.
Now, with Platner's candidacy, many Democrats think that continuing to facilitate illegal immigration, late-term abortion, and erasure of gender differences in law and policy is more important than keeping a proto-Nazi, Communist, and abuser of women out of the Senate -- as long as he will vote with Democrats to organize the chamber and help thwart Trump.
Fair enough as well. Clarity often results when the jackboot is put on the other foot.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Llewellyn King: The new ‘news’ media: A pea of news in a mattress of Words
— Photo by Pmau
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Journalism is choking on the low-hanging fruit.
Every day hundreds of newsletters and podcasts flood inboxes. These are almost entirely concerned with political goings-on in Washington.
But this isn’t to say that journalism is alive and well. In fact, this is a symptom of journalism’s straitened times.
Mostly, there is just a pea of news in a mattress of words.
The web has made the delivery of journalism cheap and easy, but it hasn’t helped with the high cost of covering the news, of sending reporters to see what is happening in the courts, the state houses, and overseas; or in science and technology, which so affect modern life.
It also hasn’t enabled news organizations to spend months on an investigation that may or may not pay off.
Instead, every minuscule development in politics is treated as a big, breaking event, and is analyzed exhaustively.
Analysis is substituting for reporting. The actual snippet of reporting is often attributed to a newspaper like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, or one of the news services, say, Reuters.
Analyzing nothing much doesn’t change it to something.
Much of what is rushed out as news wouldn’t get past an old-fashioned editor like Jim Michaels of Forbes, who I am told, in that magazine’s print heyday would chide reporters, saying, “You’re telling me things I already know.”
The ease of distribution and recording has also caused blogs with attendant webinars to sprout across the news ecosystem. Much of it is in the form of analysis, more and more analysis of less and less.
The big new entry in my inbox is magazines which were once monthly or weekly, but have joined the frenzy with daily newsletters. These include The Economist, The New Yorker, The Spectator, The Atlantic and even Vanity Fair.
I subscribed because they were weekly or monthly. I didn’t want a daily gusher.
There is also a plethora of digital-only publications — the best in my inbox is ProPublica, which manages original reporting.
The big ones which are, almost, substitute newspapers but are heavy on political coverage include Politico (which is broader) and Semafor. A new entry, NOTUS, is staffed by former Washington Post reporters. So far, it is heavily political.
I remember when people bought the Post for the Style section and its other goodies, not just its hometown industry of politics.
A further indication of the news drought, despite the torrents of words, is how many of the new dailies are quoting what was said on television. Time was when no print outlet would deign to do that. It was expected for television to pick up from the newspapers, not the other way round.
There was a reason behind the old pecking order: Broadcasting needs to have people say things in front of a camera or a microphone. By contrast, print’s best stories come from sources who are keen not to be identified, let alone go on television or radio.
In today’s vengeful times, unidentified sources are essential, to be used sparingly, but nonetheless essential. The reader has to depend on the high standing of the platform and the integrity of the byline to judge the truthfulness.
There is no doubt that the tumultuous politics that began when Donald Trump entered the arena have been good for cable news stations, which have morphed into political channels, shamelessly partisan. The politics have also been good for newsletters and blogs.
But will that be true after the Trump era? The strictly conservative New York Sun reports traffic to MAGA websites is down dramatically.
To escape the virtual political overload, I reach for the three heavyweights among newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and, though diminished, The Washington Post.
What the bulk of the press, from weeklies to big city papers to the new digital entrants, need is a sound source of income so that they have the money to do the job, to weed out local scandal, corruption and abuse, and to develop entertaining writers.
You get what you pay for and in the news business, since it lost its advertising revenue to the likes of Google, you are getting political froth: opinions about the news — most days the same opinion with shadings of difference from many publishers.
Yesterday, I counted 19 of these offerings in my inbox. I gave up on the breathlessness and read a book.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com , and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Delving into distance
Joint show entitled “Unsettled,’’ by Emily Hass and John Winship, at\the Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine, through July 18.
The gallery explains:
“Hass uses found objects as an anchor for her shapeshifting geometric forms. They live on old paper, tide-washed wood, tin cans, and sailcloth. Hass’ deep interest in displacement is a throughline in this grouping of new and familiar work, including selections from her ‘Exiles’ and ‘Water Shapes’ series.
“The subjects of Winship’s paintings are derived from found snapshots. He renders enigmatic figures in thick atmospheres of acrylic paint, leaving a borrowed sense of nostalgia and a slight uneasiness.
“Leaning into the unsettled nature of our current world and the infinite transience of time, Hass and Winship bring us an opportunity for closer examination of both psychological and physical distance.’’
