Vox clamantis in deserto
Super realism in The Pine Tree State
“Eggemoggin Reach’’(oil on linen), by Joel Babb, in his show “Shifting Visions: Joel Babb’s Painted Universe,’’ at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, through Jan. 31.
The Deer Isle Bridge spans Eggemoggin Reach, on the Maine Coast.
Does Boston need a ‘rat czar’?
(Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Guardian.)
District 2 City Councilor Ed Flynn challenged the city’s claims of progress in controlling its rat population at a recent City Council hearing. The councilor argued that successes celebrated by city officials contrast sharply with constituents’ lived experiences.
Councilor Flynn chaired the hearing, which he co-sponsored with District 9 City Councilor Liz Breadon, where residents gave testimony and questioned representatives of the Inspectional Services Department (ISD), the mayor’s Operations Cabinet, the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT), and the Boston Housing Authority (BHA).
“There’s some disconnect between what [the city] has highlighted on how things are going well and what residents are experiencing,” Councilor Flynn said after testimonies were given at the hearing. “It has not improved. It’s gotten worse. It’s a major public health, public safety, quality of life issue.”
The hearing examined the Boston Rodent Action Plan (BRAP), where officials highlighted new technology, sanitation improvements and the September National Urban Rat Summit as indicators of success.
But residents from Back Bay, Chinatown, Bay Village, Allston-Brighton and other neighborhoods testified about persistent infestations, inadequate trash collection and difficulty holding property owners and developers accountable.
One recurring demand, echoing the recommendation of Councilor Flynn, called for the appointment of a dedicated “rat czar” to oversee and coordinate the city’s rodent control across departments.
“Somebody needs to own this problem,” one resident testified. “Someone has to be the name and face of the solution. With 20 committees and agencies and departments, it’s very difficult.”
Residents also urged the city to reconsider allowing trash to sit out on sidewalks overnight, providing rats with an easily accessible food source.
Currently, trash is allowed to be curbside after 5pm the night before pickup. Residents said that schedule encourages leaving bags outside overnight. In downtown neighborhoods where space is limited, bagged trash is a particularly accessible food source for rats, but residents also testified that rodents even chew through hard plastic trash cans.
“Over the last year, we've been working to better understand the different options that are available to us,” said Luke Hines from the Operations Cabinet. “We've been in coordination with the streets team in identifying those different options, working with community partners to better understand what they would support and then working with the trash contractors to see what would be feasible for them.”
Another major concern was enforcement against landlords and developers whose buildings or construction sites contribute to rodent problems.
ISD Assistant Commissioner John Ulrich said construction projects subject to the city’s community sanitation requirements must provide pest control documentation before receiving permits. His department has conducted approximately 210 construction sanitation inspections since January and reported 785 violations this year. However, residents said that penalties are too lenient and are treated by developers as a cost of doing business.
Councilor Flynn closed out the hearing in disagreement with the city’s assessment of public health risks posed by Boston’s rat population. One resident, who identified himself as John and said he has lived on Acadia Street in South Boston for 23 years, testified that his son contracted Leptospirosis earlier this fall, a bacterial infection that can spread through contact with urine from infected animals, including rats.
“He was in the hospital for two weeks and ICU for a week and suffered serious liver and kidney injuries,” John said.
Another resident testified that their dog had also contracted Leptospirosis.
The Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) was not present at the hearing, but Ulrich characterized the number of rat-to-human infections as “relatively low” based on the word of Dr. Kathryn Himmelstein from the BPHC.
Dr. Himmelstein testified at a March 16 City Council hearing that, “contracting Leptospirosis in Boston is extremely rare, and the last reported case was in 2021.” Prior to 2021, the next most recent reported case was in 2018.
‘The beauties she so truly sees’
“Moody November Evening” (oil), by Carl Scherres (1833-1923)
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
“My November Guest,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1983)
Why won’t they head south?
“Alewife Jerry’s Pond,’’ by Vicki Kocher Paret, in her show “Color Conversations,’’ at the Arlington (Mass.) Center for the Arts, through Dec. 11
Although there’s not that much money in it
“The Artist at Work” (oil on canvas), by George Ault (1891-1948), at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Chris Powell: Some core lessons about how to help public education; but where are the parents?
The 19th Century public school, since demolished, as it appeared on a 1911 postcard.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
There’s so much wrong with public education in Connecticut generally and with the
school system particularly that criticizing them doesn’t require making up stories. But that’s what the U.S. education secretary, Connecticut’s own Linda McMahon, did the other day to try to score a political point.
McMahon said the infamous case of the Hartford Public High School girl who was graduated illiterate and innumerate two years ago was the result of the school system's spending too much on "diversity, equity, and inclusion" initiatives, political correctness the Trump administration has been trying to stamp out.
