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Families are children’s most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science. If every child arrived in school…
Read More »Our friend and colleague David Blackburn, who leads the Cultural Resources and Programs unit at Lowell National Historical Park, sent a link to a Los Angeles Times article by James Rainey via the Sacramento Bee and a listserv of David’s. He writes, “It places Lowell National Historical Park themes and our stories on…
Read More »Read Nancye Tuttle’s advance report in the Sun on the Actors Inc. production of “The Porch,’ an insightful comedy by Jack Neary. Both Nancye and Jack are regular contributors to this blog. Read her article here, and get the Sun if you want more. The shows are set for June 2, 3 and 4…
Read More »Holy Poets, Batman! Lowell’s own Tom Sexton is in the New York Times today. The front page of the Arts section/C1 includes an image of the cover of his newest book, “I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets” (Univ. of Alaska Press), and his paragraph of attention is on…
Read More »I wrote this poem one Memorial Day in the late 1970s. I was living in Dracut, where I had attended an early morning tribute to veterans. Afterwards, I drove to northeast Maine to see a friend from high school who had moved to the Bangor area. I roughed out the poem…
Read More »Here’s the text of the famous 1884 Memorial Day speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Boston-born Civil War veteran who served on the US Supreme Court. His parents were the doctor-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes and abolitionist Amelia Lee Jackson. He enlisted in the army in his senior year at Harvard…
Read More »Author and Methuen-man Jay Atkinson has an essay about fathers, dads, in today’s Boston Globe Magazine. Read the essay here, and get the Globe if you want more.
Read More »Today’s NYTimes includes a capsule review of Neil Young’s new recording, “A Treasure,” which features a song inspired by the writing of poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, most often associated with Haverhill and Amesbury, but also a former Lowell resident when he was the editor of a newspaper in the Spindle City:…
Read More »In today’s NYTimes, writer Jonathan Franzen advises graduates at Kenyon College and all of us to be brave enough to go past “like” to the “love” setting on our emotional temperature control setting. Read the essay here, and get the NYT if you want more of this kind of writing.
Read More »Horton from Krejci: Goal. (Web photo by Brian Snyder courtesy of Reuters) Boston is back in the Stanley Cup finals for the first time since 1990 for a chance to win it all for the first time since 1972, the Bobby Orr era. I was a senior in high school…
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