Essex County will have to work like hell if it wants to get its share of federal funds to combat sea level rise. Oh, and don’t expect a fair fight. 

For the first time in my life, I’ve become the owner of an entire set of dishes that match. I’m ridiculously happy.

As President Trump and Trump’s myriad critics remind us on a daily basis, ours is today a profoundly divided nation. Yet understanding the source of those divisions, amply displayed in perceptions of last week’s Democratic debates, requires looking beyond the antagonisms of the moment. Ameri…

PINKHAM NOTCH, New Hampshire -- The people here are as old as the hills, almost.

 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Anyone who lives on the East Coast has noticed that deer ticks are a lot more common and Lyme disease is a lot more virulent than in the ‘50s. When I was growing up, you spent most of your summer evenings picking fat, bloated ticks off yourself and your dogs with virtuall…

Minnesota, we hear, is divided into the Midwest and the rest.

“Get me rewrite!” So went the popular image of the rewrite editor at the other end of the line from the reporter breathlessly dictating into the phone.

Summer was about blueberries. I’ve written before about my mother’s love for blueberries and her passion for picking, cooking and eating them.

I am writing this in light of the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in Europe and to a lesser extent in the U.S.

At the time of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969, I was a young reporter for the Hartford Courant. I actually watched the landing from a popular reporters hangout next door to the paper, the Press Room.

On June 15th a group of business leaders and politicians gathered on Boston’s waterfront to celebrate the completion of a 17-floor skyscraper with a glass façade that reflected the glistening waters of Boston Harbor. 

I’ll give this to the leader of the free world: He’s a scab picker extraordinaire.

Is humility a virtue or an invitation for others to walk all over you?

Call me Mercutio.

I was fortunate to get the last parking space on Sandy Point at 6:45 in the morning on July 6th. It was hot and muggy and everyone wanted to be on the beach for the long summer weekend.

This article should have been in sooner; it was a slipup on my part, but I feel a necessity to make a comment about it.

Special counsel Robert Mueller was hired to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Your life “should be constantly as fresh as this river,” Thoreau wrote nearly two centuries ago. “It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.”

June 26 was a dark overcast day with a large gray fog bank lurking just offshore. I woke early so I could drive to Sandy Point before the parking lot filled.

Only two U.S. presidents have ever run unopposed: the first, George Washington, and the fifth, James Monroe. Since none of the current crop of Democratic candidates -- given their platforms, pandering and platitudes -- appear to have much knowledge of America’s history, purpose and role in t…

WASHINGTON — With a disgust commensurate with the fact, Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat, says that during 40% of his 10 Senate years the government has been run on “continuing resolutions.” Congress passes these in order to spare itself the torture of performing its primary function, w…

I was talking with a colleague the other day about the advent of legal recreational marijuana in Illinois when out of my mouth came words that horrified me the minute they emerged.

In an ironic twist, US magazine profiled Lori Loughlin in their “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me” section right about the time the college admissions scandal story broke.

Here’s how I define unnerving times: When professionals who write, draw or talk about current events for a living worry that if they dare create anything satiric, mocking or funny, they’ll be laid off, shut down, let go or put through the wringer.

James Holzhauer had our undivided attention until he lost on his 33rd episode of Jeopardy! — having set multiple single-game records for wins and amassing nearly a million and a half dollars, just short of Ken Jennings’ winnings in 2004.

Let’s talk geopolitics.

In 2016, Vladimir Romanovsky was flying through thick clouds over a permafrost field he had been monitoring for several decades in Alaska.

As I sit down to write this week’s column I am now about three weeks away from my date with retirement! I began my career with the auxiliary police force back in 1983 and received a full-time appointment in early 1987; thus, I’ve reached my eligibility time of 32 years. While I’ll certainly …

Last week I was standing at the edge of the pans on Plum Island trying to determine if that was really a Snowy Owl in among the staddles out in the salt marshes. Although we had slipped into March, up until that moment it was still, unambiguously winter. The temperature hovered near freezing…

The incident came out of the blue – for both sides.

SALISBURY – Our new baby needs a name. Our pumpout boat, Downwinder, is being removed from Clean Vessel Act service and she’s been replaced.

If it were all up to me, I’d turn Kremlin West back into the White House right now by putting Bernie in it.

On May 27 I went to my 50th college reunion. And Harvard being Harvard there was a lot of backslapping about how our class kicked ROTC off campus, created the Afro-American Department, and advanced civil rights and women’s liberation.

It took Marianne Williamson wading into bizarre references about New Zealand, the moon and the power of love for me to realize something: The GOP made the right decision in their own overpopulated primary on the road to 2016. Not in whom they chose, of course, but in how they chose. The past…

Life is great – quite a commentary for a resident at Atria, an assisted-living facility, but one not requiring assistance even at 90.

The results are in, and those of us over 50 who watch more than 3.5 hours of TV a day show twice the decline in verbal memory over six years. A recently released study, in Britain’s Scientific Reports, looks at nearly 3,600 adults and confirms it.

Talk about getting the dickens! That’s what happened to me. My kids really got aggravated with me after my last article in the newspaper about my swim school. They said, “Dad, you never mentioned Mom in the article.”

A few years ago, I was walking on State Street, just a bit past Pleasant. It was a lovely spring day. A group of six or so girls and boys were walking toward me. They seemed to be about 16 to 18. I had to move to the side and pause to make way for them.

We all know the proximate causes of the war in Syria, the dictatorial power of the Assad regime and the sociopolitical and religious divisions of the Middle Eastern country. But the ultimate cause of the war was water. 

Often heating and cooling systems break just when you need them the most, like a furnace or hot water tank failing in the middle of a cold stretch. The decisions made in an emergency are done for speed. No one has time for comparison shopping when the heat isn’t on, and it’s subfreezing outs…