News Analysis With a Sense of Humor
Llewellyn talks to host Tim Farley about John McCain, the late Republican senator from Arizona; and about the events that led environmentalists to choose coal over nuclear, thus allowing untold millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and now making that same mistake with wind and solar, technologies whose spent parts are creating a waste disposal problem.
Listen to the segment by pressing the play button below.
When A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press meant freedom for those who owned the presses, he spoke in a time when there were nearly 2,000 daily newspapers in the United States. Today there are fewer, and they depend on more than presses to stay in business. They depend on the indulgence of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Freedom of the press now depends on those few companies that own the logarithms on which all publishers depend to get a wider range of readers, even while making no money off them.
The newsboys and newsgirls of yesterday delivered the papers. That is all. The news deliverers of today control the whole publishing world. They can determine success or failure and, as we are seeing, have the power to censor.
William Horsley, a retired BBC correspondent who is involved with media studies at the University of Sheffield and is vice president of the Association of European Journalists, says the newsboys are now the publishers.
In the billions of words that have been spouted about freedom of the press here and around the globe, Horsley has identified a new and terrible reality about the freedom of the press and along with it, the freedom of ideas.
Quite simply, we now live in an era in which an algorithm buried somewhere in the secret depths of Google can do more to change what we know, think and say than any dictator has been able to achieve.
While the creators of Google, Facebook and Twitter probably did not dream of such power, such control, such hegemony, it has come to them.
The mind reels with possibilities, each more disturbing than the previous, of what would happen if any of the Internet giants fell into the hands of malicious owners or a dictator. Think of the damage if Steve Bannon, who presides over Breitbart, or some like ideologue, were at the helm of Google, Facebook or Twitter.
George Orwell, at his most pessimistic, could not have imagined the existential evil that could await us, courtesy of technology, plus a sociopath.
A professor at Brown University congratulates me on my life choices. He implies that my peripatetic journey through the world, clutching a press card, has been because of sound choices. To which I have to respond, “My life has been one of dumb luck and failure.”
Luck, I say, because it is what determines your being at the right place at the right time. Failure, I say, because it is possible to fail upwards: I have, often.
Had my career been on an even keel, I would have finished high school, maybe gone to university and then gotten stuck in one of the early jobs, making it my “career.” As it is, I dropped out of high school, went into journalism and failed a lot.
If I had kept any of those jobs I failed at, I might have had a duller life: a jobbing writer in Africa, a news writer at ITN in London, the creator of America’s first women’s liberation magazine (which failed to liberate any women, but liberated all my money) in New York, an assistant editor at The Washington Post, and a trade journal reporter at McGraw-Hill.
So, Mr. Professor, I recommend that you prepare students for the success of failing upwards. Sometimes that goes for relationships and marriages. Do not bivouac too early on life’s open road.
In France, it is pretty well agreed, the area around Lyon is the gastronomic capital.
In the United States, New Orleans is mentioned. Well I have eaten many a meal in New Orleans, especially during a time when I was making a lot of speeches at conventions in New Orleans. But I have to say that good food rolls in Rhode Island. So much so that smart visitors come to Li’l Rhody on gastronomic tours, including friends of mine, who, like myself, have eaten the world over.
Now there are a few quibbles, to be sure. One big one is that there are woefully few French restaurants in the state, and the Italian influence in the restaurants is pervasive. Also I think there could be more top-of-the line and regional Chinese restaurants, although a Uighur restaurant has just opened in Providence. Other Asian cuisines — Korean, Indian, Thai and Japanese — are well represented.
Still, the eating in the Ocean State leaves New Orleans with a way to go in my book.
Photo: Esther Vargas, “Twitter periodismo“. Used under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
Arctic Impresarios: David Vieira (left) and Jim Belanger. Photo Credit: Linda Gasparello
Theater should be readily accessible, affordable and good. For me, the ideal theater experience has always been to pop off to the theater at the last moment and get an affordable seat.