McMahon's accusation is nonsense. Hartford did spend a little money on those things while the girl was going to high school but that wasn’t why she was graduated uneducated.
First, she was graduated uneducated because schools in Connecticut advance and graduate students uneducated as a matter of policy, social promotion. Schools in Connecticut have no academic proficiency requirements.
Second, school management in Hartford was incompetent and indifferent.
And third, the girl's parent didn’t make a public stink about her daughter's lack of education until she was given a high school diploma and there was money to be made with a lawsuit against the school system.
Of course school and union officials attribute the girl’s ignorance to a lack of money in Hartford’s school system. Yes, the system has thousands of "high needs" students who are more expensive to educate. But the school system also has been badly managed, as the Yankee Institute showed last year with its report about a "paraeducator" who is also president of the local paraeducators union and secretary-treasurer of the Connecticut AFL-CIO and who took nearly a full year of days off in her previous three years of employment, many of the days with pay for doing union political work, not school work.
Instead of making up a story about "diversity, equity, and inclusion," McMahon could have done some good by noting the school system's negligence and incompetence and the union official so frequently absent from her school job.
McMahon also could have noted that when the scandal about the uneducated girl broke in the press, the state education commissioner and the Hartford school superintendent promised to investigate and report about the case. They may have investigated but they never reported to the public and no one has ever been held accountable.
Gov. Ned Lamont, whose re-election campaign broadcasts commercials boasting that Connecticut has "the best schools in America," never demanded an explanation about the uneducated Hartford graduate, nor has he amended his commercials to acknowledge that Connecticut also has some of the worst schools in America.
Secretary McMahon could have pushed the governor, the state Education Department, and the Hartford school system to account for what happened with the uneducated graduate, who is hardly the only Connecticut student who has been graduated uneducated in recent years. Indeed, many if not most Connecticut students emerge from high school without high school-level proficiency, and that has nothing to do with DEI either. It’s state government’s lack of political will to enforce educational standards and require parents to take more responsibility for their children.
Expect More and Get More
Most educational achievement in Connecticut, as elsewhere, is a matter of parenting and household wealth. If children have two parents whose income can support their home without much stress, the kids will tend to get more upbringing, be healthier mentally and physically, and be more engaged in school.
Where children are raised by a single parent in poverty and live more neglected under financial and emotional stress, they tend to be indifferent students or, worse, demoralized, troubled, and disruptive. That is what is signified by the catastrophically low proficiency test scores and high chronic student absenteeism in the schools of the poorest municipalities.
The results of the few proficiency tests Connecticut administers to its public school students long have shown income and the extent of parenting as clearly as federal census data can. State government has long cynically misinterpreted the data to mean that the problems of poverty and inadequate parenting can be solved by throwing more money at schools and their unionized and politically active employees, though little if anything ever changes educationally. As a result most Connecticut students are not proficient in English and math when they graduate from high school, but school employees can afford nicer cars and remain loyal to the political regime.
Two months ago, in response to marginal improvements in the latest state proficiency test scores, the state Education Department's chief performance officer, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, offered one of the department's empty pieties. "Success is possible in any district and for any child," he said. "All students should be achieving these standards."
No one at the state Capitol asked: So why aren't they?
Pursuing that question would be too sensitive politically. It would indict neglectful parents and government policy that encourages neglect. It would call attention to all the money spent without educational improvement. It might even prompt people to wonder how the country can survive as a democracy amid ever-worsening literacy and ignorance.
But this doesn't mean that since the state education bureaucracy is timid and ineffectual, schools with impoverished students are helpless. To the contrary, an excellent account published two weeks ago by Connecticut's Hearst newspapers, written by a member of the Report for America organization, Colin Tiernan, provided insight about how East Hartford's schools have begun to improve proficiency despite a student population poverty rate of 60 percent.
In 10 years East Hartford's student proficiency in English has risen to 40 percent from 30 percent while proficiency in math has risen from to 34 percent from 17 percent. While these rates remain below the state average, they are markedly better than those in Connecticut's cities.
School Superintendent Thomas Anderson says "there is no magic" about it, no single factor. But the Hearst report found important hints.
East Hartford's immediate past superintendent, Nathan Quesnel, who ran the system from 2012 to 2023, says, "When we expect more, we get more from kids." Teachers echo the theme of expecting more and holding all students to a higher standard.
East Hartford state Rep. Jason Rojas, the House Democratic majority leader, thinks the unusual stability and longer tenure in the system's superintendent position in recent years has helped. Many superintendents in Connecticut are relatively short-termers.
East Hartford teachers say they are involving students more in class exercises, requiring them to work with classmates to find correct answers, which keeps them attentive, and teachers try not to go easy on students. But some students are troubled and sometimes need to be handled gently lest school lose them.