What was that noise?
Untitled (ghost) (inkjet print), by Mandy Lamb, in the show “By Design: The Worlds of Betsy James Wyeth,’’ at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through Nov. 2.
—Image courtesy of the artist
The museum says:
{We} “invited artists Mandy Lamb, Linda Nguyen Lopez, Elaine K. Ng, and Claire Pentecost to participate in a residency on Allen and Benner Islands, where they encountered lingering traces of Wyeth that informed new works. The four share resonant approaches to place, materials, ecology, and the emotional lives of objects. Their works highlight a range of stories embedded in the islands: photographic series of ghostly vignettes (Lamb); large-scale ceramic sculptures inspired by Wyeth’s shard collections (Lopez); gathered natural dyes (Ng); and embroidered renditions of island soil samples on a monumental textile, referencing Wyeth’s fiber arts practice (Pentecost).’’
So they got into high tech instead and awaited global warming
“New Hampshire is called the Granite State, because it is built entirely of granite, covered with a couple of inches of dirt. The New Hampshire farmer does not ‘till the soil,’ he blasts it. For nine months of the year he brings in wood, shovels snow, thaws out the pump, and wonders why Peary wanted to discover the North Pole. The other three months he blasts, plants, and hopes.’’
— Will M. Cressey, in The History of New Hampshire (1920’s)
But that bird can bite
“The Goddess of Liberty Feeding the Eagle” (oil on canvas, ca. 1805), by Samuel Lovett Waldo, in the show “America’s 250: Selections from the Collection,’’ at the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Conn., through Sept. 27.
Austin Sarat: Many college students are veteran cheaters; don’t blame AI
From The Conversation (not including image above)
AMHERST, Mass.
My colleagues and I recently spoke with a group of talented, interesting students who just completed their first year of college about using artificial intelligence as a research tool.
I asked what must have seemed like an unrelated question: “How many of you cheated in high school?”
Most of the students raised their hands. Perhaps comforted by the realization that they had plenty of company, they seemed neither embarrassed nor ashamed.
This is not the first time I’ve asked my students that question. On each occasion, the results have been pretty much the same.
By the time students end up in college classrooms, many have encountered cheatingand think it makes sense in some cases to do so, because of factors like pressure to succeed.
Let’s be clear: AI has not created the problem of intellectual dishonesty among this generation of students.
Alas, the problem long predates AI and runs much deeper.
The cheating pipeline
Many college students are honest and hardworking. But by the time some students get to college, they have become accustomed to academic misconduct in American high schools.
As Eric Anderman, a scholar of educational psychology, wrote in 2018: “Academic cheating is prevalent throughout all types of American high schools. Data from one large national study indicated that 51% of high school students admit that they have cheated during a test.”
Other research on high school cheating found in 2020 that 64% of 70,000 high school students across the country admitted to cheating on a test, and 58% admitted to plagiarism. Approximately 95% of high school students, meanwhile, said they “participated in some form of cheating, whether it was on a test, plagiarism or copying homework.”
And in one Pennsylvania high school, 90 of the 100 respondents to a 2018 school survey “admitted to cheating on some form of schoolwork at least once.”
One of the respondents put it simply: “Everybody cheats.”
Students can cheat for different reasons.
They might feel unprepared for an exam or paper, but they still want to get good grades and gain admission into a competitive college.
They might recognize that cheating is wrong, but they justify it by saying everyone else is doing the same thing, or that they have teachers who don’t do their jobs well. Other students might not fully understand what cheating means in different contexts or think that what they are doing counts as cheating.
This kind of thinking can allow students who sometimes cheat to not think of themselves as cheaters.
Sociologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza call this tendency “techniques of neutralization.” This means people use their internalized ways of seeing the world to justify acting in a way they know is wrong.
Looking the other way
A 2020 study of 840 undergraduate college students found that 32% of them had cheated in some way on an exam.
College professors like me may be tempted to look the other way if we suspect a student is cheating, or try to solve the
cheating problem by changing the ways we evaluate students.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported in 2025 that faculty across the country are giving up on writing assignments, which students can produce with AI, and returning to in-class tests and examinations.
Every college and university has rules against plagiarism and other forms of intellectual dishonesty.
To offer one example, Harvard’s policy says that “Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and affairs.”
Students who violate the cheating rules at Harvard and elsewhere might face consequences ranging from failing a class to being expelled. But many instructors don’t report incidents of cheating to administrators responsible for enforcing those rules and meting out punishments.