There was a time when you could do that in London and New York. But theater-going has become an expensive chore, both in the West End and on Broadway: Buy exorbitant tickets far in advance, drive, park and get a bill for the evening which can run to over $500 for two.
Not so where I live — just down the street from the amazing Arctic Playhouse, which is to theater what food trucks are to restaurants: accessible, affordable and good.
The Arctic Playhouse is by any measure an anomaly. It just shouldn’t be. Arctic is a distressed hamlet in West Warwick, R.I. Once, it was prosperous shopping area near working textile mills. Now it has fallen on hard times, having lost its retailing base to shopping centers. Washington Street, its main street, has boarded-up shops and a pervasive sense of decay.
But Arctic has live theater at the Arctic Playhouse: a very modest but nonetheless effective theater space where, for under $15, you can see what is often a damn good show. The theater, by the way, will be moving to a larger space on the same street.
I write this in the warm glow of having just seen such a show with my wife: “I Love … What’s His Name?” As its subtitle says, it’s a cabaret about confusion in love in the 21st century.
We were dubious, but we really like the spirit and intimacy of our neighborhood theater and its energetic impresarios, Jim Belanger and David Vieira.
So we ate a light supper and drove a few minutes to be enchanted by a clever review, well-executed by a topnotch cast, including co-creators Rachel Hanauer and Jeff Blanchette, Angela Jajko, Jessica Gates and supported with industrial-lifting, as it were, from pianist Bob Logan.
The cabaret featured a series of ballads and patter songs — some by musical greats, like Tim Rice and Stephen Sondheim — about dating. Very modern, too: Cell phones play a big part in a show that is funny, tuneful and rip-roaring good entertainment.
I’ve always said you don’t need a palace to put on a good show, just good players. It’s about the play and the players, as Shakespeare said in “Hamlet,” not the venue. Arctic proves that, production after production. Local fun in a clubby atmosphere with free cookies, decaf coffee and popcorn, and a full, cash bar.
Give my regards to Broadway, but you won’t be seeing me in many a day.
Rightly, you think the national dish of Britain is fish and chips. Well, maybe not anymore.
It is increasingly hard to find fish and chips in Britain and Ireland. Not impossible, but harder than it was when there was a fish-and-chip shop, known as a chippie, almost on every corner.
The other shocking thing is that the fish and chips in the chippies, when you find them, are likely to be squeezed in with other fast food —hamburgers, sausages and even lasagna.
What you are more likely to find in every town or village is an Indian or Pakistani restaurant. In fact, I’ve read it argued that the national dish of England is no longer fish and chips, but curry and rice.
But I’m delighted to report that some of the best fish and chips to have crossed my plate in a long time are to be found in New England, particularly in Rhode Island. Almost every restaurant and bar has very good fish and chips. Excellent, in fact, but missing that standard of the British Isles version: mushy peas. You don’t have to have them with your battered cod in the U.K., but you’d be missing the full experience if you don’t.
Mushy peas are, as they sound, peas cooked to produce a mush. Sounds disgusting, eh? Well, they’re delicious.
Why, I wonder, with so much excellent haddock around, is there no smoked haddock to be had? Finnan haddie is just not on sale among the wonders of the sea in every supermarket. The Brits like to eat it at breakfast, and the French serve it as a main course. My wife, Linda Gasparello, who grew up in Hingham, Mass., says finnan haddie and cod cakes were regular offerings on South Shore menus.
Very good too. Ladies and gentlemen, start your smokers.
We moved to Rhode Island from the Washington, D.C. area five years ago and we still shuttle back and forth with some regularity. It is hard to be a journalist and not be drawn into the Washington maelstrom.
We sing the praises of Rhode Island as loudly as operatic stars. We go on about its great food, wonderful beaches, fabulous architecture and nice people.
But people in Washington, and elsewhere in the country, believe that we live in igloos, kept warm at night by a five-dog team of huskies. They believe the cold dominates our lives and that we drive Humvees to get through the snow.
