Watching the Patriots opener yesterday was a lot of fun, especially in light of the ever-worsening performance of the Red Sox. As much as I enjoy watching football, I now have mixed feelings about the sport because I’ve come to believe that the long term effects of getting one’s head…
Catherine Tumber, author of “Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low–Carbon World,” will be the featured speaker on Monday, Sept. 24, at 11:45 am, in the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center Lunchtime Lectures series. This series is a UMass Lowell Center for Arts and…
“We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”—that’s the way the Declaration of Independence wraps up. July 4, 1776. In a country founded on that principle, you would think that the theme of “We’re all in this together” would bury the opposite: “You’re on…
In the spirit of making those Lowell connections, I note that author and professor Jay Atkinson has penned an interesting article for the Improper Bostonian. Atkinson deftly connects the U.S. version of rugby – as played as a club sport in Boston to “a model for social justice, volunteerism and…
Here is the lead editorial from the September 7, 1992 edition of the New York Times – A Labor Day piece about the recently opened Boott Cotton Mills Museum: Youngsters who are made to troop through America’s historic landmarks might reasonably conclude that in the past, rich was typical. Ordinary…
In his Sunday opinion column in the NYTimes, Thomas L. Friedman begs the President and Gov Romney to give the American voters a big vision for what the country can do. One of his suggestions is to enact government policies that make some form of post-secondary education accessible and affordable for anyone who…
If I was a producer of the upcoming Democratic Party convention in North Carolina, I would bag all the speeches all week. Nobody really wants to hear more speeches from professional talkers. The leaders of the Democratic Party should take the opportunity of having heightened public attention to SHOW the…
Yesterday’s New York Times carried a story about the soaring popularity to bus-borne guided tours conducted by the Hollywood gossip website, TMZ. Unlike the classic Hollywood tour that gave visitors a peek at Clark Gable’s swimming pool, the TMZ Tour shows you where Halle Berry totaled her car when she…
Today’s NYTimes includes the latest from opinion-writer Tim Egan, a comment on the figment that is politician Mitt Romney. There is a real ex-Gov. Romney and a businessman Romney and a Grandfather Mitt, but those are not on the political sales counter for the fall. I wouldn’t use the nasty term “empty suit” for…
UMass Lowell Professor Bob Forrant shared the following essay that explores the relationship between the city of Lowell, the University, and the National Park: Introduction For thirty-seven years I’ve lived and worked in Massachusetts industrial cities and for the last twenty-five I’ve thought a lot about how cities like Springfield,…