Western face of Camel's Hump Mountain (elevation 4,079 feet), in Vermont.
— Photo by Niranjan Arminius
“….You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March….’’
— From “Two Tramps in Mud Time,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
“Uproot III” (charcoal on paper), by Julie Comnick, in the group show RISE: Trees; Our Botanical Giants, at Mad River Valley Arts, Waitsfield, Vt., through April 26.
The gallery says the show “features 20 artists paying homage to the tree in the creative process. Artists salute their relationship with wood materials reclaimed or formally crafted and in doing so push the conversation between man-made and nature into one of collaborative celebration.’’
The Mad River.
Boynton Hall, WPI's main administrative building, built in 1868.
— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
Edited from a New England Council report
“Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has announced that it will establish America’s first PhD program in financial technology (fintech). WPI already offers both bachelor’s and master’s programs in fintech, making the school the first in the nation to offer fintech programs for all three degree options.
“According to a press release from WPI, the curriculum will ‘offer a comprehensive, multidisciplinary education that bridges finance, mathematics, computer science, and ethics.’ Students will study various topics in these areas, such as AI, analytics, data science and applied statistics, as well as material on ethical challenges within the industry, such as data privacy.
“‘Introducing a doctoral degree program in FinTech exemplifies how WPI is a global innovator at the intersection of business and technology,’ said WPI President Grace Wang.
“‘Graduates of this program will emerge as academic and industry leaders who will shape the future of financial technology education and the financial services sector.”’
“Waking Up” (photomontage on aluminum), by Deer Isle, Maine-based artist Jeffrey C. Becton, in his show “Framing the Domestic Sea,’’ at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, through May 5.
— Image courtesy of Mr. Becton
The museum says the show “evokes New England’s varied histories, the maritime world and the impacts of climate change on coastal communities.’’
Federal Reserve System headquarters, in Washington, D.C.
— Photo by DestinationFearFan
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Before my column, called Economic Principals, goes monthly, I want to revisit what now seems to be its single most important misjudgment in forty years. While it occurred fifteen years ago, it has relevance to the present day.
The Jan, 25, 2009, edition of the weekly, “In Which George W. Bush Enters History,” I began:
George W. Bush left Washington last week amid a hail of jeers. “The Frat Boy Ships Out” headlined The Economist. “Serially incompetent,” declared the Financial Times. “Worse than Hoover,” concluded Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley.
Bush arrived in Midland, Texas, to find a cheering crowd of 20,000.
I was a little more temperate. Bush’s admirers for years had for years portrayed him as resembling Harry Truman – unpopular when leaving office, later remembered with “a tincture of admiration and regret.” A more re-illuminating comparison, I suggested, citing expert opinion, was to Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), the last president with a faith-based foreign policy.
I said nothing about the apartheid policy that Wilson, a Virginian, reinstalled; this was before the Third Reconstruction gathered steam, George Floyd (1973-2020) and The New York Times’s 1619 project. It was a pretty good column, worth reading today, emblematic of the weekly’s style, before, a year later, I began writing the book that has preoccupied me ever since.
Wilson’s case is a good illustration of the fact that every president makes so many decisions about so many polices that it is difficult, if not impossible to single out in his day the one for which he’ll be remembered decades later, depending on the decade. Bush’s great achievement grew out of two decisions he made during the final quarter of his administration.
The second half had started badly enough with his Second Inaugural Address.
[I]t is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
Then came the Hurricane Katrina flood, the plan to privatize Social Security, the two-thousandth American death in Iraq, Vice president Dick Cheney shooting a fellow fowler during a Texas partridge hunt. An old friend dates the low point as Bush’ s attempt to appoint one of his staffers to the Supreme Court.
After that, things improved. After heavy losses in the mid-term election, Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, turned away from Cheney in favor of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He appointed corporate attorney and former appellate court judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court. A year later he picked Goldman Sachs chief executive Henry Paulson as Treasury secretary.
Most important, in October 2005, Bush chose Ben Bernanke an expert on the Great Depression, to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Bernanke, a former Princeton University professor, had spent four years of his administration as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, then two as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. The joke at the time was that Bush chose Bernanke because he wore white socks with his dark suits to White House briefings.
Bernanke had a relatively peaceful first year as chairman, but by 2007 was preparing measures behind the scenes to defuse or at least contro a slowly building crisis. By the summer of 2008, the banking system was on the verge of collapse. Even after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in September, Paulson continued to argue that a combination of lending and takeovers by a consortium of big banks could resolve it. Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said no. After three days, Paulson folded his hand. Government lending to stop the crisis would be required. A day of meetings with legislators followed.
