For years, it’s been black letter law in journalistic ethics: Never use your position, insight or knowledge to aid or advise public figures – particularly politicians – in return for something of value. It was a bright line to be crossed at significant personal and professional peril. Over the years the line had been blurred […]

Editor’s Note: Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial on Sept. 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages […]

“If you give a hungry man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” What if you had the opportunity to get a fly-casting lesson from one of the world’s top fly-casting instructors? And what if your “payment” (a suggested donation) […]

The naked truth about vaxing, voting and hacking

“I think we can’t overstate her influence.” That’s a statement from Imani Perry, distinguished professor of Black Studies at Princeton University, who deftly and accurately summed up the impact of cultural critic Gloria Jean Watkins, better known to most of the world as bell hooks. hooks, a revolutionary feminist voice, departed this Earth on Dec. […]

Somewhere around this time of year, the song, and the tune, come into my head: “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan; earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” It seems to sum up the reasons, often inexplicable to outsiders, why those of us who choose to live in Maine do so. […]