It’s not an argument we have been able to win. But the fact is the climate in most of New England is much better than the climate down in the nation’s capital where the summers are insufferably hot and humid and the winters can be as cold as they are in Providence. There is less snow there, but everything ceases up when it does snow —usually a big one every year.
The pathological fear of cold keeps people away and living in worse climates. Pass the grog.
We call ourselves “beekeepers,” but it’s been suggested that perhaps a better description would be “bee hosts.” We don’t really “keep” them at all. They’re free to leave whenever they want, and sometimes they do.
But we provide a place where a colony of honeybees can be warm, dry, well-fed, and protected from predators. We dedicate our time and resources to financing, building and maintaining bee residences: hives. We purchase protective equipment as required, food and medicines, to assure our charges stay healthy and productive. In return, we get the joy and satisfaction of a success in a challenging and rewarding hobby, as well as honey, beeswax, and other products of our hives.
Want to give it a go? Here are some steps you can take:
First, locate some other beekeepers where you live. I’m writing this in Wakefield, R.I. in November 2017. By now, there are few areas in the United States that do not have an active beekeeping association of some kind, and the same is true nearly all over the world. Nearly all associations have web sites, and some sort of educational outreach program to teach beekeeping. Many have active mentor programs that will hook you up with an experienced beekeeper. My local beekeeping association provides 12 ½ hours of instruction for about $75 and has an active mentoring program for new beekeepers.
Do some personal research, in libraries or on the Internet. Find out what you’re getting into. “Beekeeping for Dummies,” for example, is a very readable book that provides an excellent overview of the skills and equipment you’ll need, and the problems you’re likely to face. No resource is perfect, but once you “catch the bug”, so to speak, a visit to Randy Oliver’s site (see below) will give you an idea of what you should expect from a quality beekeeping course, and the syllabus identifies more texts that will help you learn more about being a good host for your bees:
http://scientificbeekeeping.com/scibeeimages/BEGINNERS-OUTLINE-PDF.pdf
Take the beekeeping course offered by your local beekeeping association if possible; otherwise, take one elsewhere, but try to find a course near where you live. Your local environment will have special characteristics that in some cases will make your job easier, and in some cases, harder. Where I live, for example, there are few hive beetles to prey on our hives, and the Gulf Stream tends to moderate the winters compared to more inland locations 200 miles to the west. Were I to undertake beekeeping in Atlanta or Montreal, I’d face a whole different set of challenges, such as Africanized bees (in Atlanta) or icy cold winters (in Montreal).
Once you understand why beehives are built the way they are, you’ll need to build a hive for your bees to live in. Happily, if you’re not a woodworker, hives can be purchased online from beekeeping suppliers. Several of the larger ones in the United States are at the links below. It’s also not uncommon for local supply houses to exist, and your beekeeping association can help with locating them.
http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/
Any of the above suppliers will supply not only the hive components, but also the protective gear you’ll need to work safely with stinging insects, the equipment to harvest, store, and bottle your honey, and the foods, medicines and devices you will use to protect your charges from pesticides and disease.
Finally, you will need the bees themselves. The easiest way to acquire them, as bizarre as this may sound, is simply to order them, by the pound no less, from a bee supplier. While it’s possible to get them in other ways, ordering and buying a “package” from your local supplier is by far the most common way for new beekeepers to break into the hobby. Most packages come with about 20,000 worker bees, one queen, and enough food to permit the bees to survive the journey from the supplier’s facility to your local distribution point. You can learn how to get packages of bees from your class instructor or your local beekeeping association.
People have been hosts to colonies of honeybees since before the pyramids were erected. That’s a very long line of joyful, interesting, helpful, frustrated and committed people and you’re welcome to join it.
We walk a rocky, challenging, but ultimately satisfying road. Remember they are insects and sometimes they live, sometimes they die. Sometimes we know why, sometimes we realize we might have prevented a lost colony, and sometimes we never figure it out. But if you work at it, the successes are sweet and, in the long run, they eclipse the failures.
