On Thursday, June 11, 2026, at 6pm in the Luna Theater (in the former Mill No. 5), students at Lowell Community Charter Public School will present a “Reading Frederick Douglass Together” event. In recent years, many communities have come together to perform public readings of Douglass’ historic speech, “What to…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe, published in April, displays once again the author’s investigative skills and journalistic talents manifest in his books Say Nothing (about “the troubles”…
After nearly six hours of deliberations spread over two meetings, the Lowell City Council on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, adopted the city’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget of $577,861,191. Although the council cannot increase the budget proposed by the city manager, I believe the final amount was higher than what was…
Ann Fox Chandonnet In recent years, I have been able to connect with the creative world of my Lowell State / Class of 1964 classmate writer/ poet Ann Fox Chandonnet, through her editor at Loom Press – my longtime friend and colleague Paul Marion. Connections were hit and miss and…
Things We No Longer See in the Culture By Leo Racicot I’m enough of an old fuddy-duddy to actually miss some of the daily fixtures of life as we knew them in the culture of the 50s, 60s and beyond. I miss the convenience of the neighborhood mailbox, the…
Magazine: “The Venture-Capital Populist: How David Sacks and the new tech right went full MAGA and captured Washington” by George Packer in The Atlantic, June 2026 – Because of extreme cold, the 2025 presidential inauguration was held inside the U.S. Capital. The smaller venue limited how many could attend in…
La Caverne du Pont Neuf by JR, Plato and Daft Punk By Louise Peloquin More than 40 years after Christo and Jeanne-Claude literally wrapped up le Pont Neuf, JR is in the process of transforming it into what he calls “the world’s biggest immersive artwork.” (1) From Saturday June 6th…
Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was devoted almost exclusively to the council’s review of the proposed FY27 city budget. The council opted to review the budget department-by-department and worked diligently for three hours until the mandatory meeting stop time of 10 pm arrived. A vote to keep going failed and…
Eliot Church at South Common (Wikimedia photo) Survey Team With its spire ringed in scaffolding, the Eliot Church on the rim of the South Common in Lowell, Mass., looks like a church in Dresden, Germany, shown yesterday on the TV news, the spire there circled with staging from which workers…
The Pick-Me-Up By Leo Racicot I’m sitting here wondering if the charming American custom of the afternoon pick-me-up still exists. I asked around and got a lot of blank stares. It’s safe to say the afternoon pick-me-up is cousin to the British tea time tradition, that hour of the day when the…