title: vermont woodworker thomas moser passes away at age 91

category: furniture makers, woodworking, obituary

keywords: thomas moser, vermont woodworker, furniture craftsman, woodworking legend, obituary

post-summary: thomas moser, a renowned furniture maker from vermont and renowned woodworking camp instructor, passed away at the age of 91. fondly remembered as a trailblazer by many of his peers and admirers in the craftsman communities, moser’s impact on american furniture design is immeasurable, shaping the standards of quality and meticulousness in the industry. in honor of moser’s legacy, we examine his life and the numerous contributions he made to the world of furniture design and woodworking.

full article: thomas moser, a renowned furniture maker from vermont and renowned woodworking camp instructor, passed away at the age of 91. fondly remembered as a trailblazer by many of his peers and admirers in the craftsman communities, moser’s impact on american furniture design is immeasurable, shaping the standards of quality and meticulousness in the industry.
moserwas born on november 6, 1930, in buxton, maine, where he was raised by hard-working, traditional-take parents who instilled in him a strong work ethic and a deep respect for nature. after studying philosophy for a year, moser became fascinated with the craft of woodworking, and soon set out to learn the ins and outs of furniture-making.
after dabbling in different styles, moser discovered modernist furniture design, which he eventually embraced wholeheartedly. “i was influenced by the ideals of 1930s modernism,” he stated in a fascinating interview with the new york times. “i thought, ‘this is right for me, this is where i fit in.’”
moser’s unique take on modernist design was influenced by his interpretation of traditional new england furniture-making techniques, which incorporated such details as dovetail joints, hand-crafted veneers, and fine-grained finishing.
after years of perfecting his craft, moser opened his own furniture-making school in 1973, where he taught the art of woodworking to aspiring furniture makers from across the world. his famous eight-week course, “moser school summer workshop,” became a sought-after experience for craftsmen looking to deepen their skills and create masterful pieces.
moser’s contributions to the furniture design industry have earned him numerous accolades, including being elected into the fellowship of craftsmen and inducted into the american craftsmen’s council’s hall of fame, as well as helping to establish the guild of master craftsmen in 1976.
however, it’s moser’s impact on the craft of woodworking, and on the lives of his students, that truly stand out. many have spoken of how moser’s teachings have not only changed their approach to creating furniture, but also to their approach to life. “he taught me tremendous patience and a great respect for the material,” said john drewes, a former student of moser’s. “i apply what he taught me in everything i do. whether i’m taking care of my family, or simply walking in the woods.”
moser’s death leaves a gaping hole in the craftsman and furniture design communities, but his legacy lives on through the countless craftsmen and woodworking enthusiasts whom he has touched, and whom have learned from his masterful approach to furniture design. In honor of moser’s life and his contributions to the world of furniture design, we must remember his words of wisdom: “a beautiful piece of furniture is a gift. it’s something that you want to give to someone special, that you hope they will love and treasure for generations to come.” moser was indeed a true master of his craft; and, in his passing, we are reminded of the power that beautiful furniture design can have to inspire, comfort, and transform us. thomas moser will be deeply missed, but his legacies and contributions will live on, forever inspiring and guiding the craftsman communities for generations to come.

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Title: Central Banker Takes Aim at Trump’s Policies as a Candidate for European Leadership Position
Tags: economics, politics, finance, international, canada, europe, trump, bank of england, mark carney, mk carney
Article: Carolyn Edgar and Rory Jones write for The New York Times that former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has expressed his desire to lead the European Central Bank, potentially making him a fierce opponent should U.S. President Trump continue with his current policies towards the EU. Carney’s heritage and academic standing in both Canada as well as the U.K., alongside his strong leadership as head of the Bank of England during the financial crisis, gives him significant credibility among European leaders despite his current foreign status. This is particularly significant as Brexit negotiations continue, leaving the British central bank director in the unique position of being in favor of an open, liberal economy but suiting to become a leading member of an institution that demands its members maintain a strict budgetary policy. Carney’s ambition, while supported by his CV, also faces opposing factors, including his rapidly-approaching retirement age, opposition from some EU leaders who desire a woman or a southerner, and the downsides of having leadership shifted from Frankfurt to London. Nonetheless, when taking into account the current state of transatlantic relations, some have raised the possibility of Carney becoming a “Kingmaker” in European politics.