Stephen H. Burke, a Rhode Island lawyer, is secretary of the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association. He is also a beekeeping instructor at the University of Rhode Island. His e-mail is steve@stephenhburkelaw.com.
COPENHAGEN — Whenever I stray from the East Coast of the United States, I’m reminded of the debt we owe to the Gulf Stream. Malibu, Calif. may be thick with Hollywood stars, but the water is damned cold. Always. I can tell you I’ve tried swimming there often and it is, by the standards of New England’s summers, cold. Really, for all the beauty of the West Coast, you have to travel as far south as San Diego to enjoy a dip, which might remind you of the waters of Cape Cod in July.
Lest you didn’t know, that’s why the number of pleasure boats in Seattle is said to be the highest on a per capita basis in the nation. When it’s too cold to get in the water, get on it.
The Gulf Stream divides as it goes north and sends one branch to Africa and one to Europe, known as the Atlantic Drift. There’s some argument about how much the Atlantic Drift affects the climate of Europe. My empirical, unscientific observation is that it’s a big player and Europe and America would both be devastated with climate change if the Gulf Stream were to cease to flow or change course – a possibility with global warming.
It’s because of this great benevolent current, that there are palm trees on coast of Cornwall and Devon in the west of England and there are even palm trees in Ireland and Scotland. In those locations, they are small stunted things, in no way like their robust relatives in Florida. But they’re palm trees. And I’ve inspected some.
I looked down my proboscis for years when anyone mentioned cruising. I also had harsh things to say about it.
Well, for a decade and a half, I’ve been dining on my words. I took a cruise with my wife, Linda Gasparello, that changed everything back in the early 1990s. We cruised mostly in the Black and Aegean seas — and it was actually the best cruise we’ve ever taken.
It started our cruise contagion; we’ve cruised far and wide ever since. We’ve even journeyed briefly and enjoyably from Boston to Nova Scotia, but nothing equaled that first cruise. The ship wasn’t too big and the crew — mostly Greeks on the catering side of things — were marvelous.
The thing about cruising is the shore stops and tours. That first cruise took us from Athens to Yalta, Odessa, Constantia, Istanbul, Kusadasi, Mykonos, Patras and set us down in Venice. We learned – and this is the thing about cruising — that it’s wonderful because the hotel goes with you and the shore trips are usually well worth taking. That’s the kernel of what it’s about for us; not the food (too much, but good enough), nor the shows (Las Vegas lite), but the floating accommodation and shore excursions.
In 2015, just before Christmas, we cruised around Cape Horn. Amazing. It astounds me that rounding the Horn, where so many mariners perished, can be accomplished in a luxury liner. The shore trips in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia are worth running the credit cards up to the limit to do.
Linda and I have just been at it again. Capriciously, we decided it was time to cruise the Baltic and see the jewel in its crown, St. Petersburg.
For me, it was a third visit and was Linda’s first. I knew it wouldn’t disappoint and it didn’t. If it isn’t on your bucket list, write it down right now. Then go.
If you get there by water, so much the better because the cruise companies deal with the hassles — and traveling in Russia can be a big hassle, from getting a visa to finding a hotel that doesn’t look like it’s an incubator for social diseases.
So many nationalities now cruise that it’s a new universal cultural norm, like pizza and Coca-Cola.
Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on the Train” was a great read; an original story with an original kind of heroine: she has a drinking problem. Also, it’s set in England and depends on English train commuting habits, not American. But when it was turned into a movie, it was mysteriously set in New York and the English actress, Emily Blunt, was the heroine.
Now there’s a seven-part miniseries made by HBO and starring Sharon Stone and Reece Witherspoon of the splendid Liane Moriarty novel “Big Little Lies.” I haven’t seen it yet, but the thing is Moriarty is Australian and her novels, excellent writer that she is, are set in suburban Australia. One of the considerable joys of reading Moriarty is that you forget that the novels are Australian: The struggles of school playgrounds and other aspects of middle class suburbia are apparently universal.
