Llewellyn King: The trials of celebrity love, from Taylor-Burton to Swift-Kelce

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963)

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

I wouldn’t know Taylor Swift if she sat next to me on an airplane, which is unlikely because she travels by private jet. If she were to take a commercial flight, she wouldn’t be sitting in the economy seats, which the airlines politely call coach.

Swift (who lives in Watch Hill, R.I., part of the time) needs to go by private jet these days: She is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, and that is a problem. Love needs candle-lightin,g not floodlighting.

Being in love when you are famous, especially if both the lovers are famous, is tough. The normal, simple joys of that happy state are a problem: There is no privacy, precious few places outside of gated homes where the lovers can be themselves. 

They can’t do any of the things unfamous lovers take for granted, like catching a movie, holding hands or stealing a kiss in public without it being caught on video and transmitted on social media to billions of fans. Dinner for two in a cozy restaurant and what each orders is flashed around the world. “Oysters for you, sir?”

Worse, if the lovers are caught in public not doing any of those things and, say, staring into the middle distance  looking glum, the same social media will erupt with speculation about the end of the affair.

If you are a single celebrity, you are gossip-bait, catnip for the paparazzi. If a couple, the speculation is whether it will be wedding bells or splitsville.

The world at large is convinced that celebrity lovers are somehow in a different place from the rest of us. It isn’t true, of course, but there we are: We think their highs are higher and lows are lower.

That is doubtful, but it is why we yearn to hear about the ups and downs of their romances; Swift’s more than most because they are the raw material of her lyrics. Break up with Swift and wait for the album.

When I was a young reporter in London in the 1960s, I did my share of celebrity chasing. Mostly, I found, the hunters were encouraged by their prey. But not when Cupid was afoot. Celebrity is narcotic except when the addiction is inconvenient because of a significant other.

In those days, the most famous woman in the world, and seen as the most beautiful, was Elizabeth Taylor. I was employed by a London newspaper to follow her and her lover, Richard Burton, around London. They were engaged in what was then, and maybe still is, the most famous love affair in the world.

The great beauty and the great Shakespearian actor were the stuff of legends. It also was a scandal because when they met in Rome, on the set of Cleopatra, they were both married to other people. She to the singer Eddie Fisher and he to his first wife, the Welsh actress and theater director Sybil Williams.

Social rules were tighter then and scandal had a real impact. This scandal, like most scandals of a sexual nature, raised consternation along with prurient curiosity.

My role at The Daily Sketch was to stake out the lovers where they were staying at the luxury Dorchester Hotel, on Park Lane.

I never saw Taylor and Burton. Day after day I would be sidetracked by the hotel’s public-relations officer with champagne and tidbits of gossip, while they escaped by a back entrance.

Then, one Sunday in East Dulwich, a leafy part of South London where I lived with my first wife, Doreen, one of the great London newspaper writers, I happened upon them.

Every Sunday, we went to the local pub for lunch, which included traditional English roast beef or lamb. It was a good pub — which today might be called a gastropub, but back then it was just a pub with a dining room. An enticing place.

One Sunday, we went as usual to the pub and were seated right next to my targets: the most famous lovers in the world, Taylor and Burton. The elusive lovers, the scandalous stars were there next to me: a gift to a celebrity reporter.

I had never seen before, nor in the many years since, two people so in love, so aglow, so entranced with each other, so oblivious to the rest of the room. No movie that they were to star in ever captured love as palpable as the aura that enwrapped Taylor and Burton. You could warm your hands on it. Doreen whispered from behind her hand, “Are you going to call the office?”

I looked at the lovers and shook my head. They were so happy, so beautiful, so in love I didn’t have the heart to break the spell.

I wasn’t sorry I didn’t call in a story then and I haven’t changed my mind.

Love in a gilded cage is tough. If Swift and Kelce are at the next table — unlikely -- in a restaurant, I will keep mum. Love conquers all. 

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.

Web site: whchronicle.co

‘Dreamscapes’

‘Reader” (oil on linen), by Anthony Cudahy, in his show ‘‘Spinneret,’’ at the Ogunquit (Maine) Museum of American Art,

— Photograph by JSP Art Photography

Eric J. Taubert writes of the show:

"Step inside the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, and a luminous transformation unfolds. The salt-spray roar of the Gulf of Maine retreats and a different type of sensory gale rises up. Phosphorescent dreamscapes. Intoxicating light and shadows. Hues so delicious you can almost taste them. Familiar faces you couldn’t possibly know. This is 'Spinneret,' the first solo exhibition in the United States by the contemporary figurative painter Anthony Cudahy.’’