And on that Friday Bush made his second crucial decision. He walked out with the others to the Rose Garden to make an out-of-the blue plea for a something called a Troubled Asset Relief Program. Nobody seemed to know quite what it might do. Never mind that five weeks of negotiation were required to clarify the matter. By October the panic had been quelled. Last-minute lending by the Fed Reserve, backstopped by the U.S. Treasury, and ten other central banks around the world, had prevented what otherwise virtually certainly would have turned into a second Great Depression had a lawsuits race to the bottom begun.
Bush got little credit for his courage. Barack Obama defeated John McCain in November and attention quickly shifted to blame, and the steep recession that had already begun. Unemployment climbed to 10 percent, not the twenty or more that had been feared in those five desperate weeks. Ahead lay Obamacare and the Tea Party.
Like the rest of the press, I mostly missed the story at the time. Bush’s admirers turn out to have been right. That was my single worst miscalculation. Second, of course, was America’s invasion of Iraq. Like most of the rest of the mainstream press, I was for the war before it was against it. It took about four weeks to change its mind.
And the significance to the present day? It is two-fold.
The first has to do with is the carom shot that today’s is war in Ukraine. Instead of committing American forces to free the world from tyranny, the U.S. has offered intelligence and arms, and otherwise depended on the willingness of Ukrainian soldiers to repel the invaders of their homeland. Tens of thousands have died.
As Fareed Zakaria writes in the current Foreign Affairs, “America shouldn’t give up on the world it made.” Mike Johnson’s willingness to risk his speakership to build a bipartisan coalition ensure that America keeps its promises, as best it can. His choice is the true beginning of the end for Donald Trump.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com
1922 road map
Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a Modernist.
Jose Andres (born 1969), Spanish-American chef, restaurateur and teacher. Beginning in the fall of 2010, Andrés taught a culinary physics course at Harvard University with Ferran Adrià.
“Blue Water” (oil on canvas), by Patricia Crotty, in her show “Sky Water: Reflections on Walden Pond”, at Walden Pond State Reservation Gallery, Concord, Mass., through April 30.
The gallery says:
“The colorful abstract paintings and collages of local artist Patricia Crotty are inspired by the connection with nature that Walden Pond {made internationally famous by Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden} provides visitors. They celebrate the beauty of nature in all of its forms and seasons. Co-sponsored by Friends of Walden Pond. The exhibit is free; parking fees apply.’’
“Transparency’’ — a show by members of New England Wax
May 21 – June 27, 2024
Wellfleet Preservation Hall
335 Main Street in Wellfleet, MA
Reception: Saturday, June 1, 5–7pm
Open to the public Tuesday – Friday 10am–4pm, and during events.
Transparency, featuring works from 27 artists, seeks to investigate the concept of transparency in all its forms. Wax is a mutable material, capable of changing its form and adapting to its environment. Utilizing light, texture, form, and color, works in this exhibition play with the literal qualities of transparency, with pieces that are both ethereal or illusory and grounded in the physical world. Others explore the metaphorical dimensions of transparency, examining issues of trust, accountability, and communication. Through the works of a range of artists working with wax, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the significance of transparency in our society and explore its relationship to power, communication, and the human experience. Each piece in the exhibition offers a unique perspective on transparency and its many layers of meaning, creating a cohesive and thought-provoking narrative.
Wellfleet Preservation Hall is a vibrant cultural center that uses the transformational power of the arts to bring people together and impact positive change. It is a community center that celebrates people from all backgrounds and walks of life.
335 Main Street, Wellfleet, MA • 508-349-1800
Exhibiting Artists:
Katrina Abbott
Lola Baltzell
Edith Beatty
Hilary Hanson Bruel
Lisa Cohen
Angel Dean
Pamela Dorris DeJong
Heather Leigh Douglas
Hélène Farrar
Dona Mara Friedman
Kay Hartung
Anne Hebebrand
Sue Katz
Janet Lesniak
Ross Ozer
Deborah Peeples
Deborah Pressman
Stephanie Roberts-Camello
Lia Rothstein
Melissa Rubin
Ruth Sack
Sarah Springer
Donna Hamil Talman
Marina Thompson
Lelia Stokes Weinstein
Charyl Weissbach
Nancy Whitcomb
Town common in Princeton, Mass.
“Predating the merciless grid that seized Manhattan and possessed the vast Midwest, New England towns have each at their center an irregular heart of open grass, vestige of the Puritan common. {The} idea, of land held in common, as ….part of a workaday covenant with the Bestower of a new continent, has permanently imprinted the maps of these towns, and lengthens the perspectives of those who live within them.’’