The makers of the “Big Little Lies” the miniseries, which has gotten rave reviews, chose to relocate it to Monterey, Calif. Why? Maybe they thought a dash of Oz would be too hard for us to understand.
Oddly, Monterey is not typical of America’s suburbs either. Maybe, also, the series producers forgot star Nicole Kidman is an Australian. Confusing.
Llewellyn King on SiriusXM, POTUS Channel 124
Listen below for the segment, where Llewellyn discusses his column, “Europeans Feel They Can’t Trust U.S. in the Time of Trump” which can be read on this website, or on HuffPost here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/europeans-feel-they-cant-trust-us-in-the-time-of_us_595f8399e4b0cf3c8e8d57e2
Press the play button below to listen.
Photo: A Showery Cay – Naragansett Pier by Alfred Thompson Bricher 1871
I have not yet been to the beach this year and with the arrival of hot weather, a dip is in order. But the fact is the beach is not what it used to be for me. Ever since I started making television programs on the oceans, I have stared out to waves with a different mindset — foreboding tinged with sorrow.
Like most of us I thought of the oceans as the last refuge of untrammeled nature, a place where man’s predations could not defeat nature; the last safe place for the world as it was. Then I started doing television interviews about the state of the oceans and found how wrong I was.
The first interview was with Mark Spalding of The Ocean Foundation; the second with Colin Woodard of The Portland Press Herald; the third with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is my senator; the fourth with University of Rhode Island oceanographer Sunshine Menezes; and the fifth was another detailed discussion of the state of the oceans with Whitehouse in his office on Capitol Hill.
Whitehouse is a passionate advocate for the oceans and an articulate voice for their deplorable condition, due to acidification, infestation with plastic, overfishing, and the relentless rise in temperature and sea level — up there with acidification, and likely in the future to wipe out coastal communities.
It is grim stuff: a horror story of our own making and one which is sometimes lost among other stories of environmental disaster. But this is the one which will get us all in some way.
They say Algernon Charles Swinburne, the 19th-century English poet, would not only write poetry about the ocean, but also would shout his verses into the waves. This summer as we flock to enjoy the beaches in New England and elsewhere, maybe we should shout “sorry” into the sick waves, because they are sick of a disease that can be arrested if we just have the mind to start.
To me, part of the mystery of the movie business is as much in the distribution as in how particular movies come to be made. I say this because an exceptional film — one of the few of recent releases — has got short shrift from the distributors in Rhode Island. I cannot speak for the rest of New England or the country as a whole.
The movie is “Norman,” starring Richard Gere — and starring is the operative word because he is seldom off-screen. It has all of the ingredients which make a movie great to my mind – and for what it is worth, I once reviewed movies for newspapers. The story is briefly the tale of a somewhat sleazy New York fixer who ingratiates himself with an Israeli politician who rises to become prime minister of Israel. They become durable friends.
The movie, written and directed by Joseph Cedar, an Israeli film director, is taught, dodges sentimentality and yet has flashes of it, and nails the banal cruelty of politics, and the mischief of gatekeepers and the pain of outsidedness. The craft of filmmaking is on display here at its best. Gere is great and the rest of the cast is exceptional. I am sure it will be studied for its technical skill in years to come in film schools.
So why, I ask, was it not on general release in Rhode Island? On Saturday, it only had an 11:30 a.m. showing in one of the malls. My wife Linda and I ended up seeing it at Cable Car Cinema, the venerable but tiny art house in Providence, where it had a number of showings.
Why such limited release? The film was lavishly reviewed in the press, here and abroad. Curious business, movies – a joy when you see a great one where it was meant to be seen, in my view, in a cinema.
Back to Washington last week for another speech and some visits.
Washington’s law firms set the pace for office decoration and two things dominate: marble and glass. One thing is eschewed: anywhere to sit.