The Cliff House in Ogunquit in 1920

‘Mass timber’ building

Mixed coniferous and deciduous forest in Presque Isle, Maine.

—Photo by Itsasatire

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

Most of New England is woodland, especially, of course, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Well-managed forests can be an economic boon, especially given the renewability of wood as a building material. (Let’s hope that a hurricane doesn’t blow down a lot of it, which is what happened in 1938.)

I thought of this after reading Abigail Brone’s article on the New England News Collaborative website about the use of “mass timber,’’ which involves installing wood panels in place of concrete and steel, whose manufacturing emits a great deal of carbon dioxide. The wood panels are shipped to building sites from fabrication centers elsewhere. Installing wood cuts labor costs compared to handling concrete and steel. This, among other things,  could encourage a speedup in much-needed housing construction over the next few years.

Ms. Brone notes that the cost of mass timber in New England is substantially raised by having to be shipped from the South and Canada. But why not harvest a lot of New England wood for the purpose – especially from Maine, which is almost 90 percent forested?

Here’s her story:

A University of Maine report  says:

“The Maine Mass Timber Commercialization Center (MMTCC) brings together industrial partners, trade organizations, construction firms, architects, and other stakeholders in the region to revitalize and diversify Maine’s forest-based economy by bringing innovative mass timber manufacturing to the State of Maine. The emergence of this new innovation-based industry cluster will result in positive economic impacts to both local and regional economies, particularly in Maine’s rural communities.”

Martha Bebinger: Switching to eco-friendly inhalers

Three types of dry powder inhalers: Turbuhaler, Accuhaler and Ellipta devices.

Via Kaiser Family Foundation Health News

Miguel Divo, a lung specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, sits in an exam room across from Joel Rubinstein, who has asthma. Rubinstein, a retired psychiatrist, is about to get a checkup and hear a surprising pitch — for the planet, as well as his health.

Divo explains that boot-shaped inhalers, which represent nearly 90% of the U.S. market for asthma medication, save lives but also contribute to climate change. Each puff from an inhaler releases a hydrofluorocarbon gas that is 1,430 to 3,000 times as powerful as the most commonly known greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

“That absolutely never occurred to me,” said Rubinstein. “Especially, I mean, these are little, teeny things.”

So Divo has begun offering a more eco-friendly option to some patients with asthma and other lung diseases: a plastic, gray cylinder about the size and shape of a hockey puck that contains powdered medicine. Patients suck the powder into their lungs — no puff of gas required and no greenhouse gas emissions.

“You have the same medications, two different delivery systems,” Divo said.

Patients in the United States are prescribed roughly 144 million of what doctors call metered-dose inhalers each year, according to the most recently available data published in 2020. The cumulative amount of gas released is the equivalent of driving half a million gas-powered cars for a year. So, the benefits of moving to dry powder inhalers from gas inhalers could add up.

Hydrofluorocarbon gas contributes to climate change, which is creating more wildfire smoke, other types of air pollution, and longer allergy seasons. These conditions can make breathing more difficult — especially for people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD — and increase the use of inhalers.

Divo is one of a small but growing number of U.S. physicians determined to reverse what they see as an unhealthy cycle.

“There is only one planet and one human race,” Divo said. “We are creating our own problems and we need to do something.”

So Divo is working with patients like Rubinstein who may be willing to switch to dry-powder inhalers. Rubinstein said no to the idea at first because the powder inhaler would have been more expensive. Then his insurer increased the co-pay on the metered-dose inhaler so Rubinstein decided to try the dry powder.

“For me, price is a big thing,” said Rubinstein, who has tracked health-care and pharmaceutical spending in his professional roles for years. Inhaling the medicine using more of his own lung power was an adjustment. “The powder is a very strange thing, to blow powder into your mouth and lungs.”

But for Rubinstein, the new inhaler works and his asthma is under control. A recent study found that some patients in the United Kingdom who use dry- powder inhalers have better asthma control while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. In Sweden, where the vast majority of patients use dry powder inhalers, rates of severe asthma are lower than in the United States.

Rubinstein is one of a small number of U.S. patients who have made the transition. Divo said that, for a variety of reasons, only about a quarter of his patients even consider switching. Dry-powder inhalers are often more expensive than gas-propellant inhalers. For some, dry powder isn’t a good option because not all asthma or COPD sufferers can get their medications in this form. And dry powder inhalers aren’t recommended for young children or elderly patients with diminished lung strength.