Few colleges have developed an intellectual integrity curriculum that treats cheating as a habit and works to counter it over the four years of a student’s college education.
I think that, like any bad habit, students can only be weaned from cheating slowly, with a support program and clear, severe consequences when they are caught.
Cheating in college
Getting a sense of the dimension of the cheating problem on college campuses is not hard.
In February 2026, for example, a Harvard undergraduate student named Matthew Tobin published an opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson entitled “Plagiarize or Perish.”
He cited a 2024 Harvard Crimson study that showed 47% of 850 surveyed senior students said they had cheated.
Tobin wrote that while some people say cheating is the result of “modern students’ scholastic disengagement or use of artificial intelligence,” other issues are at play. Plagiarism and academic misconduct “have been happening all too often at Harvard for far longer than the advent of these issues,” he wrote.
Reported academic misconduct cases increased at Ohio State University by 57% between 2014 and 2018. This is likely a low estimate, since most academic misconduct cases are not reported or investigated.
Charlie McLaughlin, an Oberlin student, published an op-ed in the student newspaper in May 2026 criticizing the college’s decision to change its honor code charter to allow professors to proctor tests, meaning supervise students while they take the exam.
“Changing this policy is a clear sign that this school doesn’t trust us to learn to be adults with integrity,” McLaughlin wrote. “That’s sad. Maybe, it’s also reasonable. Maybe, we don’t deserve that trust. That’s even sadder.”
Princeton also recently abandoned its 133-year-old prohibition against proctoring exams “to address increasing concerns over academic integrity violations, including the proliferation of AI usage.”
A 2020 study found that 32% of undergraduate college students had cheated in some way on an exam. SDI Productions/Stock Productions
A teacher’s dilemma
I don’t think of my students as cheaters, and I don’t want to regard them with the kind of suspicion that turns teaching into a policing activity. But it is my job and that of the college where I teach to recognize that our students need a lot of help to develop good academic habits.
Unless colleges acknowledge these facts, I believe they have little chance to curb the pervasiveness of cheating.
Faculty can start by weaving discussions of intellectual integrity throughout their courses and enlisting students to think about who they want to be – and whether they want to live their lives cutting corners and gaming the system. Only then can colleges hope to build what Tobin calls “a commitment to academic integrity in (our) students.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College
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 affiliation.
Sarah Jane Tribble/Arielle Zionts: Maine and other states deal with threats of federal rural health program clawbacks
Maine population density.
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News (not including map above)
In Maine, state health officials hoped to steer a slice of $190 million in new federal rural health funding to shield hospitals and clinics from the fallout caused by cuts to federal health programs.
Their plan would have helped pay to treat low-income, uninsured patients.
But federal leaders overseeing the five-year, $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program said no.
“It was not our decision,” said Lisa Letourneau, a senior adviser at Maine’s health department.
Letourneau told an audience of health-care providers, advocates, and community groups during a March webinar that the change was “disappointing.”
Maine isn’t alone in having to make changes to plans pitched to win a share of the Trump administration’s new rural health fund.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz praised states’ plans when announcing the rural health program awards last year and said his agency would help states “turn their ideas into lasting improvements for rural families.”
But state officials and health-care leaders said it’s also clear the agency wants to encourage specific policy changes and hold states accountable to the promises they made and rules they agreed to follow.
During the past six months, as states raced to meet the program’s looming federal deadlines, CMS staffers worked with state health departments to make a flurry of changes, including scrapping some initiatives. The federal agency has the power to rescind existing funding — or reduce future awards — if states don’t follow rules or meet their goals. “We will take the money back” if states “don’t abide by what they wrote, if they don’t do a good job,” Oz said at an event this month in Washington, D.C.
Congressional Republicans created the Rural Health Transformation Program as a last-minute sweetener in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer. The funding was intended to offset concerns about the outsize fallout anticipated in rural communities from the law, which is expected to reduce Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over a decade.
“MISUSE OF FUNDS.—If the Administrator determines that a State is not using amounts allotted or redistributed to the State under this subsection in a manner consistent with the description provided by the State in its application approved under paragraph (2), the Administrator may withhold payments to, or reduce payments to, or recover previous payments from, the State under this subsection as the Administrator deems appropriate, and any amounts so withheld, or that remain after any such reduction, or so recovered, shall be returned to the Treasury of the United States.’’
On a call with reporters in December, Oz said “one of the smartest things the president and Congress” did when creating the program was to create a threat of “clawbacks,” or taking money back if states don’t do what they promised in their applications.
Oz went on to describe how the clawback mechanism gives governors leverage to press their legislatures to adopt the Trump administration’s priorities, such as instituting the presidential fitness test in schools.
