Blending Bach and social responsibility has been a lifelong goal of cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
How fitting, then, that the critically acclaimed musician is represented in the most recent art installment at the American Mural Project (AMP) in Winsted, Conn., the world’s largest indoor collaborative artwork whose very foundation is built on community engagement.
Ma, along with more than 100 composers, vocalists and instrumentalists, is featured on a larger-than-life, 18-foot piano made from a sheet of aluminum, which was recently hoisted 48 feet high and attached to a section of the 120-foot-long mural.
The mural, which represents American workers and was launched by Sharon, Conn., resident Ellen Griesedieck in 2002, is housed in a historic mill building in Winsted. The project is expected to be completed in two years.
The piano piece, four years in the making, said Griesedieck, pays tribute to American music. “It has been resting on my studio floor while other projects move into place on the mural,” she said.
“In fact, we disassembled and moved hundreds of aluminum panels out of my studio these past three years while walking over the blanketed piano.”
In keeping with the concept of collaboration that is at the heart of AMP, the artist said she contacted music artists representing every genre of American music and asked them for their favorite score to include on the piano.
“I further complicated this by deciding how beautiful the surface would be if I burned stencils of the artists’ names and scores and then transferred them onto the aluminum with metal paints and patinas,” a process that turned out, she said, to be extremely time-consuming. But once the artist started, there was no stopping, especially as the overlapping scores began to yield a visually stunning pattern.
Another challenge Griesedieck faced was selecting from a list of “thousands and thousands of gifted musicians who live and work in this country” the 118 artists to be featured on AMP’s piano. The final selection reads like a Who’s Who of American Music — with numerous Tri-state region musicians represented.
Griesedieck said that over the summer AMP hosted a few small concerts by Paul Winter, Theresa Thomason and Joel Martin.
“We discovered that the acoustics in our giant space are phenomenal,” she said. As a result, the next chapter of AMP will be “opening our space for regular music events.”
With each piece of artwork installed, Griesedieck explained, the acoustics in the cavernous space improve. The effect of music when it reverberates off the surrounding mural, she said, “pops it back at you” with a rich sound. Referring to the idea to host concerts at AMP, “We didn’t plan for it. We really have been given a gift.”
Although AMP is not currently open to the public, visitors will have an opportunity to get a sneak peek at the latest installations during Open Mill Days on Saturday, Dec. 5, and Sunday, Dec. 6.
Tours will be offered at 1 p.m. each day, lasting about 45 minutes, at AMP’s location, 90 Whiting St., Winsted. Pre-registration is required for the tours (no walk-ins), which are limited to 16 visitors, by calling 860-379-3006. A minimum suggested donation of $10 is encouraged at the time of registration.
Carol Ascher
President Trump’s second term has been a coming out party for cruelty, whether in casual pronouncements or formal policies. Amidst a cascade of international aggressions, and what looks like an expanding War in Iran, I fear for Cuba, which has been receiving U.S. threats that its centralized economy structured to ensure fairness and equality, values that many Americans also hold dear, must be give way to the excesses of free enterprise.
It may seem too long ago to remember that for decades USAID was a key component of America’s soft power. Early in his second term, the Trump Ad-ministration peremptorily ended USAID funding, partly to help balance a budget constrained by GOP tax breaks to corporations and billionaires, but also to clarify the Administration’s contempt for international decency, generosity and caring. Without Congressional discussion or approval, the U.S. summarily eliminated maternal and child healthcare for 95 million people, and created food insecurity and malnutrition, which threatened to increase forced migration even as hundreds of thousands have already died. The end of USAID also meant the cancellation of 390 education projects effecting 23 million children, with vulnerable children and girls especially effected. And, in a final Trumpian twist, the end of USAID left millions of dollars of unused food grown by U.S. farmers spoiling in warehouses.
In fact, President Trump’s attitude toward ordinary Americans has also been uncaring, if not cruel. The Administration has threatened to cut as much as $900 million in transportation funding within the U.S. and withhold over $1.3 billion in disaster relief funding to four Democratic-led states. It has also attempted to punish states whose policies it disagrees with by stripping funding, including to those states that refuse to support the President’s inhumane mass deportation agenda.