Also, some patients using dry powder inhalers worry that without the noise from the spray, they may not be receiving the proper dose. Other patients don’t like the taste that powder inhalers can leave in their mouths.

Divo said his priority is making sure patients have an inhaler they are comfortable using and that they can afford. But, when appropriate, he’ll keep offering the dry powder option.

Advocacy groups for asthma and COPD patients support more conversations about the connection between inhalers and climate change.

“The climate crisis makes these individuals have a higher risk of exacerbation and worsening disease,” said Albert Rizzo, chief medical officer of the American Lung Association. “We don’t want medications to contribute to that.”

Rizzo said there is work being done to make metered-dose inhalers more climate-friendly. The United States and many other countries are phasing down the use of hydrofluorocarbons, which are also used in refrigerators and air conditioners. It’s part of the global attempt to avoid the worst possible impacts of climate change. But inhaler manufacturers are largely exempt from those requirements and can continue to use the gases while they explore new options.

Some leading inhaler manufacturers have pledged to produce canisters with less potent greenhouse gases and to submit them for regulatory review by next year. It’s not clear when these inhalers might be available in pharmacies. Separately, the FDA is spending about $6 million on a study about the challenges of developing inhalers with a smaller carbon footprint.

Rizzo and other lung specialists worry these changes will translate into higher prices. That’s what happened in the early to mid-2000s when ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were phased out of inhalers. Manufacturers changed the gas in metered-dose inhalers and the cost to patients nearly doubled. Today, many of those re-engineered inhalers remain expensive.

William Feldman, a pulmonologist and health-policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said these dramatic price increases occur because manufacturers register updated inhalers as new products, even though they deliver medications already on the market. The manufacturers are then awarded patents, which prevent the production of competing generic medications for decades. The Federal Trade Commission says it is cracking down on this practice.

After the CFC ban, “manufacturers earned billions of dollars from the inhalers,” Feldman said of the re-engineered inhalers.

When inhaler costs went up, physicians say, patients cut back on puffs and suffered more asthma attacks. Gregg Furie, medical director for climate and sustainability at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is worried that’s about to happen again.

“While these new propellants are potentially a real positive development, there’s also a significant risk that we’re going to see patients and payers face significant cost hikes,” Furie said.

Some of the largest inhaler manufacturers, including GSK, are already under scrutiny for allegedly inflating prices in the United States. Sydney Dodson-Nease told NPR and KFF Health News that the company has a strong record for keeping medicines accessible to patients but that it’s too early to comment on the price of the more environmentally sensitive inhalers the company is developing.

Developing affordable, effective, and climate-friendly inhalers will be important for hospitals as well as patients. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recommends that hospitals looking to shrink their carbon footprint reduce inhaler emissions. Some hospital administrators see switching inhalers as low-hanging fruit on the list of climate-change improvements a hospital might make.

But Brian Chesebro, medical director of environmental stewardship at Providence, a hospital network in Oregon, said, “It’s not as easy as swapping inhalers.”

Chesebro said that even among metered-dose inhalers, the climate impact varies. So pharmacists should suggest the inhalers with the fewest greenhouse gas emissions. Insurers should also adjust reimbursements to favor climate-friendly alternatives, he said, and regulators could consider emissions when reviewing hospital performance.

Samantha Green, a family physician in Toronto, said clinicians can make a big difference with inhaler emissions by starting with the question: Does the patient in front of me really need one?

Green, who works on a project to make inhalers more environmentally sustainable, said that research shows a third of adults diagnosed with asthma may not have the disease.

“So that’s an easy place to start,” Green said. “Make sure the patient prescribed an inhaler is actually benefiting from it.”

Green said educating patients has a measurable effect. In her experience, patients are moved to learn that emissions from the approximately 200 puffs in one inhaler are equivalent to driving about 100 miles in a gas-powered car. Some researchers say switching to dry powder inhalers may be as beneficial for the climate as a patient adopting a vegetarian diet.

One of the hospitals in Green’s health-care network, St. Joseph’s Health Centre, found that talking to patients about inhalers led to a significant decrease in the use of metered-dose devices. Over six months, the hospital went from 70% of patients using the puffers, to 30%.

Green said patients who switched to dry powder inhalers have largely stuck with them and appreciate using a device that is less likely to exacerbate environmental conditions that inflame asthma.

This article is from a partnership that includes WBUR, NPR, and KFF Health News.

