“Because I could not stop for cataracts, they kindly stopped for me.” Someday I hope to find time to luxuriate in the collected works of poets such as Emily Dickinson – on paper, not as an audiobook — so my ears perked up when my recent eye exam revealed the early stages of cataracts in […]

In my day as a student in the early 1960s, Bowdoin College was a bastion of homogeneity. My class of 200 men included, as I recall, two African Americans, two Asian Americans and zero Hispanics. We had more students from my own high school in Delaware (three) than from the states of California, Florida, Washington […]

The national debt broke the $32 trillion barrier this week. It’s a number so huge it’s incomprehensible to the average citizen. We knew $32 trillion was coming. It just got here a lot faster than the money experts thought, thanks to the roughly $5 trillion that the feds spent to help people and businesses withstand […]

  Last week, as the Legislature lurched toward adjournment of its bill-packed session, a moment of extraordinary clarity occurred: Republicans, in a major surprise, announced a solution to the longstanding problem of an underfunded highway budget. As anyone who follows the state budget knows, Maine DOT funding has been a basket case ever since former […]

THE CONVERSATION — Whether or not the Ukraine counteroffensive that began in early June 2023 succeeds in dislodging Russian troops from occupied territory, there are growing signs that the push has prompted anxiety back in Moscow. Such unease was, I believe, detectable in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting on June 13 with a group of influential military bloggers – […]