Olympic happy hour ahead! Seine River water for sale at 10 euros a bottle By Louise Peloquin      On July 9th, “The last lap” covered a major player in the upcoming Summer Olympics – La Seine, the venue to host the sure-to-be-spectacular opening ceremonies. Readers can find it on this…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. James by Percival Everett tells the story of Huckleberry Finn’s escape from his drunken abusive father with slave Jim in pre-Civil War Missouri. As a child, I read Huckleberry Finn as a simple adventure tale; as a college student,…

Tuesday night the Lowell City Council discussed how to fill a vacancy on the council. The precipitating cause was the coming resignation of John Leahy, something reported by the Lowell Sun last Sunday and confirmed by Leahy during this meeting. He said he would begin his new job with the Lowell School…

Allen Ginsberg in Lowell By Leo Racicot      A sad irony — the first time Allen Ginsberg came to Lowell, it was to help bury his beloved friend, Jack Kerouac. The two met in 1944 at Columbia University when they were students there. They hit it off instantly, traveled…

The Celtics Game 5 Renews Ties Between Alaskans and New Englanders By Mike McCormick The Boston Celtics were back on their home court at TD Garden for the fifth game of the NBA Championship series. The seventeen-time champions, up three games to one in the series, could hoist an eighteenth…

“The last lap – Paris’s Summer Olympics” By Louise Peloquin      The river Seine has fashioned Paris history since its name was “Lutèce” (1), begun as a small settlement on “L’Isle de la Cité”, one of its two islands. Even today, everyone still refers to its lively Left Bank where thrones the…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Remember when we scoffed at  Richard Nixon telling David Frost that the President couldn’t be prosecuted for Watergate because “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”  We thought that our Constitution established “a government…

With no City Council meeting last week, today we’ll take another excursion into a part of Lowell political history that intersects with several contemporary issues. In May the City Council held a vigorous debate on whether to unwind the judicial consent decree from the 1980s that still governs the assignment…

In the years before the American Civil War, Frederick Douglass was a frequent visitor to Lowell. Although the city’s entire reason for existence was the production of cloth made from cotton harvested by enslaved Africans in the American south which provided a strong incentive for those in Lowell to remain…