William Morgan: Why Providence is indeed one of the 'Best Towns'
The Rhode Island State House is just the crowning example of brilliant civic architecture in Providence. Few other American cities can match Providence in the richness of its architectural patrimony.
—- Photo by William Morgan
Providence got a welcome pat on the back when CNN Travel recently ranked it Number 2 on its list of “Best Towns in America To Visit’’; Richmond, Va. was Number 1. Our high scores included Art, Architecture, Design and Food (of the other nine cities, only Macon, Ga., got a nod for its historic buildings). Such a positive national spotlight on Rhode Island’s capital is briefly heartwarming, but it barely hints at why Providence is one of the best towns anywhere in which to live.
Americans seem obsessed with lists and rankings, most of which are so superficial as to be meaningless. The worst are the college ratings, which seem only to increase applications to fewer schools (often called “elite’’) and to create a general atmosphere of insecurity for all the rest. (Examples of criteria used: Last time I checked, The New York Times’s list of the 300 Best Colleges had Providence College dead last in terms of student diversity; the University of Chicago held the bottom rung on the ladder for social life.)
The Zumper real-estate study listed Providence as 98th in 100 spots for best city for this year’s college graduates. Such metrics as median rents and the unemployment rate produced findings giving top spots to far-from-the- ocean Minneapolis, Columbus and Oklahoma City, while admittedly much more vibrant cities with higher costs of living, such as Boston or New York, lagged far behind. Where are the rankings for character, for beauty, for soul?
Beacon Hill, Boston. Who would trade this for Grand Rapids or Duluth?
— Photo by Willliam Morgan
When I was a professor of urban studies at the University of Louisville, students would often ask me what makes a great city. Somewhat tongue in cheek, yet also in a way deadly serious, I said that a great city was one that poets would write poems about and to which musicians would write love songs (“I left my heart in Duluth” doesn’t work). A few other pedagogical chestnuts: All great cities are on water. Street life and the strength of the neighborhoods are key indicators of livable cities. And the acceptance in a city of its gay citizens is also a strong indication of its livability.
A collection of the author’s columns that he wrote as architecture critic of the Louisville Courier-Journal were published as this book.
When my wife, Carolyn, and I decided to leave Kentucky for a new home somewhere in New England, we tried to heed my own urbanism lessons. We agreed that we would seek the ideal place to live in, and then look for work, rather than let a job dictate where we would settle. We drew up a stringent list of urban wants, headed by proximity to the ocean and a city’s strong sense of its history. Needing to work, we wanted a city with several colleges and universities where we could teach.
Our ideal new hometown would have inviting sidewalks with interesting stores and restaurants alongside, including independent bookstores, and and with larger cities nearby. We craved ethnic diversity and a variety of cuisines. Most of all it had to look and “feel right,” with a distinguished collection of high-style and vernacular architecture, gathered together in a human scale. A preservation-minded mayor, the late Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, with seemingly off-the-wall ideas, played an important promotional role. He and other local leaders weren’t afraid to help arrange for the likes of Venetian gondolas and to light up a river.
Note that there were no econometrics in our city-search template.
WaterFire was one of the urban inventions that impressed this city shopper.
— Sketch by William Morgan
Size is not really an accurate gauge of a city’s desirability – CNN Best Towns are actually smaller cities, from about 50,000 to about 225,000 residents. One interesting aspect of the story, however, is that it uses the term town. The word seems to suggest something more accessible than canyons of concrete and glass.
In Britain, the people who shape metropolises are called town planners. Before consolidation into Greater London following World War II, the British capital had been a collection of 23 boroughs, each with its own government, identity and traditions. One thinks of Providence’s two dozen neighborhoods, from Silver Lake to Fox Point, collectively contributing to a lively mosaic instead of an Anywhere USA blanket of sprawl.
Great towns need boldness and innovative out-of-the-box thinking. Providence uncovered a river and moved an interstate highway.
