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Today, I’ll jump from local to world events for a brief comment about the Chinese balloon that was shot down by the US off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, 2023, after transiting much of the United States. I assume it was an intelligence collection platform that vacuumed…
Read More »Living Madly: By Any Other Name By Emilie-Noelle Provost Every year around Valentine’s Day, when advertisements for engagement rings and wedding venues start popping up in newspapers and on billboards, I start thinking about names. When I was 11 years old, a friend and I would sometimes walk through the…
Read More »Boarding School Blues: Ch. 52 By Louise Peloquin Ch. 52: Eve of Destruction The initiation to skiing left its mark. Within twenty-four hours, indigo, violet and maroon splotches popped up all over Blanche’s and her brother’s bodies. Proud of his battle wounds, Antoine wowed Byron and Maggie by showing them…
Read More »Two years ago, I faced some major home maintenance challenges. My roof, boiler and hot water tank all needed replacing. It was not an emergency, but that’s what I wanted to avoid. The contractors I consulted urged me to first contact Mass Save for a home energy audit which was…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakins is a brilliant accounting of America’s slowness to embrace modern art, from the post-impressionists on. Even while Europe was enthralled by Matisse and intrigued by Picasso, those and…
Read More »The imagery of this poem by Frank Wagner is grim but it ends on an uplifting note. It also echoes an emerging movement in burial practice: Natural Organic Reduction, also known as human composting. It’s an option in six states and there’s a bill pending in the state legislature to…
Read More »Mark Cote, a regular contributor to this website, recently shared the following essay which he wrote 23 years ago when he served as the Chair of the city of Lowell’s Hunger/Homeless Commission. The essay originally appeared in the Lowell Sun on December 21, 2000, under the title, “Real tragedy of…
Read More »The bitter cold we endured this weekend brought to mind other weather extremes. For me, the Blizzard of ’78, which struck on February 5, 1978, has always been tops in that category. I lived through it as a 19-year-old student at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. As bad as…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Optimistic. Intelligent. Articulate. Polished. Upbeat. Confident. Michelle Wu is a great look for Boston. And so was the audience for her State of the City talk last Wednesday, one year into her term as mayor. Several thousand…
Read More »My Granny’s Life in Television By Malcolm Sharps Looking back on his childhood in the 50s and later, Malcolm Sharps remembers the defeats and triumph in his uneasy relationship with his grandmother. My grandmother was one of those women that the term ‘old lady’ already comfortably fitted long before her…
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