Between the Lines
Puerto Rico isn’t GoodFellas
Puerto Rico is $72 billion in the hole and struggling to pay loans leaders took out to keep their nation afloat. Meanwhile, hedge funds and bond firms are throwing their hands up in the air and filing lawsuits against the island nation. As if this were not foreseen by...
Between the Lines: Help the Economy, Get Cool Stuff: Shop Local
The “Be a Local Hero” or “Shero” slogan is a too hyperbolic for me, but below the schmaltz there’s some truth to it. The small action of buying local goods and services strengthens hometowns in ways that big box stores and corporate businesses can’t: more local jobs...
Between the Lines: US to blame: Government at fault for low voter turnout
The voter turnout rate in the Valley this past election was dismal — just as it was across the nation. There’s been a lot of hand wringing over the apathetic American voter over the years, but laying this problem at the feet of an allegedly uncaring public is a...
Between the Lines: Owen Labrie – Rapist or Simply a Jerk?
Editor’s note: Editors Kristin Palpini and Jeff Good couldn’t come to an agreement on how to interpret the Labrie decisions, so they wrote their own opinion pieces. Jeffrey Good: There is no doubt that Owen Labrie was guilty of being an oaf, a striver and...
Between the Lines: Doesn’t Count – Deaths by police are not tracked in the US
So far in 2015, 965 people have been killed by U.S. police. A disproportionate number of those people are black, Hispanic or Latino; almost all are male. The causes of the deaths range from being shot by police to being hit by a police vehicle to dying — somehow — in...
Between the Lines: Run for it, Girl!
We can debate whether there is an ongoing war on women, but the irrefutable fact is that issues important to women are being considered and laws are being created without much input from the ladies. The 2015 Congress is 80 percent men. Would abortion coverage be under...
Looking For a Toolbox of Memories
Since my father died just shy of his 80th birthday, I’ve visited his grave only a few times. My mother finds comfort in sitting on the nearby granite bench, listening to the small planes come and go from a nearby airport and communing with her husband of more than...
Better Education for Some, II: How to fix charters
For as long as they’ve been around, charter schools have been a controversial topic in education. But the federal government has the power to settle this beef once and for all: Stop pitting schools against each other for funding and provide all schools with adequate...
Between the Lines: Charter Schools, A Better Education for Some at a Cost to Others
Five students are suing the state for a better education — for some. In September, five anonymous students filed a suit against the state in Suffolk County Superior Court alleging the cap on the number of charter schools in Massachusetts unfairly denies them their...
Between the Lines: Chill Out on the Marijuana, Man
As I write these words, on the other side of Conz Street, Western Mass residents are strolling into Northampton’s New England Treatment Access on opening day to purchase medical marijuana from the area’s first dispensary. Would that have seemed possible in 2007? As...
Between the Lines: Defund cancer screenings? The problem with defunding Planned Parenthood
Is Planned Parenthood “Big Abortion” or women’s health care? Both characterizations are sharing time in the media, but only one of them is true. While Planned Parenthood does perform some abortions, it makes up only 3 percent of the work done at the 700 clinics and...
Between the Lines: Racism Isn’t a Brand, Washington
Last football season was marked by a media blitz on the Washington Redskins’ odious team name. Use of the full team name in broadcasts was down 27 percent in 2014 compared to 2013, according to a Deadspin analysis. I was hopeful that pressure on owner Dan Snyder —...
Between the Lines: The Addicts in All Our Lives
In the grip of a national opiate-addiction epidemic, Behavioral Health Network of Springfield is poised to renovate an old manufacturing site in Greenfield turning it into a 24-hour, 64-bed detox and rehab center offering both in- and out-patient programs. Franklin...
Between the Lines: Support Local Music
Music is like a garden; water it, tend to it, and it will be a blooming beauty that can attract visitors from miles around. But forget to water it, let the weeds take over, and you’re left with a field of crackling, dusty sticks that at best annoy your neighbor. Local...
Between the Lines: Why #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLives(Don’t)Matter
In a conversation about how more than 140 black people have been killed by police this year, all lives don’t matter. All lives are as pertinent to this discussion as Vienna sausages, Breaking Bad reruns, and gardening — they have no place at the table. Likewise, how...
Between the Lines: Let Brandon Have His Tree House Already
I’ve never met Brandon, but I know him. He lives in my old neighborhood and just about every time I come in for a visit, I can spot Brandon out on the front lawn of his Havenhurst Road home swinging on a giant blue, high-back swing, or playing golf with his dad. He...