— Photo by William Morgan
Let’s stop worrying about lists and ratings and simply strengthen those attributes that make a place beloved – attributes that Providence has in spades. Economic development has a major role, of course, but stressing monetary concerns over humanizing factors cannot ensure a high quality of urban life. And worse than lists are one-size-fits-all advertising, such as the current slick but trite “All that …” campaign. If Providence is an urban success, people will come to visit those who live here and who have helped make it one the best towns anywhere.
People connecting make a lively town, not statistics. Hope Street is the main drag of Providence’s East Side.
— Photo by William Morgan
Architectural historian, critic and photographer William Morgan has lived in Providence for 25 years. His latest book is Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States.
Appearances are deceiving
1914 photo
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked,
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
‘‘Richard Cory,’’ by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935). He grew up in Gardiner, Maine, whence came the themes of many of his poems.
Chris Powell: Totalitarian ‘climate-change’ protestors
Climate-change protestors in Germany.
Cromwell Meadows, in Cromwell, Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
When, in 1955, Rosa Parks, a courageous Black woman, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., was arrested, and dramatically advanced the modern U.S. civil-rights movement, the connection between her protest and her objective was clear: to end the racial segregation maintained by the bus service.
When, in 1960, courageous Black college students sat down at the white sections of racially segregated lunch counters throughout the segregated South and refused to leave until they were served, the connection between their protest and their objective was clear again: to end the racial segregation maintained at of lunch counters.
In those protests and many others during that era, the demands of the protesters could be easily granted by the targets of the protest without any loss or harm to anyone.
But what is to be construed from the sort of protest that is erupting in Western Europe and now the United States, such as the protest that disrupted the final minutes of play at the Travelers Championship golf tournament in Cromwell, Conn., two weekends ago? The protesters, wearing shirts with the legend "No golf on a dead planet," ran onto the putting green and sprayed colored powder on it before police intercepted them, took them away, and charged them with criminal mischief.
The protesters in Cromwell want to eliminate oil and natural-gas fuels, in the belief that those fuels are causing devastating "climate change." In other venues such protesters are defacing paintings and statues. But the golf tournament, a major money-raiser for charity, and the defaced paintings and statues have no special connection to fuel use and their operators and custodians have no special responsibility for fuel policy. They don't use oil and gas any more than everyone else does.
Sometimes fuel protesters block roadways, halting traffic. Of course most vehicles use fuel, but most of their operators of the vehicles being blocked use fuel no more than everyone else does.
The fuel issue is a society-wide issue but the targets selected by the fuel protesters are not objectionable by the protesters' own standards, and hindering them won't affect fuel policy. The protesters have selected the targets instead for their capacity to cause annoyance when impaired and thus generate publicity.
But the fuel issue long has been getting plenty of publicity quite apart from the efforts of the protesters. It is a major political controversy in the United States and Western Europe, where it is politically correct to imagine that there are readily available and adequate alternatives to oil and natural gas. But fuel is not a political controversy in most of the rest of the world, and especially not in the developing world, which will be needing not just oil and natural gas but also coal, the dirtiest conventional fuel, for decades to come.
Calculating the benefits and harms of conventional fuels and striking a balance between them is a task for democratic politics. But the fuel protesters are so sure they are right, and so self-righteous, that they claim the right to nullify the rights of all people who disagree with them or don't heed them.
These protests go far beyond civil disobedience. They go far beyond criminal mischief as well. They are totalitarian. and any prosecutor who pursues the criminal charges from the golf tournament, and any court that tries them, should keep this in mind.
MORE SCHOOLS CRASH: Add Stamford to the list of Connecticut cities whose schools are getting out of control.
Teachers at Stamford's Turn of River Middle School say that they are being abused, bullied, threatened, and even assaulted by students, adding that the school administration has failed to report the assaults to the police.
The administration says it will make changes, including adding a third security officer to the school. That officer is needed not to protect the school against outsiders but against its own students, since under Connecticut law even the most disruptive students are almost impossible to expel, lest their feelings be hurt and the public notice social disintegration.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net) .
Ryan McGrady/Ethan Zuckerman: Your personal and family videos are stuff for AI and so a privacy risk
From The Conversation
AMHERST, Mass.
