The Moxie Boy wants you to drink Moxie!
Moxie is a distinctly different soft drink that was once more popular than Coca-Cola, or Pepsi. Now, it’s an iconic regional soft drink with a cult-like fan base and a festival in its honor.
For the uninitiated, the Moxie Festival occurs the second weekend in July, just like it has been now for the past 30 years. The place is Lisbon Falls, the town where I grew up and still live across the Androscoggin River from. Continue reading
Amtrak Platform, Freeport, Maine
Robert Putnam coined the term “social capital” in a seminal essay written in 1995. He’d later expand those ideas about community into a full-length book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, in 2000.
Putnam’s book and his ideas have infused my own thinking about the world since reading the book in 2002. In 2005, I tackled writing a book of my own, one that drew liberally upon the concept of social capital, using baseball rather than bowling as the metaphor for the changes American communities have experienced over the last 50-60 years. Continue reading