Between the Lines: Legal Pot? Don’t Make It So Complicated
Maybe it’s marijuana’s cultural baggage of Deadheads, dreadlocked Rastafarians, and psychedelic paraphernalia that does it, but there’s something about cannabis that brings out the school marm in certain segments of the population. It just makes the members of the...Between The Lines: Space — It Matters
Now and then, often while we’re preoccupied with some screen or other, something particularly interesting happens in the sky. A very bright star appears, as if it’s suddenly popped through the inky background, and flies across the heavens. It winks out as abruptly as...
Between the Lines: Catholic Church Shirks Duty to Care for Aging Religious
The Catholic Church is on the precipice of another failure almost as shameful, in its own way, as the decades of rampant child molestation and cover-up efforts. A glut of priests, brothers, and nuns is hitting retirement age without adequate finances to sustain them...
Between the Lines: Why I Am Pro-Abortion And You Should Be Too
I am pro-abortion in the same way I am pro-triple bypass surgery and chemotherapy. In general, I am “pro” any helpful, legal medical procedure. Being pro-abortion is different than being pro-angioplasty, though, and that’s because, ostensibly, there is a second human...
Between the Lines: James Tate, 1943-2015
During my poetry MFA thesis defense some years ago, I sat in a professor’s living room, relieved to hear praise from the committee. Then poet James Tate, who’d been peering over with a semi-grin, weighed in. “Mr. Heflin,” he said, “We’ve praised you enough.” He...
Between the Lines: Do We Really Need a $2.7 Billion Pipeline?
Last winter, Eversource increased electricity rates by 29 percent and National Grid jacked their rates by 37 percent. What happened? No one’s really sure. Prices have gone down some, but they’re still higher than this time last year. Maybe it was a supply and demand...
Between the Lines: Dear Fellow Oppressed Gay Marriage Opponents
I write to you from the flaming, rainbow-hued ruins of the state of Massachusetts. Let us be a warning to all of you who are now experiencing the first stage of blowback from the latest liberal policy writ large. It is my hope that what we have seen in the Bay State...
Between the Lines: Keep the Olympics out of Boston
A modern Olympics has never made a profit for a host city, though you’ve probably heard otherwise. There have been two Olympics, however, that have claimed such a feat: the 2012 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah....
Between the Lines: Time for the Twits of the Year
In Monty Python’s sketch “The Upper Class Twit of the Year,” the competition gets fierce. The commentator, voiced by John Cleese, runs down the lineup: “Vivian Smith-Smythe-Smith has an O-level in chemo-hygiene. Simon-Zinc-Trumpet-Harris, married to a very attractive...
Between the Lines: Ineffective, expensive, and racist – mandatory sentences for nonviolent crimes
Between the Lines: Textbooks Gone Wild
I’m a Texan. Sometimes this fact comes in handy — people defer to me when it comes to assigning grades to enchiladas, for instance — and sometimes it compels me to write columns in defense of the good people of the Lone Star State who aren’t a) crazy, b) rabidly...
Between the Lines: Violence Against Women is Kinda a Crime
Earlier this year, when Georgia’s Ebony Monique Dickens posted that “all black people should rise up and shoot at every white cop in the nation starting right now,” she got arrested. When Jeremiah Perez of Colorado wrote in the comment of a YouTube video in December...
Between the Lines: When Thank You Is Not Enough
In a pocket of my work bag, I carry a talisman of sorts. It’s a patch from the First Marine Division, aka “The Old Breed.” A man named Harris Mills gave it to me years ago. He was a family friend, and an imposing, if grandfatherly figure — tall, well-coiffed, and...
Between the Lines: Advocate Grand Band Slam Is Back, now with more slam!
Back in the final year of the 1900s, I stood, guitar in hand, on the steps of Northampton’s old courthouse at the main intersection. The occasion was the (then new) Valley Advocate Grand Band Slam. My bandmates and I had won top honors in the...
Between the Lines: Riots: The Language of the Unheard
Yet another young black man is dead at the hands of America’s law enforcement. We may not yet know all of the details, but video footage shows that Freddie Gray was breathing and screaming when he went into a Baltimore Police van. He was unconscious and had a severed...
Between the Lines: Stay Off the Damn Grass
Not to sound like too much of a curmudgeon, but South Hadley should stay off the damn grass. The town recently joined Springfield in being the only communities in the area that impose fines when grass on a private lawn grows to a pearl-clutching height of six inches....