The promised artificial intelligence revolution requires data. Lots and lots of data. OpenAI and Google have begun using YouTube videos to train their text-based AI models. But what does the YouTube archive actually include?
Our team of digital media researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst collected and analyzed random samples of YouTube videos to learn more about that archive. We published an 85-page paper about that dataset and set up a website called TubeStats for researchers and journalists who need basic information about YouTube.
Now, we’re taking a closer look at some of our more surprising findings to better understand how these obscure videos might become part of powerful AI systems. We’ve found that many YouTube videos are meant for personal use or for small groups of people, and a significant proportion were created by children who appear to be under 13.
Most people’s experience of YouTube is algorithmically curated: Up to 70% of the videos users watch are recommended by the site’s algorithms. Recommended videos are typically popular content such as influencer stunts, news clips, explainer videos, travel vlogs and video game reviews, while content that is not recommended languishes in obscurity.
Some YouTube content emulates popular creators or fits into established genres, but much of it is personal: family celebrations, selfies set to music, homework assignments, video game clips without context and kids dancing. The obscure side of YouTube – the vast majority of the estimated 14.8 billion videos created and uploaded to the platform – is poorly understood.
Illuminating this aspect of YouTube – and social media generally – is difficult because big tech companies have become increasingly hostile to researchers.
We’ve found that many videos on YouTube were never meant to be shared widely. We documented thousands of short, personal videos that have few views but high engagement – likes and comments – implying a small but highly engaged audience. These were clearly meant for a small audience of friends and family. Such social uses of YouTube contrast with videos that try to maximize their audience, suggesting another way to use YouTube: as a video-centered social network for small groups.
Other videos seem intended for a different kind of small, fixed audience: recorded classes from pandemic-era virtual instruction, school board meetings and work meetings. While not what most people think of as social uses, they likewise imply that their creators have a different expectation about the audience for the videos than creators of the kind of content people see in their recommendations.
Fuel for the AI Machine
It was with this broader understanding that we read The New York Times exposé on how OpenAI and Google turned to YouTube in a race to find new troves of data to train their large language models. An archive of YouTube transcripts makes an extraordinary dataset for text-based models.
There is also speculation, fueled in part by an evasive answer from OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, that the videos themselves could be used to train AI text-to-video models such as OpenAI’s Sora.
The New York Times story raised concerns about YouTube’s terms of service and, of course, the copyright issues that pervade much of the debate about AI. But there’s another problem: How could anyone know what an archive of more than 14 billion videos, uploaded by people all over the world, actually contains? It’s not entirely clear that Google knows or even could know if it wanted to.
Kids as Content Creators
We were surprised to find an unsettling number of videos featuring kids or apparently created by them. YouTube requires uploaders to be at least 13 years old, but we frequently saw children who appeared to be much younger than that, typically dancing, singing or playing video games.
In our preliminary research, our coders determined nearly a fifth of random videos with at least one person’s face visible likely included someone under 13. We didn’t take into account videos that were clearly shot with the consent of a parent or guardian.
Our current sample size of 250 is relatively small – we are working on coding a much larger sample – but the findings thus far are consistent with what we’ve seen in the past. We’re not aiming to scold Google. Age validation on the internet is infamously difficult and fraught, and we have no way of determining whether these videos were uploaded with the consent of a parent or guardian. But we want to underscore what is being ingested by these large companies’ AI models.
Small Reach, Big Influence
It’s tempting to assume OpenAI is using highly produced influencer videos or TV newscasts posted to the platform to train its models, but previous research on large language model training data shows that the most popular content is not always the most influential in training AI models. A virtually unwatched conversation between three friends could have much more linguistic value in training a chatbot language model than a music video with millions of views.
Unfortunately, OpenAI and other AI companies are quite opaque about their training materials: They don’t specify what goes in and what doesn’t. Most of the time, researchers can infer problems with training data through biases in AI systems’ output. But when we do get a glimpse at training data, there’s often cause for concern. For example, Human Rights Watch released a report on June 10, 2024, that showed that a popular training dataset includes many photos of identifiable kids.