Building after building, housing the myriad law firms which are lobbying shops as well, have ridiculously obstructive security with rent-a-cops running little fiefs, and acres of cold, people-rejecting marble.
When you get upstairs, everything that can be glass is glass. One lobbyist makes sure you are escorted at all times because of the number of people who have been hurt walking onto glass walls and doors.
Glass and marble: What does it all mean? What happened to wood and warmth and places to sit in lobbies? Heaven knows, human knees have not been converted to stone and glass.
Joe Mathieu, who for the past six years has been a drive-time news anchor, from 5 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., on WBZ NewsRadio 1030 is moving to WGBH’s “Morning Edition” as the anchor, replacing Bob Seay. Seay will concentrate, according to the NPR station, on enterprise reporting. Probably on sleeping in as well. Drive-time hours are brutal.
On a personal note, I’m delighted. I met Joe when he was putting together the very successful POTUS ’08 channel on SiriusXM Radio. While the channel was supposed to run just for the length of the 2008 presidential campaign, it was so popular that it was made permanent.
Originally, the channel took its title from POTUS, an abbreviation for President of the United States (first used in the late 1800s in telegraphic communications). It dropped the year in its title and defined POTUS as “Politics of the United States.”
I’m glad not only to be a regular commentator on POTUS, Channel 124, but also that it airs the audio from my PBS program, “White House Chronicle,” four times weekends.
My presence there is all due to the days when Joe was the impresario of the channel. I’m indebted to him.
But despite the national reach of his Washington commitments, Joe yearned for his native Boston. He told me he began his career in broadcasting at 14 years old. He graduated from Emerson College, renowned for its arts and communications programs.
I’m glad of the new assignment, not because WBZ is anything but an excellent public service in Boston, but because the new venue will provide more room for Joe’s extraordinary talents as a broadcaster, a political analyst and, his special mastery, as an interviewer.
On the downside, Joe won’t get any more sleep: his WGBH anchor slot, beginning in August, starts at 5 a.m. As a longtime newspaperman and broadcaster, I can tell you about those hours: They’re tough.
The Arctic Playhouse, the little not-for-profit theater, located on the main street of Arctic Village in West Warwick, R.I., has a table for you.
Well, it is raffling a magnificent dining-room table, matching upholstered chairs, a sideboard and a hutch. Cardi’s, the furniture chain, donated the table to the theater. It is the centerpiece of the set for the theater’s current, lively production of A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room.”
The dining-room set is worth $3,500, and the raffle winner will be chosen after the play’s run. One of the table’s leaves will be signed by the cast and the three Cardi brothers. Instant provenance for a serious set of dining-room furniture.
Raffle tickets are just $10 for one ticket, or $25 for three. Tickets can be bought online or in person at the theater until June 3.
Photo: The cast of A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room, currently playing at The Arctic Playhouse, credit Linda Gasparello
Amtrak, so important to New England and the operator of the only bit of rail service between Boston and Washington, D.C., which looks something like a train service should, is having problems at New York’s Penn Station. It is not the awful, crowded concourse at the station, but the awful, crowded rails which passengers don’t see.
Commuter trains have derailed and fixes are going to have to be made with equivalent disruptions this summer. There is even a scheme to reroute the New England trains through Grand Central for the duration.
When will we get the message that infrastructure starved of funding and preventative maintenance fails? Looks like the Trump budget will make matters worse. Broken infrastructure is a tax in its own way. Very taxing.
Lead photo: Joe Mathieu, credit CBS
As opportunities in journalism have tightened, many of my colleagues have tuned to writing books. I admire them. Actually, I more than admire them: I’m astounded by them.
Among them is my friend Richard Whittle, a former Pentagon correspondent for The Dallas Morning News, who has written two first-rate books. His first was about the V-22 Osprey vertical takeoff aircraft and his second was about drones.
Whittle is hard at it on a third. He tells me that he loves his second career – and, as an elegant writer and an impeccable reporter, he’s doing well.