— John Updike (1932-2009), American novelist, poet, short-story writer and literary and art critic. He lived for most of his adult life in Massachusetts North Shore towns.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Judging by voter participation in Connecticut's most recent municipal elections, Hartford may be the most demoralized place in the state.
The Hearst Connecticut newspapers report that only 14 percent of Hartford residents who are registered to vote did so in last year's municipal election, when the city had the lowest voter participation among all Connecticut municipalities. The city's voter participation rate is actually far worse than reported, since, as with all other municipalities, many eligible residents don't even register to vote.
What is the City Council's idea for curing this civic demoralization? It's to diminish election security by mailing absentee-ballot applications for future elections to all residents on the voter rolls.
Of course, absentee ballots have been at the center of the recent election-corruption scandals in Bridgeport, where absentee ballot applications have been pressed on people who did not apply for them and completed absentee ballots have been stuffed by political operatives into unsecured ballot deposit boxes.
Absentee ballots are a necessity of democracy, but for election security their use should be minimized, not increased. For the more a voter is separated from the in-person casting of his vote, the more potential there will be for corruption. Requests for absentee ballots should be scrutinized for validation as much as the casting of completed ballots in person should be.
The Republican minority in the General Assembly is serious about this issue. The Democratic majority is not.
The Republicans propose to outlaw the mailing of unsolicited absentee-ballot applications, to require people voting by absentee ballot to include a copy of an identification document bearing a photo, to require municipalities to provide voters with photo identification without charge, the cost to be reimbursed by state government; to require municipalities to update and audit their voter rolls regularly, and to suspend use of absentee ballot deposit boxes, since the U.S. mail can do the job more securely.
xxx
PLEADING POVERTY: Should poor people have to obey the law in Connecticut? Legislation approved by the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee suggests that poverty should confer exemption from the law.
The legislation, sponsored by four Democratic state representatives, would forbid the suspension of driver's licenses for people who have failed to appear in court as ordered or who have failed to pay fines. Suspension of the driver's licenses of people who ignore court orders and judgments has been an incentive for obeying the law.
The rationale of the legislation is that poor people are less able to take time off from work to attend court and less able to pay fines, and of course they are. But if poverty is to excuse people from respect the law and the courts, why should they obey any law at all?
Connecticut's courts already carry hundreds of cases of failure to appear. If the Judiciary Committee's legislation is enacted, the state is sure to experience much more contempt for law and an ever-growing inventory of "failure to appears" -- and somehow the Democrats will call it justice.
At Bradley International Airport
DILLON IMPROVED BRADLEY: In recent years Connecticut has put many millions of dollars into Bradley International Airport. Though the correlation between spending and improvement in state government is usually weak, the airport has improved much since the Connecticut Airport Authority was created to operate it and the other state-owned airports in 2013.
For the 11 years since then Kevin A. Dillon has been the authority's executive director, overseeing a great expansion of service at Bradley -- more international and nonstop flights, more airlines, better facilities, and more passengers, though the passenger total from the year prior to the virus epidemic has not quite been surpassed yet.
Bradley makes a huge contribution to Connecticut's economy, its business environment, and quality of life, for which Dillon must be credited. He plans to retire early next year. Before he leaves the authority should name something after him.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
“Aunt Karen in the Rocking Chair,’’ by Edvard Munch, 1883
Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.
Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We're told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.
‘‘New England,’’ by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), famed poet who grew up on the Maine Coast
Old High School (1870-1969) in Gardiner, Maine, which Robinson attended.
“The Downtown’s deferred zoning update has abruptly lost one of its core propositions, replacing a pay-for-height proposal with new ‘skyline districts’ and leaving compensation for that height to the yet undecided Article 80 process.
“The Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) outlined the changes in an April 9 public meeting on PLAN: Downtown, a sweeping set of reforms that drastically changes downtown zoning to allow more businesses and, in some places, increases the maximum building height by hundreds of feet.
“PLAN: Downtown was supposed to be resolved back in November but proved controversial enough to delay full adoption and split into three parts to be debated separately this year.
“Now PLAN: Downtown seems to have lost its central ‘height bonus’ model that allowed developers to build by right up to state shadow and aviation limits in exchange for proportional donations to a community fund.’’
To read the whole article, please hit this link.
“Freedom Arrows” (arrows, feathers (mostly turkey), wood, paint, metals, brass, beads, leather plastic, twine, acrylic paint, bone, human hair, stone, arrow heads), by Ari Montford, at the Fitchburg (Mass.) Art Museum, through June 2.