One student, a teacher said, "comes to me every morning not wanting to be here. I say, 'Thank God you're here. I would be so upset if you weren't here.' It's the hardest thing for her to have gotten here today, and here I am loading her down with fractions."
But, the teacher added, "If they know you love them, they'll do anything for you."
In that respect teachers, as always, often make up for what many children don't get at home -- the problem government can't bring itself to address: expecting more from parents.
MORE OMBUDSMEN, PLEASE: Recent days have shown Connecticut that it needs many more independent monitors of state government agencies and programs.
First the Correction Department’s ombudsman, DeVaughn Ward, exposed an abusive, incompetent, and unqualified prison doctor who had been chased away from medical jobs in two states before being hired to treat Connecticut’s prisoners. With an annual salary of $260,000, the doctor has been placed on paid administrative leave, presumably forever.
Then Mairead Painter of the nursing home ombudsman program in the state Department of Aging and Disability Services exposed a nursing home in East Windsor for having left the wound on a patient’s head swarming with maggots. Now he’ll probably need skin grafts. The failure was blamed on a lack of staffing, a problem at many nursing homes.
What might more ombudsmen might find in and around state government?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government, politics and culture for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
And they undermine democracy
What happens when managers no longer have the authority to manage? When managers can’t terminate an employee who is inept? When they can’t assign the best employees to a hard task? Or when they can’t consolidate near-empty facilities? Any business would soon fail.
Welcome to the sinkhole of American public administration. Government supervisors and school principals in most states and cities are more like compliance officers, lacking rudimentary management powers, because public-union collective-bargaining agreements—often several hundred pages long—dictate how to do almost everything.
The harm of unmanageable government is not a matter of degree. Nothing much works as it should. American citizens are burdened with poor services and schools, often at twice the reasonable cost, plus massive unfunded benefits that could bankrupt our children.
Yet new governors or mayors can’t do anything about it because they come to office bound by pre-existing union agreements. The legislatures won’t help because they rely on public-employee unions as their main source of campaign support.
Public-union controls are a cancer in American democracy. Without managerial powers, the executive branch in many states and cities is an empty shell. Democracy is now in the grips of a new spoils system—serving public employees instead of the American public.
In Burning Money, Philip K. Howard, shows why the public-union stranglehold must be broken, and how that will unlock massive public resources and human initiative.
Burning Money will be published by Rodin Books on Jan. 19, 2027. Read the press release here.
“Continuing his important work on sources of public-sector inefficiency, Philip Howard's Burning Money takes a big step—demonstrating harm to public management and even democracy of entrenched public-sector unions. Anyone interested in advancing agency and taking back control should read this book.’’
— Glenn Hubbard — professor of economics and finance at Columbia University and former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers
xxx
“The role of public-employee unions in delivering government services is massively concerning yet poorly understood. The unions have an outsized influence on electing the government officials with whom they have to deal and, as a result, those officials do what the unions want, not what the public needs. This process makes government services—things like schools, police, transit, etc.—substantially more expensive and less good than they should be.
“Philip Howard shines a spotlight on this debilitating arrangement and shows how badly the public is being hosed. He will be vilified for being anti-union but, as this book irrefutably demonstrates, he should be heralded for being pro-democracy.’’
—Joel Klein, former chancellor, New York City Department of Education
Workers' agitation as portrayed in “Strike,’’ by Mihály Munkácsy (1895).
Robert Whitcomb: John & Yoko in candids
Roger Farrington
From The Boston Guardian
The tiny new book Starting Over with John and Yoko is a look at the last months, in 1980, of ex-Beatle John Lennon, shot to death on December 9 that year, about the social, technical and other aspects of pre-digital photography, and the ethics and anti-ethics of public relations.
The work, with text by Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack and photos by famed Boston photographer Roger Farrington, centers on the celebrity couple’s activities at a New York recording studio and outside The Dakota, the famous Upper West Side apartment building where the couple lived. Lennon, in collaboration with his wife, Yoko Ono, was recording what turned out to be his last album, Double Fantasy, sometimes erroneously called Double Fantasies, which was released on Nov. 17, 1980.
The duo had taken a five-year hiatus from recording starting in 1975 and rumors that they might be planning a return to production were constantly circulating. I remember those rumors, though I wasn’t a Beatles World obsessive. Anyway, on August 7, 1980, John Lennon and Yoko Ono walked into the Hit Factory to secretly begin work on a new album.
At the studio and outside The Dakota, Farrington, who was 27 at time, took some memorable candids of the couple, some of which are in this book, all the while having to deal with an irascible and sometimes crooked, or at least “colorful,’’ Boston-based press agent called Charles Cohen. He almost seemed like a guy in a ‘40’s Film Noir. Lennon himself was widely seen as arrogant and irascible but doesn’t seem that way in the book.