Although many Americans voted for Trump because of his promise to end the disasters of war, within the first year of his second term, his administration has authorized military strikes and bombing operations in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The U.S. also bombed nuclear facilities in Iran in June 2025, and a facility in Venezuela in late 2025. Early in 2026, it also collaborated with Israel in a widening war with Iran.
Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of the renamed Department of War, has epitomized the Administration’s cruelty and disdain. Aiming to sound bellicose, tough and vengeful, Hegseth has said that, “We fight to win. We unleash over-whelming and punishing violence on the enemy.” We also don’t fight with “politically correct” or “stupid rules of engagement.” That is presumably why no effort was made to rescue the 180 Persian sailors left in the water when their warship was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine in the Indian Ocean, 2,000 miles from Iran.And why there has been no apology or even acknowledgment for the 175, mostly children, killed when a U.S. bomb mistakenly hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building in Teheran.
Finally, in our own hemisphere, more than 157 people have been killed in 46 separate bombings of small boats in the Caribbean that were supposedly delivering drugs. Moreover, since Secretary Hegseth had directly ordered to that everyone on board should be “killed,” this tally includes two men who had survived the bombing of their boat and were clinging to its destroyed pieces when they were directly targeted, a war crime by international rules of engagement. And the dramatic seizure of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Caracas included the murder of 47 Venezuelan soldiers, along with 32 Cuban security personnel acting as bodyguards, for which there has been no formal expression of condolence.
Unfortunately, this refusal by Trump and Hegseth to give the deaths of Americans the dignity of an apology or acknowledgment extends to both soldiers and people killed by government agents on U.S. soil. As President Trump made clear in his State of the Union address, he considers it unpatriotic to worry about immigrants seeking asylum, Green-card holders, or even American citizens either violently rounded up by ICE, or held in one of the new mega-detention centers, without access to families or an attorney. And this morning Donald Trump used a photo of himself in a “dignified return” of a soldier killed in the Middle east to sell his private security briefings.
All of which make me especially worried about the Administration’s bellicose attitude toward Cuba, whose people have lived under a U.S. embargo throughout its 67 years of socialism. In January, 2026, President Trump urged Cuba to “make a deal, before it is too late.” At the same time, the Administration cut off all oil that Cuba had been receiving from Venezuela, its major sup-plier. Moreover, Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on any country that provides oil to Cuba resulted in Mexico closing off its shipments, leaving Cubans with dwindling available oil. And Trump has made clear that Cuba needs to open its economy to capitalism if its people want to survive.
As of March 2026, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, whose parents left for the United States soon after the Revolution, is said to be in contact with the Cuban leadership, including Raul Castro’s grandson. While supposedly “squeezing” the regime, he is offering to roll back sanctions if Cuba implements the privatization sought by the Trump Administration. However, given the paucity of private companies currently in Cuba, this process is likely to be slow. And since American philanthropic organizations like USAID no longer exist to offer food, medicine and electricity in the meantime, there will be more suffering for Cubans, including longer blackouts, more scarcity and ongoing migration.
A March 13, 2026 article in the New York Times by Frances Robles, a seasoned reporter on the Caribbean, notes that experts say, “Any meaningful deal with the Cuban government” would also have to include such important changes as “an end to the criminalization of dissent,” and “a restoration of basic civil liberties including freedom of speech and the press”—important re-forms, if we want Cuba to become a democracy. However, these are exactly the freedoms that Trump and his supporters find threatening in the United States and are working to remove. Perhaps the experts hope that our island neighbor, 90 miles south of Florida, will be there as a beacon of democracy in years hence to remind us of all we carelessly gave away.
Carol Ascher, who lives in Sharon, has published seven books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as many essays and stories.She is trained as a spiritual director.
Bill Schmick
The introduction of prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi are exploding in popularity. At the same time crypto currency trading seems to be falling off a cliff. Are the two connected?
