A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Museum Exhibit: “American Stories: Revolution to Rockwell” at Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts until October 26, 2026. Anytime we visit the Berkshires, the Rockwell Museum is a regular destination, mostly because of the interesting temporary exhibits presented there. This one is unique in that it encompasses the entire museum. The show utilizes paintings, prints, drawings and other pieces to illustrate how works of art showed the progression of life in the United States from the Revolution up to the present. Notably, the Rockwell Museum does not accept any federal funding so there were no restraints on the content presented as there have been with other museums that have had content censored by the US government.

Blog Post: “Why the Backlash Against Data Centers Is So Potent” Talking Points Memo website, July 31, 2026. Talking Points Memo, better known now as TPM, has been around for a long time. Its editor and primary writer, Josh Marshall, shares opinions on national politics that usually make lots of sense to me (meaning he’s pretty progressive). In this post, he analyzed local pushback against data centers. The AI companies are owned by the richest men in the world – and they always seem to be men – who, because of their unimaginable wealth, always get their way. And if someone says no, they just go ahead and do it anyway, assured that their wealth and the political power that they purchase will ensure no negative repercussions. Marshall’s point is that method of operation hits a potential roadblock on the local level where planning and zoning boards and citizen participation, make local government less dependent and less subservient to the immense power of the data center purveyors. We might be seeing that in action in Lowell right now. 

Article: “Rescuers show signs of harm to the brain but aren’t helped.” By Dave Philipps in New York Times, August 1, 2026. This is a sad story that begins with a retired veteran of 21 years in the Coast Guard taking his own life after increasingly violent and erratic behavior while still in the service that grew worse as time went on. Throughout his Coast Guard career, he was a crewmember on rescue boats, 47-foot long craft designed to plow through heavy surf to conduct rescues and other missions. After the man died, his high school age daughter contacted the Coast Guard to inquire if anything about his job may have caused his condition. She was told no. Not accepting that, she developed a questionnaire for a school project and shared it with several dozen Coast Guard personnel who had the same job as her dad. The results were astounding because most of the respondents had similar symptoms. She won an award for her science project but also caused the Coast Guard to open its eyes to growing research around the world that crew members on these kinds of boats sustain severe head injuries from the constant pounding their bodies take in the heavy surf. This is another example of how we don’t know as much as we think we do about how the human body works and it demonstrates the importance of conducting science and medical research and being open to new ideas and spotting causal connections we haven’t yet thought about. 

Book Review: The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction by John Robertson. I like to read but works on philosophy are not high on my list. However, I’ve been troubled by how many in higher office treat science and knowledge with disdain. They act if their goal is to drag us back into the Middle Ages. I struggle to understand why this is so which caused me to pick up this book. If the Enlightenment led us out of the backwardness of the Middle Ages, it might be a template for how we should navigate today’s world. Oxford University Press has a series of small paperbacks called “A Very Short Introduction.” There are perhaps 200 titles. I read this book with enthusiasm but still struggled to understand the topic. Here’s what I came up with: The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement characterized by certain ideas but also a commitment to engaging with a wider public of readers. Enlightenment thinkers had a complex attitude towards religion. They weren’t anti-religion but they were committed to toleration, mostly because of the devastating religious wars that had been fought across Europe. They sought a new, modern understanding of the place of human beings in the world and to better the human condition for all people. Enlightenment thinkers sought to understand society, the economy, religion and politics. They made the “public sphere” – places like coffee houses – more important, and contributed to a vibrant print culture that greatly increased the number of books written, printed and read.

Article: “Let the Sun Shine. It’s a Matter of When.” New York Times, August 4, 2026. The push to adopt year-round daylight savings time seems to be gaining momentum. There are also contrary movements to have year-round standard time, or to keep things the way they are now. This article explores the consequences of each of the three options. Long ago, time was set by the position of the sun. When the sun was directly overhead, that marked noon. That worked pretty well when no one ever traveled beyond the village of their birth but in the modern world, having time unsynchronized from place to place would be chaotic. However, since humans evolved long before today’s complex world, we don’t respond well to these artificial shifts in time so experts agree that none of these systems are perfect. It seems each is supported by a specific interest group: public health officials would keep the current system despite its flaws; business people who seek customers want year-round daylight savings to extend the amount of light at the end of the day; and educators and children’s health advocates would rather have more light in the morning. To help you make up your own mind, here’s an illustration of how the proposed changes would affect us here in Massachusetts:

Under our current system, mid-winter on January 15 brings sunrise at 7:13 AM and sunset at 4:36 PM, while mid-summer on July 15 sees sunrise at 5:19 AM and sunset at 8:22 PM.

If Massachusetts adopted Year-Round Daylight Saving Time, winter evenings would gain an extra hour of light—pushing the January 15 sunset to 5:36 PM—but mornings would remain dark far longer, delaying winter sunrise until 8:13 AM. (Summer times would remain unchanged at a 5:19 AM sunrise and 8:22 PM sunset).

Conversely, under Year-Round Standard Time, summer evenings would lose an hour of twilight—pulling the July 15 sunset back to 7:22 PM—and summer sunrises would occur at an unusually early 4:19 AM, well before most people awaken. (Winter times would remain unchanged at a 7:13 AM sunrise and 4:36 PM sunset).