Menu
For the next few days I will publish sections of an essay about Lowell. The essay in a slightly different form first appeared in “The Offering,” the literary magazine of UMass Lowell, in 2007.—PM . Cut from American Cloth In the middle of the nineteenth century, workers in the red-brick…
Read More »A friend sent a link to “Suburban Pioneer: Musings on Life in the Merrimack Valley”, a blog that seems to have been around for a while but which had thus far escaped my attention. I’m not sure who writes it, but it seems to be centered in the Lawrence-area with…
Read More »Last June, Lowell hosted a conference on Innovative Cities that was attended by people from around the country and overseas. The late Tony Judt wrote about his days in New York City. An excerpt from his forthcoming book “The Memory Chalet’ is in today’s NYTimes. His description of the pluralistic…
Read More »HuffingtonPost.com advises us that on this 50th anniversary of the election of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States, LIFE.com published today never-before seen photos of JFK from the archives. Fifty years ago today, on Nov. 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected the 35th president of the United States.…
Read More »The BostonHerald.com is reporting that the long-awaited sale of the Caritas Christi Health Care sysytem – formerly owned by the Archdiocese of Boston – to Cerberus Capital management has been completed. The sale was dependent – among other things – on the approval of Attorney General Martha Coakley, licensure of the…
Read More »“If, because of cutbacks and lack of support from the federal government, literature and the arts and other aspects of the humanities become just parlor musings of the wealthy, we would have made a huge mistake,’’ Dartmouth’s president, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, said in an interview. “Literature and the arts…
Read More »There’s much analysis out there on why the GOP took so many seats in the House and a few in the Senate. Over at POLITIO, reporter Byron Tau comments on the “senior factor” in some these races. In an election marked by dramatic defections from the Democratic Party, older voters…
Read More »John Lennon’s image will appear on a commemorative coin issued in England thanks to a popular vote conducted by the Royal Mint. He joins other notable persons who have received this “honour,” including Shakespeare, Churchill, Darwin, and Florence Nightingale. If England can manage this kind of tribute for John Lennon,…
Read More »Cardinal Sean O’Malley commented on his blog this week about his visit to Lowell last Saturday evening. First he celebrated the 4 o’clock Mass at the Immaculate Conception Parish. The Immaculate happens to be my parish – Bill and I attended the Mass and the D’Youville event. The Cardinal writes: I spent Saturday…
Read More »From the NYTimes website, here are several poems in which the writers speak to the daylight savings time experience. It’s a big deal when the NYT gives this kind of premium space to poets. The contributors are well known.
Read More »