The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

For the fortieth summer, hundreds of Vermont high school students had a different kind of learning experience. They attended one of eight programs of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont. In 1983, the very first Governor’s Institutes of Vermont program was launched. It was focused on the arts, addressing what advisers to Gov. Richard Snelling felt was a dearth of opportunity in arts education in Vermont. In the four decades since that first program, more than 10,000 students have attended one of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont, which are now offered at nine locations around the state. Each year, some 500 students attend a governor’s institute. It also runs winter weekend programs, though these were not offered in 2023. The Governor’s Institutes of Vermont has one of the longest running governor’s schools in the country. On this Vermont Conversation, past and recent alums and their parents talk about this unique enrichment program for Vermonters: Dave Amidon (Arts 1992), his son Nicholas Jamisco Amidon (Arts 2023), River Woods (Arts 2022, Health & Medicine 2023), Jim Michael (whose five children attended the institute) and Elizabeth Frascoia, the executive director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont. We also hear from musician Grace Potter, who attended an arts institute while in high school. "Never underestimate the power of being completely and utterly embarrassed by the things that you try,” Potter said.

When Champlain College President Alejandro "Alex" Hernandez is asked about the value of an education, he responds by telling the story of his family.He is the child of immigrant parents who both became school teachers in California. After Hernandez received a masters degree from Stanford, he went into finance, but eventually left to become a high school math teacher in South Central Los Angeles. He went on to become a dean and provost at the University of Virginia, and in 2022, was named president of Champlain College in Burlington.Hernandez assumes the helm of Champlain after a period of leadership turnover at the 145-year-old not-for-profit private college. He is the fourth president in four years. He has already made his mark as the college has had a record-breaking year in fundraising.Education has become central to the culture wars. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended race-based affirmative action this June, Hernandez must now craft a way for Champlain to champion diversity without running afoul of the law.“You're either being intentionally diverse or unintentionally exclusive,” said Hernandez. “Why is it that certain groups are not showing up to college campuses? And what is it about the colleges that we’re creating that make that true?”“I've spent my entire career thinking about how do you increase access. How do you increase accessibility, and that work is never done. It's an ideal that you need to continue to pursue as a country. And it goes on for generations.”

Stephen Kiernan spent much of his life as an award-winning journalist for the Burlington Free Press and the Boston Globe. In 2013, he made the jump from reporter to novelist with the publication of his debut book of fiction, “The Curiosity.” He has never looked back.Kiernan has now published five critically acclaimed novels, including “The Baker’s Secret” and “Universe of Two.” His latest novel is “The Glass Chateau,” which was published in June. It’s a haunting tale set just after World War II in France. The story centers around an assassin for the Resistance who struggles to reckon with the killings he has committed. Around him, a traumatized nation attempts to rebuild after war. The challenge is captured in an attempt to repair the shattered stained glass windows of a grand cathedral.Kiernan is a graduate of Middlebury College, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.“The Glass Chateau,” Kiernan said, is intended to be “a healing book.”“Covid was underway when I started this book, but also what was happening in the fabric of our culture, our politics and all of that. Why is everyone so angry? And why are so many people also so sad and lonely?” he said,“This book begins a month after the war is ended. And it's about these people trying to rebuild this really divided nation” Kiernan said.

Scenes of the smoldering ruins of Lahaina, Maui, are the latest evidence that no place, no matter how idyllic, is safe from climate disruption. The wildfires that destroyed the town this week are the deadliest in the modern history of the U.S.The Maui wildfires were far more lethal but they share common elements with the floods that ravaged parts of Vermont last month. Both disasters were fueled by climate change. And both have displaced numerous people from their homes.Disasters such as these are expected to force millions of Americans from their homes and communities in coming years. Many residents will never return. In 2021, one in three Americans had experienced some kind of weather disaster.Journalists Tik Root and Jake Bittle cover climate change as staff writers for Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Root recently reported on how FEMA’s flood maps failed to cover many areas in Vermont that were flooded this July. As a result, many flooded residents falsely believed they were outside the flood zone. The outdated maps reflect past floods and do not take climate change into account.Bittle is the author of a new book, “The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration.” He said that climate change is forcing a mass migration in the U.S. as people try to escape the next climate disaster. This migration is different than the Great Migration in which Blacks fled from the south to the north to escape political persecution, slavery and Jim Crow laws.“The migration from climate starts all over the country, it starts in coastal areas, in the desert, in wildfire areas, and the movement is much more chaotic.“It's not so much that you're picking up in one place and moving all the way across the country to another place. It's that you're being buffeted around by these bigger forces.”This summer’s floods disabused many people of that notion that Vermont is a safe haven from climate chaos. “There's a big question about where people will go,” Bittle said. But rebuilding or relocating after disaster opens up new possibilities. “You have an opportunity to build a society that is safer and fairer and more equitable.”

Will it be three indictments and Trump’s out?Stuart Stevens doesn’t think so. “The indictments will help (former president Donald) Trump in the Republican primary, of which there’s a certain crazy logic,” he said. “The Republican Party now is pretty much officially a white grievance party. And there's no greater way to prove the grievance than to be indicted by the Deep State.”Stevens contends that the Republican Party that he spent his career promoting has morphed into an authoritarian movement. Stevens was a former top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns and dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate. Today, he has abandoned the Republican Party and is now doing all he can to stop it. He is a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. Stevens grew up in Mississippi but now lives in Stowe.Stevens says that the Trump era “is sort of like a pandemic: Whatever you say in the beginning will sound alarmist, but in the end will prove inadequate.”"I'm working on the assumption that Trump will not be convicted before the election,” he said. “And it'll be sort of a moral test for the country because Trump's basically running — his theme is so I can pardon myself. And by pardoning myself, I'm pardoning you, because you invested in me, and we were right, they were wrong."We've never had an election like that." Stevens has a new book due out in October, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy.” This follows his 2020 bestseller, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”“It's an existential crisis,” Stevens said of the political precipice on which the U.S. teeters. “I can't really tell you by 2028 if we have an election in America, that it will be a democratic election.”

The brick crashed through Lauren Chooljian’s window accompanied by a message scrawled on the side of her house: “THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING.”Chooljian had a good idea what this attack was about. She is a senior reporter and producer at New Hampshire Public Radio. She had been investigating alleged sexual misconduct by Eric Spofford, the founder of GraniteRecovery Centers, New Hampshire's largest substance use disorder treatment and rehabilitation network. As more and more women told her of being sexually harassed and abused by Spofford, Chooljian has faced mounting threats, lawsuits, and attacks on her home as well as the homes of her parents and editor.“That’s being a journalist in America today,” Chooljian told the New York Times.Spofford denies the sexual misconduct allegations.If the attacks and lawsuits were intended to silence Chooljian, they failed spectacularly. In June, NHPR released a seven-part podcast series, “The 13th Step,” hosted by Lauren Chooljian. The series investigated Spofford and systemic abuse in the substance use disorder treatment industry. New York Magazine recently named “The 13th Step” one of the best podcasts of 2023.In late June, several weeks after the podcast dropped, federal authorities charged three men for their role in the attacks on Chooljian’s house. The complaint said that “a close personal associate” of Spofford’s solicited the attackers. Spofford has also sued NHPR for libel and demanded that it retract the stories about him. The attacks occurred two days after the news organization refused to take down the story. A New Hampshire judge dismissed the libel complaint last year, but Spofford has now demanded access to Chooljian’s interviews and notes. NHPR is currently fighting the request.The attacks on Lauren Chooljian take place within a larger context of journalists being increasingly targeted. Former President Donald Trump frequently urges his followers to confront journalists, who he calls "enemies of the people." Last year, 41 journalists were physically assaulted, according to the U.S. PressFreedom Tracker, and there has been a rise in libel and defamation suits.“We should all see journalism as an essential piece of our democracy,” Chooljian told The Vermont Conversation. “If people are afraid to report wrongdoing, then wrongdoing will never come to light.”

In the early hours of July 11, the rain-swollen Lamoille River rose up out of its banks and tore through the heart of downtown Johnson. Parts of the small Vermont town lay in ruins. Johnson’s wastewater treatment plant was destroyed, and the downtown supermarket, the town offices and fire department, surrounding farms, the Johnson health center, and dozens of manufactured homes all sustained heavy damage.How do you recover? Johnson may have a homegrown answer as it recovers from twin disasters: the opioid crisis and a flood fueled by the climate crisis.Jenna’s Promise is a recovery community in Johnson that helps women with substance use disorder. It is named for 26-year-old Jenna Tatro, who died in February 2019 following a drug overdose at her family’s Johnson home. Her grieving parents, Greg and Dawn Tatro, founded Jenna’s Promise as a place they wish had existed for their daughter — a community-based center for women in recovery.In just a few years, Jenna’s Promise has expanded into a number of formerly vacant buildings in Johnson and now includes recovery housing, a workforce development program, a popular downtown café, a coffee roastery, and a surplus goods and appliances store. The flood damaged one of Jenna’s Promise recovery housing locations and filled the basement of Jenna’s Coffee House, but the café is up and running again.Are the lessons of recovery transferable from one crisis to another? Greg Tatro believes so. “You gotta have hope and keep moving ahead, even if it's small steps every day,” said Greg Tatro, the owner of the 67-year-old family business, G.W. Tatro Construction.