The history of big tech self-regulation is filled with moving goal posts. OpenAI in particular is notorious for asking for forgiveness rather than permission and has faced increasing criticism for putting profit over safety.
Concerns over the use of user-generated content for training AI models typically center on intellectual property, but there are also privacy issues. YouTube is a vast, unwieldy archive, impossible to fully review.
Models trained on a subset of professionally produced videos could conceivably be an AI company’s first training corpus. But without strong policies in place, any company that ingests more than the popular tip of the iceberg is likely including content that violates the Federal Trade Commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, which prevents companies from collecting data from children under 13 without notice.
With last year’s executive order on AI and at least one promising proposal on the table for comprehensive privacy legislation, there are signs that legal protections for user data in the U.S. might become more robust.
When the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern asked OpenAI CTO Mira Murati whether OpenAI trained its text-to-video generator Sora on YouTube videos, she said she wasn’t sure.
Have You Unwittingly Helped Train ChatGPT?
The intentions of a YouTube uploader simply aren’t as consistent or predictable as those of someone publishing a book, writing an article for a magazine or displaying a painting in a gallery. But even if YouTube’s algorithm ignores your upload and it never gets more than a couple of views, it may be used to train models like ChatGPT and Gemini.
As far as AI is concerned, your family reunion video may be just as important as those uploaded by influencer giant Mr. Beast or CNN.
Ryan McGrady is a senior researcher, Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Ethan Zuckerman is an associate professor of public policy, communication and Information at UMass Amherst.
Disclosure statement
Ethan Zuckerman says: “My work - and the work we refer to in this article - is supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the National Science Foundation. I am on the board of several nonprofit organizations, including Global Voices, but none are directly connected to politics.’’
Ryan McGrady 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.
Re-examining her life
“Snake Den Mesa” (screen printed collage), by Jungil Hong, in her show “Jungil Hong: The Time Being,’’ at the ODD-KIN gallery, East Providence, R.I., through July 21.
The exhibition examines and reexamines Hong’s personal life and career. “In the time between oldest and newest work in the exhibition I have questioned parts of my identity—as an immigrant, a mother, a daughter, a partner, an artist,” said Hong.
Portuguese Bodo de Leite parade on Orchard Street, in East Providence. The city has many residents with Portuguese and Cape Verdean origins.
Jim Hightower: Big companies’ CEO’s impose ‘shrinkflation’ on us
“Shakespeare Sacrificed: Or the Offering to Avarice ,’’ by James Gillray
Believed to be the first coupon ever, this ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola was first distributed in 1888 to help promote the drink. By 1913, the company had redeemed 8.5 million tickets.
Via OtherWords.org
We should pay attention to corporate America’s fluctuating wordplay, for their frequent contortions of language disguise ploys to dupe, confuse and rip off us hoi polloi — i.e., their customers.
For example, here’s a mouthful that’s been gaining popularity among manufacturers of food products: price pack architecture.
It’s a bit of gobbledygook meant to obscure the profiteering practice of ever so quietly shrinking the size and contents of their packages — without lowering prices. Economists dubbed this “shrinkflation,” but that too clearly implied gouging. Thus, corporate image-makers invented the incomprehensible nonsense phrase of PPA to cloak their anti-consumer trickery.
This convoluted codeword also allows the tricksters to brag openly about their cleverness to their Wall Street investors. Here’s Coca-Cola’s CEO, for example, doing corporate-speak to bankers in February: “We are leveraging our revenue growth management capabilities to tailor our offerings and price pack architecture to meet consumers’ evolving needs.”
English translation: Consumers will need to pay us more for less Coke. You could almost hear the bankers weep for joy over Coke’s sneaky scheme to stiff its customers.
Perhaps you’ve wondered what big-time corporate CEOs actually do to rake in their exorbitant salaries, now averaging more than $8,000 an hour! Well, there it is: The CEO’s main job is to keep workers’ pay low, monopolize markets, and constantly invent slick ways to squeeze another dime from each consumer’s pocket.
