Tonight Chronicle – WCVB/Channel 5’s iconic television magazine program – tells the tale of the real people and the real world behind the awarding-winning, made-in-Lowell movie – “The Fighter.” From the Chronicle website: It’s taken in more than 70 million dollars at the box office, and took home seven Oscar…
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As the Sesqucentennnial of the Civil War is remembered, History.com reminds us that on this day January 31, 1865, the U. S. House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment – abolishing slavery in the United States. The U.S. House of Representatives passes the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery…
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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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See this nugget over at Cliff’s place in which Larry Summers takes on the Tiger Mom-mom Amy Chau on the topic of strict study-and-learning practices vs. creativity.
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Big. Huge. Vast. Jumbo. Massive. A cornucopia of American art. My wife and I met two friends for Sunday brunch at the Museum of Fine Arts. We hadn’t been to the MFA since the opening of the new Art of the Americas Wing and Shapiro Family Courtyard last November. To…
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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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From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, a column about history and the trouble in Egypt by an international relations scholar. I picked this up from realclearpolitics.com
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This is Catholic Schools Week. Catholic schools have a long and rich tradition in Lowell and in the Merrimack Valley. Of those schools still open and active: St. Patrick’s School in the Acre opened in 1852, the Immaculate Conception School in 1880, St. Michael’s in 1889, St. Jeanne d’Arc School…
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“…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers…
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Lowell-rooted poet Joe Donahue is one of the subjects of an essay titled “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry” in the Chicago Review. Read the essay by Peter O’Leary here. Donahue has spent years mastering long serial poems that combine elements of mysticism, esotericism, protest, and the alienation of the…
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