“Crypto is so yesterday,” said one Gen Z trader, in response to my question. Younger investors are turning their attention to platforms where users can trade contracts on the outcome of future events. Today, one can bet on everything from the outcome of the mid-term elections to when the next Fed interest rate cut will occur. Not only can you bet on political or cultural events but increasingly on sports and real-world events.
I suspect that economic conditionsmay be behind Gen Z’s shifting preferences. The average salary for a Gen Z is under $40,000. Speculating in Bitcoin has become an expensive proposition with the price around $63,000 per coin. It has traded as high as $124,000. That is a far cry from the days of $15,000 or less.
That doesn’t mean the younger generations are completely abandoning crypto currencies but are instead changing the way they speculate. In addition, the narrative has changed. The number of HODLs “Hold on for dear life” have declined as dreams ofa $1 million Bitcoin seem less feasible. Prediction markets offer a simpler, cheaper and more scalable alternative.
You can still bet on the future price of crypto, along with individual stocks, bonds, gold, or whatever. “Why buy Bitcoin when you can buy a cheap contract that offers you the same chance to profit?” argues another Gen Z trader.The simplicity of the prediction market structure is also appealing. There are no research reports, promises of gains or losses based on scenarios or schedules. The price you pay reflects a bet on a simple yes or no, to happen or not to happen. It appeals to a generation increasingly skeptical of project promises.
However, the prediction market uses cryptocurrency infrastructure to underpin their platform. Custody, settlement and payment processes run on block chain technology. With the support of stablecoins. Bitcoin contracts are still one of the most active speculative markets.
Another encouraging development is that prediction market platforms are regulated by the Commodity Futures Reading Commission. As such all prices are set by buyers and sellers and not by “the house.” In many ways, prediction market contracts are like trading futures contracts. You are essentially buying or selling a financial derivative when you invest in prediction contracts.
In 2025, this prediction markets saw trading volume expand to more than $27.9 billion. Open interest, which is the total value locked in contracts broke $1 billion. These contracts are both liquid and easy to trade. One can pay for them in both crypto currencies and regular currencies.
Supporters argue that these platforms represent a new frontier for fintech.Their platforms innovation has combined the blending of capital markets, crypto, prediction-economics and sports betting into one. The rapid growth in this new avenue of investment, speculation, or just plain gambling depending upon your view, has attracted outside investment. Several institutional players believe this new technology has enormous potential. The retail brokerage firm, Robin Hood, as well as Coinbase Global are entering the market.No surprise there, but some of the largest exchanges and financial institutions in the world are also embracing these betting platforms.
In October 2025, The New York Stock Exchange parent company, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), purchased a $2 billion stake in prediction leader, Polymarket. The S&P Down Jones Indices also announced a partnership with another fintech company, Dinari, to create a crypto-focused index. DraftKings and Flutter Entertainment, two sports betting operators, entered the prediction markets in December 2025. Flutter joined hands with the CME Group, to launch FanDuel Predicts in five U.S. states and plans to go nationwide this year.
Supporters argue that these platforms use innovation financial technology tools that allow traders to better discover efficient pricing of event risk. Yet prediction markets today are sitting astride several industry faultlines. Including sports on their platforms, for example, are encroaching on already established regulatory domains.
Many states are in an uproar as a result, predicting that these new markets make it easier for coaches, players, or referees to bet on matches they may be able to influence.The wave of recent betting scandals in 2025 makes regulator’s fears that much more immediate. Rather than new investment alternatives, many regulators see them as an easy avenue toward further corruption.
This week two congress representatives Blake Moore (R-UT) and Salud Carbajal(D-Ca) jumped into the fray by introducing legislation that would prohibit the listing of contracts for sale related to terrorism, assassination, war, gaming (sports or athletic competitions ), or illegal activity. Betting on certain outcomes in the U.S./ Iran conflict may have sparked this bipartisan effort to reign in the prediction markets when it comes to what they deem to be threats to public safety and national security risks.
