“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 […]