A crazy thing happened the other night: five friends and I sat down to dinner and not one of us looked at a phone. Not once. No one took a picture of the food, amazing as it was, and no one checked a text. The sole exception was (embarrassingly) me, when, as the hour grew […]

On Aug. 15 the Scarborough Town Council will hold a workshop on the creation of a Downtown Tax Increment Financing District. The council is primed to rush through a large, complex and potentially risky financial transaction that could cause significant property tax increases in the future. At the most basic level, all a TIF does […]

Perhaps you’ve noticed that fresh, local crabmeat can be hard to find these days. I’ve been buying eight-ounce plastic containers of rock crab from Moody’s Seafood in Brunswick and Day’s Crabmeat & Lobster in Yarmouth, but on a couple of occasions recently they have both been fresh out. So what’s the deal? To my taste, […]

The contest for worst candidate of the year is far from over. And Seth Carey is no longer the front-runner. When Maine Republicans nominated Carey to run for district attorney in Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties, he looked like a clear winner (of this dubious distinction, not the election). Carey’s license to practice law has […]

I came across a passage of text this week from about 200 years ago that should give us pause as we embark on further automation of the labor force. It comes from Thomas Carlyle’s 1843 essay “Labour,” which was part of a larger work, “Past and Present.” He was a Scottish writer, philosopher and all-around […]

It seems the good faith of the Falmouth Memorial Library is on the line, as the basis that taxpayers voted in 2014 to support its then equally shared expansion funding request is going out the Town Council’s window. Excerpts from the Memorandum of Understanding define what voters, in good faith, agreed to (and I, for […]

Senate District 30 voters in Gorham, Scarborough and Buxton have a great opportunity to elect Dr. Linda Sanborn this November. Voters in this district have supported MaineCare expansion, and Sanborn has worked hard in recent years to bring health-care coverage to more Mainers. Moreover, Sanborn is a tireless advocate for programs to make quality and […]

Our family feels fortunate that our quality-of-life move landed us in Falmouth almost six years ago. While scenic beauty, quality schools, and proximity to Portland were among the initial criteria in our search, one attribute that only presented itself after we moved here was the accessibility of our elected officials. First as a town councilor […]

Last week, while cooking hundreds of hot dogs at the Yarmouth Clam Festival, it struck me that I no longer feel part of the Yarmouth community. Ever since we moved to Brunswick almost four years ago, people have been asking me if I miss Yarmouth, where we lived for 32 years. My standard answer has […]

Bureaucracy is a terrible word. It invokes boxes. Taxes. Forms. White walls. Impersonality. Lines. Both of the waiting variety and the straight variety. Bureaucracy makes a human feel tiny. Each month I’m going to analyze it in this column. Civics, on the other hand, is a wonderful word. It’s empowering. It’s an active education of […]