Vermont Sen. Peter Welch spent last week touring his flooded state and assuring residents that help was on the way. Welch has a lot of practice with this. First elected to Congress in 2006, he experienced Vermont’s first so-called 100-year flood following Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.In Irene’s aftermath, Welch fought with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to enable Vermont to rebuild roads and bridges to withstand the new realities of climate change instead of being forced to replace the shattered infrastructure with the same inadequate design and materials.“This is all about climate change,” Welch said of the flood devastation that he observed last week. “It's astonishing to me, but there's a lot of people resisting acknowledging that we have to act and act quickly to address climate change. And I think that does not reflect denial. I think it reflects desperation to try to hang on to whatever fossil fuel interests that some of my colleagues represent. And (it) reflects a fear about making the transition from a carbon-based economy to a clean energy economy because it is disruptive.”Welch returned to Washington on Tuesday to give his debut speech on the Senate floor. In that speech, he outlined his two top priorities as senator: “Our challenge is strengthening our democracy and improving the living standards for everyday Americans. … If we don’t do both, we won’t do either.”In a wide-ranging Vermont Conversation interview with Welch, we discussed his visit to flood-stricken parts of Vermont, the fragile state of democracy and the surprising common ground that the progressive Vermont Democrat has found with far-right Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.Welch remains guarded in his assessment of the fate of American democracy. "It's a jump ball," he said. "Jan. 6 was of course the most vivid manifestation of the erosion of democratic norms. … But you're seeing many of the candidates running for Senate and for Congress — and of course (Donald) Trump running again for president — who were in denial about the outcome of the last election or peddling 'the election was stolen' lie."The reason I think is so important for our democracy to work is that's the tool that we use to address the challenges that Americans face."

Rick Dente thought this might be the end. The 77-year-old owner of Dente's Market in Barre was trying to save what he could in his family store as flood waters rose on Monday night. The store has been in business since 1907 and had survived previous disasters. But Dente, the affectionately nicknamed "Mayor of North Barre," didn't realize that this time was different. He was suddenly in water up to his neck, pinned to a door, his tired legs giving out. Just when Dente thought it was over, three tenants who lived above his store came down, ropes around their waists. They banged open the door and rescued the exhausted shopkeeper."Someone was watching over me," Dente told me on Saturday, standing inside his mud filled market. When the flood waters receded this week, volunteers streamed into Montpelier and Waterbury and other flooded Vermont communities to help muck out. But Barre, the Granite City, has until now been hauling itself back to life largely on its own. The flood left the downtown covered in deep mud. The city public works department spent days sending snowplows through the streets to clear the mess. Some streets are still impassable. The city is under a boil water notice.Saturday was the first day that volunteers were invited into Barre. People came in droves. I came to the Aldrich Public Library where volunteers were lined up to get work assignments. Volunteer coordinators were sitting under tents with laptops dispatching people to homes that needed help. One tent was for volunteers willing to do light work, another was for heavy work. I walked down Main Street in Barre talking to volunteers and business owners. Volunteers carrying mops, buckets, and shovels were moving up and down the street. My final stop was at the beloved Dente's Market, whose owner who, like his city, nearly drowned but now has another chance.

Randall and Elm Streets in Waterbury felt like a raucous New Orleans funeral on Thursday. Residents and businesses lost so much when the waters of the Winooski River inundated parts of the downtown, flooding some 40 homes and six businesses. But scores of volunteers came from everywhere to give so much back. Prohibition Pig, the popular restaurant and brewery at the corner of Elm Street and Main Street, was the center of cleanup activity. By midday, the staff were serving free food and pizza donated by American Flatbread. A who’s who of Vermont craft beer brewers, including John Kimmich, owner of the Alchemist brewery — which operated a pub that was flooded out of this location when Tropical Storm Irene hit in 2011 — dropped off coolers full of beer for the volunteers. A public works crew from St. Albans drove around with a giant vacuum truck — dubbed the “suck truck” by grateful residents – that pumped out flooded basements, a backbreaking job that took days when Irene flooded these same homes.Behind the celebratory vibe, there was also a somber reality. ProPig would be closed for the foreseeable future and owner Eric Warnstedt had to tell its 49 employees that they were laid off. The brewery was flooded and 3,000 gallons of their famous craft beer was lost.But the buzz, enhanced by the excellent beer, was palpable.I spent Thursday walking around the neighborhood talking to the people who were hard at work and elbows deep in mud.

The rain began on Sunday, and by Tuesday morning, July 11, residents of Waterbury, Vermont, woke up to find the downtown flooded and roads closed.Waterbury took a hard hit, but the damage and destruction were far greater in other Vermont communities. Montpelier, Barre, Johnson and Ludlow, to name a few, were inundated. All of these communities face a long road to recovery.Gov. Scott called this week’s Vermont floods “historic and catastrophic.” Climatologists call it “the new abnormal,” another eruption of climate chaos that is sweeping the globe.For Waterbury, where I live, this was the second so-called 100-year flood in a dozen years. In 2011, Tropical Storm Irene devastated downtown Waterbury, with flooding damaging 222 homes, one third of the structures in the village.This week, some 40 homes and six businesses were flooded in Waterbury, with most of the flooding occurring in basements. Waterbury may have been spared the worst of the damage thanks to flood resilient measures it took when rebuilding after Tropical Storm Irene.I spent Tuesday sloshing through flood waters in Waterbury and talking to my neighbors about what they’re going through and how they’re coping.“I feel a bit out of body, like I'm floating a little bit in this surreal situation and I can't really think too far ahead,” said Georgia Ayers, who had to canoe to her flooded house. “We just need the water to recede so we can get to work.” This is an audio postcard from one Vermont community rising from a disaster.

The simple version of American history depicts the original 13 American colonies banding together as one, declaring their independence in 1776, fighting and winning an eight-year-long War of Independence against the British, and then triumphantly establishing the United States of America.But how united was this new nation? Political historian Eli Merritt asserts that despite its harmonious sounding name, the United States was actually more like a shotgun marriage that nearly ended in a quick divorce.Merritt is the author of a new book, “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.” “The American Union was an unwelcome alliance formed by bitterly conflictual colonies and regions,” he wrote. The primary purpose of the original American government, he said, was to prevent the colonies from disintegrating into civil war.Merritt is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and writes political commentary for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and for his Substack, American Commonwealth. Merritt said that America’s founders warned of the danger of demagogues.“The first step in democratic breakdown is the election of a demagogue to power,” he wrote. "The demagogue is someone who wins votes by dividing the people not uniting the people … through fear mongering, through hate mongering, through bigotry. And sadly, it works. “The demagogue converts into an authoritarian once drinking at the cup of power. … We did see precisely that with Donald Trump.”Merritt argues that the founding story of the U.S. affirms that “when a government turns unconstitutional and repressive, you have the right of revolution, which means first, the right of resistance.”Merritt said he believes that Juneteenth is a far more significant day of independence than July 4. “This is the emancipation of 4 million enslaved people,” he said. “It is clearly the most important event in all U.S. history.”

Brett Forrest has been explaining Russia and Ukraine to the world for two decades. He is an award-winning national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where his investigative work focuses on the former Soviet Union.It is a dangerous time to be a reporter in Russia. In March, Russian authorities arrested Forrest’s Wall Street Journal colleague, Evan Gershkovich, on spying charges, which he vehemently denies. Gershkovich is in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison facing a sentence of up to 20 years. “I never felt like I was in the crosshairs of the state,” said Forrest. The invasion of Ukraine changed all that. “When Russia began enacting new laws about criticizing the war, or even calling it a war in Russia, I began to feel like maybe the state had taken a turn and was now looking at all of us as a target.”Forrest has a new book, “Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI’s Secret Wars,” in which he investigates the mystery of a young American, Billy Reilly, who vanished into Russia’s war with Ukraine. Forrest cracks an FBI coverup to learn what happened to the unwitting Reilly.Forrest said that “what happened in Ukraine can also be traced to the fact that Vladimir Putin has simply stayed in power too long. And this is often what happens when leaders stay in power too long. They begin thinking about their place in history.” Forrest said that other world leaders “think squarely about what's best for the people. And I don't think that Vladimir Putin really has that in mind anymore for Russians.”Forrest said that Putin has staked his leadership on the notion that he can assure domestic peace. Upheaval at home and in Ukraine, he said, “is the price for the illusion of stability that he’s created in Russia over the years.”

