Produced by Maine Poetry Central and Dennis Camire This week’s poem, by Bob MacLaughlin, humorously explores how someone “from away” invariably comes to fit in with his Maine neighbors who, like all of us, seem eager to want to find a simple reason to like a newly transplanted “out-a-stata.”   Having Bought The Farm Waldoboro, […]

The pest goes by many names. I have a friend who calls them mutant spiders. The exterminator at my neighbor’s house calls them criders. The bug is also called spider cricket, spricket, cave cricket and camel cricket.From here forward, I’ll just refer to them as spider crickets.During the summer and fall, spider crickets seek dark […]

“Have you no sense of decency?”Those six words, uttered on June 9, 1954, by Army lawyer Joseph Welch before a Senate subcommittee went a long way to bringing down one of the most powerful men in politics at the time, the virulently anti-communist Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. Sixty-four years later, indecency is in vogue again. […]

Here are edited excerpts from a recent online chat. Recipes whose names are capitalized can be found in our Recipe Finder at washingtonpost. com/recipes.Q: I bought turnips at the farmers market over the weekend and have no idea what to do with them. Do you have any vegetarian-friendly suggestions?A: For starters, they’d be great to […]

The weight-loss industry has long been saturated with gimmicky, too-good-to-be-true diets, so one could be excused for thinking the main benefit of “Eat Fat, Get Thin” is to burn calories by causing particularly vigorous eye-rolling. I mean, doesn’t eating fat, like, make you fat? Actually, the answer is a big, fat no, at least according […]

“Mothers from miles around worried about Zuckerman’s swing. They feared some child would fall off. But no child ever did. Children almost always hold onto things tighter than their parents think they will.”– E.B. White, “Charlotte’s Web”At school pickup, I stand outside the chain-link fence that separates the kindergarten playground from the parents. Our 5-year-olds […]