Six Arlington students at Minuteman High School have been named Commonwealth Athletic Conference League all-stars for the fall 2022 season.

Both the boys’ and girls’ soccer teams at Minuteman qualified for their respective tournaments. The girls’ team earned a home game in the state tournament.

The girls’ team ended the season with an impressive 12-5-1 record, while the boys’ team accomplished a 10-4-4 record.

The late Richard Horn, author of the novel titled Encyclopedia. / courtesy Richard Schober

Tough Poets Press, founded, owned and operated solely by Richard Schober of Arlington, is about to release its 50th book since its founding in early 2015: a reissue of Encyclopedia, from 1969, by the late Richard Horn. The press has previously republished many new editions of novels -- some by well-known authors, some not -- and is a small independent publisher of new and rediscovered unconventional and neglected literary fiction, poetry and nonfiction.

"I'm running a Kickstarter now to help cover the costs of producing this new edition," Schober told YourArlington. Details are here >>

The Kickstarter description calls Encyclopedia a "comical literary oddity" that was Horn's only published novel. The unconventionally structured book garnered good reviews from major newspapers upon original publication by Grove Press more than half-a-century ago but has since lapsed into obscurity.

As of mid-November, the project had found 149 backers and from them raised more than $3,000 -- more than enough to complete publication of the relatively short (168-page) paperback book. The crowdfunding effort can accept additional backers through Nov. 25, and publication is expected in January 2023, Schober wrote in an email interview.

More than 425,000 river herring passed through the fish ladder at the Mystic Lakes Dam in Medford in spring 2022, and an additional 20,000 passed into Horn Pond -- the latest evidence of a successful ecological effort that began a decade ago.

These official estimates from the state's Division of Marine Fisheries reflect the highest documented herring run this year in any river in Massachusetts, the Arlington-based Mystic River Watershed Association said in a Nov. 7 news release.

River herring — Alewife and blueback herring — are migratory species that spend most of their lives in the open ocean but return to freshwater yearly to spawn in the rivers in which they were born.

The watershed release said that the herring are threatened by overharvesting in the ocean and by the loss of inland habitat for breeding caused by dams blocking access to inland lakes and streams.

UPDATED Oct. 20: The following letter by David Bean of Arlington is republished with the author's permission. It appeared in the Monday, Oct. 18, Boston Globe here >>

 Smartphones are not just communication devices. They are the necessary link between a person and “the hive.” Most of us have ourselves experienced impulsive, compulsive, and obsessive thinking. Imagine that going on in your child’s developing brain.

The geniuses of social media, people like Mark Zuckerberg, are working full time to suck everyone in to an existence that involves the substitution of a virtual-reality world, the “metaverse,” for the real world — a VR world with nonstop commercialism, nonstop data gathering, and nonstop insanity.