America’s school children are in trouble. Just this week, test scores were released that showed math and reading performance of 13-year olds in the U.S. hit the lowest level in decades. In Vermont, just 27% of eighth graders were proficient in math in 2022, down from 47% in 2013.This academic decline is compounded by what the U.S. Surgeon General has dubbed “the health crisis of our time” in youth mental health.What can be done to stop this downward slide?Around the country and in a handful of Vermont communities, community schools are succeeding against the odds at improving student outcomes and family well-being. In 2021, Vermont passed the Community Schools Act, which provided over $1 million in grants for community school pilot projects in Hazen Union School, Vergennes Union Elementary School, White River Valley Middle School in Bethel, the Cabot School and North Country Supervisory Union.What are community schools? It is a strategy that encourages deep partnerships among students, schools, families and communities. Schools become hubs of learning and engagement, and a powerful tool to tackle extreme inequality and racial injustice.Community schools address the needs of the whole child. If a student is struggling because they are hungry or unhoused, they need more than tutoring. That’s why many community schools include partnerships with local health centers, legal clinics, housing assistance and other social services. The schools help the student by helping the family.For the past two years, I’ve been researching community schools for a book that I co-authored with the founders of this movement, “The Community Schools Revolution: Building Partnerships, Transforming Lives, Advancing Democracy” (free download at communityschoolsrevolution.org). We explored the remarkable impact that these schools have had in thousands of schools, especially in under-resourced communities. For example, at the Oyler School in Cincinnati, once dubbed a “dropout factory,” high school graduation rates rose from around 30 percent to over 90 percent. The entire Cincinnati city public school system has now adopted the community school model.At a middle school in Brooklyn, math proficiency increased more than seven-fold and English proficiency quadrupled, and the school’s bilingual debate team has won numerous citywide and national debate competitions. The success of this model is why New York City has opened more than 400 community schools in the last dozen years.At Hazen Union School in Hardwick, Principal Dr. Jason Di Giulio said that “schools have almost put up walls and become fortresses up on a hill and separate from their communities.” This isolation has been exacerbated by the national epidemic of school shootings. Di Giulio said that Hazen Union, one of Vermont’s pilot community schools, is trying to “break down the walls of school, let the community in, send the students out, have learning happening all over the place and recogniz[e] that learning doesn't just happen sitting in a chair in a classroom.” One result is that Hazen Union is now drawing students from outside its district.Jane Quinn, who directed the National Center for Community Schools, said that community schools have had a significant impact on reducing chronic absence and increasing student engagement. “Because community schools are involved in the community and are getting students more involved in their communities, we've seen dramatic increases in student engagement, and that is not trivial,” she says. “We have known for 30 years that student connectedness to school is the protective factor against all of the major risk factors.”On this Vermont Conversation, we discuss the impact of community schools with Hazen Union Principal Jason Di Giulio and community school coordinator Dani Smith, as well as Vergennes Union Elementary School Principal Matthew DeBlois. We are also joined by three founders of the national community school movement, Marty Blank, Jane Quinn and Lisa Villarreal. “The school isn't just that place on the hill that’s shining, it's really connected," said Di Giulio. "The community's dreams for us are similar to our dreams for us, too.”

Rep. Becca Balint ran for Congress last year as a bridge builder and a peacemaker. But five months into the job, the first-term Vermont representative is appearing on national news and going viral on social media as she slams anti-LGBTQ+ attacks as “garbage” and slaps down far-right trolls such as Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo,Balint’s willingness to rumble in the culture wars and push back against political opponents has earned her respect from her Democratic colleagues. This week, House Democrats voted to appoint her to the House Judiciary Committee, one of the most high-profile assignments. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said that Balint “will be a strong voice on the Judiciary Committee and I look forward to working with her to fight back against MAGA extremism and continue putting People Over Politics.”Rep. Balint, who is filling a vacancy left by Rep. David Cicciline, D-R.I., on the Judiciary Committee, will be the committee’s sole openly gay member and the only democratic representative from the Northeast. She also serves on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the House Budget Committee, though she is likely to have to step down from one of those committees when she joins Judiciary.Balint entered electoral politics after being a middle school teacher in Windham County for 14 years. She served eight years in the Vermont State Senate, including two years as Senate President Pro Tempore.For Balint, the current wave of GOP attacks on queer and trans people — over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year — is personal and infuriating.“To bring in queer and trans kids into the conversation [Republicans] have decided that this is a boogeyman that they can use to raise money, turn people out to the polls …something else to rile the base.“For me, it is so cynical and so cruel to decide that the enemy that you're going after are our children and their parents who are just trying to do the very best they can do.”Balint said that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 legalizing same-sex marriage spawned a backlash.“There is always a backlash when Americans gain rights when they are accepted in their communities,” she said. “What I didn't anticipate was that there would be so many bystanders who do nothing.”Rep. Balint spoke with The Vermont Conversation in the midst of a standoff by far right Republican lawmakers in the Freedom Caucus that paralyzed the House for nearly a week.Balint called the Freedom Caucus an “extremist coalition.”“They're not about freedom at all. They are not about giving families the freedom to do the very best for their kids. They're not about women's reproductive freedom. They're not about us being a free society where we can read the books that we want and have them available to us. They have completely and totally — not just co-opted freedom — it's a perversion of freedom and a free society.”“I really want us as Americans who still believe in a democracy, in a free society, to be much more strong about pushing back about this notion that they are the party of freedom, because it's just not the reality on the ground.” Balint said that she can be both a fighter and a peacemaker. “I'm hoping that when I'm called upon to be fierce, and to call people on their garbage as I said in committee, or if I'm called upon to have a very heartfelt, deep conversation with constituents or others within my caucus who are still struggling, I want to be both those people. Because we can't be railing at people who are struggling with trying to understand what for them is a hard issue. But we also can't allow these kids and parents to be dehumanized and demonized. And so it is the work that allies need to do right now. And I want to be a good ally.”

On this "Best of The Vermont Conversation," we re-broadcast an interview from 2015 that traced the roots of the marriage equality revolution. The interview was recorded live in the studios of WDEV Radio. The interview marked the first time that Vermont marriage equality pioneers State Rep. Bill Lippert and former Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy discussed their roles in the marriage equality fight. On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4, in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges, that same-sex couples could wed throughout the country. The avalanche that swept America actually began as a snowball high up in the Green Mountains in the late 1990s.In 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Vermont that the Vermont state legislature must craft a law granting all of the rights and privileges of marriage to same-sex couples. In 2000, Vermont legalized civil unions, the most sweeping grant of rights to same-sex couples up to that time.In 2009, the Vermont state legislature legalized same-sex marriage, making it the first legislature to do so. On this Vermont Conversation, we discuss Vermont’s role in the marriage equality revolution with some of the pioneers of that effort: former Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy, author of the groundbreaking Baker v. Vermont ruling; former State Representative Bill Lippert, who led the fight for passage of civil unions in 2000 and same-sex marriage in 2009; Susan Murray, attorney with Langrock Sperry & Wool, who represented the plaintiffs in Baker v. Vermont along with attorney Beth Robinson (now a Vermont Supreme Court judge); and Stacey Jolles and Nina Beck, a lesbian couple who were one of three same-sex couples who sued the State of Vermont in the late 1990s in Baker v. Vermont, catalyzing the fight for marriage equality in Vermont and the U.S.Chief Justice Amestoy said in this 2015 interview, "I didn't expect to see (marriage equality) throughout the United States in my lifetime. ... I don't think it ever crossed my mind that we would reach a point, only six years later, that the United States Supreme Court would echo the analysis that Vermont used in the 1999 decision."Plaintiff Nina Beck said, “I feel incredibly proud to have been part of this moment… (and) that I live in a state that wants to create equality for everyone. “I’m very, very pleased that marriage — our marriage — has been recognized everywhere in the United States. It's an amazing, amazing thing.”

The inauguration of President Joe Biden generated many memorable images. There was the inauguration of Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to hold the office. Young poet Amanda Gorman gave a mesmerizing reading of her poem, “The Hill We Climb.”And Sen. Bernie Sanders became an internet icon for his mittens.A photo captured Sanders bundled against the January cold, sitting alone on a chair, cross-legged, wearing a Burton ski parka and looking cozy in a pair of fuzzy wool mittens. The image instantly became a viral meme depicting him on the throne from Game of Thrones, on Mike Pence’s head and sitting in a row of ironworkers high above New York City.This viral sensation led reporters to seek out the mitten maker. They quickly found Jen Ellis, a second grade teacher at Westford Elementary School. She sewed the mittens for Sanders after he lost the 2016 Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. She hoped it would cheer him up.Ellis’s sudden fame turned her life upside down. She was flooded with interview requests and thousands of mitten orders that overwhelmed her. She ultimately struck a deal with Darn Tough, which made the “Jenerosity” socks, which sold out in a day and resulted in thousands of meals being donated to the Vermont Foodbank. She partnered with Vermont Teddy Bear which continues to make the iconic Bernie Mittens.Jen Ellis has written a book, Bernie’s Mitten Maker, which tells a deeper back story. Ellis is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. It was in an elementary school sewing class that Ellis “started to develop the skills I needed to save myself.”Ellis told The Vermont Conversation that she shared this story in her book because “the longer people remain silent about this, the more it is able to spread as an epidemic.” “The world might have learned about me because of some mittens I made,” she said, “but there's a whole intricate backstory that people don't know, that is interesting. And that has a theme of empowerment and generosity and kindness, and it has a path in the end to joy.”

