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With today being the annual running of the Boston Marathon, my thoughts drifted back to that event in 2013 when terrorism injected itself into the iconic sporting event. Most are familiar with what happened, but this post, which I wrote on April 22, 2013, provides many details and a feel…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Art Thief: a True Story of Love, Crime and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel, published in 2023, is a well researched and documented account of one of the most unusual art thieves of all time. For…
Read More »Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was a business-like gathering with no overt controversies. However, a couple of innocuous items on the agenda shed some light on the workings of local government and some important public policy considerations so I’ll discuss them first. **** A routine public hearing on a request…
Read More »Donuts Back in the Day By Leo Racicot There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when Lowell could have earned the nickname, The Donut Capital of Massachusetts. The city was home to many. Let’s see now: there was Donut Shack. Its made-on-the-premises, old-fashioned donuts have been a crowd pleaser…
Read More »Living Madly: Lost Worlds By Emilie-Noelle Provost On my website, I often write essays about places, and sometimes people, that were once an integral part of my life but today no longer exist. Some of them are part of what I call the Lost World Series, but there are others…
Read More »Book Review: The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II by David Nasaw. This 2025 book popped up in my Kindle (the e-reader) recommendations recently, so I downloaded it, mostly because of my current research project on Lowell residents who died in the military during World War II. I…
Read More »“Let them eat …” Croissants! By Louise Peloquin In a world where the wild whirlwind of war blows needless destruction, it seems frivolous and callous to think about the pleasures of sampling food. This post, written by a “Nam generation” baby who participated in a Boston sit-in for peace in…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Jonathan Weiner is a comprehensive and enormously powerful study of the cycle of poverty in American cities brought about by the eviction of poor people from their homes. Eviction is not…
Read More »Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting covered a variety of topics with a discussion of how the Lowell Police Department interacts (or doesn’t interact) with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents being most important, although I’ll save that until last. **** There was a public hearing and then a vote to…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted by Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson is a mystery set in London in 1749. It is a romp, filled with colorful characters, set against the well-detailed urban landscape of the Georgian era. The plot is full of surprises,…
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