Hollywood can’t always be trusted to accurately portray reality or history, to say the least. But I fully enjoyed watching the facts go by in the premier of “Reagan,” which I saw this week at the famous Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. “Reagan,” which stars Dennis Quaid as my father and opened around the […]

For decades, my mother (who was a veterinarian’s assistant during my childhood) gloated about her visit to my third-grade classroom. The dignified Mrs. Shelton accidentally transposed some numbers and Mom quickly corrected her for stating the normal human body temperature is 96-point-8. (With the proliferation of true-crime podcasts, it seems today the normal human body […]

Journalist Studs Terkel, who wrote “Working,” the classic oral history of Americans’ on-the-job lives, called Marvin Miller “the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis.” Miller, the United Mine Workers president for forty years and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ founder, took over a failing group that represented the nation’s most exploited but irreplaceable workers […]

For decades, Republicans have monopolized and marketed the f-word – freedom. Ever since Ronald Reagan, the f-word has been central to their brand, a handy way to trumpet their support for “small government.” Their enemy was “big government” – in their view, the meddling feds in Washington who regulate the private sector and thus curb […]

According to our progeny who claim to know of such things, it seems I cannot live without four items: fishing line, clothes line rope, duct tape and Velcro. There are a few others but those are the principals. They insist that if those four already-in-use items were to be pulled from our house, it’d crash […]

Fantasy football is played by more than 50 million Americans — and we’re all experts. Of course, my expertise usually costs me money while the genuinely smart analysts earn the big bucks. As the 2024 season kicks off, we find ourselves drifting, while drafting, in a sea of advice. On YouTube alone, there are now […]

Almost without our noticing it, Maine has become a better place to work. Naturally, the newspapers as usual are full of problems: high cost of housing, unavailable child care, schools under stress. I’ve never been comfortable with that aspect of my chosen profession. If we dig a little deeper, there are positive signs people both […]

A dozen people will meet behind closed doors next month and make a decision that will heavily influence the presidential election and might even decide it. They are not politicians. They are a group of almost anonymous economists and bankers who will set the interest rate affecting everything from mortgages and housing to credit cards […]