The U.S. Surgeon General warned earlier this month that “there is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation."Champlain College professor Sheila Liming has a cure for this social disease. In “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time,” Liming writes that the simple act of hanging out offers connection, intimacy and meaning. It is an act of resistance, she said, against the relentless pull of consumerism, individualism and the encroachment of digital culture in every aspect of our lives.Hanging out with others does not just make you feel good. It can save your life.The surgeon general warned that loneliness can increase your risk of premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It increases your risk of dementia by 50%.Sheila Liming is an associate professor of professional writing at Champlain College. She previously taught at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of three books, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s and other publications.Liming described loneliness as “a quiet crisis.”“It's one that's difficult to diagnose and to see and sometimes even to notice in our own society … (the) things that are sometimes preventing us from just hanging out and making social relationships and building connections with each other that strengthen ourselves in our community," she said.Liming defined “hanging out” as “daring to do very little and daring to do it in the company of others.”The “radical” part of killing time, Liming said, is that “you have to say no to something that already exists on your calendar that would be standing in the way of you and this casual social connection. ... Saying no to some things means saying yes to hanging out and spending time with each other."

A war on doctors is underway in Republican-led states, and numerous physicians are fleeing for safer ground.Thirteen states have criminalized all abortion care. Over 500 bills have been proposed targeting LGBTQ+ care, including many that criminalize gender affirming care. Obstetricians and gynecologists, or OB-GYNs, who routinely perform abortions and provide health care to LGBTQ+ people, have been a particular target of these laws and bills.Idaho is a case in point. Soon after the US Supreme Court passed the Dobbs decision that ended the constitutional right to an abortion, Idaho passed a law allowing family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000. Doctors also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges, and prison.The fallout has been swift: five of the nine maternal fetal medicine specialists in Idaho who deal with high risk pregnancies will leave the state by the end of 2023, several hospitals have closed their labor and delivery units, and 40 percents of Idaho’s OB-GYNs said in a recent survey that they were considering leaving the state.As doctors leave, maternity care deserts are expanding. According to the March of Dimes, nearly 7 million people who can become pregnant who are of childbearing age now live in a county with either no maternity care services or with limited services. One-third of US counties qualify as a maternity care desert, more than half of them classified as rural, including parts of Vermont. On this Vermont Conversation, we speak with physicians on the front lines of providing abortions and gender affirming care. In the first part of our program, we talk with three physicians at the UVM Medical Center who are midway through their four-year OB-GYN residency. Along with caring for patients, Drs. Mackenzie Delzer, Gnendy Indig, and Sarah McShane have already been to the Vermont State House to testify in defense of reproductive rights.In the second part of the program we speak with Dr. Lauren MacAfee, associate professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Complex Family Planning at University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine and the UVM Medical Center. She has been an outspoken advocate for reproductive rights.For young physicians who are deciding where they will practice medicine after completing their residency, they must each decide whether they are willing to go to states with abortion bans. “I feel the pull of patients in those areas and the huge deficits and care that are going to be created,” said Dr. Sarah McShane, who attended medical school in North Carolina, which this week banned abortion after 12 weeks. “Part of the moral pull is to also be a part of still fulfilling care, even despite this horrible legislation.”Dr. Gnendy Indig plans to specialize in health care for LGBTQ+ people. “My mentors in very progressive liberal institutions and cities have been dealing with death threats and doxing to the point where some of them have had to hire full time security to protect them,” she said. “Watching their bravery and watching them use that fear as a motivating factor and …keep pushing on, and still saying I will treat a population that needs me … is what keeps me on the path.”“We all are trying to do everything we can …in a safe state like Vermont to be a beacon of light and hope for other states,” said Dr. Lauren MacAfee.

Vermont is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis. Vermont has among the lowest rental vacancy rates in the country and among the highest rates of homelessness. Gov. Phil Schott has announced that he will not extend the pandemic-era emergency hotel housing program now that federal funds for it have run out, and state lawmakers are currently wrestling over its fate. The emergency housing program could end as soon as June, pushing out several thousand people from the hotels and leaving them at high risk of being homeless.On this Vermont Conversation, we hear from people at the center of the housing crisis.“What's going to happen right now is we're going to have a catastrophic fallout that's going to be …a humanitarian crisis,” asserted Brenda Siegel, a housing advocate and former gubernatorial candidate. “We're expecting our small communities, who do not have the resources, to pick up all these pieces.”“People think homeless people don't work, and it's not true. They work so hard,” said Brittany Plucas, 29, who spoke to me at the Hilltop Inn in Berlin. Plucas works two jobs, but lost her housing in April. She is frantically looking for affordable housing but has discovered that waiting lists are months and even years long.“The housing crisis is so bad. There are families here that have lost housing and they are working to provide for the children and for themselves. They're working to keep their kids safe. People just aren't understanding it. Right now, it’s a hard time for everyone.”Gary Winslett is an assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College. His own challenge in buying a home motivated him to investigate and write about the roots of Vermont’s housing crisis. Vermont “spent a long time just kind of not building any new housing,” he said. He argues that Act 250, Vermont’s land use and development law passed in 1970, has had the unintended consequence of blocking affordable housing and must be significantly reformed. “In the Vermont context, the pro-environment thing to do is to build housing near where jobs are so that people can drive less. It's to build those new homes with modern insulation, so that they're using far less greenhouse gases when they heat their home in Vermont winters. The environmentalism that we need today is not about blocking everything in sight. The environmentalism that we need today is about building things,” he insisted.Brittany Plucas is now confronting homelessness if the emergency hotel housing is not extended past June. Being homeless “terrifies me. I didn't think it was something that was possible,” she said, choking up. “Because I've worked so hard in my life to try to provide for myself and make myself something. I've worked since I graduated high school. I've tried to keep a roof over my head for years. And I failed. I feel like the state failed me [and] the government failed.”“I'm not giving up,” she said through tears. “I'm still gonna try my best at making my life better.”

LGBTQ+ rights are under attack throughout the country. Nearly 500 bills targeting LGBTQ+ people have been proposed in the U.S. to date, including in every state in New England. Eighteen Republican-controlled states have so far passed laws banning gender affirming health care, affecting 1 in 4 transgender youth.In Montana, State Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who is transgender, was ousted from the Republican-led House of Representatives last week for her passionate statements objecting to a ban on hormone treatments and surgical care for transgender children. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law last week, despite pleas from his son David, who identifies as nonbinary.In Nebraska, state Senator Megan Hunt is being investigated for allegedly having a conflict of interest for her opposition to a law that would ban gender-affirming health care. Her supposed conflict? She is the mother of a transgender child.The American Academy of Pediatrics and other leading medical organizations support gender affirming care and warn that bans pose serious health risks to young people.Rep. Taylor Small, 29, is among just 8 out transgender state legislators in the country, and is the first out trans legislator in Vermont. She was elected in 2020 to represent Winooski. A graduate of Colchester High School and the University of Vermont, Small is also education program manager at the Pride Center of Vermont, where we had this conversation. Small was named a 2022 Politician of Year by One Young World, an international youth leadership organization based in the U.K.Small said that anti-LGBTQ+ laws – from barring trans and nonbinary youth from participating in school sports, to book bans, to criminalizing gender-affirming health care – “are killing our youth. They are showing them that there is no hope for their future where they can be thriving trans adults.”By contrast, she said that she and Montana Rep. Zooey Zephyr “are trying to show that beacon of hope that you can still be involved, that you do have leadership qualities, and not only can you participate, but you can have a fulfilling life.”“This is nothing new that we've seen in politics…going after and targeting specific groups of people,” Small asserted. “What group does the general public have a lot of ignorance around and have a lot of questions? That is the trans community. As we see this growing recognition and visibility, it also comes with that backlash of ‘That is not what I grew up with, that is not my understanding of gender.’”As other states restrict access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care, the Vermont legislature has passed two reproductive “shield bills,” S.37 and H.89, which protect doctors and patients who give and receive this care, respectively.“Vermont is saying that we're putting this shield around our border, that as long as you are in our state, as a provider or as a patient, that you are protected by our laws and recognizing that gender affirming care and reproductive health care are legally protected,” she said.Small cautioned that vigilance is required to stop anti-LGBTQ attacks in Vermont. “It absolutely could happen here,” she said, citing anti-trans incidents in Randolph and Burlington.“As long as we continue to engage as leaders and engage in these difficult conversations, I think we can prevent what is happening in Montana, what is happening in Oklahoma and in Tennessee, from happening right here in our own state.”