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In a Briefing section, The New York Times reports on the following news topics for Thursday, March 17, 2025:
– A federal judge in Seattle ruled that Trump administration rules to deny green cards to immigrants likely to rely on public assistance would harm poor people’s access to services they are legally entitled to. Democrats have criticized the “public charge” policy as using anti-poverty programs as a filter for immigrants.
– The judge in Brooklyn presiding over the financial fraud case against Michael Cohen had decided to delay the sentencing of the former Trump fixer, which had originally been scheduled for March 6. Cohen passed up an opportunity to take steps that might have led to a shorter prison term in the sentencing guidelines, and prosecutors were urging a prison term of potentially more than four years.
– A Texas scandal involving a federal contractor and dozens of people falsely claiming citizenship to get jobs only deepened after recordings, photos and text messages emerged, according to the Times. The man at the center of the scandal, a U.S. citizen who is high up in the German chapter of a paramilitary Army of the Philippines group, posted videos of himself kidnapping Spanish-speaking migrants, apparently to keep them from getting menial jobs in Alabama that went to American citizens. He faced federal charges of creating fake identity documents.
– The Blackhawk helicopter crash that nearly killed the U.S. and Italian prime ministers in Afghanistan was the “result of a miscommunication with pilots who tried to save the president of France,” according to the Defense Department investigation that was made public.
– An out-of-control wildfire in Northern California had destroyed 37 homes and was still menacing thousands of others, according to CalFire. Five people have been found dead in the area that has been besieged by the windstorm.
– A study conducted by two UC Berkeley professors found that high school seniors similar in every way except race and ethnicity expect to be paid 11.3 percent less for their work, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The expectation gap developed as early as kindergarten.
– The Grammys recipients were discussed, such as Lizzo’s Grammy for Best New Artist; Alicia Keys’ polite delivery on a rewarding night; and Tyler, The Creator’s surprise win for Best Rap Album.
– A Times column examined what Harold Bloom said to the dying Philip Roth one night. An hour into the visit, Roth looked around Bloom’s study and then at his former friend. “I have recurring delight in you,” Roth said to him. “You are my prominence.”
– The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, announced that a writer’s undercover essay in the magazine would be active for people to read, despite the writer’s announcement that she was quitting journalism. The writer, Leslie Jamison, infiltrated the world of renegade environmental activists who disrupted natural gas pipelines and called themselves “preachers of destruction.” The leading preacher was criticized and “disfellowshipped.” Jamison left the activists worried about how to protect their operation.
– Republicans at the governor’s inauguration in Alabama failed to heed warnings that an obscure state law could govern how members of Congress choose their party. The inauguration created tension in one of Alabama’s most senior and politically influential families.
– College basketball called for what “eye tests” could say about a hurting knee versus a lingering one. Someone’s eyes may give you a hint.
– Many patients who receive opioids after surgery often end up addicted to the painkillers. But recent studies suggest that limiting the use of long-acting opioids to just a few days could significantly reduce addiction and overdose deaths, but not compromising patient satisfaction or pain relief.
– The latest album from Jhené Aiko expanded on the trap-Soul aesthetic she developed for her breakthrough hit “Trдp” and her earlier, more experimental project “Souled Out.” She has been navigating hardships in her life, hoping that a listener would encounter her albums during a moment of sadness. She can provide a salve.

