GBH Daily: Three things to do this weekend

🌨️More wintery mix, with highs around 34. Sunset is at 5:40 p.m. Remember: Daylight Savings Time begins this weekend. We spring forward one hour between Saturday and Sunday.

Here are three things you can do this weekend, from Jared Bowen, host of GBH’s The Culture Show. First: the play “We Had a World” at the Calderwood Pavillion. The play follows a young playwright whose dying grandmother asks him to write a play about their family, and to make it “as bitter and vitriolic as possible.” “It’s a comedy and a blistering family drama,” Bowen said. “It’s really an examination of him, his mother and his grandmother, and about how the people we love the most can also hurt us the most.”

Second: an exhibition by sculptor Masako Miki at the MassArt Art Museum, which is always free to visit. “She creates a fabulous immersive world of her sculptures through these furry beings that come from Japanese folklore and mythology,” Bowen said. Miki and the museum’s team designed the whole exhibition: the walls, the lighting and the floors.

And finally: the book “On Morrison” by Namwali Serpell, an English professor at Harvard and a novelist. She explores the works of Nobel laureate and novelist Toni Morrison. “Her writing and reading can be difficult, but in the end, we are treated to a very singular American writer,” Bowen says. “If you love process and you love Toni Morrison, this is absolutely the book for you.” If you want to get Bowen’s culture picks every weekend, follow GBH’s The Culture Show on Instagram.

Four Things to Know

1. More people are seeking help from nonprofits, but the organizations have less money to help, according to a survey of 500 nonprofit leaders by The Boston Foundation and MassINC Polling Group. Almost 40% of nonprofits said funding cuts meant they’ve had to cut back on services, though some also said they’re increasing their efforts to reach larger geographic areas, help people get food and fuel and train people on their constitutional rights, especially because of the Trump administration’s mass deportations.

“These responses confirm the breadth and depth of the impact of federal actions on the nonprofit sector,” Steve Koczela, President of the MassINC Polling Group, said in a statement. “While SNAP cuts, immigration raids and the elimination of federal funding programs are making headlines, Massachusetts nonprofits are expanding their services to meet an increased and widening demand for critical supports.”

2. The number of au pairs in Massachusetts has fallen by about 76% since 2018. The U.S. au pair program lets people come to the U.S. from other countries to live with families and care for their children, usually for low pay — about $200 a week for up to 45 hours. There are a few factors behind the drop: in 2020, the state began requiring that au pairs be paid at least a minimum wage and provided more worker protections. Some families decided to switch to American nannies, day care, or other childcare options because they could not afford to pay the higher wages.

Now Mike DiMauro, who leads the agency Agent Au Pair, said signups from people interested in becoming au pairs are down about 30% compared to last year. “What’s happened is obviously the immigration policies of the country are impacting people’s desire to come here — whether it’s tourism, education, higher education or cultural exchange programs,” he said.

3. Boston is in for some temperatures in the 50s and 60s next week, meaning we can say goodbye to many of the snow and slush piles that have lined our streets for the last two months. But before we say goodbye to winter, Bostonians want their city government to review how it dealt with this winter’s snowstorms, in which unshoveled and icy sidewalks, curbs and bus stops often made getting around extremely difficult.

“The lack of having things shoveled and the sidewalk access being completely absent, it just made me feel like my disabilities were not ever going to be seen as important or worth anything,” said Cassandra Xavier, a local disability advocate who spoke to the Boston City Council about her experience trying to navigate the city this winter. “To have to shoreline on the side of the street like that — feeling the wind of the car going past my body, or when the cars are at a standstill, feeling the heat come off of the cars onto my body — should not be a thing, but it is, and it was.”

4. New England Aquarium scientists spotted two blue whales about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard last week — and released photos of them. Blue whales, the largest animal on earth, are usually more common in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Researchers don’t know exactly what brought them here, but they hypothesize that the whales are drawn to food resources or fleeing something bad happening in their usual habitat.

“That was just such a beautiful sighting,” said Orla O’Brien, a research scientist with the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium. “We watched the whales kind of like come up and down. One of them would be at the surface and we’d just see it swimming. And then the other whale would come up and we just kind of watched them for maybe 20 minutes or so and it was really, really pretty.”

The first Secretary of War’s books are in Boston. What was he reading?

What can we learn from the library of Henry Knox, who served as the United States’ first-ever Secretary of War in the 1780s and 1790s?

GBH’s Chris Burrell got a tour of his book collection, now held in four bookcases on the Boston Athenaeum’s fourth floor.

“He has the works of Francis Bacon. He has books on hydraulic architecture in French. A book on rhetoric,” John Buchtel, the Athenaeum’s curator of rare books, told Burrell.

Knox had to drop out of Boston Latin School when his father left the family. He was largely self-taught and became a bookseller in Boston, then led the charge moving artillery from Fort Ticonderoga in New York to Boston in the winter of 1776.

One book in his library is “Field Engineer,” printed that year. It’s possible that members of the Continental Army used it to learn how to fortify Dorchester Heights.

“Imagine Americans trying to figure out how to defeat a powerful, powerful army with much better training,” Buchtel said. “And it’s books like these that they’re studying intensely in camp, as opposed to the British soldiers who were just reading light stuff or playing cards. The Americans were studying hard.”

Knox was later put in charge of Indian Affairs for the new U.S. government, and was an advocate for sovereignty of Native Americans, said Robert Allison, who teaches American history at Suffolk University.

“[Knox] tries to create a more humane policy toward Native Americans, recognizing them as sovereign entities with whom the United States will make binding treaties,” Allison said. “That’s a policy that is really squashed by the subsequent administrations.”

You can see more photos from his library and read more about his life here. 

Dig deeper: 

-Harvard makes contingency plan after Pentagon cuts military programs