Why does the U.S. — the richest country in the world — have the most poverty of any advanced democracy? Why are homeless encampments popping up from Seattle to Burlington?The answer is that, knowingly or unknowingly, many of us benefit from keeping poor people poor.That is the argument made by Matthew Desmond in his bestselling new book, “Poverty, by America.” Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," which was named by Book Riot as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last century. He is a professor of sociology at Princeton University, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, and was named by Politico in 2016 as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”He argues that regulations ranging from zoning to environmental laws are being used to block affordable housing, a key factor that is driving the homeless crisis. He says that this problem is often especially acute in communities known for their otherwise progressive politics. Low wages are kept low for the benefit of the more affluent.“In most residential land in America, it's illegal to build anything except a single detached family home,” Desmond told The Vermont Conversation. “That little regulation buried inside of our zoning codes really means that the only place poor families can live are neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, concentrated poverty, and that creates a level of disadvantage of a whole other order. I think that we need to think about our role and our complicity in maintaining those walls around our communities.”Desmond intends his work to be “a call to action. It means that we need to get our tails down to that zoning board meeting on a Thursday night at eight o'clock and stand up and say, Look, I refuse to be a segregationist. I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids receive living here. Let's build [affordable housing].”Matthew Desmond’s work is grounded in his own experience growing up in poverty. He started studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008, when he lived among poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee. He now directs the Eviction Lab at Princeton, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where “Poverty, By America” was recently excerpted.Desmond wants to inspire a new abolitionist movement. “Poverty abolitionists view poverty not as a minor social issue or an inevitability, but as an abomination,” he said. “It shares with other abolitionist movements -- the movement to abolish slavery [and] prisons, for example -- the recognition, the conviction, that if my gain comes at someone else's loss, that's corrupting in a way." "A poverty abolitionist divests from exploitation even if it benefits us. We try to shop and invest in solidarity with poor workers," he said. "We want a government that has a balanced and sensible welfare state, a government that does much more to fight poverty than to alleviate the tax burdens of the affluent. And we are for integrated communities and open, inclusive neighborhoods.”Poverty abolitionism “is a political mission,” said Desmond, “but it's also a personal stance.”

Editor's Note: This Vermont Conversation with Ed Koren was recorded at his home in Brookfield in October 2022. Koren died on April 14, 2023 at the age of 87.When the New Yorker published Ed Koren’s first cartoon 60 years ago, it marked the beginning of a relationship that has come to define both the magazine and the artist. Koren’s cartoons feature hairy, long-nosed characters that poke fun at issues from the serious to the mundane, ranging from rural life, to politics, consumerism, climate change, to encounters on the street — or in his case, on the dirt road where he lives in Brookfield, Vermont, his home since the 1970s with his wife, Curtis. He has been a volunteer firefighter in his community for over three decades.Koren, 86, is one of America’s most celebrated and beloved cartoonists. He has contributed some 1,400 cartoons to the New Yorker over the past six decades. He was Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate from 2014 to 2017, and his cartoons have also appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to Sports Illustrated to numerous books. His latest collection of cartoons is Koren in the Wild.Fellow New Yorker contributor Bill McKibben says of Koren, “Sometimes one thinks of the cartoonist as 'making fun.' But though Ed's drawings have long been the funniest thing in the New Yorker, it's because they're essentially kind, filled with the understanding that we're all trying hard. And that kindness, of course, is what makes him such a remarkable neighbor to all of us in Vermont.”The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction recently launched the Ed Koren Scholarship Fund to support “an emerging cartoonist who is also looking to enrich the cultural and civic life of Vermont.” Koren’s work is also featured in an exhibition about the climate crisis at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., “Down to the Bone,” which includes his cartoons and the images of nature photographer Stephen Gorman.Ed Koren continues to make people laugh even as he faces a serious predicament: He has incurable lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2020. Koren, who I’ve known for many years, has long politely declined my interview requests, protesting that he didn’t think he was that interesting. I begged to differ, and finally, last week he agreed to talk. I found him in his studio at his home doing what he loves, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker.“I'm an inhabitant of two worlds,” he tells me, sitting in a wheelchair in front of his drawing table in a room that overlooks a lush autumn forest. “My early work was based on the Upper West Side.” By contrast, “Vermont has always had its own milieu that I've drawn from, and I oftentimes mix and match.”I ask him why he draws hairy creatures. “It makes it funnier. There's some cartoons that I've done that just aren't funny enough without hair. And I love hair. I love to draw hair. I can't suppress my hand. … The hand really is the key instrument here. It keeps working and keeps flying along.”Koren’s advice to young people is to “find your own voice. It's what I tell young cartoonists. Don't accept situations where you have to work for so many decades of your life in something you really don't like. …Don't hesitate to change if it's not what you want.”Koren has been a brilliant chronicler and satirist of the human condition. “I'm irrepressible when it comes to seeing other people's folly and missteps and kind of haplessness. So I just kept doing it because I love to do it," he said.“I love my life. I love my work. I would hate to say goodbye to it.”

Author Tracy Kidder has been described as a “master of narrative nonfiction.” Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his 1981 book, “The Soul of a New Machine,” about the development of cutting edge computers. He is the author of more than a dozen books including the acclaimed 2003 New York Times bestseller, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about the late global health pioneer Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health. The book is often assigned as required reading in colleges.The Washington Post says that Kidder writes about “the moral value of small victories in a world of big problems.”Homelessness is the focus of Kidder’s latest bestselling book, “Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.” Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell as he worked the streets of Boston. Kidder was moved by the people he met who were experiencing homelessness in Boston and wanted to tell their stories. “If you get to know them, to really look at them — and a lot of people never do — you realize that they're every bit as human as you and I, and that old adage, There but for the grace of God go I.”“The engine of every good story is human character,” said Kidder. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and the New York Times but he insisted, “I'm a storyteller more than I am a journalist.”“I stopped thinking of myself as a journalist around the time of the Iraq War. I didn't want to be associated,” he explained. “Because there were so many lies told and so much bad reporting… it starts to taint the term. And then you have Fox News. …It's a wonderful profession, journalism. I believe in it utterly. But I want to see it practiced better.”Kidder says of his craft that “the techniques of storytelling don't belong exclusively to fiction.” Good writing should “be like a pane of glass. The writing itself should be interesting but it doesn't have to be flashy. I believe in immersion in the story that I've discovered.”

On April 3, social worker Leah Rosin-Pritchard was working at a Brattleboro shelter for people experiencing homelessness when she was killed, allegedly by a shelter resident.The brutal murder of the 36-year old shelter coordinator shocked the state. It struck especially close to home for Rick DeAngelis, co-executive director of Good Samaritan Haven, which operates shelters and transitional housing in Barre and Montpelier. In February, DeAngelis’s son Gabe was stabbed multiple times while working at a Montpelier warming shelter. He is recovering from his wounds.Vermont’s system of care for people who are unhoused or in need of mental health services is in a perilous state. This fragile system will be further strained as pandemic funding for emergency housing is about to end for about 3,000 people who are currently living in motels. Affordable housing is in critically short supply, psychiatric beds are scarce, an opioid crisis rages, and homelessness is rising. Vermont has the second-highest per-capita rate of homelessness in the country, behind only California, according to a recent government report. Rick DeAngelis began working with people who are experiencing homelessness in Boston in the 1980s. DeAngelis went on to work at the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and was the first executive director of what is now Downstreet Housing and Community Development before becoming co-director of Good Samaritan Haven in 2020.DeAngelis said “there is a perfect storm of factors that have come together over the last couple of years to create this crisis situation.”Anne Sosin, interim director of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, insists that the shortage of affordable housing is the primary driver of homelessness. “The vast majority of people who are experiencing homelessness can be successfully housed.” She said that a strategy “that combines housing with a supportive service model [has] made really dramatic progress” in other cities.DeAngelis, a lifelong advocate for people experiencing homelessness, said that despite the current challenges, “we have an opportunity in every moment, to try to rebuild, to heal, to start again.”