Martha Bebinger is a WBUR reporter; marthab@wbur.org, @mbebinger

Extinction pile

“Built on the Past’’ (detail) (mixed media sculpture), by George LeMaitre, in his show with Pat Fietta, “Pondering Environmental Anxieties,’’ at Future Lab(s) Gallery, North Adams, Mass., through May 27.

https://www.futurelabsgallery.com/

Looming from the Jazz Age

The Industrial Trust Building, in downtown Providence, now being retrofitted for apartments. Opened in 1928, it’s an Art Deco monument and reminder of the optimism of the “Roaring Twenties.’’

— 2019 Photo by Lydia Whitcomb

‘Byproduct’ of daily life

“The Age of Aquarium” (encaustic with layered toner transfers), by Providence-based artist Angel Dean, in New England Wax’s group show “Transparency,’’ at Wellfleet (Mass.) Preservation Hall, May 21-June 27. Also see the 17th Annual International Encaustic Conference in nearby Provincetown, May 31-June 2.

Ms. Dean’s artist statement includes this:

“Angel Dean is an artist who mainly works with encaustic media. Her work is personal and unconventional. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Dean makes work that is the by-product of the life she’s living.

“‘The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up & get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part & a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.”’

— Chuck Close

Erik Bleich and Christopher Star: 'Apocalypse' has become a secular term, too

Apocalypse depicted in Christian Orthodox traditional fresco scenes in Osogovo Monastery, North Macedonia

From The Conversation

MIDDLEBURY, VT.

The exponential growth of artificial intelligence over the past year has sparked discussions about whether the era of human domination of our planet is drawing to a close. The most dire predictions claim that the machines will take over within five to 10 years.

Fears of AI are not the only things driving public concern about the end of the world. Climate change and pandemic diseases are also well-known threats. Reporting on these challenges and dubbing them a potential “apocalypse” has become common in the media – so common, in fact, that it might go unnoticed, or may simply be written off as hyperbole.

Is the use of the word “apocalypse” in the media significant? Our common interest in how the American public understands apocalyptic threats brought us together to answer this question. One of us is a scholar of the apocalypse in the ancient world, and the other studies press coverage of contemporary concerns.

By tracing what events the media describe as “apocalyptic,” we can gain insight into our changing fears about potential catastrophes. We have found that discussions of the apocalypse unite the ancient and modern, the religious and secular, and the revelatory and the rational. They show how a term with roots in classical Greece and early Christianity helps us articulate our deepest anxieties today.

What is an apocalypse?

Humans have been fascinated by the demise of the world since ancient times. However, the word apocalypse was not intended to convey this preoccupation. In Greek, the verb “apokalyptein” originally meant simply to uncover, or to reveal.

In his dialogue “Protagoras,” Plato used this term to describe how a doctor may ask a patient to uncover his body for a medical exam. He also used it metaphorically when he asked an interlocutor to reveal his thoughts.

A wood engraving by German painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld illustrates a scene from the Book of Revelation. ZU_09/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty images

New Testament authors used the noun “apokalypsis” to refer to the “revelation” of God’s divine plan for the world. In the original Koine Greek version, “apokalypsis” is the first word of the Book of Revelation, which describes not only the impending arrival of a painful inferno for sinners, but also a second coming of Christ that will bring eternal salvation for the faithful.

The apocalypse in the contemporary world

Many American Christians today feel that the day of God’s judgment is just around the corner. In a December 2022 Pew Research Center Survey, 39% of those polled believed they were “living in the end times,” while 10% said that Jesus will “definitely” or “probably” return in their lifetime.

Yet for some believers, the Christian apocalypse is not viewed entirely negatively. Rather, it is a moment that will elevate the righteous and cleanse the world of sinners.

Secular understandings of the word, by contrast, rarely include this redeeming element. An apocalypse is more commonly understood as a cataclysmic, catastrophic event that will irreparably alter our world for the worse. It is something to avoid, not something to await.

What we fear most, decade by decade

Political communications scholars Christopher Wlezien and Stuart Soroka demonstrate in their research that the media are likely to reflect public opinion even more than they direct it or alter it. While their study focused largely on Americans’ views of important policy decisions, their findings, they argue, apply beyond those domains.

If they are correct, we can use discussions of the apocalypse in the media over the past few decades as a barometer of prevailing public concerns.

Following this logic, we collected all articles mentioning the words “apocalypse” or “apocalyptic” from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post between Jan. 1, 1980, and Dec. 31, 2023. After filtering out articles centered on religion and entertainment, there were 9,380 articles that mentioned one or more of four prominent apocalyptic concerns: nuclear war, disease, climate change and AI.