I’m frequently asked why I don’t take this path and write books about the subjects I know something about or, to be exact, subjects about which I’m supposed to know something. The answer is simple: fear. Not fear about my ability, but fear of boredom. Fear of waking up every day and having to take up where I left off the day before.
The peripatetic journalistic life suits me; maybe too well. I love the idea that each day could bring something new, unexpected and thrilling, just because it’s new.
Like many newspapermen, I answer phones with alacrity because the next call might, as it says in “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” could “in a trice life’s leaden metal into gold transmute.”
The poet was referring to liquor, and it might be why liquor and newspapering have been so indelibly linked. Certainly, the drinking by newpapermen — and I’ve worked on newspapers in colonial Africa, London, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. — was endemic and awesome.
Less now, I gather. The venerable National Press Club in Washington used to support two bars and, at lunch and in the evening, drinkers crowded them 15- deep. Now the only bar is sadly empty most of the time.
Once I ran into a colleague at the end of the day at the Paris Air Show. “How are you?” I asked. “I’m cold, I’m wet, my feet hurt and I haven’t found a story,” he said. I knew why he was miserable: Life’s leaden metal hadn’t been transmuted into gold nuggets of news.
The book writers, if they’re any good, unearth many stories, but the thrill of publication isn’t daily. It can take a year or longer. Not for me.
News writing, like drinking, produces its thrills predictably, and I’m for the early gratification. More power to my colleagues who are undaunted by the long haul.
Rhode Island, where I live, is, as I have found, a kindly place: people look out for one another. So why, I wonder, are there so few bus shelters and even benches?
I find the public transportation users (I’m one) standing forlornly, in all kinds of weather, waiting for a bus. Recently, in the heavy rains, they were especially bedraggled. This must negatively affect ridership. Since I have difficulty standing for long periods, I don’t take the buses in Providence and its surrounding communities. But I’d take them if I could sit down while waiting.
In Washington, D.C., where I’m often, I take the buses a lot. There are seats in shelters that don’t keep you warm but do keep you dry.
It’s cruel to leave those who ride buses without shelter or seating.
I travel to Cambridge, Mass., quite a bit. But recently, in this self-regarding gyre of great ideas, I’ve noticed more homeless people than ever sleeping on the streets. One wonders, wandering the streets so close to the Great Minds, whether some of them haven’t thought of a solution? Is it a step too far from the ivory towers to the hard pavement where the luckless sleep?
I went to Warren, R.I. to see “Art” at 2nd Story Theatre. At the end Ed Shea, the dominant force there – by turns actor, director and manager — came on stage to announce that the building, which now includes two small theaters and a very pleasant bar, is to be refurbished, and that the first-story theater will be transformed into a restaurant.
I wish them well, but it’s unclear how this will work. Will the restaurant be complimentary or competitive? If I’m going to eat and go to the theater, I favor supper after rather than dinner before. Going to a good restaurant is, in itself, a theatrical experience and competes with theater for entertainment hours.
One of the joys of Rhode Island is its profusion of really good places to eat. Warren is no exception. New Orleans has the reputation, but Rhode Island has the vittles.
Second story will lose a stage, but Shea still plans to cook up some imaginative theater on the remaining one.
By Linda Gasparello
Last week my husband, Llewellyn King, and I abandoned the delights of West Warwick, R.I., to visit Chicago – actually, a part of Chicagoland that few visitors get to see.
Llewellyn was a speaker at a conference held at Argonne National Laboratory, just outside of Chicago. Argonne is the multidisciplinary science and engineering research center, born out of the University of Chicago’s work on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.
The lab, which occupies 1,500 acres, came as a total surprise for our Uber driver, a Chicago native who used to drive trucks professionally. “I’ve driven past this place many times, but I never knew what was goin’ on,” he said.
We had some difficulty finding Argonne’s Main North Gate and delay getting our ore-arranged passes. Once cleared for entry, we had to drive behind a security vehicle to our hotel: the Argonne Guest House, which is Building 240 on the “campus.” It is where most people stay for conferences, short research visits and invited tours of the site, thus avoiding the main security gate rigamarole.
