RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Seen & Heard: Vol. 23

In which I write about interesting things that I have read, heard and seen during the past week:

Destination: Concord Museum – Located at 53 Cambridge Turnpike, Concord Museum is not far from downtown Concord, Massachusetts. The mission of the museum is to share objects and stories about the many elements of the town’s history including its original Indigenous inhabitants; the arrival of the English; the accomplishments and challenges faced by the town’s Black residents; the accomplishments and challenges faced by the town’s female residents; the April 19, 1775, fight at the Old North Bridge that helped start the American Revolution; the town’s role in the abolitionist movement and the Civil War; the many writers of the Transcendentalist movement who lived in the town; and how the town has commemorated all of the above. If you want to understand what happened on April 18 & 19, 1775, this museum is a good place to start. A video storyboard map of the vicinity with accompanying narration provides a timeline of the British advance from and retreat back to Boston and all that happened in between. Period artifacts such as one of the two lamps that hung in the steeple of the Old North Church that evening, enrich the story. I’ve been to Concord Museum many times but I visited it again to see a temporary exhibit called “Revolutionary Legacies” that uses artifacts to explore how the events of April 19th have been remembered and celebrated and how commemorations like the 250th of the founding of the United States cause us to reflect not just on the past but also on how we see our legacy in the future. 

Podcast: Impolitic with John Heilemann – On this episode, host John Heilemann interviewed Josh Tyrangiel, a contributor to The Atlantic who discussed his new book, AI For Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter. The book grew out of a column on AI that Tyrangiel wrote for The Washington Post in which he found people in different fields, mostly outside of Silicon Valley, who were finding new and innovative ways in which artificial intelligence could help them do their jobs better. I haven’t read the book and probably won’t, not because I don’t find the topic interesting but because I have so many other books waiting to be read that I’ll never get to it. But I do find the topic of how to use AI to be fascinating and in this hourlong podcast, Tyrangiel seemed clear-eyed about the possibilities but also the challenges. A big part of all the jobs I have held in my life (Army intelligence officer, lawyer, register of deeds) and in my current avocation as an historian, has been finding and managing information. Since my first experience with a word processor in the early 1980s, I’ve been convinced that computers are a terrific tool for helping with those tasks. From my first use of ChatGPT in December 2022, I saw the enormous potential of AI and nothing I’ve seen since has changed that opinion. That’s the “glass is half full” view of AI. The “glass is half empty” take which Tyrangiel and I share, is that the people who are the chief spokespersons for AI are also the one who stand to benefit the most from it financially. They are also the same people who assured us that social media would be such a positive good for society. That turned out to be about as far from the truth as you can get, so these guys (and they always seem to be males) have no credibility. Their embrace of Trumpism also demonstrates that they have no regard for ordinary people. They want to maximize their power and profits and will ally themselves with whichever political leaders will help facilitate that. For that reason, I see the groundswell of opposition to AI – most recently in fights against data centers and college graduates booing commencement speakers who speak approvingly of AI – as well-founded. For all the good that AI might provide, its current trajectory will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs with no provision for what the displaced employees will do. If our government was looking out for the best interests of regular people, it would be imposing taxes on profits derived from AI to fund retraining and support for those who lose their jobs. The middle part of our country was shattered by unmanaged deindustrialization in the 1990s and we’re on that same pathway again. However, because of unlimited campaign spending, our government now seems to work for those who profit the most from things like AI and those people have no interest in reducing their profits and power for any reason, so there has been no meaningful effort from either party to address this problem. 

YouTube: Conan O’Brien Commencement Address at Harvard – Conan O’Brien, Harvard class of 1985, returned to the school on May 28, 2026, to deliver this year’s commencement address. Employing his well-known sense of humor and a heavy dose of self-deprecation, O’Brien delivered many insider remarks about life at the school that would have been particularly entertaining to the graduates. He also made some serious points, telling graduates to wear their Ivy League degrees lightly, making it “the least important thing people know about you.”  He criticized the current regime in Washington, saying they viewed empathy as a weakness and acted like America stands “supreme and alone.” At the same time, O’Brien lauded the vital contributions of international students to American society. 

Book Review: The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations” by Sebastian Mallaby (2004). Most of us have heard of the World Bank but few know anything about it. Recently I heard a podcast interview of Sebastian Mallaby, a longtime journalist who has written a handful of nonfiction books. While the podcast topic was a more recent book, Mallaby talked a bit about his 2004 biography of James Wolfensohn (1933 to 2020), an Australian-born investment banker who served as the president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005. Established along with the International Money Fund in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference to help rebuild countries devastated by World War II, the World Bank continues to operate as an international financial institution providing low-interest loans, grants, and technical assistance to developing nations, aiming to reduce global poverty and promote sustainable economic growth. Wolfensohn gained prominence for his role in bringing Chrysler out of bankruptcy and led Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. He was nominated for the presidency of the World Bank by President Bill Clinton (it’s an international institution but since the US is the largest investor, its nominee is usually elected president). This book documents the turbulence experienced by the World Bank during Wolfensohn’s tenure from internal factors (bureaucratic infighting; attempts to reform the culture and operational rules; dealing with NGOs) and external factors (the war in Bosnia; the AIDs epidemic; the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and the Iraq War). Mallaby’s assessment of Wolfensohn’s tenure is mixed: he tackled some tough issues that needed to be addressed but he sometimes fell into the frequent trap that the management practices of American private industry are sometimes not all that they are made out to be in the media and therefore are not always appropriate for emulation in government and government-adjacent institutions.