Between the Lines: College, Debt Prep 101
The education system is failing American students — hard. Public education is a dedication to helping young people get ahead in life and imparting knowledge that will lead to future success for the betterment of the national economy and society as a whole — but this...
Between the Lines: The Georgia Varmint Dust-Up
It’s easy to see why the story made international news. It doesn’t get crazier than this cavalcade of questionable decisions, though the victim (expected to recover) probably disagrees. Recently, in Georgia, a man decided that a) he should shoot an armadillo which was...
Between the Lines: Best Of the Valley, Intangibles
In this week’s Advocate, you’ll find the winners of our annual Best Of the Valley Readers’ Poll, a who’s who and what’s what of all the top people, places, and businesses Western Mass and Southern Vermont has to offer. Thank you to everyone who voted. We can’t provide...Between the Lines: In the Clouds
The radio said, “What happened in the terrifying last minutes of Germanwings…” I don’t know how it went from there, because I turned it off. The media coverage of the latest air disaster, like the many that preceded it, is all wrapped up in an unspoken contract:...
Get Heard: Holyoke Students Get Courageous
In late March, a group of about 50 Holyoke high school students concerned their district may go into receivership — meaning it could soon be run by the state instead of local officials — got up in the middles of class and walked out of school in protest. For their...
Between the Lines: Hands Off My Stuff! Politicians’ emails are public business
Politicians skirting public record laws by conducting public business on private email accounts is becoming a scandal celebre. That Hillary Clinton kept a few private email accounts and used her own server may not seem like a big deal. But it is. Politicians’ emails...The Snowball Effect: Why Climatology Matters
In early 2014, former Gov. Deval Patrick proposed the creation of an office of the state climatologist, to be housed at the Northeast Climate Science Center at UMass Amherst. By July, when Patrick signed the fiscal 2015 budget, the funding for that office stood at...
Our Martians: 100 people picked to go on a one-way trip to Mars are already a little alien
I stood in the below-zero wind, my dog circling — quickly — to find the right spot. High above the blue glow of moon on snow, far Jupiter shone. It went crisply about its business of marching at barely perceptible speed, of turning its eye upon us. Someone trundled by...
Between the Lines: SEX! Now that I’ve got your attention, SEX! The importance of The V-Spot
Since returning The V-Spot sex advice column to the pages of the Advocate earlier this month, I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from our readers. Most are thrilled to have a sassy sexpert closing out the paper every week. Others question why a newspaper would dedicate so...
Between the Lines: Bad Data Drives the Anti-vaxx Movement
Measles, an infectious viral disease, is far more harmful and deadly than the measles vaccine. So why have so many parents opted to skip this regular inoculation? Bad information. The so-called anti-vaxx movement advises against childhood inoculations, especially the...Guest Column: Pardon my conflation, Brian Williams and I come clean about our pasts
Brian Williams, the NBC Nightly News anchor — at least for the time being — has come in for a lot of criticism lately for claiming, falsely,that he was aboard a U.S. military helicopter in 2003 that was hit by small-arms fire and forced down in the desert during the...
Between the Lines: Smoke ’em if you got ’em — and if you’re over 21
I had my first cigarette when I was 13; stole it from my dad’s pack of menthol Pall Malls and smoked it on the back porch. I had heard cigarettes were a good way to relax. I took a few puffs. The flavor was all ash and prickly mint. For a moment a rushing dizziness...
Between the Lines: The Vagina Dialogues
The show must go on, as they say — until it’s gone on long enough. On Jan. 14, the student-run Project Theatre group at Mount Holyoke College canceled its annual production of Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues, opting instead to write and produce a new show of...Between the Lines: Supporting Rape Victims is Just Logical
When someone comes forward to share an experience of sexual assault, my gut reaction is to believe her or him. Logistically, it’s the right assumption. It is widely recognized that one in four women will experience some form of sexual assault in her lifetime. Only 8...Between the Lines: Art and Shovels
My driveway, not long ago, looked like those windswept landscapes where forlorn polar bears play. I’d waited too late to blow the snow, led astray by forecasts of a balmy 52-degree afternoon. I’m bad at snow removal. I blame my Southern childhood, in which frozen...
Nuclear Wasted: No Fond Farewell to Vermont Yankee
After 60-plus years pumping out energy and radioactive waste, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is in the process of decommissioning. Protesters have been advocating for the plant’s shutdown since before it opened in the ‘70s, citing the environmental threat...E-Edition
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