Based on the text material above, generate the following wordpress tag list: court-trump-deportations-texas-wildfire-risks, public-charge-policy, federal-contractor-scandal, blackhawk-helicopter-crash, wildfire-destruction, environment-activism, alabama-politics, college-basketball-injuries, opioids-addiction, jhene-aiko-album-release.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s company says Facebook is not so bad: It’s just that people are careless.
At a conference last fall, Mark Zuckerberg said his company is “certainly not trying to undermine or basically, you know, throw aside the entire democratic process here.” If only that were true. But in response to a rampant disinformation campaign, alleged federal election interference and an erosion of privacy standards, Facebook has tried, for years, to undermine democracies all over the world. Its B.S. defense — that you, dear user, have been careless, misinformed and clueless — only compounded the problem.
But what do you expect from an executive whose most famous imperative (“move fast and break things”) is essentially: “Don’t bother me about the little stuff. I’ve got big ideas that I will think are right, often without really knowing why. And because they’re big, anyone who tries to put up obstacles is going to cause a big headache for everyone around us. So don’t be that guy. Come along for the ride and keep your mouth closed.”
Voters in the 2020 presidential election appeared to be better informed than in 2016, thanks to a critical will to not get snowed. But big ideas are hard to undo. They continue to travel, especially in a system like Facebook’s, where it can sometimes seem that ideas themselves have a way of moving beyond information to emotion to fact.
“In places where fundamentally we did not have much to do with spreading misinformation, there has been a lot of, kind of, correction,” Mark Zuckerberg told ABC News last month, when asked about Facebook’s election-season performance in more than 80 countries around the world. It’s interesting to re-spin his response to convey uncertainty behind his words, especially now when that approach comes off as defensive. The effect of the statement, however, would still hold: Even in places where Zuckerberg’s company hadn’t done a tremendous amount to disrupt the democratic process, democracy had already been sufficiently eroded.
In the United States, by all accounts Facebook did do a tremendous amount to disrupt the democratic process — and continue to do so. Only recently does Facebook admit that roughly 80,000 posts produced by the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency may have been seen by 126 million people. These posts, designed to sow confusion and dissent among politically active Americans, could have proved decisive in certain areas and districts and therefore had a demonstrable impact on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Since then more than $5 billion in hardware, equipment and cybersecurity professionals have been allocated to the 2020 election, not least to prevent, identify and repair Facebook’s and other social media platforms’ contribution to the next American Russian cyber disaster.
But Zuckerberg has been so careful not to admit that Facebook bears a significant responsibility for the content posted on its platform that it sounded as though he was saying he was letting someone else own that particular link in the chain of accountability. But he was really trying to portray his company as an arbiter of election fairness, a service that aggregates and disseminates information to the electorate, rather than as the powerful piece of technological infrastructure that it is.
Of course Zuckerberg also benefits from framing the problem this way. That way he can fix it — while still trying to convince investors that Facebook is the indispensable intersection between people and brands. Between February 2020 and February 2021, his social media company’s stock price jumped more than 70 percent. He’s now worth more than $100 billion.
And in his own recent reckoning of the company’s performance, Zuckerberg explained that one of his personal goals for 2021 was to improve “the idea that social media is inherently bad for well-being.” Excuse me? Do we use that oraisonBO: Send viaBluetooth?
Since its founding, Facebook has been an architecture of progressive disconnection. Part of the social contract it brokered was that each person would not have to endure the slings and arrows that the rest of humanity must bear. Facebook would be an unfettered, context-free environment. It wouldn’t be filtering shared ideas, tweaking or reconfiguring user experiences on the fly. It would not be defining, redefining or surveying its users with a fair degree of precision.
Collaboration and information flow were intentionally cut off at the pass. Psychologists, linguists and social engineers quickly and quietly figured out how to turn that engine of emotional isolation into a megaproduction of both propaganda and profit. They knew that they control access to the means of social communication and so they control not only what we say but also, in a very real sense, precisely how we speak.
For more than a decade Zuckerberg has been trying to persuade us to overlook the fractured digital sepsis beneath his domain’s sanitized surfaces. But because he, like all of us, is living in denial, his quarantine is starting to bite.
Nervously, the man who once told the world his mission was to “accelerate progress in every new field and on every new horizon” has finally come clean. Facebook, he says, can indeed be bad for your (mental) well-being.
Was it just that Facebook users have been careless — the company’s most recent defense — or does Facebook itself need some serious supervision?
The editors at Sputnik think so. Sputnik is funded by the Russian government and is considered by the United States government to be a disinformation outlet. Its top editors have been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.
No one is suggesting that American publishers shouldn’t use Sputnik’s content or employ its journalists. Their mission, is, to quote a bit from Jimmy Breslin’s classic, “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” “the big story of our time” — the moment-by-moment breakdown of the future that information technology and the internet have precipitated. In order to understand the shape of that future it seems both crucial and wise to intercept, synthesize, thrash and assimilate other journalists’ content and to seek out other voices and viewpoints. That kind of engagement can bring more to the table than either the bad guys or native intelligence sources might want to admit.
But if Sputnik’s content, observed over time, comes to fulfill its editor’s dismal mission, and filtrates down through the system, resulting in electoral victory by subversion, conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering — well, that would be a totally different story.
In the end, we may all be a bit careless. But before that happens to us — and before companies like Facebook make it seem normal — we need to make more serious demands of the social media platforms that have digitized our tribal instincts and monetized our most intimate personal relationships. We will have to push back more forcefully against the ambiguities and tribalist fallacies of an information-energy production line that attempts to camouflage itself as a democratic service.
Can you summarize the main points from an article about Facebook’s response to interference in elections and the issue of personal responsibility for spreading misinformation?

