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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Nearly eight years ago, I sat at a small table at a Peet’s Coffee shop across from a pretty, pert, smart and saucy woman, the former head of the state Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division and chief…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. This was the speech many have been waiting for for months: the President standing in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol and speaking the truth about the democracy-defying January 2021 insurrection. Conciliatory softness would just not do…

Learn About Kerouac on Zoom from Anchorage, Alaska Jack Kerouac, U.S. Navy, 1943 (colorized by metacolor on reddit)   Alaskans and people around the country who are over the age of fifty will have an opportunity to learn about author Jack Kerouac in four seventy-five-minute Zoom sessions beginning February 10.…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Remember Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan whistleblowing eye doctor whose warnings to medical colleagues about the not-yet-identified Covid virus were dismissed by Chinese authorities as “false comments” and rumors?  In January 2020 my info-holic husband told me about Dr.…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. For lovers of non-fiction, two deep dives into the fragility of democracy, here and in the land in the land of its birth. These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore is a mammoth tome, published…

It’s a new year. There’s a new Lowell City Council. And I’m trying a new thing, a weekly newsletter on Lowell politics. Some background: The richardhowe.com blog was born 15 years ago. Its mission was to cover “Lowell politics and history” which we did with thoroughness and regularity. But by…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The galaxy lost a stellar jewel last night with the passing of WCVB-TV’s bright and talented Mary Richardson. Sadly, her star had gradually lost its sparkle over the seven years in which her dark disease – Alzheimer’s –…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. I like to think of myself as a glass-half-full sort, looking for reasons to be optimistic even when events in this country seem to be circling the drain and democracy seems more fragile than ever. Realism does…

A Lowell-centric view of the year just completed: Pandemic The Covid-19 pandemic was the biggest story of 2021, both globally and locally. In March, the number of Americans who had died of Covid topped 500,000. By December, more than 800,000, including one of every 100 people over the age of…