Now available at Barnes and Noble Downtown, Welles Emporium, Guy Lefebvre’s Lowell Gallery, Brew’d Awakening, National Park Visitor Center Gift Shop, Monkey’s Ice Cream & Gifts, Dharma Buns, and online at www.loompress.com and www.amazon.com At many of these same fine businesses, readers will find Loom Press book titles, including those by Steve…
Paul Krugman in his NYT column today tells why we are not getting serious energy policy legislation out of Washington, D.C. Krugman lines up with Andrew H., if you’ve been reading this blog regularly. Read his essay here. Krugman’s colleague Ross Douthat takes a different view on the consequences in his…
Kudos to the City of Lowell, Greater Merrimack Valley Convention and Visitor Bureau, Lowell Festival Foundation, Lowell National Historical Park, and National Council for Traditional Arts for once again being the prime movers behind an inspiring and joyful Lowell Folk Festival. The Sunday crowd was much smaller than yesterday’s, but it…
The popular Franco-American singer-songwriter Michele Choiniere of Vermont this afternoon at Boarding House Park dedicated her final song at the Lowell Folk Festival to Jack Kerouac because, she said, “He was a Franco-American, and he was from Lowell.” I missed her additional comments about the song and the title, but it…
I’ve been to every Folk Festival since the first National Folk Festival in Lowell in 1987, and the 2010 Saturday was as good as I’ve seen it—the talent, the street life, the audience size, the urban energy. I spent a lot of time at Boarding House Park with the UMass…
The Associated Press reported on President Obama’s comments about making progress on the national economic front, including the new financial regulations law. He also called on Congress to send him a bill that is intended to assist small businesses through tax credits. Looming over these steps forward, however, was the…
Last Friday, economist Paul Krugman wrote in the NYTimes about the comeback of “voodoo” economics, which the first President Bush tried to warn Americans about in 1980, when he was trying to stop Ronald Reagan from becoming the Republican Party’s nominee for president. And the rest is history, as they…
The Learning Gulf It has been about a week now. BP has its finger in the dike, and the seabed is strangely silent. I almost miss that Live Feed (Live! Crude! Oil!). On TV the oil looked, oddly, like some underwater dust storm. Maybe it is over. Maybe not. Now…
It’s always fun to get the SUN insert with the Lowell Folk Festival schedule, artist/group descriptions, and street map of the stage locations and other attractions. Looking at it this morning, I thought the community has done well in the past 30-something years building what is for all intents and…
The NYTimes today reports that the US is falling behind in college completion rates when compared to other countries. It’s good to note that UMass Lowell is bucking the worrisome national trend. Between 2007 and 2009, the student success rate increased by about five to eight percent in various measures,…