Through the end of the Cold War, fears of nuclear apocalypse predominated not only in the newspaper data we assembled, but also in visual media such as the 1983 post-apocalyptic film The Day After, which was watched by as many as 100 million Americans.

By the 1990s, however, articles linking the word apocalypse to climate and disease – in roughly equal measure – had surpassed those focused on nuclear war. By the 2000s, and even more so during the 2010s, newspaper attention had turned squarely in the direction of environmental concerns.

The 2020s disrupted this pattern. COVID-19 caused a spike in articles mentioning the pandemic. There were almost three times as many stories linking disease to the apocalypse in the first four years of this decade compared to the entire 2010s.

In addition, while AI was practically absent from media coverage through 2015, recent technological breakthroughs generated more apocalypse articles touching on AI than on nuclear concerns in 2023 for the first time ever.

What should we fear most?

Do the apocalyptic fears we read about most actually pose the greatest danger to humanity? Some journalists have recently issued warnings that a nuclear war is more plausible than we realize.

That jibes with the perspective of scientists responsible for the Doomsday Clock who track what they think of as the critical threats to human existence. They focus principally on nuclear concerns, followed by climate, biological threats and AI.

It might appear that the use of apocalyptic language to describe these challenges represents an increasing secularization of the concept. For example, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued that the media’s portrayal of COVID-19 as a potentially apocalyptic event reflects the replacement of religion by science. Similarly, the cultural historian Eva Horn has asserted that the contemporary vision of the end of the world is an apocalypse without God.

However, as the Pew poll demonstrates, apocalyptic thinking remains common among American Christians.

The key point is that both religious and secular views of the end of the world make use of the same word. The meaning of “apocalypse” has thus expanded in recent decades from an exclusively religious idea to include other, more human-driven apocalyptic scenarios, such as a “nuclear apocalypse,” a “climate apocalypse,” a “COVID-19 apocalypse” or an “AI apocalypse.”

In short, the reporting of apocalypses in the media does indeed provide a revelation – not of how the world will end but of the ever-increasing ways in which it could end. It also reveals a paradox: that people today often envision the future most vividly when they revive and adapt an ancient word.

Erik Bleich is Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science, and Christopher Star a professor of classics, at Middlebury College.

These authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Looking up in Concord, N.H.

“Red and White Potential” (handwoven rug), by Polly Apfelbaum, in a two-person show with the late Alice Mackler, “The Potential of Women in Outer Space,’’ at Outer Space Arts, Concord, N.H., through June 1.

The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord. The museum is dedicated to the memory of Christa McAuliffe, the Concord High School teacher selected by NASA out of over 11,000 applicants to be the first teacher in space, and Alan Shepard, the Derry, N.H., native and Navy test pilot who became the first American in space.

Chris Powell: How many more illegal immigrants can Conn. afford?

A map of U.S. states colored by their policy on “sanctuary cities” for illegal aliens. States in red have banned sanctuary cities statewide. States in blue are pro-sanctuary states.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut’s state government seems to think that illegal immigration isn’t a problem here, just -- maybe -- in other states. The other day state officials gathered with advocates of illegal immigration at the state Capitol to congratulate themselves on what a Connecticut Mirror report called the “explosive” demand for state insurance coverage for illegal immigrant children.

When this insurance, which is much like federal Medicaid insurance, was extended to illegal immigrant children age 12 and younger in January 2023, the state Department of Social Services estimated that about 4,000 children would be enrolled. But enrollees now exceed 11,000.

Now pregnant illegal immigrants qualify for this insurance as well and can continue it for a year after childbirth. 

While it has not been publicized, children born to illegal immigrants in Connecticut also qualify for state government’s touted “baby bonds” program, in which the children are to receive as much as $24,000 in state money upon turning 18 -- money to be used for higher education, starting a business, buying a home or saving for retirement. The office of state Treasurer Erick Russell, which manages the program, lied to this writer to conceal the eligibility of the children of illegal immigrants but told the truth to a state legislator.

The deputy commissioner of the Social Services Department, Peter Hadler, gave the Mirror an absurd comment about the state’s medical insurance for illegal immigrant kids and pregnant illegal immigrants.

“Sometimes,” Hadler said, “there is trepidation on the part, especially of non-citizens, to participate in government programs. The good news is that that has not proven to be a barrier, and people are enrolling at strong rates and they’re seeking this out.”

Reluctance to claim government benefits? Maybe there was some back when the United States enforced its immigration law and immigrants were expected to cover their own expenses, but there is no reluctance today. Under the Biden administration and Democratic state administrations, illegal immigrants are qualifying not just for free medical insurance but also housing and monthly stipends.