It’s not honest work, but it does pay well. Coca-Cola’s CEO James Quincey, for example, hauled in $25 million in pay last year. That’s 1,800 times more than the annual income of the typical Coca-Cola worker, who will now pay more for a sip of Coke, thanks to Quincey’s “price pack architecture.”
Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.
Fiber festival
“Dance of the Bull Kelp” (quilted cottons), by Boston-based Nancy Crasco, in the show “Untangled: Original Fiber,’’ sponsored by ArtSpace Maynard (Mass.) and 6Bridges Gallery, in Maynard. The show is being presented at 6Bridges.
- Image courtesy of the artist.
The show’s curator says artists were invited to submit works in fiber in every shape and form. Aside from the stipulation that all works must be in fiber, artists were free to run wild and create quilts, sculptures and anything else in any fiber technique.
See this story about kelp growing by Natutical Farms, in Machias, Maine.
Llewellyn King: Big Tech conquers American culture, including politics; striving to be first past the post
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I sometimes write about the propensity for technology to be imperial, to conquer and to force itself on the world whether the world wants it or not. Now with AI taking hold, I have to say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
The wise people who write about international trade say that globalization is dead, killed off by nationalism and protectionism.
Well, you might not be able to get a Big Mac in Russia these days, but I bet they know who Taylor Swift is. Tom Friedman may be a well-read New York Times columnist, but his penetration is nothing compared to that of the influencers on TikTok, or maybe even Heather Cox Richardson on Substack.
Then there is the money.
The Computer Age has spawned a new class of ultra-rich, dwarfing the rich of the past, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and the Rothschilds. Names like Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and Musk dominate the age.
The descendants of the great Internet-based companies will form a new aristocracy with money so abundant that they will be able to influence our lives culturally and politically.
Culture will be shaped by them via what they sponsor. The rich have always sponsored the arts, but now there will be so much money, seeming to dwarf what Carnegie, Rockefeller, Getty, Guggenheim and their millions wrought.
If a multibillionaire wants to weigh in politically with big money, both political parties and individual politicians will tailor their offerings to get some of that campaign cash. That is occurring now. But in the future it will be occurring even more.
One could reasonably argue that the political class has already sold out to its backers. It isn’t the kind of government that a candidate will provide so much as how much that worthy raised to get elected.
I suspect that we are only at the very beginning of the effects of money in politics and how it may well reshape the future.
The people creating innovative technologies today have little idea where their inventions will take them.
Did the guys who launched Uber in San Francisco ever think that it would go nationwide, let alone that it would sweep the world and wipe out many taxi fleets? One would have believed that every county or region would have its own rideshare operator. But no. Uber went global thanks to the controlling computer technology.
One of the realities of computer-based technology is that it picks winners and losers early on — and winners win bigger than anything heretofore seen. Losers fade away, as they did after the first tranche of tech upheaval: the dot-com bubble.
It turns out that computer tech favors monopoly, and the monopoly in each market segment wins.
With AI coming into daily use, and likely to command the way we live and work after a few decades, the companies that provide that service today, and will come to control it, will potentially dwarf the existing tech mega-giants. In theory, an AI company can employ AI to consolidate its authority in the field and to vanquish competition.
If that happens, a single company will have greater wealth and greater social and political power than any aspirant for global domination ever has had.
The backstory to why early bots are error-riddled and why we get hilarious “hallucinations” is that the companies — the big techies — are so aware of the stakes that they are rushing to market their products before they have perfected them. They calculate that it is better to achieve some market penetration with an inferior product than to wait for the perfected one, when a rival has become the bot of choice and technological world conquest is at hand. Never let the perfect get in the way of market share.
Consider the evolution of Google. When it perfected its search engine it was one of a handful of search engines (Remember Jeeves?). But it grabbed market share, and the rest is history. Microsoft’s Bing can do everything that Google does, but it has a third of the users. Google got the reputation and was first past the post.
Where does Taylor Swift fit in? Is she the greatest singer about the travails of love? Almost certainly not, but social media loved her.
Tech loved Taylor, and she is the brightest star ever seen in the firmament of tech-influenced culture — the equivalent in entertainment of world conquest. It is the future.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he based in Rhode Island.