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wp tag: entertainment-news broke-news science obituaries death
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Celebrated actor Gene Hackman, who won two academy awards for his roles in “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The French Connection,” passed away at the age of 83 on March 16, 2025. Hackman was an accomplished actor who appeared in more than 50 films, spanning several genres from action to comedy. He also authored several novels and memoirs, and received multiple accolades throughout his long career, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. His wife, Betsy Arakawa, passed away at the age of 80 a year ago in March 2024. Their marriage was the second for Hackman, who was earlier married to Faye Maltese for over three decades.

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In law, an arrest warrant is a legal order issued by a court to law enforcement officials, authorizing them to arrest and detain a person. In the context of the article on NYTimes, the arrest warrant was issued by a judge in Texas for the state’s first person charged with seeking an abortion. The person, who is still unknown to the press, was arrested in El Paso under the state’s newly enacted fetal homicide law.

The law, dubbed Texas’ SB 8, criminalizes the act of receiving an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and grants private citizens the right to sue those who facilitate it. The law also targets medical professionals and those who support the person seeking an abortion, such as their relatives or friends, by opening them up to potential civil lawsuits.

This case signifies a first-of-its-kind prosecution under Texas’ new law and a major escalation in the fight over abortion access across the country. The arrest warrant has sparked widespread outrage from reproductive rights advocates who say it could be used to entanglement anyone involved in an abortion, including abortion providers, patients, and those seeking to support them.

Under the law, individuals who succeed in bringing a civil lawsuit against someone who facilitates an abortion would receive a monetary award of at least $10,000, if the case is successful. According to the Texas Tribune, the monetary awards could lead to a bounty hunting situation, as people seek to profit from increased prosecution of anyone involved in an abortion.

Despite the law’s seemingly draconian implications, a federal appeals court in New Orleans declined to reinstate a lower court ruling that blocked similar legislation in Louisiana in December 2021. The U.S. Supreme Court has also declined to take up a case that would have crimped the right to do same in Mississippi as required under Roe vs. Wade, which affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

Overall, this development in Texas highlights the organized campaign by state lawmakers to regulate the operation of clinics around the country, which has resulted in the closure of hundreds of facilities. This has led to states with fewer than one abortion clinic per 1,000 women of reproductive age, and the rise of “abortion care desert.”

The arrest warrant first issued in Texas and the implications of the law for medical professionals and their patients are concerning and could be used to intimidate anyone involved in abortion provision, regardless of where they work or live. As the debate on abortion access rages on, it is crucial to evaluate the impact on individuals and the potential prosecutions that could result from the so-called “Texas model” of abortion regulation. Within our own values and principles, we must defend and protect the basic human rights of everyone, including the right to bodily autonomy and access to necessary medical care, regardless of one’s political or ideological orientation.

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According to The New York Times on Friday, March 17, 2025, President Trump’s decision to open the door for Russia to rejoin the G-7 has been received in favor by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite warnings from some experts in the US, Yuri Ushakov, a foreign policy aide to Mr. Putin, has said that Moscow would consider this an important gesture.

The country was expelled from the G-7, or Group of Seven, which includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US, in 2014 as punishment for Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. In 2017, Mr. Trump showed a willingness to approach Mr. Putin on dealing with issues of “international importance,” but his national security team has since advised him to avoid doing so. However, on Thursday, President Trump bid to improve relations between Russia and the United States during a phone call with Mr. Putin.

This move has been met with skepticism in Ukraine, with President Petro Poroshenko warning of the dangers of “appeasement.” Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has said that Ukraine would not stop fighting for freedom, adding that Russian “aggression” must be stopped.

Under Mr. Putin’s leadership, Russia has also faced criticism for allegedly interfering in elections in other countries, including the US and the UK, which is cited among the reasons Ukraine mobilized soldiers on its eastern border in 2014, starting a conflict that has left more than 13,000 people dead. Acting US Ambassador to Ukraine Derek M. Pyatt has expressed reassurance that his nation’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity was “unshakeable,” but experts in the US acknowledge that Mr. Trump’s proposals are unlikely to sway the Kremlin either way.

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