There continues to be much agitation at the state Capitol to extend state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants in the state, though there are concerns about cost. It probably won’t happen during the current session of the General Assembly, since Gov. Ned Lamont is reluctant to give up the “fiscal guardrails” keeping order in state government's finances.

At the rally at the Capitol a spokesman for the coalition seeking to extend state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants in Connecticut said: “Health care is a fundamental human right, and no one should be denied access based on immigration status.”

But anyone can be treated without charge in a public hospital emergency room in the state, and is entering the United States illegally and living in Connecticut a fundamental human right too?

The advocates of extending state medical insurance to all illegal immigrants seem to think so. They seem to think there should be no controls to ensure that immigration can be assimilated without overwhelming public resources -- housing, medical care and insurance, and education -- and without sparking ethnic conflict and jeopardizing national security and the democratic and secular culture.

With its disastrous shortage of housing and long decline of its public education, Connecticut especially should have awakened to the danger by now.

While the campaign to subsidize illegal immigration dresses itself in righteousness and goodness, it devalues citizenship. It would increase dependence on government, enlarge the constituencies of the Democratic Party, increase the number of Democratic-dominated legislative districts, and drain the private sector. It would make the country ungovernable.

If what I see as the Biden administration’s open-borders policy continues and Connecticut continues its own subsidies for illegal immigration and continues its own nullification of federal immigration law, in a year or two the state easily could double its population of illegal immigrants, now estimated at 113,000. Millions of people in troubled and impoverished places like Guatemala, Venezuela, and most of Africa perceive the grand invitation. How many more does Connecticut want? How many more can it afford? 

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

‘Deforming the landscape’

Webster, N.H., Congregational Church

“I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was 'breaking the Lord's fourth commandment,' and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day.”

― Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Hell on the dirt

“Are You Not Entertained?” (oil on canvas), by Enfield, Conn.-based artist Devon Edwards, at Hartford Art School Galleries, West Hartford, Conn.

— Image courtesy of the artist

Enfield Shaker Village in 1910.

Then don't go there

Harkins Hall, at Providence College. The college’s first building, it was constructed in 1918—1919 in the Collegiate Gothic style then very popular on American campuses.

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

There’s considerable tension these days at Providence College, a Catholic institution founded in 1917, over the feeling of LGBTQ students and employees that PC’s administration doesn’t adequately respect them (or agree with them?). 

The central problem, of course, is that Catholic theology doesn’t mesh well with the desires, actions and beliefs of these students and staff. One wonders, then, why they’re at PC, given the many other institutions they could attend. And after all, PC, let alone the Roman Catholic Church, has no obligation to change its views.

I taught at the college for several years and always found it was run in a kindly way. That was before most people had heard of “LGBTQ”. I’m waiting for a few more letters to be added in our identity-obsessed times.

Spring burst

“Apple Trees in a Meadow,’’ by Providence-based painter Edward Bannister (1828-1901).

‘Greening the Labs’’ at MGH

Headquarters of Mass General Brigham, in Somerville

— Photo by Hospitalupdate

Edited from a New England Council report

“Mass General Brigham is expanding its ‘Greening the Lab’ initiative, which was concluded at five Massachusetts General Hospital labs earlier this year. Now, the research team behind the program is selecting 20 more labs from MGH’s parent organization to participate.

“The program comes from a partnership between MGH and My Green Lab, a San Diego-based nonprofit that helps increase the sustainability of biomedical research entities. The initial pilot program ensured the sustainability efforts would work in an academic medical center. According to Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime, the associate director for research and publications at the Center for the Environment and Health at MGH, the initial results have been positive, showing that the program has effectively reduced costs, energy expenditure and hazardous-waste needs. 

“‘The push to put more emphasis on sustainability has largely come from the junior researchers at the hospital,’’’ Duhaime said. ‘Creating a holistic program that brings all members of a lab together to focus on climate impact in addition to the clinical pursuits of their research has been a priority of the integration of the initiative, and initial findings have suggested that it’s increasing job satisfaction among participants.’

Chris Powell: U.S. students demonstrating for Palestinians display outrageous double standard about brutal, fascist Hamas

Pro-Palestinian college students near the Harvard campus, in Cambridge, Mass.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

At Yale University in New Haven, Conn., the University of Connecticut in Storrs, and a score of other institutions of higher education, students are protesting the support being given by the United States to Israel in its war with the Hamas regime in Gaza. 