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Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
Shedding season
“Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.”
— Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013), famed architectural writer. She spent about half of each year in a ranch house in Marblehead, on the Massachusetts North Shore.
Don't go out in public without it
“La Commedia: Juliet's Mask” (cotton yarn, acrylic paint resin), by Anna Fubini, in her show “Unraveled Realities,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, July 5-July 28.
The gallery says:
“‘Unraveled Realities’ is a collection of fiber art and mixed-media works, including collaborative pieces and projects with fellow visual and performing artists. At its core, ‘Unraveled Realities ‘seeks to disrupt traditional narratives of canonical art and challenge the notion of a fixed nature of being, asserting the inherent dualities present in all things. The works showcase the interplay between materials, the creative process, and the thematic approach, embodying the concepts of deconstruction and reconstruction.’’
A kind of genius
From the show “Tony Sarg: Genius at Play,” now at the Nantucket Historical Association/Whaling Museum.
Edited from the gallery’s statement:
This is is “the first comprehensive exhibition exploring the life, art, and adventures of Tony Sarg (1880–1942). Known as the father of modern puppetry in North America and the originator of the iconic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloons, Sarg was a famed illustrator, animator, designer and nimble entrepreneur who summered on, and took inspiration from, Nantucket for nearly 20 years. Organized and in partnership with the Normal Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Mass.’’
Nantucket from a NASA satellite
New bike, bus lanes on Boylston have fans and foes
On Boylston Street
Excerpted from The Boston Guardian
The city has begun adding bike and bus lanes to Boylston Street in Boston’s Back Bay, kicking off weeks of intermittent road work along with furious debate among residents and commuters.
Boylston’s redesign comes courtesy of the Back Bay Mobility Projects, a sweeping initiative covering almost the entire neighborhood. Workers broke ground for the Boylston section on June 9, with the aim of installing bus and bike lanes, changing parking with new moped loading zones and new signals separating turn lights from crossing periods.
The redesign will be starting on Massachusetts Avenue and working its way east to Arlington Street. Sidewalks will remain open, but planners do anticipate the need for parking restrictions around affected areas.
A city spokesperson said they expect work to continue for about three weeks, probably ending near the start of July. Workers will be installing new markings and flex posts at night, saving daytimes for signal changes and sign installation.
"The changes on Boylston Street will make the roadway safer for all who live, work and visit in the Back Bay, improving speed and reliability for the more than 13,000 people who ride on the bus each day,” said the Boston Transportation Department (BTD). {But not everyone, especially some business people, agrees.}
'Economic development'
Citizens Bank headquarters, between two rivers in downtown Providence.
High Street Bank, founded in 1828, a precursor of Citizens Bank, in an 1898 photo. High Street established Citizens Savings Bank in 1871.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary’’ in GoLocal.24.com
Companies and their senior executives will always try to play states off against other in order to boost profits and thus executive compensation via friendlier tax and regulatory policies. So it is with Providence-based Citizens Bank’s apparently successful drive to get Rhode Island to give it a new tax break like the one that Massachusetts is giving to banks there. Citizens is the 14th biggest banking institution in the United States.
This involves jettisoning the current system, which bases a financial institution’s state taxes on the value of its property, payroll and sales, and letting Citizens, et al., use only sales to calculate their state corporate-income tax. This would give Citizens an effective $7.5 million tax cut.
Would Citizens move its headquarters (and perhaps some other operations, too) out of state, say to the Boston area, without the break? Maybe eventually, which would be a disaster for Rhode Island.
The painful fact is that Rhode Island must try to be competitive with its much bigger and richer neighbor and so is at the mercy of what Bay State policymakers decide in economic matters.
Much of what constitutes states’ economic-development policies is simply paying big companies to stay.
I increasingly believe that corporate-income taxes should be abolished and the loss of money to be offset by higher personal-income taxes. In the end, people, not some inorganic entity called a business, pay taxes, and the effort to avoid corporate taxes leads to what is in effect bribery of public officials through campaign contributions, etc.
