Event: Lowell in World War II Walking Tour: On Saturday, Bob Forrant and I led 30 people around downtown Lowell, sharing stories about the city during World War II. The main theme was how war production temporarily rescued the remaining Lowell mills and boosted employment and wages for Lowell residents who had suffered through almost two decades of hard times. We also talked about organized labor, the military draft, how the city honored those who gave their lives in the military, and how the war was financed through “war bond” drives that united the community. 

Television: America’s Bookclub on C-Span. David Rubenstein interviews the historian Candice Millard who has written several best selling books, the best known of which may be Destiny of the Republic which is about the assassination of President James Garfield. She grew up in Ohio in a blue collar family. Both of her parents loved to read. She went to a small college in the midwest then worked at National Geographic where she worked for six years when she wrote her first book, River of Doubt, which is about Theodore Roosevelt’s post politics journey up an unknown in South America.

YouTube: Google I/O 2026 – Google I/O is Google’s annual developer conference which was held this year on May 19-20, 2026, in Mountain View, California. I watched the keynote address by the company’s CEO and several of its top executives. The purpose of the presentation I watched was to announce new things in artificial intelligence and Google products and systems. For a variety of reasons, I never found my way into the Apple universe and landed on Google as a comprehensive alternative. I use it for email, calendar, writing, entertainment (I watch YouTube more than anything else on TV) and my Pixel phone, watch and tablet. Perhaps the biggest announcement was a further shift by Google away from its traditional “search” function that would return a bunch of hyperlinks to websites in reply to your query with greater reliance on AI summaries. “AI mode” has been available in Google search for a while so it’s not completely new, but that functionality has been much expanded and made more dynamic in that you can ask follow up questions and almost engage in a dialog with the device. Other big announcements involved “coding” (using AI to write computer code) and “agentic AI” (having an agent automatically do things for you like order coffee or schedule an Uber based on some prompt embedded in your calendar, for instance). Finally, Google introduced an “intelligent eyewear” product, also known as smart glasses, which will compete with META which has the lead in this technology. 

Streaming: Late Night with Steven Colbert – I don’t watch much TV, certainly not any late night TV, and as much as I find the various hosts amusing, there is so much other content on YouTube that I find interesting that I don’t catch their clips there. However, I did watch a replay of the full final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I found the program entertaining and enjoyed watching, especially the musical finale which featured Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Jon Batiste. McCartney was the one guest who sat next to Colbert’s desk and talked in the traditional TV talk show way. The former Beatle was coherent and entertaining but he looked and sounded old (he’s 83), but when he sang, I thought the years melted away. There were several “comedy cameos” where different celebrities seated in the audience interrupted then expressed displeasure that they were not the final guest. Jon Stewart had an appearance as did the scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. And Colbert’s four late night colleagues, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myers and John Oliver, appeared as a group. The Colbert version of the Late Show has been around for 11 years which is a good run on TV, so if it had just been cancelled in normal times it would not have been such a cultural marker. But the wide perception is the show was cancelled by Paramount to earn favor from President Trump who had expressed annoyance at Colbert’s mockery of him. That context elevated the significance of this episode beyond the normal termination of a TV show. 

Obituary: Barney Frank – Former Congressman Barney Frank died on May 19, 2016, at age 86. Born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, Frank came to Massachusetts to attend Harvard and was in graduate school there when he was hired by Mayor Kevin White. In 1972, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature and in 1980, when incumbent Congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest, had to relinquish his elected office due to a new policy from Pope John Paul II, Frank won that seat which he held until 2012 when he chose not to seek reelection. In 1987, he came out as gay, the first sitting member of Congress to do so publicly. In 2012, before his term ended, he married Jim Ready, making Frank the first member of Congress to have a spouse of the same sex. His most significant legislative achievement was the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act which tightened the rules on lenders in response to the meltdown of the housing market that led to the global financial crisis in 2007. Conservatives later argued that a main driver of the financial crash was risky loans that liberal politicians forced lenders to make to undeserving poor people. The reality is that lenders delighted in making those loans because the riskier the borrower, the higher the rate of interest the lender could charge, and none of the loans were held by the entities that made them – they cashed in their profits right as the loan was made – but were passed on to gullible investors who were left holding the bag when the bottom fell out.