In my opinion, trying to stem the flow of this new prediction market arena in the age of AI is futile. Over the next ten years, the sector is projected to reach a market size of $95 billion, with a growth rate of 47%.Even an old codger like me, is already monitoring the betting on any number of events from war in Iran to the earnings on Nvidia. I suggest you do the same.
Bill Schmick is a founding partner of Onota Partners, Inc., in the Berkshires.Bill’s forecasts and opinions are purely his own and do not necessarily represent the views of Onota Partners, Inc. (OPI).
Norma Bosworth
125 years ago — March 1901
Master Roscoe Brinton sprained his wrist one day the past week so badly while playing at school, as to require Dr. Skiff’s services.
Did you ever observe that we have what may be called submarine sidewalks.
Dr. Coley, whose summer home is in Sharon, contemplates having a hospital in town where he may care for his patients during the summer months.
I.W. Sanford has been busy surveying ground and arranging plans for the new milk bottling plant to be erected by the Borden Co. at Canaan. The building is said to be of wood, 50x150 feet.
The new iron trestle being erected by the railroad company is being rapidly put together by a force of workmen. The first span is already in place. The whole number of sections will be three and when finished will be a great improvement over the old wooden one.
100 years ago — March 1926
LIME ROCK — Lawrence Belter went to Hartford Monday for treatment on his throat. Friends of Mrs. Belter are glad to hear she is improving slowly.
The blue birds have been postponed on account of the weather.
LIME ROCK — Miss Doris Athoe who is training to be a nurse in the Hartford hospital, spent Sunday with her parents.
Col. Charles H. Ball has installed a radio at his home.
50 years ago — March 1976
Gov. Ella Grasso announced Tuesday the appointment Tuesday of Patsy Van Doren of Cornwall to the governor’s Council on Voluntary Action. Mrs. Van Doren said she is “very pleased” with the appointment and is looking forward to working with the council. The Council on Voluntary Action, a 12-member body, coordinates volunteer activity, initiates programs, consults with private agencies using volunteers, assists in fundraising and tests new methods of coordinating volunteer programs.
The move to provide better “sex education” at Housatonic Valley Regional High School got a strong boost this past week from four physicians. The doctors vigorously urged a HVRHS board-appointed committee to pursue and expand its plans for developing new programs.
Caring for the President’s skis when he vacations at Vail, Colo., is the job of Gunnar Jansen, son of Karine Jansen of Salisbury. Jansen, who was photographed with President Ford during the First Family’s Christmas holiday, is the Rossignol Ski Company’s representative in Colorado.
CANAAN — Lester Gochey Jr., 40, of the Greenacres section of Canaan, was drowned Sunday night after his snowmobile crashed through the ice on Lake Pleasant at Northville, N.Y. Douglas A. Parker, undersheriff of Hamilton Country, N.Y., said that Gochey was snowmobiling on the lake with Kenneth Demming of Ashley Falls, Mass., when the accident occurred. Gochey’s snowmobile was ahead of Demming’s when it went through the ice and into about 12 feet of water. Gochey was a mechanic for the Riva Equipment Co. in Canaan. He lived on Housatonic Avenue with his wife Anita and twochildren, Raymond and Michele. A snowmobile rally will be held on Dave Carlson’s farm in Canaan Valley Sunday afternoon at 1 p.m. All proceeds from the event will benefit the Gochey family.
25 years ago — March 2001
CANAAN — The Environmental Protection Agency has filed an administrative complaint against MINTEQ International stemming from an oil spill last year that released a small amount of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) into the environment. PCBs are considered by the EPA to be “probable carcinogens.” The federal agency is alleging six violations relating to the spill — classified as an “unauthorized disposal” — and inadequate storage of PCBs. Penalties for the complaints total $192,000.
CANAAN — Molly Toomey brought her imperturbable style to Pittsfield last Saturday and brought home the regional spelling bee championship. The seventh-grader also made history, becoming the first North Canaan Elementary School student to achieve the title in the 21 years of the regional competition.
These items were taken from The Lakeville Journal archives at Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library, keeping the original wording intact as possible.