To say the least, Farrington was a surprise choice to visually record the couple in the studio. In 1980, he was performing a variety of jobs for owner Jack Sugrue at The Charles Playhouse, in Boston.
The book memorably evokes the times and places of that era, including the urban seediness of Boston and New York.
It reminded me of my experiences in school, developing film in darkrooms, especially the strong smell of the chemicals! Also later on my watching news photographers and photo editors I worked with at newspapers sometimes create memorable work in the face of big obstacles, some even dangerous. And then there was the challenge to editors to properly size and crop the images.
The book’s descriptions of what Farrington had to do to create those pictures act as a solid first lesson in the glories, disasters, unpredictability and occasional chaos of pre-digital professional/commercial photography and, so far as any photography goes, what goes into the decision of when to shoot a picture, whatever the gear. But when a photographer does get great pics, sometimes by accident, what an addition to the historical record!
Mr. Womack notes at the end of the book that Yoko’s Summer of 1980 anthology, which she compiled in 1983, “pointedly featured John in happier times, when the world was brighter {for some anyway} and the idea of making music again seemed a worthy cause for coming out of retirement. {Yoko’s} husband had been, as always, a visionary of the highest order, and the photos from that fate-filled summer redound with optimism and hope. Life is indeed what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’’
Robert Whitcomb is chairman of The Boston Guardian.
Marcus LiBrizzi: Ghost stories are reminders of historical injustices
1827 Finley Map
From The Conversation, except for image above
(Editor’s note: The Conversation, a nonprofit service, is a very useful and interesting source of knowledge and understanding. New England Diary is a donor to it, and we hope that you’ll become one, too.)
ORONO, Maine
Along with the pumpkins and costumes, the candles and cobwebs, Halloween is all about storytelling. From tales of haunted houses to accounts of demonic possession, ghost stories are part of the holiday’s appeal.
As a professor at the University of Maine who specializes in ghost stories, I’ve thought a lot about what makes one unforgettable. My field research has taken me from the coast of Maine to the Amazon jungle, but some factors remain constant in an unforgettable tale.
One factor is what I call “creep value,” which includes the scare factor but also the elements of a story that might be simply unsettling or uncanny.
Take, for starters, the ghost of Catherine’s Hill along the Blacks Woods Road in Maine. The story warns that, against all intuition, even a lone driver at night must always stop and offer the phantom woman a ride. If not, as the story goes, she will appear when least expected in the back seat of the car to cause a fatal accident.
But there is more to account for than creep value in an unforgettable ghost story. These stories can keep alive the memory of a dark past. In my research I have come across tales that preserve memories of injustices that might otherwise have been forgotten.
Dark histories
One story, about a ghost ship that can be heard but never seen, preserves the little-known history of the smuggling of enslaved people.
The legend goes that on foggy nights, during the full moon, those standing at the Cooksey Drive Overlook in Seal Harbor, just outside Acadia National Park, can hear the slaves in the hold of a sinking ship crying for help.
The story goes back to the Pride of the Seas, a ship that smuggled enslaved Africans into the United States after the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been abolished but slavery remained legal. The account specifies that the smugglers scuttled the ship to evade the law. In ghost stories that circulate by word of mouth on Mount Desert Island, the screams of those left behind can still be heard.
Pennsylvania coal miners offer another example of past grievances passed down in the form of ghost stories. At the sites of deadly accidents, people have reported the sound of a pickaxe or the groans of a dying man. An extensive archive contains multiple accounts of coal miners witnessing ghostly knocking, disembodied voices and apparitions of mangled men. One story involves an innocent coal miner, condemned to death in 1877, who left a handprint in his cell at the Carbon County Jail that no amount of sanding or paint has been able to erase.
Coal miners endured brutal work conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries. ilbusca/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images
Today, it is widely known that coal miners of the 19th and early 20th centuries experienced ruthless exploitation and hazardous working conditions. Years ago, their plight went unrecognized in official histories and government policies, but ghost stories helped keep these experiences in the collective memory.
A South American perspective
When I collected ghost stories in South America, the same pattern held true: Some tales preserved history that would otherwise be lost.
In the Amazon jungle of northern Brazil, I traveled to a gloomy site where people, over several generations, have claimed to see the spirits of young men in the murky water. These stories keep alive injustices from the 19th century involving enslavement of Indigenous people. The location was a former sugarcane plantation notorious for cruelty, and accounts of apparitions in the water are a reminder of this history.
In Rio de Janeiro a well-known ghost story involves the apparition of a young girl in a mansion known as the Castelinho do Flamengo. All the accounts of her story agree that this young heiress, named Maria de Lourdes Fernandes, witnessed the deaths of her parents; her guardian then locked her up and drove her to suicide to get her inheritance.