The students want their colleges to dissociate themselves from Israel and from military contractors whose munitions Israel uses. The students call for a ceasefire in the war and chant, "Palestine will be free."

But there were no protests at the colleges when Gaza attacked Israel on Oct. 7 last year, launching hundreds of rockets and murdering, raping, kidnapping, and mutilating civilians. The protests began only when Israel naturally retaliated and undertook to destroy Hamas. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir remarked a half century ago, the world loves Jews as victims but hates them when they fight back.

And what exactly do the students mean by "Palestine will be free"?

Do they mean freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly? Due process of law? Sexual freedom? 

If so, the students' sympathies are laughably misplaced, for there have been no such freedoms in Gaza under Hamas rule, and few such freedoms elsewhere in the Arab world. Gaza's sympathizers on U.S. college campuses would be murdered within a week if they lived among the people are defending.

So maybe the calls of the students for a ceasefire in Gaza and freedom for Palestine really mean they want the area to be free of Jews. That always has been the objective of the people who have been running Gaza since Israel ended its occupation there in 2005. Back then Palestinians at last had their own state.

But two years later they elected Hamas, a movement sworn to Israel's destruction. Soon missiles were flying from Gaza into Israel. For years Israel tried to handle the problem merely defensively. Then came last October's barbaric attack.

Many people are appalled by the destruction and famine in Gaza. By some estimates more than half the structures in the territory have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair, and people are starving. Yet that is common in war. 

Gaza today still looks better than Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and dozens of other cities in Germany and Japan did in 1945. Those cities and many others had to be leveled by Allied bombing to compel the enemy's surrender. 

Gaza's sympathizers complain that Israel's blockading Gaza has made starvation a weapon of war. But starvation always has been a weapon of war. With its submarines Germany tried to starve Britain out of both world wars, just as Britain and the United States, with naval blockades, tried to do the same to Germany. In 1945 the United States mined most Japanese harbors in what was frankly called Operation Starvation. It was highly effective and if undertaken earlier might have prevented the atomic bombings.

For starvation is a far more merciful weapon than bullets and bombs, as it gives an adversary more of a choice for survival.

Some of Israel's tactics are fairly criticized. But Israel is fighting for survival against an enemy that, at least until recent days, has refused even to contemplate the "two-state solution" the world presses on Israel. Indeed, the integrity of the Palestinian hate for Jews is amazingly pure, since most Palestinians still prefer their own destruction to co-existence. Their longstanding fanaticism now is generating similar fanaticism among Israelis, who years ago moved far closer to peace than the Palestinian factions ever went.

The protesting students don't help with their calls for a ceasefire. Since Israel was re-established by the United Nations in 1948 there have been dozens of ceasefires with the irreconcilables who surround the country. What is needed is not another ceasefire but peace -- that is, a permanent settlement. 

Israel doesn't want to rule Gaza. But Gaza wants war, having broken a ceasefire last October. So Gaza will have to be the one to ask for peace, and Gaza, not Israel, is where pressure for peace first must be applied. =

Chris Powell is a veteran Connecticut-based columnist (CPowell@cox.net). 

‘Bucket of bad sleep’

“A bucket of fish,’’ Mats Hagwall

“I let down my long line; it went falling; I pulled; up came
A bucket of bad sleep in which tongues were sloshing about
Like frogs and dark fish, breaking the surface of silence….’’

— From “The Angler’s Story,’’ by American poet and Yale Prof. John Hollander (1929-2013). He lived in Woodbridge, Conn.

Here the whole poem.

In Woodbridge, the Darling House Museum, built in 1774

— Photo by Jerry Dougherty

'Forms of connection'

“Women in Design: The Next Decade” (Diazo lithograph on paper), by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, in her show “Community, Activism and Design,’’ at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.

— Courtesy Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

She says:

“From the start, I saw that the direct expression of a plurality of voices within each community could carry the immediacy of conversations, and that content and site combine to inform my choice of materials and processes. Over time open-ended forms, processes and materials offered me different ways to extend to others an invitation to participate in the meaning of each work. Through listening I have been able to reflect local populations and translate that connection first in ephemera and then in site specific, permanent installations integrated into specific places here in the states and abroad. The vivid forms of connection to people and place has become recognizable as my work…’’

Glassy-eyed in Vermont

This work by Mr. Bernbaum is in the show “Sand to Glass: The Nature of Glass,’’ at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, June 8-Sept. 22

Mr. Bernbaum says on his Web site:

“I am most interested in color, especially color relationships in the works I create in blown glass. Utilizing traditional Italian cane (or striping) techniques in new and  personalized ways is the driving force behind most of my current designs.

