The great American novelist Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” I thought of that Tuesday night while watching the Lowell City Council once again debate whether the method of selecting Lowell’s mayor should…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Kamala Harris pledges, “We won’t go back.” Tonight, however, we all will. At 2 a.m. tomorrow morning we set the clocks back an hour. Sure, it means an extra hour of sleep, but, for many of us,…

Martha Sparks: Chelmsford’s Accused Witch By Ron Sykes Certainly, there are many stories of injustice in Chelmsford’s past but, the story of Martha Sparks seems to be particularly cruel. On July 10, 1676 Martha, the daughter of Thomas Barrett Jr., married Henry Sparks from Exeter, New Hampshire. Henry purchased 1…

Register to vote! – (PIP #45) By Louise Peloquin Registering to vote is a duty and voting a sacred right. Nothing has changed over the years. L’Etoile, October 5, 1924 Urgent Call from the Permanent Committee of Naturalization May all those who are citizens by birth, by naturalization or by…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by journalist Nathan Thrall won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction this year.  The core of the narrative is simple: in 2012 a rickety school bus carrying…

A joint motion by Councilors Erik Gitschier and Corey Robinson that “the law department draft necessary language to facilitate residents’ ability to select our mayor via ballot before the 2025 city council election cycle” generated some discussion at Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting. However, like so many of the motions…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Hiding out from election coverage isn’t working all that well for me. Half my recent blogs have been non-political book reviews, but that hasn’t diluted the tension leading up to November 5th. Now I feel compelled to…

The onset of this year’s World Series and the recent deaths of Luis Tiant and Pete Rose revived my memories of the 1975 World Series which Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy calls The Greatest World Series Ever. The two teams that played that year were Tiant’s Boston Red Sox and…

Overheard Conversations: Be Careful, A Writer Could Be Listening By Stephen O’Connor James Joyce was certainly not the first writer whose pockets were full of scraps of paper on which were scrawled bits of conversations. Any writer worth his or her salt is continually listening to other people’s phrases, stories…