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In honor of Pride Month 2022, here’s a story we first posted in 2014: Moody Gardens By Mehmed Ali and Beth Brassel Between 1950 and 1970, Lowell, Mass., saw its status as an industrial dynamo erode. The textile industry shrank to almost nothing and many residents quit on the city,…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. President Biden ran on the promise to bring out country together.  Yet, as Tom Friedman recently pointed out in the NY Times, the President has been more effective at strengthening bonds among our allies abroad than in healing divisions at…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Two weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a California law that blocked anyone younger than 21 from buying a semiautomatic rifle. In a 2-to-1 decision, two Trump-appointed judges waxed poetic about the importance…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. My dad was one of the first generation of type 1 diabetics to survive because insulin was available. We worried about him as over the years he developed one after another of the complications of this potentially deadly…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (author of A Gentleman in Moscow) follows Emmett Watson, an 18-year-old just released from a juvenile work farm for accidentally causing the death of a fellow who had been bullying him. Having survived his…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. With spring, we’re all getting out more. But even with yard cleanup and planting, and longer walks to enjoy, there’s still time for the pleasures of reading. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe is a full accounting of Purdue…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The handwriting has been on the wall. We shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still enraging. A draft SCOTUS opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito and leaked to Politico, shows that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the Roe…

In this short video from France, Kate Rex explores the French roots of Jack Kerouac’s mother.

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Some of you have read “The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate” by James H. Barron. Receiving critical acclaim internationally, my husband’s book, the product of ten years of research and writing, was…

In 1969, Tim Trask returned from the Vietnam War and took a job as a guard at Massachusetts Correctional Institute (MCI) Concord. The following post, and part 2 which follows tomorrow, are taken from his memoir about that experience. The first chapter of that work, Odysseus Wandering, appeared on this…