Vermont journalist Sue Halpern reports on national issues for the New Yorker magazine, where she is a staff writer. Her recent reporting has included stories about the 40-year effort to ban abortion pills, the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, and threats to democracy. One topic that she has covered in depth is the effort to subvert elections. She has written about candidates for secretary of state who deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, attempts by election deniers to access electronic voting systems and the Republican war on voting. Halpern was recently shocked to discover that Vermont is currently considering allowing internet voting, which experts have described as “a security nightmare.” The provision, which is supported by the Office of the Vermont Secretary of State, is tucked into legislation, H.429, that was approved last month by the Vermont House and is now being considered in the Senate. Among those arguing against Vermont’s internet voting provision are the watchdog groups Common Cause, Public Citizen, Free Speech for the People and the Brennan Center for Justice.Halpern is the author of seven books, including the best-selling “A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home” and “Four Wings and a Prayer,” which was made into an Emmy-nominated film. She was a columnist for Mother Jones, Ms. Magazine and Smithsonian Magazine, and has written on science, technology and politics for the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. She is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, where she directs the program in narrative journalism. Halpern is also a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.Based on her reporting on internet voting, Halpern insisted that “every computer science expert who has looked into internet voting is against it because it is insecure.”Halpern has recently reported on artificial intelligence engines such as ChatGPT. “My biggest concern is that it's going to be used for disinformation and misinformation as we go forward in our very fractured political life,” she said.Halpern’s reporting shines a light on the fragile state of democracy in the U.S.“We have people who are trying to undermine the two parts of our public life that are central to the preservation of democracy, and those are public schools and public libraries,” she said. “I'm deeply worried that the people who are trying to maintain this democracy are kind of working on the case a little bit too late, and they're not quite as wily as the people who are trying to undermine it.”

It’s a tough time for books. A wave of book bannings is occurring throughout numerous states. Last school year, more than 2,500 books were banned, according to PEN America. The vast majority of the targeted books feature LGBTQ+ themes or characters of color. Meanwhile in Vermont, the state colleges announced in February a plan to close their libraries and sell off their books.Against this backdrop, Duncan McDougall has quietly crusaded to expand literacy and give away books to underserved children and communities throughout Vermont and New Hampshire. Twenty five years ago, McDougall, a former management consultant and wilderness guide, founded the Children’s Literacy Foundation, or CLiF, and ran it out of his home in Waterbury Center. To date, CLiF has donated $10 million worth of books to more than 350,000 children in 85% of the towns in Vermont and New Hampshire. CLiF now runs more than 1,000 programs per year in schools, rural libraries, prisons, and other locations where children and parents are at risk of low literacy.The literacy gap is wide. Nationally and in Vermont, more than two-thirds of fourth graders read below grade level, according to the Literacy Network.For children with low literacy, “the probability of them getting through high school is much lower, the probability of them going beyond high school is lower,” McDougall said. “It's a vicious cycle. So what we do at the Children's Literacy foundation is we try to inspire those kids and give them experiences and resources that can help them change that cycle. … For a child who's never had that opportunity to choose a book that's really on a topic that they love, it’s life changing.”This week marks a milestone in New England's literacy efforts. After a quarter century at its helm, McDougall is stepping down as executive director of CLiF and handing the reigns of the organization to Laura Rice, a nonprofit leader and former CLiF board member. And the organization is moving from McDougall’s garage to a 3,000 square foot new headquarters on Route 100 in Waterbury Center.“Books can be mirrors and windows,” McDougall said. “What we want to do is for those kids who don't see anyone like them in their world to see a book that reflects characters just like them. For people who have never had a chance to leave their town, or go more than three or four towns away, to see the tremendous variety and magical diversity of this world.” “Literacy is really a social justice issue,” he added. “We are opening books, opening minds, opening doors, and there are just a lot of folks who have doors closed to them. Helping young kids develop a love for reading and writing can open so many doors for them and for their kids and grandkids too.”

VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.This Vermont Conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) was originally published in May 2022.Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin was expecting trouble after the November 2020 presidential election. Raskin and his Democratic colleagues in Congress anticipated that former President Donald Trump would try to subvert the results and try to derail Congress’s normally pro-forma certification of President Joe Biden’s election. But Raskin was blindsided. On December 31, 2020, Raskin’s only son, Tommy, a promising young student at Harvard Law School, took his own life after a long struggle with depression. Seven days later — and just a day after burying his son — Raskin returned to Congress to cast his vote to certify Biden’s election. That’s when Trump supporters mounted a violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, egged on by the defeated president. Speaker Nancy Pelosi then tapped the grieving Raskin to be lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Since the summer, Raskin has been a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol. Raskin tells his intensely personal and political story in his new book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.”

If there is a conspiracy theory or far right group, Jeff Sharlet has probably hung out with its followers. Sharlet is an investigative journalist and correspondent for Vanity Fair. He is one of the country’s leading experts on religion, fundamentalism and American politics. He is the winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and numerous other awards.In 2019, Netflix released "The Family," a five-part series based on Sharlet’s reporting about the secretive fundamentalist group that includes among its members a number of the country’s leading politicians. He has attended countless Trump rallies around the country, chronicled people preparing for armed insurrection, and attended gatherings of QAnon followers.Sharlet is a professor of English and director of creative writing at Dartmouth College. He has a new book out this week, “The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War.” Sharlet believes that averting civil war will take concerted and sustained action. "We don't think of democracy as something we have, but as something we do. You get up and you do it every day," he said."We haven't achieved democracy once yet. But we're going to try again tomorrow."

Are ski bums an endangered species?The iconic “ski bum” is a romantic character who has forsaken ambition and material comfort for something purer: high mountains, big adventure and the pursuit of the perfect ski run. Vermont is filled with ski bums past and present who live for powder days. Ski bums have had a tough go lately. Climate change and economic hardship have taken a toll. New England just endured the warmest January in history. Powder days are fewer and farther between. Airbnb and Covid-19 have dealt a blow to many of the affordable crash pads and couches that ski bums once surfed.Then there is the matter of white privilege. “There is only one subset of the population who can safely, comfortably, and consistently pull off this lifestyle: white, cis-gendered skiers, usually middle class or wealthier, usually men,” wrote racial equity advocate Mardi Fuller in an essay for SKI Magazine entitled, “Let’s Stop Celebrating the White Male Ski Bum.”Journalist Heather Hansman explores the modern reality of ski bumming in her book, “Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow.” She journeys from Vermont to Colorado and back to tell the stories of people who have built their lives around snowy mountains. Hansman is the environmental columnist for Outside Online and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic and other publications. She is also the author of “Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West.”Hansman writes that ski bums are “part of an ecosystem of skiing which encompasses everyone from celebrity vacationers to the undocumented lifties.” A decade after her own ski bum journeys, she hits the road again, this time with existential questions.“In the face of climate change, economic upheaval, and so much more, I’m trying to figure out if skiing as we know it will survive,” she said.

Ryan DeLena was a “problem child.”He had frequent emotional outbursts, and his parents’ efforts to control him proved futile. Mental health professionals and teachers said Ryan should be removed from the public schools in suburban Boston where he lived and placed into therapeutic schools. While there, he was subjected to physical restraints and heavy medication.Nothing helped. At age 9, he landed in a psychiatric hospital. His problems only got worse.In a desperate attempt to connect with his troubled son, Ryan’s father Rob took his son skiing at a small Massachusetts ski area. That was the beginning of a transformation for young Ryan. He channeled his energies into skiing and climbing, and now nurtures a dream to become a professional ski mountaineer. Ryan and Rob DeLena have continued to ski together around the world, including in Antarctica. Ryan finished high school and enrolled at Northern Vermont University, where he is a junior studying outdoor education.Ryan and Robert DeLena co-wrote a new memoir, “Without Restraint: How Skiing Saved My Son’s Life.” It is a harrowing and heartwarming story told by father and son about a misunderstood and troubled boy, and the bond the two forged as they found Ryan’s path.“Through skiing and the adventures we experienced together, I learned everyone was wrong about Ryan, especially me,” wrote Rob, an attorney who runs a legal staffing agency in Boston.Ryan, now 21, concluded with an improbable sentiment. “If I was offered the chance to have my childhood over again, growing up like a normal kid, I’d say no thanks,” he wrote. “Despite all the pain and hardship, I now appreciate that I’m strong enough to handle anything,” he said.

VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.This Vermont Conversation with professor Timothy Snyder was originally published in September 2020.Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale and a world renowned scholar of authoritarianism. His 2017 international bestseller, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” is a roadmap to how autocrats rise and democracies fall.Snyder has frequently appeared in the news to discuss the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and he recently met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Rep. Jamie Raskin consulted with Snyder during President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021."Post-truth," Snyder wrote, "is pre-fascism."In 2020, Snyder published “Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary.” He described his near-death experience following a missed medical diagnosis the previous year, and he eviscerated America’s failed coronavirus response.Snyder calls on us to rethink the fundamental connection between health and freedom. "Other countries look at us and for the first time ever, they sincerely pity us but also wonder, how can you have so much wealth ... and kill so many people?” Snyder asked."We're at a tipping point,” he said. “To say that it can't go on like this is an understatement. Things could get much worse than they are — and they might."

