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In commentary at huffingtonpost.com this morning, former Vermont governor Madeleine M. Kunin writes about the American-ness of unity and cooperation as opposed to a doctrine of winner-take-all competition that is behind the most mean-spirited attitudes encountered too often these days. Read her thoughts here.
Read More »For the past three days, UMass Lowell’s Center for Arts and Ideas hosted its first visiting artist, Lynda Barry, an award-winning author, comic strip artist, painter, and teacher. She met with students in their classes, gave a talk to a standing-room-only sized audience in O’Leary Library, and taught a workshop about stories and…
Read More »This is an excerpt from a poetic sketch titled “Old Love-Light” by nineteen-year-old Jack Kerouac. October was his favorite month. In “On the Road,” he wrote: “In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after…
Read More »Pete Seeger with red cap at center; to his right is honorary Lowellian David Amram (AP web photo by Stephanie Keith courtesy of cbs.com). Read the Washington Post report about music legends Pete Seeger, David Amram, and friends taking to the street last Friday night with the “Occupy” demonstrators in New York…
Read More »This is a reproduction of the Ishtar Gate built by King Nebuchadnezzar II at the entrance to Babylon about 600 years before Jesus of Nazareth was born. You can’t see it in Iraq these days, but there’s a version in a German museum that was built in the 1930s from remains…
Read More »With more polls showing the public sympathizes with the general goals of the “Occupy” movement, Charles Blow of the NYTimes today takes a cultural cut at the activity to try to figure out why this thing isn’t going away quickly. He suggests that it has attained that mysterious quality of…
Read More »A swimmer from Harvard trains at Walden Pond in Concord for Olympic competition. Read Karen Crouse’s long profile of Alex Meyer in the NYTimes, and get the paper if you want more.
Read More »“Lowell Morning” by Richard Marion (c) 2011 See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net
Read More »Joe Nocera in the NYTimes this morning shares news about an idea that Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz and some of his people came up with as a way to stoke up the ecoomy and create jobs. He’s urging Americans to donate money that can be loaned to small businesses for the purpose…
Read More »There’s a lot of talk out there about books and reading being endangered by changing tastes among people. And then there was “Harry Potter” with lines around the bookstore block and six-year-olds reading hardcovers as thick as a brick. And now there’s Haruki Murakami of Japan, a literary writer selling millions of books.…
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