“I consider  the pieces I make to be documents along the way of a (hopefully) life-long journey of  both refining the necessary skills and developing the patience one needs in order to create with this captivating and mesmerizing molten material.’’

The elegant court house In Manchester. It was built in 1822.

Gird yourself for noisy double brood of cicadas

Cicada in Princeton, N.J., in 2014

— Photo by Pmjacoby

From The Conversation

The article with additional graphics

John Cooley is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and Chris Simons a senior research scientist of ecology and evoluttionary biology, at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

John Cooley receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

Chris Simon has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Geographic Society and the New Zealand Marsden Fund.

In the wake of North America’s recent solar eclipse, another historic natural event is on the horizon. From now through June 2024, the largest brood of 13-year cicadas, known as Brood XIX, will co-emerge with a Midwestern brood of 17-year cicadas, Brood XIII.

This event will affect 17 states, from Maryland west to Iowa and south into Arkansas, Alabama and northern Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Maryland. A co-emergence like this of two specific broods with different life cycles happens only once every 221 years. The last time these two groups emerged together was in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president.

For about four weeks, scattered wooded and suburban areas will ring with cicadas’ distinctive whistling, buzzing and chirping mating calls. After mating, each female will lay hundreds of eggs in pencil-size tree branches. Then the adult cicadas will die. Once the eggs hatch, new cicada nymphs will fall from the trees and burrow back underground, starting the cycle again.

There are perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 species of cicadas around the world, but the 13- and 17-year periodical cicadas of the eastern U.S. appear to be unique in combining long juvenile development times underground with synchronized, mass adult emergences. There are two other known periodical cicadas in the world, one in northeast India and one in Fiji, but these have only four-year and eight-year life cycles, respectively.

Periodical cicadas raise many questions for entomologists and the public alike. What do cicadas do underground for 13 or 17 years? Why are their life cycles so long? Why are they synchronized? Will the two broods emerging this spring interact? How can citizen scientists help to document this emergence? And is climate change affecting this wonder of the insect world?

We study periodical cicadas to understand questions about biodiversity, biogeography, behavior and ecology – the evolution, natural history and geographic distribution of life. It’s no accident that the scientific name for periodical 13- and 17-year cicadas is Magicicada, shortened from “magic cicada.”

Illinois is expected to be ground zero for the dual emergence of two periodical cicada broods in 2024.

Transformation from mature cicada nymph to adult.

Ancient visitors

As species, periodical cicadas are older than the forests that they inhabit. Molecular analysis has shown that about 4 million years ago, the ancestor of the current Magicicada species split into two lineages. Some 1.5 million years later, one of those lineages split again. The resulting three lineages are the basis of the modern periodical cicada species groups, Decim, Cassini and Decula.

Early American colonists first encountered periodical cicadas in Massachusetts. The sudden appearance of so many insects reminded them of biblical plagues of locusts, which are a type of grasshopper. That’s how the name “locust” became incorrectly associated with cicadas in North America.

During the 19th century, notable entomologists such as Benjamin Walsh, C.V. Riley and Charles Marlatt worked out the astonishing biology of periodical cicadas. They established that unlike locusts or other grasshoppers, cicadas don’t chew leaves, decimate crops or fly in swarms.

Instead, these insects spend most of their lives out of sight, growing underground and feeding on plant roots as they pass through five juvenile stages. Their synchronized emergences are predictable, occurring on a clockwork schedule of 17 years in the North and 13 years in the South and Mississippi Valley. There are multiple, regional year classes, known as broods.

Acting in unison

The key feature of Magicicada biology is that these insects emerge synchronously in huge numbers – as high as 1.5 million per acre. This increases their chances of accomplishing their key mission aboveground: finding mates.

Dense emergences also provide what scientists call a predator-satiation or safety-in-numbers defense. Any predator that feeds on cicadas, whether it’s a fox, squirrel, bat or bird, will eat its fill long before it consumes all of the insects in the area, leaving many survivors behind.

While periodical cicadas largely come out on schedule every 17 or 13 years, often a small group emerges four years early or late. Early-emerging cicadas may be faster-growing individuals that had access to abundant food, and the laggards may be individuals that subsisted with less.

If growing conditions change over time, as is happening now with climate warming, having the ability to make this kind of life cycle switch and come out either four years early in favorable times or four years late in more difficult times becomes important. If a sudden warm or cold phase causes a large number of cicadas to come out off schedule by four years, the insects can emerge in sufficient numbers to satiate predators and shift to a new schedule.