When Laurie Patton became president of Middlebury College in 2015, it marked the beginning of a quiet transformation at one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. Patton is the first woman to lead Middlebury in its 223-year history.Patton is changing the face of Middlebury. In more than a decade, Middlebury has roughly doubled the number of domestic BIPOC — Black, Indigenous and people of color — students, who comprise almost 40% of the class of 2026. The number of first generation college students at Middlebury has also nearly doubled, and now represent about 1 in 5 students admitted to the school.Patton has also led Middlebury to make an about face on fossil fuel divestment. For years, the Middlebury administration rejected student divestment demands. But in 2019, Patton announced the Energy 2028 plan, in which Middlebury would divest its $1 billion endowment from fossil fuels and commit to having the college be completely powered by renewable energy by 2028.“I feel (it) is something good I did for the world,” Patton told The Vermont Conversation when discussing the divestment and sustainability plan.Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, who is a distinguished scholar at Middlebury, tweeted at the time that this move placed Middlebury “among the very greenest institutions in the world.”Patton is now confronting a future in which diversity initiatives at Middlebury at other colleges face significant headwinds. A conservative Supreme Court is expected to end or curtail affirmative action later this year.How will Middlebury maintain its diversity if affirmative action is struck down? “I feel deeply confident in Middlebury’s commitment to the principles and its savvy in figuring out how we move forward in a new environment,” Patton said. “As we continue to read applications, can we say that this student brings that diversity and can tell a story with us … about their experience that will enrich all of us?”Soon after Patton became president, Middlebury found itself the focus of a national debate about free speech on campus when a talk by a conservative political scientist was shouted down by protesters, including students. Some five dozen Middlebury students faced disciplinary action after the incident, and the punishment further roiled the campus.“Holding each other accountable is important,” Patton said, adding that in hindsight, “there are times when we probably could have taken a pause to reflect and talk to each other.” Last year, Middlebury received $25 million, the largest programmatic grant in its history, to launch a program on conflict transformation.Patton is deeply concerned about censorship of school curricula — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s rejection of an AP African American studies course on the grounds that it had a “political agenda.” Asked whether students coming from schools with censored history classes are well prepared for a college such as Middlebury, Patton replied, “Absolutely not.”“There's so much hope in inclusive storytelling, and I really wish that the frame of an uncensored way of thinking about history was about hope. And that is what I deeply believe the power of an education should be,” she said.Patton is a scholar of South Asian history, culture and religion. In addition to being president of Middlebury, she is a professor of religion. Patton came to Middlebury from Duke University, where she was a professor and dean. She has also been on the faculty of Emory University and Bard College. She is the author or editor of 10 books and has written three books of poems.Patton has advice for high students who are applying to college. “Think about the place where you want to be next truly as a form of community and of place. And as you are choosing the college, think about the ways in which that community thrives and what makes that community thrive. And then you'll find that when you end up at a college, you will have a sense of belonging that will really drive you and help you ask the most important questions of your life, because that's what college should encourage you to do,” she said.

The anti-communist Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s spared no corner of the country or the culture. The FBI combed the Green Mountains looking for communists, and the University of Vermont ousted a suspected faculty member. In Hollywood, 10 screenwriters and directors refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, which led to a highly publicized hunt for supposed communist sympathizers and “subversives” throughout the entertainment industry.The Hollywood 10, as they came to be known, used the HUAC hearings in 1947 to condemn the committee. Among them was Dalton Trumbo, one of Hollywood’s highest paid writers. His credits included “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” (1944). As result of their defiance and principled stands, Trumbo and other members of the Hollywood 10 were convicted of contempt of Congress, fined, imprisoned and blacklisted from working in the film industry. Trumbo was unable to make a living under his own name for more than a decade, though he continued to write scripts under pseudonyms and use other writers as a front. He won an Oscar for “The Brave One” (1956), which he wrote under the name Robert Rich.In 1959, former President Harry Truman denounced HUAC as the “most un-American thing in the country today.” The Hollywood blacklist ended in 1960, when Trumbo was publicly credited with writing two films, “Spartacus” and “Exodus.” In 1975, the Academy Awards officially recognized Trumbo as the writer of “The Brave One.”“Trumbo: Red White & Blacklisted” is a two-person play featuring Trumbo’s letters that was written in 2003 by Trumbo’s son Christopher. The play is being performed in Vermont beginning Feb. 11 in Plainfield, Waterbury Center and White River Junction. It is directed by Monica Callan, narrated by Nick Charyk, and actor and former State Rep. Donny Osman plays Trumbo. Rick Winston, author of “Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946-1960,” is an adviser to the play.Trumbo served 11 months in prison for contempt of Congress. “As far as I was concerned, it was a completely just verdict. I had full contempt for that Congress,” he wrote.

When white supremacists launched a campaign of racist and misogynist attacks against former State Rep. Kiah Morris, they hoped to silence her.They failed.Morris has continued to fight back and speak out since resigning her seat as a state representative from Bennington. She stepped down out of concern for the safety of her family, but she has not stepped back. Her story is told in a new documentary, “Backlash – Misogyny in the Digital Age,” which has its U.S. premiere in the Vermont Statehouse on Feb. 7, during Black History Month. Morris is among four women profiled in the film who fight against cyberviolence. The women include “the most harassed politician in Italy” Laura Boldrini, French YouTube personality Marion Seclin and an Montreal elementary school teacher Laurence Gratton. All four women pursue their tormentors and demand accountability from those who are responsible, ranging from the tech giants, to the state, law enforcement and the perpetrators.Morris says that the backlash is against women. “As women are stepping into our own power, as we are continuing to move with a society that's supposed to move with us, there are many who cannot handle that level of progress. There are many who actively want us to retreat back into subservient roles,” she said.The backlash is also about race. When Morris was elected in 2014, she was the second African American woman to serve in the Vermont Legislature. In January 2019, Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan announced that he would not bring criminal charges against the white nationalist who was harassing Morris and her family, insisting that racially offensive speech was protected. Civil rights groups denounced the decision. Morris has continued to pursue justice.In 2021, an investigator with by the Vermont Human Rights Commission found grounds that the Bennington Police Department violated the human rights of Morris and her family and endangered their safety by withholding critical information about the white supremacist who had been targeting her. As part of the settlement, the Bennington Selectboard paid $137,000 to Morris and formally apologized to her.Was justice done? “Not really,” Morris said. “Nothing has changed in Bennington at all … to this day, not a single sanction, not a single call for resignation.” By contrast, she had to sell her house in Bennington and move to the Burlington area. She describes the settlement as “paltry.”Morris says her case — and the documentary “Backlash” — have “raised the profile in a way that other people knew that they should try to fight back. And the system is so stacked against anyone who deserves to have justice and who deserves to have peace.”“We have to continue to fight. I must not leave that legacy to my son to know that we said it was OK because it's not OK,” she said.

Erika Nichols-Frazer was like many kids growing up in the resort town of Stowe. She loved to snowboard and play hockey. But Erika hid a dark secret: She was at war with food. By eighth grade, she had anorexia, an eating disorder. She was starving herself, and her weight dropped below 80 pounds.Erika ended up in a psychiatric institution as her family worked to help her with her eating disorder. But she continued to face other mental health challenges. Depression and anxiety was a constant. At the age of 29, Erika was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder.What Erika guarded as her deeply private struggle is actually common. One in five adults and one in six youth experience a mental health disorder every year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Only around half of people with mental illness receive treatment, and the average delay between the onset of symptoms and treatment is 11 years.“There's still a huge amount of stigma around mental illness, and many of us are afraid to tell people that we're not doing okay and that we're having a hard time,” Nichols-Frazer said.Nichols-Frazer, now 34, is a writer, editor, and poet. She is a journalist for the Valley Reporter, a weekly newspaper that covers the Mad River Valley, where she lives. She shares the story of her journey to save herself in a new memoir, “Feed Me: A Story of Food, Love and Mental Illness.”Opening up about her struggles, she said, has been “really important for my own healing process, as well as for others who need to hear that they're not alone in their struggles.”Nichols-Frazer has transformed her relationship to food. Instead of food being a source of isolation and pain, it is now a way to connect with the world. “It's been a yearslong process of really coming to a place where I love food. I appreciate it. I appreciate the nourishment and sustenance it gives us, and I think that it really is a way to build community,” she said.

For this 10th anniversary Vermont Conversation, we invited back our first guest. Bill McKibben was on the inaugural broadcast of the Vermont Conversation on Jan. 16, 2013. As a journalist, he has eloquently chronicled the impact of the climate crisis across the globe and put a human face on what too often is cast as a political or scientific problem. He is the author of some 20 books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He writes regularly for the New Yorker and his Substack site, The Crucial Years. His latest book is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.”McKibben acknowledges that most of his dire predictions about climate change have come true since he first started writing about it three decades ago. And yet he insists “we are actually at a moment of extraordinary opportunity, the convergence of this big mobilization of people around the world.”McKibben has been a key figure in that grassroots mobilization. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org, and is the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award, and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His latest project is Third Act, which is organizing people older than 60 for progressive change.“The remarkable fall in the price of renewable energy has left us in a place where it's possible to imagine, for the first time, really rapid change. Now, whether it'll come or not will depend on how hard we push. But there's nothing far fetched about it. In fact, it's very clear that 40 years from now, we'll run the world on clean energy, because it's cheap.”Reflecting on key developments of the past decade, McKibben singles out the role of Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I just want Vermonters to be aware and proud of the fact that Bernie (Sanders) played an absolutely pivotal role in the transformation of how this country or large parts of it thinks about itself,” he saidMcKibben believes that the failure of a “red tsunami” of Republican electoral victories last fall is an important signal. “It feels to me like there's people standing up for common sense, for the idea that science is a useful tool, that vaccines were a good development of the 20th century,” he said.He concedes, "Yes, we're living in a country that still is riven, where there's people constantly trying to foment unpleasantness at all times. But that election result was kind of a quiet testimony to the quiet sanity of a fair number of people in this country. So one takes hope where one can find it.”

