David Pedrick

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June 15, 2026  

Magna Carta, sealed on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, mapped in the charter as a water-meadow along the River Thames in Surrey between Windsor and Staines, was born of a time of tension, as…

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June 8, 2026

World Ocean Day is an annual international observance held on June 8th that celebrates the ocean’s importance to life on Earth and encourages action to protect marine ecosystems. It was first proposed in 1992 at…

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June 1, 2026  

There was a time, not necessarily a happier or better-informed one, when music journalism was a thing. The halcyon days, when there was a trusted, blind-bake relationship among musicians and listeners, and the writer was…

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May 24, 2026

Lingua Franca  

when it’s late or dark or dusk  
or in ambient light,
when you get caught in the rain,  
wringing out your possibilities,
being poor on purpose, catastrophic  
as a last-minute cassoulet,
insufferably loud…

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May 18, 2026  

Montreal’s founding dates to May 17, 1642, when Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve led about 50 French settlers to the island at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, establishing Ville-Marie as a…

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May 11, 2026  

Some fears are irrational, but fear itself is not. In that first inaugural address, FDR was onto something: panic, softened to “fear” in his 1933 speech, was a greater obstacle to recovery from the Great…

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May 4, 2026  

The first Grammy Awards, presented by the Recording Academy of the United States, were held on May 4, 1959, casting a new national spotlight on several musical achievements from 1958. They were originally called the…

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April 27, 2026

Pen(z)ance

the idea of a stroll through the garden gained currency
as other aims waned and withered,
yet her penchant for distraction often spoiled such a ramble.
today’s turn could forgive others, though,
and the…

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April 20, 2026  

No sentence in the next four paragraphs of this admittedly frank, cathartic rambling, to my mind at least, can be refuted. That was the prompt, the challenge I set for myself and ultimately tried to…

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April 13, 2026  

George Frideric Handel’s Messiah premiered in Dublin on April 13, 1742, 284 years ago today, at Neale’s Music Hall in Fishamble Street, and was a significant event in the city’s cultural life at the time…