Wind rips through la Caverne

Wind rips through la Caverne

By Louise Peloquin

     After an 8-day, record-breaking heatwave at the end of May stifled Paris, June 2nd brought torrential rain and, as the French say, un vent à décorner les boeufs – a wind to rip the horns off a bull.

As far as we know, the sudden meteorological shift left Parisian region bulls unscathed but not La Caverne du Pont Neuf. JR’s monumental sculpture was meant to be ephemeral but the weather wasn’t supposed to dictate its fleetingness.

After our coverage on La Caverne, here’s an update. (1)

     On the afternoon of June 2nd, violent wind ripped swaths of the 20,066.29 yards of painted fabric used to create La Caverne, baring the inflatable structure supporting it. Consequently, its planned grand opening to the public on June 6th has been indefinitely postponed.

JR’s press team released the following statement without specifying the extent of the damage: “the technical experts and engineers of this art project are actively working to determine the precise causes.”

They announced: “the decision was taken to postpone the opening of the sculpture to a later date to be defined in light of the conclusions on the state of the premises.” (2)

     JR has not abandoned his intention to freely offer the general public a 24-hour-a-day, immersive, visual and musical experience in his unique trompe-l’oeil rock formation – La Caverne du Pont Neuf.

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• https://richardhowe.com/2026/06/02/la-caverne-du-pont-neuf-by-jr-plato-and-daft-punk/
• Translation by Louise Peloquin.

Reading Frederick Douglass this THURSDAY

On Thursday, June 11, 2026, at 6pm in the Luna Theater (in the former Mill No. 5), students at Lowell Community Charter Public School will present a “Reading Frederick Douglass Together” event. In recent years, many communities have come together to perform public readings of Douglass’ historic speech, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July.” Professor Bob Forrant will open the program and then lead a discussion after the reading that will engage the audience in considering the speech’s historical and contemporary context and its enduring relevance.

The event is free but there are limited seats in the Luna Theater so you must sign up in advance. You can do that at this link.

[Please note that in Sunday’s newsletter, I mistakenly wrote the event was on Tuesday rather than Thursday.]

A crime, a cover-up, a case of corruption by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe, published in April, displays once again the author’s investigative skills and journalistic talents manifest in his books Say Nothing (about “the troubles” in Northern Ireland) and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (about the family behind Purdue Pharma and the marketing of oxycontin).  Once again, Keefe does a meticulous deep dive into the personal stories of individuals involved in a true crime mystery against the backdrop of freshly explained British history.

Keefe sweeps across the history of London, from the disease and crime of Dickens’s world, its later primacy as a vibrant shipping center and subsequent industrial boom. We travel from the decline of its factories to its transformation from an active port city to a financial capital of the world. Wealthy Greeks arrived in London in the 1960s, and later the Saudis acquired properties that became known as “Billionaires’ Row.” The demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s brought to London the vast nouveau wealth of Russian oligarchs, including their laundering of “post-privatization” money through investments in luxury apartment towers like Riverwalk. London became a center of drug trade, ostentatious living, corruption and murder. It was a time of wine bars, BMWs, vacation homes, and lots and lots of cocaine and Ecstasy.

On November 29, 2019, a surveillance camera from the gleaming new MI6 building across the River Thames from the Riverwalk luxury tower picked up the image of a figure of a young man going off the fifth-floor balcony into the Thames. Did he jump, or was he pushed? Or did something else happen? Keefe spent more than two years working to find out.

In London Falling, we meet the victim, Zac Brettler, 18-year-old son of an affluent established Jewish family who had become obsessed with the vast wealth of his private school classmates, their flashy cars and watches, their lives in the fast lane. His grieving parents, financier Matthew Brettler and writer Rachelle, could never accept how quickly the Metropolitan Police closed the case as a suicide. They spent five years trying to learn the truth.

During Zac’s short lifetime, his parents never recognized their son’s narcissistic self-destructive behavior.  His blurring of fantasy and reality was clearly fueled by social media. Claiming vast wealth and taking on a Russian last name, Zac talked his way into high-end real estate.  He fell in with unsavory people, including, in particular, a con man pretending to be a successful entrepreneur whose empire, in reality, was built on debt. The con man’s modus operandi included serial bankruptcies, stiffing those he did business with. The more lethal of Zac’s principal “colleagues,” a man posturing as a mentor to Zac in matters of business , was in reality a major narcotics importer, an extortionist and leg-breaker not above hiring thugs to eliminate those who crossed him.

London’s Metropolitan Police Department was intent on burying the investigation of Zac’s death. There was garden variety police incompetence. Scotland Yard was drastically understaffed, and corruption was rife. Criminals had infiltrated the police, the courts, the prisons, virtually all criminal justice agencies. Refraining from vigorous prosecutions, British higher-ups didn’t want to alienate the Russian mafia, which was pumping billions into the local economy.

Patrick Radden Keefe doggedly dug into the story for two years, working with Zac’s parents who had been doing their own amateur detective work. The three spoke virtually every day. At many points, the crime story gives way to an exposition of parental grief. Keefe’s work, as always, was a masterpiece of investigative journalism. The book began as a piece in The New Yorker. The police department refused to comment offically on Keefe’s writing, but along the way some individuals on the force did manage to provide him with transcripts of interrogations, inquests, and interviews.

Heavy with detail (sometimes too heavy), Keefe still manages to present the narrative in a riveting way. In the process, he paints an eye-opening picture of London’s corrupt underbelly. Parental love keeps the search going, in the end yielding a plausible conclusion that I won’t spoil for you. This book is not as big in scope as Empire of Pain or Say Nothing. But, if you love London or if you enjoy watching procedurals, you’ll find London Falling a satisfying read.