Author Archive

Does snow make you SAD

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression or winter blues, is a mood disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter . . . Once regarded skeptically by the experts, seasonal affective disorder is now well…

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No school in Lowell

An email alert arrived at 5:55 am and the robocall just came in at 6:02 am – no school in Lowell on Tuesday. Not a flake has fallen yet, so this is a prospective cancellation but also a wise one. Several years ago school was held in the face of…

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Review of “The Town”

Not to be confused with the play (“Our Town”) I wrote about yesterday, “The Town” is the 2010 Ben Affleck film about a gang of bank robbers from Charlestown. I ordered it from Netflix, mostly to try to discover why “The Fighter” was winning so many awards while “The Town”…

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“Our Town” at Lowell High

Last evening I attended an excellent performance of “Our Town”, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, at Lowell High School’s Little Theater. Under the direction of Sharon Bisantz, the Student Theater Company did a masterful job of presenting this classic that is set in a fictional New Hampshire town near…

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Mandatory minimum drug sentences

Back in the late 1980s when I did a lot of criminal defense work, the “war on drugs” adopted minimum mandatory sentences as its tactic of choice. The most onerous and ill-considered was a mandatory minimum 5 year sentence for a second offense of distribution of heroin. In the abstract,…

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