Her soul is said to remain in the mansion she tried to escape. The tale is not just about an individual tragedy but one that exposes inequities involving the mistreatment of juveniles and the corrupting influence of power.
The past that isn’t past
Ghost stories don’t simply recount memories – they can revive them and bring the past back into the present.
The unsolved 1898 murder of a 52-year-old woman, Sarah Ware, in Bucksport, Maine, illustrates how ghost stories can have historical significance and flood the present with the past.
In the 1980s a woman and her daughter began having nightmares about a long-haired woman in a long dress struggling to rise from the bottom of a lake. When they realized they were having the same recurring dream, they partnered with an author, and their research led them to a conclusion that the apparition was the ghost of Ware.
Official records document that when Ware’s body was recovered it was badly decomposed and her head had completely detached. Her head remained in the courthouse until the 1990s, when it was buried in Ware’s grave. According to local lore, however, Ware’s headless body is not in that grave but instead in her original grave, now located at the bottom of Silver Lake. In the oral history of the area, workers moved only the tombstones when they flooded the paupers’ graveyard – the cemetery for the poor – to make a reservoir in the 1930s.
Ware’s ghost is believed to have appeared again in 2006. When a young woman went scuba diving in Silver Lake in Bucksport, she reported seeing a woman in a long dress struggling to rise from the bottom of the lake. When she swam over to help, the figure’s hair floated back with the movement of the water to reveal she was a faceless apparition. The sighting of the faceless ghost revived the history of the unsolved murder all over again.
Ware’s case highlights the violence and injustice and their connection to gender and social class in 19th-century Maine. Missing evidence and recanted testimonies suggest that powerful men might have interfered with the investigation to hide their own complicity in the murder. As an independent woman of the time, Ware was the subject of gossip, and the treatment of her body shows how social class affects even the honoring of the dead. As a ghost story, the history of Sarah Ware is not past but rather part of the here and now.
So when you’re out and about telling ghost stories this Halloween, remember that the unforgettable ones are all about creep value in the context of a dark history that flows back in again like the tide.
Marcus LiBrizzi is a professor of English at the University of Maine
He has received funding from the Maine Humanities Council.
Thanks, but I’ll sleep in the other room
“Nature’s Resting” (photo), by Rebecca Skinner, in Fountain Street’s group show “Confluence,’’ at the Southborough (Mass.) History and Arts Center, through Jan. 3.
Llewellyn King: The increasing torture of airline travel
On a brighter note, T.F. Green Rhode Island International Airport has been voted the best American airport.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
You can see them everywhere at this time of year: People who have a hollowed-out look.
They are people who have endured the agony of airline flights, from buying a ticket in an online minefield of dynamic pricing and extra charges to blown-up hopes.
They are the victims of post-flight syndrome, PFS. Treat them kindly. They will recover with some long-term affects.
These include a determination to drive or take a train next time, and to ask family members who live in distant places, “Why don’t you visit us this year?”
Online ticket buyers find that getting a reasonable price is like buying a new car. Abandon hope all ye who have entered the dealership, and forget what the advertisement said.
Airlines use dynamic pricing, and it is designed to separate you from your money in subtle and underhand ways. They teach it in college business schools — at colleges like Harvard and Stanford which offer MBAs. The airlines hire people out of these schools for their skill at providing less service for more money.
You buy a “basic economy” ticket because you don’t want to pay an extra $100 roundtrip to check your bag. So you drag it through TSA, where the rule is that you are assumed to be a terrorist until proven otherwise.
If you settle for basic economy — the extra-cramped seats near the toilets — you advertise to all that you have no money.
Or for two inches more legroom and less compassion from the cabin crew, you can pay more while still in economy: a word with new meaning when used around dynamic pricing schemes.
This way you can avoid the parlor game in basic economy of wondering who has a weak bladder or who might be going to the toilet to ingest an illegal substance.
Okay, squeeze into your seat and wait for your seat mate. He is bound to be a sumo wrestler, a basketball player of either sex or a former football player gone to fat. You will be sharing your little patch of seat whether you want to or not.
About those toilets. The airlines have cut down the amount of space allocated to each toilet, so two now occupy a space designed for one.
This has consequences. Large people get stuck and have to be pulled out by the crew, I am told.
Men, I can attest, aren’t advised to try to take their jackets off in the toilet. They also should decide what they need to do before entering because turning around, if you are large, is a challenge. Think ahead.
The late financier Pete Peterson once described airline food to me as a classic oxymoron. Well, it has gotten worse since his day.
He said that to me some time in the 1980s. Now you get — if they haven’t run out of it — the shavings of a bird that may or may not have been a chicken in an oleaginous sauce, accompanied by three green beans, a green plant leaf posing as a salad, and some artificially flavored Vaseline for dessert. Pack a candy bar in your hand luggage.