—Image courtesy of the artist
The museum says that the work “amplifies the arrow’s symbolism as tool, weapon, and message to explore Indigenous Black themes through the lens of the Native American experience of genocide. Within the museum lobby, a volley of hand-beaded arrows is suspended midair (as if just unleashed from unseen bows) and embedded in the walls. Dual concepts of protection and service, aggression and power blend with the arrows’ spiritual presence to create a space that provokes conversation about racial justice and narrative-making. Montford’s installation engages with the impact of structural racism, Indigenous trauma, and the process of creating safe spaces for restorative justice through their own voice as a Black Two Spirit Indigenous cultural practitioner.’’
Moss Pallet (detail), by Ruth Douzinas, in the show “UMass Dartmouth 2024 Thesis Exhibition,’’ at the New Bedford Art Museum through May 17.
— Image courtesy of UMass Dartmouth
The museum says the show presents work of MFA students Ruth Douzinas, Zeph Luck, Matthew Napoli, Fallon Keiko Navarro and Darley Ortiz Garcia. The work of these graduating students includes painting, drawing, ceramics, digital media and site-specific installation and draw on the individual skills and interests of the students involved as well as the strong traditions of the UMass Dartmouth College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Levittown, Pa., housing development in 1958. There was a great deal of housing built in the 1950s.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Not as dark as an eclipse but two dark clouds, under-mentioned by most politicians, are forming on America’s horizon. They are the housing crisis and the growing threat of electricity shortages.
The housing crisis hasn’t caught fire as the issue one would have expected it to be among politicians. Electricity shortages are an awkward issue for President Biden because he has staked much of eahis reputation on electrifying the country with alternative energy.
As much as I am aware, neither the housing crisis nor the electricity challenge has garnered high recognition in the presidential election. Biden has touched on the housing crisis and former President Trump has denigrated alternative energy.
Both are complex issues and need urgent attention. And both defy simple, declarative political statements, which may be why they are lying there, untouched but with lethality.
Housing hurts in obvious ways, including homelessness, a reduction in the birthrate and a freeze on the mobility of labor, once one of the great economic strengths of the United States. Where there was work, workers went.
Less so during the current housing crunch: When Americans may not be able to find housing where the work is, they won’t move. The consequence: European-type labor immobility.
Another consequence is that if the free movement of workers and their families stops, it contributes to the splintering of America: The New South goes back to being the Old South and the rigidity of elitism in the Northeast hardens. The East Coast and the West Coast start to think differently: The East Coast looking to Europe and the West Coast looking to Asia. Those developments aren’t good for the body politic. Intra-nationalism is a challenge to a country of continental dimension.
For those lucky enough to have shelter, nothing delivered to it is more important than electricity. We can do without pizza delivery, mail delivery and telephone service, but we can’t survive without electricity.
If it is extremely hot for months, as it was last summer in some regions, people die. Around Phoenix, according to Arizona data, over 500 people died from heat-related causes.
In Texas, during Ice Storm Uri in 2o21, 246 people by official count froze to death. Try to imagine those people, including children, freezing to death in their homes in America!
The homeless die all the time from exposure.
A chorus of voices, led by the American Public Power Association and the National Rural Electric Association, has been sounding the electricity alarm for several years. But the crisis continues to form because there is no quick fix for electricity generation and transmission any more than for housing development.
Demand is rising because of a national movement to electrify everything, especially transportation, and the growth of data centers. Rudy Garza, president of CPS Energy, the municipally owned natural-gas and electric utility in San Antonio, said there are eight data centers planned and there are “20 more waiting in the wings.”
Utilities don’t say no. They have a history of planning for demand, but the end of that may be in sight if the data center demand, fed by artificial intelligence, continues to grow. While national electricity growth is about 2 percent per year, it is at 3 percent in high-growth areas like San Antonio and around Dallas.
David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric Cooperative, northeast of Dallas, told me that his area is experiencing explosive growth in demand of 3 percent or more per year without yet accommodating data-center growth, although that is coming.
Technology will play a role in solving the future of housing with better construction techniques. Also, national standards would give new housing a boost — the core of the problem remains local ordinances and resistance in the suburbs and other “desirable” areas.
Some of the same not-where-we-live attitude frustrates utilities in moving renewable energy from the sunny and windy areas — mostly in the West -- to the places where it is needed.
Not-where-we-live syndrome is stunting America’s future growth. In housing, the crunch is here. In electricity, it is coming.
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.
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
Lilac Sunday, every spring, at the Arnold Arboretum, in Boston.
