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What is striking about the Burlington ICE Field Office is its unremarkable appearance. Save for the two flagpoles, with the red, white, and blue American and Department of Homeland Security flags, the two-story building could be mistaken for just another blah office building, in a sea of corporate buildings and parking garages bordering the expansive […]

Most of us believe that if our intentions are good, our decisions will be too. I used to think so as well. But during my years on the Amherst Town Council, I learned that good intentions can still lead to harmful outcomes when they’re shaped by incomplete information, hidden biases, and the limits of our […]

Three important disability-related news items have come out in the news recently. They are separate but share a common theme — the Trump regime’s campaign to segregate and exclude people with disabilities from society, reversing the progress of the disability rights and independent living movements over the last 50 years, and returning to the days […]

Nearly every contentious debate in Northampton politics comes down to a singular issue: how much money? How much for schools, how much for roads, for police, for the unhoused? It’s a necessary argument but it quietly assumes that a dollar spent is a dollar delivered, and it skips the question that should accompany it: What […]

For Bay Staters, “the pursuit of happiness,” as the Declaration of Independence put it, has often taken place in nature. In 1836, Boston-native Ralph Waldo Emerson described the benefits of time spent outdoors on the human soul in his essay, “Nature.” A few years later, Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” inspired more Americans to connect with […]

Across western Massachusetts, the local housing crisis is lived and it is affecting people we know; the single woman searching for a safe, modest apartment; the young professional hoping to stay in the region where they grew up; the senior on a fixed income; the family trying to remain rooted in the community. At this […]

I have long known that Northampton’s famous colonial preacher, Jonathan Edwards, was the maternal grandfather of Aaron Burr who was the third vice-president of the United States and is best remembered today for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. While that relationship was an interesting fact, I never gave the familial connection much thought until […]

WARNING: If you’re short on time at the moment and have a list of even trivial things to do you should skip to the next article immediately. Only pass the next minute or two reading this essay if you wish to immerse yourself in an insignificant — possibly even a meaningless topic of interest to […]

On June 9, the South Hadley Board of Health passed a regulation banning application of second generation anticoagulant rodenticides [SGARs] on town-owned/-operated property. SGARs are environmentally harmful wherever they are applied, including to federally listed threatened and endangered species, household pets and even young children. Plus, low-income and minority populations tend to be financially least […]

RFK Jr. likes to lambaste the medical establishment for its “war on protein” or “war on saturated fats.” But if we’re to use Merriam-Webster’s definition of war — “a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism,” it’s not hyperbole to say that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his boss are waging the real war — one […]

I first read Dylan Thomas when I was 17. Fifty-eight years later I still read his poems, most recently, “And Death Shall have No Dominion.”  Its theme: after a human life ends, we somehow, mysteriously remain part of the universe and each other. Despite my agnosticism, this poem speaks to me. It always has.  On June 6, my wife Dale and I attended a memorial service for Paki Wieland at Northampton’s First Churches. I met Paki decades ago through her colleague and […]

Sixty years ago, in 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stood before Western diplomats in Moscow and said something that would echo for decades: “We will bury you.” Americans heard it as a threat of nuclear war. Khrushchev later said he meant something different — that communism would outlast and outperform capitalism, burying it economically, not […]