Long gone are the days when airlines hired name chefs and advertised their food as an inducement to fly. Some had dining rooms and others had bars, where the long-haul passenger could belly up and sink a pint or two.
Adding to the horror of the economy cabins is the chaos of the terminals, where too many people are crowded into too small a space and announcements can’t be heard, gates change without notification, and cancellations barely earn an apology. My wife tells me the women’s toilets are especially foul.
Oh, you think you can use all those frequent flyer miles to whisk you to a Shangri-La? Forget it. The MBAs have been tampering with those, too. Now you are advised to get an affinity credit card. Like everything else on board, this has an affinity for your money and won’t guarantee you an upgrade or free trip.
I’ll be seeing you — those who trade our well-being for transportation — in the back of the plane. You can still get one free cup of coffee, but that is bound to end.
Bon voyage, seat mates.
Llewellyn King, an international energy-sector consultant and long-time reporter and editor, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Allow a little crowding
IDuke photo
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I hope that Massachusetts voters approve the proposal in Question 7 on the Nov. 3 ballot that would let single-family homes be built on lots that are as small as 5,000 square feet –a little less than an eighth of an acre – provided that there’s adequate water and sewer access. The proposed law would set aside localities’ zoning that sets much larger lot sizes, in what’s sometimes called “snob zoning.’’ That obviously curtails the creation of much needed new housing, raising the cost of current housing – the old supply-and-demand problem.
But even if the measure is approved, some affluent localities will fight hard to undermine it. But it would be a modest boon for the Bay State’s economy, which has been hurt by the lack of “affordable’’ housing for workers and their families. Very expensive Greater Boston would be most helped; and northern Rhode Island, which is economically integrated with much of it, would also benefit.
Going to sleep
“Autumn Landscape” (oil on canvas), by Joseph H. Greenwood (1857-1927), at the Worcester Art Museum.
The museum explains:
"The son of French-Canadian immigrants, Greenwood grew up in Spencer, Mass. He left school at age 11 to work in the local boot factory and later wire mill. Meanwhile, he scavenged chicken feathers for brushes and wallpaper scraps for pigment to create his first works of art. A wealthy mill owner recognized Greenwood's inclination for art and sent him to Wilbraham Academy for two terms of study.
“A prolific painter, Greenwood preferred the natural landscape as his subject and captured the pastoral beauty of rural New England in all its glorious seasons. He painted scenes from Worcester's Green Hill Park, Paxton's Davis Hill Farm (now Moore State Park), Grafton's Pigeon Hill, and the Western Massachusetts villages of Greenwich and Prescott, which were later flooded to create the massive Quabbin Reservoir. The paintings are distinctively New England.’’
‘Between control and surrender’
“Ocher — The Pursuit of Knowledge” (acrylic, charcoal and pastel sticks), by Mia Eriksson, in her show “Holding the Line,’’ at Alofft Gallery, Litchfield, Conn., through Nov. 1.
She says:
“We are surrounded by lines in our lives. Lines we face: starting lines, finish lines, blurred lines, and bottom lines. Lines we draw: ethical lines, moral lines, lines in the sand, and creative lines. And lines we learn to live with: aging lines, laugh lines, bloodlines, and timelines.
“These lines mark the boundaries between control and surrender. They define where we stand, what we protect, and how much of ourselves we are willing to expose.
“Within each painting in Holding the Line, I have placed a holding line, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, and sometimes hidden within layers of color and texture. For me, it represents the place where we refuse to give up ground, compromise our principles, or surrender under pressure.
“The holding line is an ethical anchor and an emotional boundary. It is also a place of shared sacrifice, support, and commitment for people, nature, beliefs, and things we love.’’
N.E. Council’s warning about proposed federal regulation against ‘racial discrimination’ in private schools
Unsplash photo by Vitaly Gariev
From The New England Council (very slightly edited for clarity)
BOSTON
The New England Council recently submitted comments expressing our significant concerns regarding the proposed federal regulation entitled “Racial Nondiscrimination in Private Schools.”
Under the proposed rule, a private school would not qualify for federal tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) if it “adopts, maintains, or enforces a policy or practice that discriminates on the basis of race, color, or national or ethnic origin.” The rule would apply across admissions, educational policies, scholarships and loans, athletics, and any other school administered or school-supported program.
The Treasury Department, which includes the Internal Revenue Service, estimated that the proposal may affect as many as 18,000 private educational institutions, including tax-exempt private primary and secondary schools, colleges, universities, professional schools, and trade schools.
Threatening the tax-exempt status of private educational institutions based on their support for policies or programs designed to address racial discrimination raises serious concerns regarding freedom of speech, association, religion, and the ability of charitable organizations to pursue their lawful missions.
Here’s what the The New England Council has written to the IRS.
Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., founded in 1781, one of the oldest private boarding schools in the United States.
