Earlier this year, DownEast magazine chose 100 books that “every lover of Maine should read.” This idea of “Maine books” has long fascinated me. It is really a question of what Henry Louis Gates calls authenticity, and I wrote about it years ago in an essay called Two Pigs from Maine. When DownEast announced their […]
The first national election in which I voted was 1972, the year that Margaret Chase Smith lost her U.S. Senate seat to Bill Hathaway. I am sure I must have voted for Hathaway, largely because of Senator Smith’s dogged support for American policies in Vietnam. My early political inclinations notwithstanding, I find the Margaret Chase […]
Most Mainers know something about seaweed, some of what they know might even be true. My mother sang the praises of dulse in her diet, though I recall that she rarely ate it. My father used what we called rockweed from the shores of Penobscot Bay to enrich his vegetable garden. R.P.T. Coffin describes the […]
For the past few weeks we have heard a Northern Bobwhite singing in our neighborhood. This is a bird we associate with Southern New England, so we were surprised to hear it in Eastern Maine. My first thought was, here is yet another bird whose range has moved north in response to climate change, a […]
I have listened now to all the candidates for Governor in Maine. There are some I could happily vote for and some others scare the bejesus out of me. But among all the candidates, there is a notable lack of vision for Maine. There are lists of “where I am on the issues.” There is […]
Before last weekend, the last time I had spent any time on Maine’s Southern beaches was a field trip for a geology class in my first year of college (don’t ask the year). Professor Hussey used the trip to immerse us in the patterns of coastal geology. In early April we spent a couple of […]
I first encountered the idea that the future was something one could study in 1971 from historian Roger Howell Jr. In one way or another, thinking about the future informed much that I have written about since, including here in Stirring the Pot. In my way of thinking about the future, I believe there should […]
Mailboxes are flooded with direct mail fliers. The roadsides are littered with plastic signs. We are admonished to Vote Yes On Question 1 on November 7. This is one of the clearest examples of rent seeking behavior I have ever seen. It is text book quality. Rent seeking occurs when an economic actor, in this […]
The pain and suffering of the residents of coastal Texas and Louisiana fill us all with feelings of empathy and concern for their future. Most of us can only imagine losing all of our physical possessions and having to start over again. Hurricane Harvey brought an unprecedented rainfall event in U.S. weather history. So the […]
The narrative goes something like this: The Maine Legislature and Governor require all Maine schools to provide certain “essential” services. This is out of a sense of fairness for all Maine school children, wherever they may live. Everyone is entitled to a minimum education. Many localities struggle to pay the costs of these minimum services […]
