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Garrison Keillor, author, long-time radio host of “Prairie Home Companion,” and one-time visitor to Lowell on the stage of Lowell Memorial Auditorium, has a new essay that appeared in papers all over the country this week. He titled it “Trump Is What He Is, and God Help Us Now.” He…
Read More »Eliot A. Cohen writes in ATLANTIC magazine that we are in a “clarifying moment” in our national journey. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.…
Read More »Student Mario Savio at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech protests in 1964.
Read More »Web photo courtesy of ABC News Over the weekend, we saw two competing visions of America in the form of citizens standing (and marching) for what they believe is best for the country, all of it in public view on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I wrote this poem…
Read More »I wrote this poem in late 2008 after Barack Obama was elected president but before his inauguration. The title is from his campaign chant that he got from a woman who supported him: “Fired up! Ready to Go!” The poem is not so much about him as the sense of…
Read More »Following are a few email messages between Malaysia and Lowell this weekend. The story begins with Swagata Sinha Roy finding a poem of mine, “Deep in the Weave,” on the web, very likely in a post by my blogging colleague Marie, who shared on this blog a post from the…
Read More »I am surprised this topic is back in play. So, what’s the thinking by those who want to put a new high school on the South Common? Are they saying to themselves that it will be no problem to blow up that useless empty lot where there are not many…
Read More »Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in 2002 captured businessman, now president-elect, Donald Trump talking about his favorite movie, “Citizen Kane.” Here’s an interview with Morris and a film clip. Thanks to lithub.com for the source material.
Read More »Economics scholar Bill Lazonick, who teaches at UMass Lowell, contributes to the global discussion about money, labor, and ownership. Here is his latest, co-written for the Korea Times. “Disappearing Act of the U.S. Middle Class.” While pressing for restructuring, value extractors and academics who justified this activity argued that…
Read More »I’m not insensitive to the condition of the White Working Class today, which as an identity politics category seems accepted by chin-stroking pundits in comparison to Environmentalists, now some kind of No Go Zone for political strategists if you listen to the opinion writers (Don’t pander to those Green people).…
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