“This gives you extra umph, a little bit of gusto to go after these issues,” he said.
That message was received loudly and clearly in Tennessee. Michael Hendrix, policy director for the governor’s office, said during a hearing that federal officials said the state “would be more competitive for more funding through policy change.” He said CMS also relayed that “some share of this year’s funding, if policies are not implemented, might be clawed back.”
The threat of rescinding funding has caused fear and confusion among health organization leaders, said Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association.
“We’re worried that facilities and organizations won’t apply for the grant money because of the fears of the clawbacks,” he said, adding that he would like the administration to clarify if federal officials could take back grant money that states have already awarded to rural health organizations.
While clawbacks are a “necessary, important tool” to address misuse of funds and ensure the money goes toward helping rural communities, they are also “a dangerous tool,” said Morgan, whose organization represents rural hospitals and clinics.
CMS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
States must file progress reports by the end of August. They then have until Oct. 30 to commit their first-year funding and Sept. 30, 2027, to spend it.
States are progressing at wildly different rates, with some still developing grant applications and others already distributing money, according to a tracker created by Morgan’s rural health association.
In late January, Iowa became the first to award funding. The tracker shows that most states have opened grant applications, but 11 others, including Wyoming, Maine, and Colorado, have yet to post any funding opportunities.
CMS’s tight control over state programs is one reason for such disparity in progress.
Instead of typical grants, the rural health program uses cooperative agreements, which require a back-and-forth partnership, said Charlie Sagona, a grant specialist at Assel Grant Services, a consulting firm that helps organizations manage grants.
“You are going to be working very, very closely with them; things will ebb and flow and change and move,” said Sagona, who is helping several large hospital systems interested in winning some of the rural funding.
Kate Sapra, deputy director of CMS’s Office of Rural Health Transformation, said at a May event that the agency has “many avenues of oversight.” Staffers are tracking applications for state funding and “looking to see when contracts are executed,” she said.
Sapra said the agency wants to “have conversations with states before they get to the point” of putting out something that’s not allowed. It’s “really important to us” for the funding to reach rural providers, she added.
Sapra said her office has filled about half of 30 new slots for project officers. The officers and the states check in “at least twice a month, if not on a weekly basis.”
Vermont Medicaid Director Jill Mazza Olson, who led her state’s rural health application, said the officers are “very responsive.”
Vermont is one of the states that had to ditch or tweak its plans. Olson said the state pulled its plan to increase housing for rural healthcare workers after federal officials said they would evaluate the proposal based on the agency’s guidelines for construction projects at healthcare facilities. Those rules allow only “minor” renovations to existing buildings or campuses.
In Colorado, state leaders changed grant eligibility rules after they “received feedback” from CMS and healthcare providers, said Marc Williams, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing.
Wyoming legislators and state officials spent months designing, discussing, and voting on a plan to invest most of its award into a perpetuity fund that could have generated $28.5 million for the state to spend every year, “forever,” according to materials presented to lawmakers.
The state had to pull the idea because it “was a degree too innovative for CMS to swallow,” said Republican state Sen. Charles Scott, a veteran lawmaker and cattle rancher. “This whole thing has been a bit of a disappointment to us in Wyoming.”
Stefan Johansson, director of the state’s health department, said Wyoming’s final spending plan wasn’t approved until mid- to late May. He said the department hopes to begin awarding money in late summer or early fall.
“Make no mistake — it is a very compressed timeline,” he said.
Across the country, Maine was forced to rework its plan to reimburse hospitals and clinics when they provide “essential” care to certain uninsured patients.
Letourneau said during her March remarks that federal officials rejected this idea because “provider payments had to be more directly linked to a rural transformation kind of activity.”
Lindsay Hammes, a spokesperson for Maine’s health department, told KFF Health News that funding will instead help providers transition to reimbursement models that aren’t based on how many patients they treat.
Reworked plans call for spending $28.5 million to support providers, Letourneau said in March.
“But there definitely will be more strings attached.”
KFF Health News correspondent Darius Tahir contributed to this report.
Presenting manic America
“I Feel Like I'm Just Waking Up,’’ by John Joseph Hanright, at the Samuel Owen Gallery, Greenwich, Conn.
He says:
“To create my paintings, I draw from several strains of American popular culture and art throughout the last several decades. By mining advertisements, magazine headlines, comics, pop art, and iconic imagery, I hope to create complex, layered narratives. From heroes to hookups, these narratives investigate our interpersonal dynamics with a manic verve that is central to the American experience.’’