Times past on Block Island
“Gathering Seaweed (watercolor), in the show “Times Past: New Works by William Talmadge Hall,’’ at the Jessie Edwards Gallery, Block Island, through July 2.
He writes: “Seaweed from the beaches on Block Island was gathered as fertilizer and for food. The rule on Block Island in the 1800’s was that access to all beaches was protected for islanders to gather whatever they could find. This included seaweed, fish, salvage from shipwrecks, heating fuel, such as driftwood, and virtually anything else that would help them survive.’’
{Editor’s note: Seaweed aquaculture has been expanding at a good clip in New England in the past few years. Seaweed has many uses and growing it removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.}
The gallery says:
The show “displays the artist’s love of Block Island and history. These works are personal for Hall, a third-generation islander, and encompass a past he hopes that people think about as he immortalizes the rich and fabulous, and now too-often forgotten, history of the island’s people, land and sea in his beautiful watercolors.’’
“Fisherman’s Corner-Old Harbor Block Island’’
Mr. Hall explains:
“Once thick with fishing shacks, the west corner of Old Harbor was the domain of the Block Island fishing fleet. When the steamers on the Fall River Line docked on the east side of this harbor of refuge, the passengers from New York City, Providence, Boston and elsewhere in the region were delivered into a bustling port. But the hurricane of 1938 devastated this fleet; 80 percent of it was destroyed in a few hours. In its heyday, these docks landed enough fresh fish to meet a substantial part of the demands of urban centers in southern New England as well as of the summer resort season.’’
‘‘Victorian Swim Party” (1889)
“During the late Victorian era, which came to be called ‘The Gilded Age,’ Block Island became know as a tourist venue without the social restrictions imposed by, say, Newport high society. Large luxurious hotels offered a more open attitude to anyone, no matter who they were or where their money came from
“The beautiful and romantic scenery and relatively remote location encouraged discreet pleasure and relaxation.
“This painting evokes a slackening of Victorian dress codes and the pure pleasure
of being alive.’’
Elevated agriculture at Boston Medical Center
Expanded farming on a roof of the Boston Medical Center.
Edited from a New England Council report
“Boston Medical Center has opened a second farm on the roof of one of its administrative buildings, which will produce food to be donated to local nonprofits and community centers.
‘‘BMC’s first farm, Power Plant Farm, opened in 2017 to provide fresh and nutritious food for patients. Now BMC expects its new Newmarket Farm to quadruple the amount of produce grown annually while partnering with a local food-access nonprofit, in Boston Area Gleaners. The farms support a clinical program at BMC called the Preventive Food Pantry, which is meant for doctors to prescribe certain foods for recovery from certain illnesses.
“‘Our rooftop farms increase green space in our community, reduce the hospital’s carbon footprint, and strengthen at-risk local food systems,’ said senior director of support services at BMC David Maffeo.’’
'A primal presence'
“Half Tree” (oil on canvas), by Barbara Groh, at Gallery Sitka, Newport, R.I.
She says in her artist statement:
“My visual inspiration began early with Abstract Expressionism. As I am primarily an abstract artist, I aspire to have my work affect others as I have been by provoking thought, emotional experiences, moods, and aesthetic pleasure.
“Landscape is a primal presence for me. I explore by walking in diverse environments and return to the studio to transform my experiences into physical being. These inspirations can happen just outside my studio door or in distant lands with unfamiliar landscapes and cultures.
“My paintings in oil, acrylic, or cold wax may reflect a quiet practice of noticing inner space, peace, and presence, while others may reflect a desire and will to express freedom and unencumbered thought. Both encompass the moment and the past – a synthesis of physicality, perception, meditation, and inner movement.’’
Founders Hall at the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport.
Chris Powell: What is ‘enough’? One-man crime wave in Conn.
“The Worship of Mammon,’’ by Evelyn De Morgan
MA NCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut is not just thrilled that UConn men's basketball coach Dan Hurley has declined a lucrative offer from the Los Angeles Lakers. People are also moved by the expressions of loyalty from the coach and his wife, Andrea -- not just loyalty to the state but, as Mrs. Hurley noted in a television interview, loyalty to the players the coach had recruited and who expected to be playing for him next year.