— Photo by Transmarinus
Having fun with horror in N.E.
Postcard was gift of Fielding Schofield to New England Historical Society, May 1, 1925
Excerpted and edited from an article by the New England Historical Society
“Many of the objects from the early history of Halloween celebrations in the U.S. relate directly to women and the home. As Halloween evolved into a popular holiday around the turn of the twentieth century, parties were often held at home and an increasing variety of decorations, postcards, and other items became commercially available for the Halloween season.
“Women and children feature prominently in the imagery of early Halloween postcards. The postcard above, in Historic New England’s collection, was created by American artist Ellen H. Clapsaddle. Clapsaddle was a successful commercial artist and designed many Halloween and other holiday postcards in the early twentieth century. The International Art Publishing Company manufactured this postcard around 1912….’’
1926 postcard in Historic New England collection
“Since witchcraft was historically a crime associated with women and the home, it is interesting to consider that long after the threat of witch trials {in Salem, etc.} disappeared from New England, women were still closely connected to a holiday that celebrates witches and magic.’’
Make it another old-fashioned, please
“A Friend Walks Into a Bar’’ (acrylic on canvas), by Kate Micucci, at the Samuel Owen Gallery, Greenwich, Conn.
The gallery says:
“Kate Micucci is a multidisciplinary artist whose work moves between drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, and interventions in public space. Known also for her work as an actress, comedian, and musician, Micucci brings a distinct sense of improvisation, curiosity, and emotional immediacy to her visual practice.’’
Nicholas Jacobs: In Maine and elsewhere, why access to public money depends heavily on the influence of individual politicians
The political success of Maine Sen. Susan Collins has heavily depended on her record of bringing federal contract money to the Pine Tree State.
Seal of Aroostook County, the huge, northernmost and thinly populated home of both Collins and Troy Jackson, her Republican foe in their battle for a Senate seat in the next Congress.
From The Conversation (except for images above)
WATERVILLE, Maine
Give politicians the power to decide who gets a government contract, and people will naturally want to get on their good side. After all, the power to hand out something valuable is itself something valuable.
Consider the recent ProPublica investigation involving Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. Martin Kao, the former head of a Hawaii defense contractor called Navatek, told the FBI that his donations to the Republican senator’s campaign and an allied super PAC were part of a deal for help winning federal funding and contracts for his company.
That money padded Navatek’s bottom line, but it was also pitched as an investment in Maine: well-paying jobs from Navy contracts, university research and a new facility on Portland’s harbor.
Trading campaign contributions for official acts, or concealing illegal donations through relatives and shell companies, violate existing law – and it is part of why Kao now sits behind bars. Whether Collins or her official staff knew of an alleged bargain remains a legitimate question the public deserves answered.
But as a scholar of American politics, I argue that the question of criminal corruption obscures a larger problem: The line between political favoritism and effective representation is remarkably thin.
Instead, I wonder why a Hawaii defense contractor concluded that the surest route to federal money ran through a senator from Maine – and why his bet paid off.
Why is access to public money so dependent on the political influence of individual legislators?
On May 5, 2026, Sen. Susan Collins stands in front of posters announcing expansion plans for Bridgton Hospital, for which she helped get federal funding. Graeme Sloan/Getty Images
The power of appropriators
Earmarks – spending directed by a lawmaker to a specific local project – account for only about 1% of discretionary federal spending, but they offer an unusually clear window into a much larger competition for public money.
Congress revived the practice in 2021, allowing lawmakers to request funding for particular projects in their states and districts. Navatek’s funding came through the Pentagon budget in 2019, when earmarks were banned. But legislative disclosures make it possible to see who asks for money, who gets it and which politicians are best at delivering.
According to Senate Appropriations Committee disclosures, senators submitted 8,071 requests worth US$26.9 billion for fiscal year 2022. By 2026, that grew to 13,997 requests totaling $50.4 billion.
As these requests have grown, however, the share receiving such funding has fallen.
I matched nearly 55,000 Senate requests from fiscal years 2022 through 2026 against the projects Congress ultimately funded. For every senator, I calculated how many projects they requested independently and how many received funding.
Two things stand out.
The first is the seat: About 30 senators serve on the Appropriations Committee, which writes the bills funding federal agencies. They requested about one-third of the money but secured nearly half of the dollars approved and allocated. A dollar requested by an appropriator was almost twice as likely to become law.
The advantage isn’t partisan: Near the top of the chart, alongside Collins, sit a Vermont Democrat, Patrick Leahy, and a Kansas Republican, Jerry Moran. Leahy retired in 2023, while Moran is still on the panel.
The second is skill: Volume usually costs success – the more a senator asks for, the less of it lands. The median senator won 41% of the money they requested. But Collins is the exception. She requested 496 projects on her own over those five years and won 92% of them – the highest sustained rate in the Senate.
