The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ • Editor: Steven Fowle • Founded 1756 by Daniel Fowle
Monday, August 24, 2009 — Granted, it’s not exactly breaking news. The event took place August 7th. But we do what we can. Herewith, exclusive footage, or inchage, of the event that copyright law prohibits us from calling anything like “Tall Ships, 2009.” Woops … Sadly, the lovely bridge in the background is still in danger.
Monday, July 27, 2009 — We’ve recently caught up with our posted papers. The pdf file for our June 19 paper is here, and the pdf file for our July 3 paper is here. The browser-readable version of our July 3 paper is here. We apologize for the poor service on this front. The failure was on the part of the editor. He’s a hard man to fire. While we’re interrupting the serene stillness of this site, congratulations to our Moving Pictures reviewer, Rodman Philbrick. His The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg recently drew this praise from Anita Silvey, author of “100 Best …
Sunday, January 25, 2009—Some time ago we had a volunteer who distributed the Gazette to a number of place in Kittery. Sadly, his work took him elsewhere. At present we have one stalwart friend who brings copies every fortnight to the Rice Library, but that’s it. It’s a shame, particularly now that the Memorial Bridge is suddenly on the “Expendable” list. So, we want to expand—or rebuild—our distribution in Kittery. We could sit here and arbitrarily work up a list of places to put the paper. But we had what we think is a better idea: let our readers in Kittery use the “comment” feature …
Thursday, January 22, 2009—Jill Lepore has an ambiguous but lovely piece in the latest New Yorker called “Back Issues: The day the newspaper died.” She seems not to take a predictive position on the format’s future, but it’s gratifying to see such a vivid picture of the newspaper’s place in the fight for liberty. All the more so because we get a mention. Ms. Lepore quotes Daniel Fowle’s issue of this paper dated October 31, 1765, which “lamented its own demise.” And she cites his coverage of the mock funeral of Liberty held here in Portsmouth the next day. “In the eighteenth century,” Lepore writes, …
Friday, January 16, 2009—“Through last-minute rule changes and appointments, George W. Bush and his unindicted co-conspirators are doing their damnedest to extend the influence of the worst president in history as far into the future as they can.” In the Fortnightly Rant which leads off our January 2 paper (Vol. CCLII, No. 7), we attempt to sketch the outlines of the Bush administration’s “domestic version of Operation Gladio,” the CIA’s series of clandestine paramilitary “stay-behind” organizations, “whose official purpose was to counter a possible Soviet invasion. Their membership often included former Nazis and other fascist sympathisers. They meddled in the internal politics of sovereign nations …