Our driver thought all this cloak-and-dagger stuff was a hoot, but Llewellyn, who has visited Argonne many times, wasn’t entertained. He wanted his dinner and a glass, or two, of red wine.
The guest house is a fine example of 1970s university dormitory architecture, more Brutalist than humanist. But what the building lacks in design, it more than makes up for in setting: It backs onto some of the Argonne site’s wooded acres.
The lobby and the guest rooms don’t inspire one to linger. But you might want to hang out with colleagues in the elevator lobby on any of the guest floors. Each has comfortable club chairs, equipped with wooden swivel trays and a huge whiteboard hanging on a wall – perfect for a pre-breakfast solving of isotope burn-up equations.
The Zen garden in the seven-story Theory and Computing Sciences Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.
As you drive up to the Theory and Computing Sciences Center on the Argonne site, your heart will beat a little faster: This building – Building 240 — with its jutting, pierced concrete slabs and glass walls, houses state-of-the-art supercomputing systems. You sense from its great, gray exterior that the interior won’t be filled with floors of sensory-deprivation cubbies for techies.
It isn’t. The building, according to the lab, “was designed to be an open and flexible workspace to encourage the free flow of ideas between scientists at Argonne as well as the technology to connect researchers across the globe.” Its seven stories wrap around a Zen garden.
There are cloth-lined cubicles with whiteboards — on some of which I saw scrawled equations. But on the ground floor no glass walls separate them from the garden. Surely, gazing at the garden and ambling around it through the open hall must reduce workers’ stress; unless you’re a worker who is stressed by the thought of a snake curled up in your cubicle.
The garden’s raked, gray gravel sits upon dirt and occasionally critters – frogs, rodents and even garden-variety snakes — break through the garden’s surface and can be found among its plants and rocks.
“We like ’em. They’re engineers,” one ground-floor worker told me.
Door sign in the Theory and Computing Sciences Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.
“Scientists are literal.” That’s how Gilbert Brown, director of the nuclear engineering program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, explained why the Theory and Computing Sciences Center’s bathrooms are called “toilet rooms.”
“The rooms have toilets but no baths,” he said.
Makes sense to me.
When I pointed out to another nuclear engineer that all the push pins on a bulletin board outside the center’s conference room were placed in a rectangle, he said unhesitatingly, “Scientists are neat as pins.”
The white fallow deer herd that has roamed the Argonne site since the lab’s inception in 1946 – and has caused visitors sometimes to speculate on the nature of the experiment that produced their unusual coloring – has dwindled to one doe.
“Prior to 1946, part of the land that is now Argonne was the country estate of Gustav Freund, inventor of ‘skinless’ casings for hot dogs. Freund had a small herd of the deer on his estate for several years. The naturally light-colored species – Dama dama – are native to North Africa, Europe and parts of Asia.
“When the federal government purchased the property, it was believed all of the herd had either been given away to parks and zoos or destroyed by the local game warden. It turned out there still were two does on the property, and one gave birth to a buck. The herd created from these three deer became a fixture on the Argonne property and a topic of interest and conversation for employees and visitors alike,” Donna Jones Pelkie wrote in Argonne Today, a lab publication.
Unfortunately, the white fallow deer didn’t reproduce at a normal rate because of a lack of genetic diversity; even when they do reproduce, they only give birth to one fawn per year – unlike the fecund, native white-tailed deer which also roam the site. The fawns were prey to coyotes, which have become city slinkers.
Efforts to preserve or replenish this historic herd were stymied by state regulations, which not only would’ve required any new white fallow deer brought onto the site to be deemed “livestock,” but also would’ve made Argonne responsible for the herd’s maintenance, including penning, feeding and veterinary care.
So the lab opted for natural attrition, which comports with “its thinking of keeping natural areas in balance with the native ecosystem,” according to the Jones Pelkie story.