Living Madly: I Hate Summer By Emilie-Noelle Provost Although I appreciate fresh local vegetables and not having to scrape ice off my windshield, summer and I really don’t get along. Every May, I’m overcome by a sense of dread because summer is coming, and there’s nothing I can do to…
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A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. Book Review: This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, by Beverly Gage (2026). A professor of American history at Yale, Gage won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for her biography of J. Edgar…
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2026 FIFA World Cup – Fans, Feelings and Facts By Louise Peloquin Even the most indifferent to the world’s most popular sport have been caught up, at least for a few moments, by some of the many viral images around the 2026 FIFA World Cup competition. It runs from June…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson is a spellbinding journalistic revelation of the innermost thinking and maneuvering of key players in Iran and the United States leading up…
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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. About a month ago I wrote a blog asserting that, unless some new major scandal erupted causing Graham Platner to leave the race, Maine voters would be faced in November with two bad US Senate choices—but for different reasons.…
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There was no Lowell City Council meeting this week so I will return to my biographical sketches of the mayors of Lowell. This is the third installment which covers the first 18 mayors who served under the Plan E form of government (1945 to 1983). For those who missed the…
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Here’s a story, a memory from my early days in Dracut, Mass. When I was growing up, high-speed aircraft often broke the sound barrier even over residential areas. The enormous boom results from a massive shock wave caused by the aircraft moving faster than the speed of sound. This is…
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Between the Covers By Leo Racicot The Golden Age of magazines was still going strong when I was a kid. Popular publications like LIFE and LOOK Magazines still held their popularity with readers. As someone who’d been weaned from a young age on movies and movie-going, thanks to my father’s…
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A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. Article: “Inside Trump’s Great American State Fair” by Jim Puzzanghera, et al, Boston Globe, June 29, 2026. The Great American State Fair is a 16-day event on the National Mall in Washington, DC that runs from June…
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A Bigger Splash in a Bigger Heat (1) By Louise Peloquin After an unusually early record-breaking heatwave at the end of May, June 15th temperatures started rising past the three-digit mark to top 106 in Paris on the 24th making the City of Lights the hottest spot on the planet.…
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