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

Museum visit: Cape Ann Museum: A recent road trip to Gloucester brought me to the Cape Ann Museum which features a big show called “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea.” It featured works by Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko who summered in Gloucester in the 1920s and 1930s. Rothko is the only one of the three I was familiar with although the other two have national reputations. It was interesting to see their early work and contrast it with some of their later stuff which was all part of the exhibit. That was especially true for Rothko, whose most famous paintings feature horizontal rectangles of color stacked atop each other. This showed the transition of his work from realist to abstract. For instance, an early painting might be sand, surf, ocean and sky. The next phase was something similar with the lines between sections all fuzzy-ed up but still a seashore, just one viewed through an out of focus lens. Then his late phase was just strips of color but after seeing the earlier two, the resemblance was quite clear. This exhibit is in Gloucester until September 27. 

Obituary: “Don Nelson, Celtics great who won five titles before revolutionizing coaching, dies at 86” by John Powers in Boston Globe, August 9, 2026. My basketball awakening occurred while watching the Boston Celtics in the early 1970s. I had been to a few Celtics games earlier than that and saw Bill Russell and Sam Jones, but I don’t remember much about that era. In 1970, we moved to a new house and erected a basketball hoop in the driveway. I was 12 years old and big enough to have my shots reach the rim consistently (although not necessarily go through the rim), so it was natural to seek out on TV the game we played everyday in the driveway. My era’s Celtics were led by John Havlicek, Dave Cowens and Jo Jo White with Paul Silas and Don Nelson as important supporting players. Nelson had sat on the LA Laker’s bench for a couple of seasons and was about to be cut when Red Auerbach bought his rights for $1000 and he became a Celtic. He won three championships in the final years of the Bill Russell phase, then was a key player in the transition to the next phase of Celtics championships (in 1974 vs the Milwaukee Bucks and in 1976 vs the Phoenix Suns). When Nelson retired, he became an assistant coach in Milwaukee and soon a head coach, a position he held with various teams for 31 years and which earned him a spot in the Basketball Hall of Fame. He retired to Hawaii where he reportedly played a lot of poker and smoked a lot of marijuana until he passed away this month at age 86. 

Article: “Two U.K. Scholars Started a Podcast. ‘The Rest is History.” by Esther Bintliff in New York Times on August 23, 2026. Each morning when I exercise, I listen to a podcast. I avoid shows that are overtly political and lean towards technology and the media (although politics intrudes on both of those topics these days). I tried several history podcasts but didn’t enjoy them. Until I found The Rest is History, which I listen to regularly and with great enjoyment. I’m not alone: this show is the most popular history podcast in the US with 30 million listeners. It features to English historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Show topics range from the ancient Aztecs to “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. There are two hour-long episodes each week and a topic typically covers several episodes. (The story of the Titanic stretched to eight episodes). On a typical episode, one host will take the lead and drive the narrative while the other plays off of him with comments and questions. While a tremendous amount of information is conveyed to listeners, so is ample laughter since life, even when tragic, can also be comic. Coincidentally, Holland was urged to try the podcast format by his brother James, another historian and podcast host. His World War II series, “We have ways of making you talk” which is co-hosted by comedian Al Murray, is equally entertaining although the topics are more limited. I don’t do Spotify but I assume the podcast is there, but I get it on YouTube Music and on Amazon Prime. 

Book Review: Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World by James MacGregor Burns (2013). If you read this column regularly, you know I’ve doing a (moderately) deep dive into the Enlightenment because, as I wrote previously, the regime in Washington seems determined to drag us back to the Middle Ages and I want to recall what helped the world emerge from that period. At the time this book was written, Burns was a history professor at Williams College (in Williamstown, Mass) and had won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of FDR. Much of the book sketches the major propositions advanced by the major enlightenment figures (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume and many others). But the part of the book I found most interesting and insightful (to me) was the premium our country’s founders, especially John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, placed on public education. A populace that was uneducated and unread would too easily fall under the sway of a con man since the world is a complicated place and if you don’t have the mental tools to work through those complexities you will default to simple solutions that are untrue but which sound good and feel comforting.