When Republicans regained the Senate majority in 2024, the rate only improved. In fiscal year 2026, her first year as chair, Congress funded 95% of her solo requests, while the median senator’s rate fell to 35%.
When Collins calls her chairmanship a “once in a century” opportunity, she has the evidence. The last Mainer to lead the appropriations committee was GOP Sen. Frederick Hale, who held the chair for four months in the 1930s.
Collins’ chairmanship explains her most recent advantage, but not her entire record. Even before taking the gavel, she secured funding at nearly twice the Senate median. Even in Washington, 30 years of showing up and working across the aisle still gets results.
Forms of political exchange
Now, put yourself in the position of a hospital, a business or a town seeking those dollars. Whose political career would you want to support?
In that respect, Collins is doing what senators are elected to do, and she’s doing it exceptionally well. When access to public resources depends on political influence, those who benefit have reasons to support the politicians most capable of delivering.
Voters call it delivering for Maine. It is why it is a core message of her reelection campaign. You cannot turn on a television in Maine without hearing about some project “Susan” delivered. It has helped get her reelected four times, because people support candidates who promise results; candidates then run on having delivered on that promise.
The same kind of political exchange happens when businesses contribute to super PACs supporting politicians who deliver. It happens when unions organize turnout for candidates promising favorable policies or when nonprofits support politicians who might fund their programs. These are all different forms of political exchange.
Political scientists call this “rent-seeking”: getting ahead by winning government favors rather than creating something of value. And the more government decides who gets what, the harder it becomes to distinguish representation from favoritism.
Systemic problem
The Supreme Court confronted this problem in McCormick v. United States, a 1991 case involving campaign contributions and extortion. To violate the law, the court said, payment had to be made in return for explicit, official action.
Otherwise, the court recognized, ordinary campaign finance would become nearly impossible to distinguish from criminal conduct.
The same relationships that make effective representation possible also make political favoritism difficult to distinguish from legitimate government. A company wins a contract after supporting a senator. A nonprofit receives a grant after helping elect an ally.
The problem is systemic.
Even if every senator were ethical, conscientious and committed to the public good, the incentives would remain the same. A senator who refused to compete wouldn’t make their state’s sewers less leaky. They would leave them unfunded while other states secured the money. The problem doesn’t require bad people.
Nor can it be resolved by declaring one set of political interests more virtuous than another.
Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson greets supporters at a town hall on Sept. 13, 2026, in Biddeford, Maine. Joseph Prezioso/Getty Images
Clients and patrons
Collins’ Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, for example, says he isn’t backed by corporate PACs or billionaire donors but by working people. Such a claim implies a distinction between self-interested corporate influence and supposedly public-spirited political support that motivates his donor base – even if that donor base includes a multimillion-dollar “dark money” super PAC.
But when a union invests substantial resources to elect politicians who promise favorable labor legislation, or if a nonprofit mobilizes its members to elect someone who promises to expand grants for its programs, the same client-patron relationship persists.
Corporate entities have particular interests; so do noncorporate entities. Both can expect benefits from government. Patronage exists even when the profits don’t go to shareholders.
To call one form of influence corrupt and the other well intentioned is to paper over the business model of reelection: Have they delivered? Will they continue to deliver? Changing the source of campaign support doesn’t change the powers the winner will exercise.
Restricting earmarks didn’t eliminate the underlying incentives. Nor can campaign finance laws, however necessary, eliminate the value of having a powerful political friend.
If Americans want less rent-seeking, it requires reducing how much government spending depends on discretionary political decisions in the first place. General funding rules, established in advance and responsive to differing local needs, offer one alternative. Such rules wouldn’t remove politics from public spending. But they could shift the political contest away from who gets a particular favor and toward the rules under which everyone receives funding.
Until then, voters face a choice between two kinds of political patrons. Each is asking to hold the pen and write checks. Neither is offering to put it down.
Nicholas Jacobs is Goldfarb Family Distinguished Chair in American Government at Colby College and is associated with the Institute for Humane Studies.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
So near and yet so far
An item in my Oct. 25 GoLocalProv.com column referencing Brian L. Porto’s new book, Twin States, Different Paths, on how New Hampshire and Vermont have developed so differently as neighbors caught the eye of my friend John O. Harney, the now-retired editor of "The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE)" and occasional contributor to New England Diary.
John and I have long shared a fascination with the nuances and contradictions of New England's culture and economy. Plus, John is always trying to preserve the good work of NEJHE and Connection, which he edited from 1989 until his retirement (and the journal's disappearance), in 2023. So he shared this short piece on the N.H.-VT. differences that the journal first ran in 2008 and John reprised in his blog on May 13, 2011.
Here it is. Good reading!
—- Robert Whitcomb