We are pleased to introduce a new contributor to RichardHowe.com, the notable cartoonist Nicholas Whitmore, who creates a daily cartoon for The Journal in Newcastle Upon Tyne on the northeast coast of England. What is Nick doing here in Lowell? He comes to us via his lifelong friend John Wooding,…
Read More »
One of our occasional contributors, Bob Hodge, has a new book about his adventures in running, Tales of the Times. Bob finished third in the Boston Marathon in 1979 and won the 1982 Beppa-Oita Marathon in Japan. His memoir is filled with rich and lively accounts of an elite athlete’s…
Read More »
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. My last blog warned about the need to separate reliable COVID-19 information from misinformation, whether intentional or unintentional, and rumor. Last week an esteemed British scientist passed on a podcast to my brother-in-law, who shared it with me. …
Read More »
As panic sweeps the United States and the world in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, our regular contributor George Chigas of UMass Lowell was reminded of the poem “Fear” by Charles Simic, the Serbian-born Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has taught at the University of New Hampshire since the 1970s.…
Read More »
Please welcome Kathleen Aponick of Andover to our roster of writers. RPH Postcards from Haggett’s Pond By Kathleen Aponick —after a recurrence of cancer I’m by the water on a path once a railroad bed thinking of trains whizzing by, passengers deep in thought, tense perhaps over work, family problems,…
Read More »
In response to the public health-related postponement of yesterday’s Lowell Walk on the Irish Acre, here is a virtual tour of a portion of that neighborhood. The text is based on the script I used to lead this tour in April 2016. The tour Dave McKean would have given yesterday…
Read More »
The entry below is being cross posted from Majorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. psmag.com Everyone has an opinion on how serious is the WHO-identified pandemic coronavirus. Many share guidance on how to deal with it. Far fewer share evidence-based science. Disturbing though it may be, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at…
Read More »
Virus Dispatch From The Northwest by Mike McCormick ON MARCH 3, WHEN MY WIFE KATY and I landed in Seattle off a flight from Anchorage, concern about the spread of the coronavirus was ramping up. We had arrived in Seattle three days before Katy’s scheduled minor procedure at the Swedish…
Read More »
It was 13 years ago this month that I launched this blog. Since then, I have used this site to capture in words the major events of our time (which is why Paul Marion and I called our 2017 best-of-the-blog book History as It Happens). Mindful of that tradition and…
Read More »
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. The Freedom of Information Act has never been celebrated by those in power. After Congress passed it in 1966, LBJ signed it quietly at his Texas ranch. Even under President Obama, the federal government was loath to facilitate…
Read More »