— Photo by John Phelan
Pea flowers in spring
— Photo by Rasbak
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
“All gardening is an act of faith, but in no work in the garden is the chasm that faith must leap wider or deeper than in planting peas. In the North, where peas grow best, they are planted in April, which around here is called a spring month only out of courtesy to the equinox, much as you might call a mean, stingy and detested family acquaintance ‘Uncle’ Adolf.’’’
-- Castle Freeman Jr. (born 1944) in Spring Snow (1995), American author who lives in Vermont.
I’m always a bit surprised at this time of year at how quickly life comes back in bright colors, motion and smell after the freezing sterile nights of winter. Insects buzzing away, worms wiggling, birds rioting and leaves and flowers opening theatrically – on a warm day, fast. And far too swiftly, petals of flowering trees drop on the ground, making what looks like an Impressionist painting that seems to fade as you look down on it.
People fortunate enough to have gardens feel exuberant now and line up various projects for the growing season, which continues to lengthen as the years roll by. They haven’t yet grown weary of weeding, and they probably won’t have to water for a while.
Or maybe they’ll say the hell with it and take out a second mortgage so they can go to Fenway.
I used to be surprised at learning about people who grew up on farms, as my maternal grandfather did, and then went off to make money in physically much easier, white-collar ways but in middle age bought a little farm as a hobby. That’s what my grandfather, who became a (mostly corporate) lawyer, did in Minnesota, with raising a few representatives of each major type of farm animal on the premises of his little farm, which he mostly visited on weekends and paid a couple to look after much of the time. Nostalgia for gritty work.
‘Poetic License,’’ by Patricia Busso, at New Art Center, Newton, Mass.
She says in her Web site:
“In particular, I am fascinated with how visually pleasing nature’s randomness can be; the way a row of trees is capriciously arranged, how chance groupings of flowers color a field, the geometrical patterns created by plots of land in a countryscape, the seemingly arbitrary twists and turns branches choose to make - configurations that present themselves with confidence; like there could be no other way.’’
In Vermont’s Green Mountains looking south from Mt. Mansfield, which, at 4,393 feet, is the highest in the range.
— Photo by Mike9827
“Life has all sorts of hills and valleys, and sometimes you don’t end up doing what you had your heart set on, but sometimes that’s even better.’’
— Ruth Buzzi (born 1936), actress and comedian. She was raised in the village of Wequetequock. in Stonington, Conn., in a rock house overlooking the ocean at Wequetequock Cove. Her father owned Buzzi Memorials, a stone-sculpture business that her older brother Harold operated until his retirement, in 2013.
Map of South Hadley Canal, the earliest such commercial canal in the U.S. It was opened in 1795 and was closed in 1862 because of competition from railroads.
Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), who served as president of Yale (1795-1817), traveled through New England and New York beginning in the 1790s. The first volume of his four-volume account of his travels included this description of the South Hadley (Mass.) Canal.
About five or six miles above Chequapee [Chicopee] we visited South Hadley Canal. Before this canal was finished, the boats were unloaded at the head of the falls, and the merchandise embarked again in other boats at the foot.
The removal of this inconvenience was contemplated many years since, but was never seriously undertaken until the year 1792, when a company was formed, under the name of the proprietors of the locks and canals in Connecticut river, and their capital distributed into five hundred and four shares. . . .
A dam was built at the head of the falls, following, in an irregular and oblique course, the bed of rocks across the river. The whole height of the dam was eleven feet, and its elevation above the surface, at the common height of the stream, four. Its length was two hundred rods.
Just above the dam the canal commences, defended by a strong guard-lock, and extends down the river two miles and a quarter. At the lower end of the canal was erected an inclined plane. . . .
The outlet of the canal was secured by a sufficient lock, of the common construction. When boats were to be conveyed down the intended plane, they passed through the lower lock, and were received immediately through folding doors into a carriage, which admitted a sufficient quantity of water from the canal to float the boat. As soon as the boat was fairly within the carriage, the lock and the folding-doors were closed, and the water suffered to run out of the carriage through sluices made for that purpose. The carriage was then let slowly down the inclined plane. . . .
The machinery, by which the carriage was raised or lowered, consisted of a water-wheel, sixteen feet in diameter, on each side of the inclined plane; on the axis of which was wound a strong iron chain, formed like that of a watch, and fastened to the carriage.
When the carriage was to be let down, a gate was opened at the bottom of the canal; and the water, passing through a sluice, turned these wheels, and thus slowly unwinding the chain, suffered the carriage to proceed to the foot of the plane by its own weight. When the carriage was to be drawn up, this process was reversed. The motion was perfectly regular, easy, and free from danger. . . .
From Travels in New England and New York, Volume1, by Timothy Dwight
Remnant of the canal