Of course this loyalty was not exactly reciprocated by some of the players on this year's championship UConn team. They are leaving college early for what will be their own lucrative contracts with the pros.
But there's a big difference between the situations of the players and the coach. The players aren't making much if any money and may suddenly earn millions of dollars for each year of early departure. But the coach already is making millions each year, and for having won consecutive national tournaments he is likely to make millions more from UConn with a big raise that will bring his annual compensation close to what the Lakers were offering him.
When one is already earning big money, loyalty isn't the sacrifice lately imagined and cheered by UConn basketball fans, people for whom a night out with the family for dinner and a game is a substantial expense. Indeed, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "the very rich are different from you and me."
But then there are differences among the rich too.
A recent essay recounted that two financially comfortable guys were discussing a billionaire who had just undertaken a business plan he expected would bring him even greater wealth. One guy boasted to the other: "I have what he'll never have." The other guy asked: "What's that?" The answer: "Enough."
If Hurley has enough for staying put at UConn -- even if "enough" includes a huge raise -- it still may be considered relative loyalty, and Connecticut may be glad of it all the same, but just shouldn't overdo it.
That wasn't a parody of criminal justice in Connecticut on the front page of The Hartford Courant the other day. It was reality that should have been shocking, except that repeat offenders on the loose are now so numerous in the state that few people -- and apparently none in authority -- are shocked.
State police say a 35-year-old Bozrah man with a long criminal record sped through a stop sign in Griswold, ramming another car and killing one of its passengers, Charlotte Degrado, 96, of Branford. The Courant says the offending driver has at least a dozen criminal convictions, has 10 more criminal cases pending against him, and was free because, after being arrested six times since January, he had managed to post $275,000 in bonds.
State police say the driver and his companions in the speeding car ran away after the crash but the driver was apprehended while hiding in nearby woods with a bag of fentanyl pills and $4,693 in cash.
The driver's convictions, according to the Courant, include larceny, burglary, narcotics possession, and engaging police in pursuit, and he has served three prison sentences since 2016 -- 18 months, a year, 90 days. He repeatedly has violated his probations.
If elected officials in Connecticut were more concerned about public safety than in reducing the state's prison population, they might investigate this situation urgently, interviewing every prosecutor and judge involved with the repeat offender's cases. While individually some of his crimes may seem minor, cumulatively they scream incorrigibility.
Could no one in the criminal-justice system perceive this before the fatality? Could no one note the chronic offender's 10 pending cases and realize that speedy trials and maximum sentences would be necessary to halt his crime wave?
Since Gov. Ned Lamont and state legislators don't seem to be taking note of the atrocity, will anyone in journalism confront them about it?
Or will the always dim prospect of reform be left to any efforts made by the dead woman's grieving family?]
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
'Anatomy of the human soul'
Detail from “Meditation,’’ in Keri Straka’s show “Biological Tithing,’' at Boston Sculptors Gallery through July 14.
The gallery says:
The gallery says that ‘“Keri Straka: Biological Tithing’ combines textiles and ceramics to create clusters of cells, tissue, organs, and bones, while posing intimate questions about the anatomy of the human soul as witnessed by the aging human body. …Straka uses delicate, organic shapes created from fabrics and hard, striking ceramic accents to muse on the concept of tithing, wondering whether molted cells could be collected and used to patch and protect skin as it becomes threadbare with age or illness."
Natives, residents and ticks
There are, generally speaking, five sorts of people found on Cape Cod at one time or another: native residents, natives who are not residents, residents who are not natives, summer residents who are natives, and summer residents who are not natives. A sixth classification…is the group known as ‘guests.’ Native residents have had company all their lives, as have summer residents who are natives. These hosts are fairly casual about guests, seeing them as a natural and inevitable part of any year – like ticks.’’
-- Marcia J. Monbleau, in her 2000 book The Inevitable Guest: A Survival Guide to Being Company and Having Company on Cape Cod