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Ruth Epstein
Swift House
KENT — The committee studying the future of Kent’s historic Swift House is considering pursuing National Register of Historic Places designation as part of its effort to determine how the deteriorating town-owned building might be preserved and used.
The group, established by the Board of Selectmen, has been given until April 30 to provide a report outlining recommendations for the structure that dates back to the 1700s. The building is located on Maple Street, just east of Route 7.
The former farmhouse has been the subject of discussion for several years, with concerns raised about its poor condition and whether the town should retain or sell it.
A previous task force conducted a survey that generated 144 comments, with 26 expressing negative opinions about the town keeping the building. That group also had the firm Silver Petrocelli prepare an estimate on the cost to renovate the building and bring it into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The figure given was $2 million.
At the committee’s meeting Tuesday, March 10, member Christine Adams, executive director of the Kent Historical Society, reiterated her previous push to hire a consultant to prepare an application for National Register designation. With finances always a concern, Adams said if a building is listed on the register, there would be many opportunities for grants. She estimated such a consultant would cost about $2,500 to $3,000.
She also recommended the town have an attorney draw up a preservation easement at the same time the designation is being sought.
Committee chairman James Anderson said he had recently toured the building and saw the many challenges it faces. “As it stands now, it has no purpose. We need to accelerate the process of finding solutions for its use.”
During the meeting, members suggested a variety of possible uses for the building. William Reihl echoed what several others favored: creating a town welcome center.
“That would be a perfect place for it,” Reihl said. “It can become a gathering center for the community.”
His other ideas included creating an ongoing arts and culture festival and renting out space to provide a source of revenue for the town. He said he does not see the building as a place for municipal offices,a possibility that had been discussed during the earlier task force’s tenure.
Adams said she knows of other historic buildings where faculty apartments have been created. Since there are several private schools in Kent, that might be an option for the second floor. “The downstairs would remain a public place.”
Margie Austell said she would like to focus on the building’s historic perspective. Marge Smith, who at the last meeting said local attorney Anthony Palumbo had expressed interest in purchasing the building, added, “He would go along with many of these ideas.”
Jason Wright, the Board of Finance’s representative on the committee, said he did not think the group should get too specific yet. “We need to come up with a template...We need to come up with the financial issue. We just don’t have the resources.”
Selectman Lynn Harrington said the committee should concentrate on the first floor and leave the upstairs for further discussion.
When the talk turned to finances, Wright said, “A $2 million commitment from my perspective is not realistic. Since the town is revenue-strapped, I think $2 million is high. We need to push for some more creativity.” He wondered if some local craftsmen might be willing to take on the work for a reduced rate.
Harrington said she thought the Silver Petrocelli report was reliable, “but I’m not sure we have to do all of it.”
The town currently budgets $19,600 per year for the Swift House. When Joyce Kearns, the selectmen’s administrative assistant, was asked whether the town might be able to use some of that appropriation to pay for the consultant, she listed several upcoming expenses before adding,
Lakeville Journal
Salisbury Central School students, from left, Jackson Magyar, Evelyn Adkins, Noah Tencer and Kellan Lockton (mixed chorus) and Annabelle Bunce (band, not pictured) participated in the Connecticut Music Educators Association Northern Region Middle School Honors festival March 6 and 7.
Simon Markow
Skylar Brown, front, leads the ensemble of “Moana Jr.” at Cornwall Consolidated School March 13.
CORNWALL — The Cornwall Consolidated School opened its musical production of ‘Moana Jr.’ Friday, March 13, with a full house.
The play was based on the 2016 Disney film ‘Moana,’ with music and lyrics by Lin Manuel Miranda. Orchestrations were adapted and arranged by Ian Weinberger.
The cast started rehearsal in November and persevered through winter weather and sickness.
On premiere night, the crew overcame some technical difficulties early on. This hiccup was soon forgotten as the young performers took the stage and dazzled with musical numbers.
The cast performs “Moana Jr.” amid captivating set designs.Simon Markow
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