The past week has been filled with images of high conflict. There was the shocking violent right-wing attacks on government institutions in Brazil, which appear to be a copycat of the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.Then there was the chaotic election of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a madcap four-day, 15-round epic in which a small far-right faction of the GOP held the rest of Congress hostage to its demands.How do we break out of this cycle in which disagreements quickly spiral into good-versus-evil, us-versus-them battles? And how did we get here?Journalist Amanda Ripley tackles these questions in her bestselling book, “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.” Ripley was an investigative reporter for TIME Magazine and writes regularly for The Atlantic and Washington Post. She is also author of the bestselling book, “The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way,” and she hosts the Slate podcast “How To!” for which she interviewed then-candidate and now Vermont Rep. Becca Balint in a piece called, “How to Run for Office Without Being an A**hole.”In "High Conflict," Ripley writes about “how good people get captured by high conflict — and how they break free.”Ripley said there is a time-tested method for generating conflict. “When I look at mob activity like we just saw in Brazil, what I think most about is the climate of fear and threat and blame that has allowed this to happen,” she said.Ripley cited the power of “conflict entrepreneurs,” such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News, to incite people. “Influential voices in the media and in politics (utilize) the same kind of recipe: … generate a feeling of threat, that there's a crisis, identify a villain and then proclaim yourself as the hero who can save the day. That is how, again and again, again, politicians and pundits have managed to cast a sort of spell of high conflict over people.”She tweeted this week about how to avoid another Jan. 6, based on her conversation with security and democracy expert Rachel Kleinfeld: “For [journalists]: 1. Amplify non-extremists. 2. Report out disagreements within parties/groups, not just between. 3. Correct your audience's mistakes about the other side. They are vast. For Politicians: Call out your own party more — and the other party less. One works, the other doesn't. For Regular People: Don't share violent memes. It might sound kind of funny & not important, but in fact, jokes are one of those things that go beyond our rational brain & allow us to do things we would never normally say or do."Ripley has also criticized the media for how it has helped stoke conflict. She confessed in the Washington Post that she often avoids the news because it can be depressing and “paralyzing.” She cites studies showing that 4 in 10 Americans do the same thing.“Almost no one is really happy with the way politics is happening, the way the news is covered, the way we are treating each other,” she said. “I think there's a huge opportunity there.”From politics to news, “most Americans are yearning for something different. Widespread dissatisfaction is what we need to change this,” Ripley said.

On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy ended his remarkable 48-year career as the senator from Vermont.Leahy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1974 at the age of 34. He is now 82. He was the first Democrat elected to Congress from Vermont, and until this week, the only Vermont Democratic senator, since Sen. Bernie Sanders is an independent. Leahy was also the last of the Senate's "Watergate Babies" elected in the wake of former President Richard Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal.Leahy is the third longest serving U.S. senator in history, after Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WV (51 years), and Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-HI (49 years). He has served with nine presidents and has cast more than 17,000 votes as a senator. As a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he participated in some 18 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. His memoir, “The Road Taken,” was published in 2022.Leahy’s last day as a U.S. senator was historic in another way: It was the first time in a century that the House of Representatives failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot. Leahy reflected on the political impasse, “This is hurting the United States. It is hurting our sense of democracy. When you have people from the former President (Trump) on say, ‘Well maybe we should just suspend a few of these parts of the Constitution because they're inconvenient for what we want to do’ — they weren't made to be convenient. They're made to hold a country together. And I fear for the country if it continues like this.”The Vermont Conversation asked Leahy who of the nine presidents he served with were the most consequential. He replied, “It would probably be Trump because of all the things he did that we're still paying the price for.”During the Jan. 6 insurrection, Leahy was evacuated to a secure room with other senators while police battled with the mob of Trump supporters who had invaded the Capitol. A Senate colleague suggested that the Senate finish its business in the secure room. The suggestion infuriated Leahy. He declared to his fellow Senators, “I'm the dean of the Senate. I'm the longest serving person here. I’m the president pro tem. And I'll be damned if I'm going to meet in secret.”“Let us go back where the American people can see what we're saying, how we're voting, what we're doing. Don't hide,” he said. He received a standing ovation.“I leave with pride in what I've done,” Leahy said. “I cast more votes than all but one person in history. I've actually served with 20% of the senators who have been elected in the history of this country. … I felt that gives me a responsibility to do what I think is right. And that's what I've tried to do.”“But I gotta tell you,” the Vermont senator said after nearly a half-century of service, “Marcelle and I are just looking forward to coming home now.”

As one news outlet after another downsizes and closes, who is going to do the journalism in the future?That’s the question asked by Ken Tingley, the former editor of the Post-Star, the newspaper in Glens Falls, N.Y. Over the last decade, Tingley watched as his newsroom went from a staff of about 50 to just 7 people today. He chronicles what has happened to local news in his new book, “The Last American Newspaper: An Institution in Peril, Through the Eyes of a Small-Town Editor.”Tingley’s experience in Glens Falls, a city of 15,000 located near the tourist centers of Lake George and Saratoga Springs, is part of a national trend. From 2005 to 2020, about a quarter of local print newspapers ceased publication in the U.S. Half of over 3,000 counties in the U.S. had just one local print newspaper. Only a third had a daily newspaper, and over 200 counties had no newspaper at all. Vast swaths of the country have become news deserts.The Post-Star was founded in 1904. The daily newspaper in Glens Falls won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for the editorial writing of Mark Mahoney, who wrote about government secrecy and the public’s right to know.Tingley and his colleagues have reported on the rise of a local Republican member of Congress, Elise Stefanik, who was elected to Congress in 2014 at age 30. Stefanik ran as a political moderate but has since become a staunch acolyte of former President Donald Trump. Stefanik is a rising star in the party who became the third-ranking House Republican after Liz Cheney was pushed out by Trump loyalists in 2021.The Trump era has been marked by increasing threats against journalists. A pro-Trump protester in Glens Falls pointed a toy gun at one of Tingley's reporters and declared, “We’ve got one coming for you, Post-Star!” After the newspaper reported on the incident, Rep. Stefanik invited the protester to one of her town halls, and her staffer sent him an appreciative message.An outraged Tingley contacted Stefanik’s communications director. “I asked her to immediately denounce this man, that he had threatened our reporters, he had threatened our editors, he had threatened people at our newspaper and put their lives in danger.”“Never heard anything,” he said.Tingley urges people to subscribe and support local news. If local news outlets don’t survive, he said, “the number of people who vote will be less [because] they don't know who's running for office, and …there's going to be less community engagement.” He also predicted that without local watchdogs, “You're gonna see your taxes go up.”In addition to democracy taking a hit, Tingley predicts that without the public accountability that local media provides, “It's going to cost us all more money.”

“Greed is good.”That idea was famously uttered by a fictional stockbroker named Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.”That line leapt out at Jon Erickson. He was an undergraduate studying economics at Cornell University in the late 1980s and he was coming to believe that the misguided priorities of conventional economics did not lead to prosperity, but to a failed and grossly unequal society and was “a path to planetary ruin.” Erickson is now an ecological economist, and he champions a new kind of economics that fosters a healthy, balanced relationship between people and planet. Ecological economics has been gaining influence both in academia and in environmental and social justice movements.“I think of it as 21st century economics. It's an economics that reflects the realities of living on a full planet,” Erickson said.Jon Erickson makes the case for a new economics in a new book, “The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.” Erickson is the Blittersdorf professor of sustainability science and policy at the University of Vermont, a faculty member of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment. Erickson sees the current challenge as “taking power back from the wealthy elite and overturning the idea of a market society, returning back to democratic institutions and systems of trust and community. (It's) about social movement building.”“The challenge now is that it can't be every four years. It's got to be day to day, week to week, month to month. It's got to be overturning the kind of brainwashing that we've all gone through.”

International human rights lawyer Reed Brody has been dubbed the “Dictator Hunter.” He has helped pursue and bring to justice notorious dictators including Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti and Yahya Jammeh of Gambia.One dictator became a special focus of Brody’s global pursuit of justice. Hissène Habré was the former despot who ruled Chad from 1982 until he was deposed in 1990. Habré met with then-President Ronald Reagan and was armed and backed by the U.S. Habré, who was dubbed “Africa’s Pinochet,” was accused of ordering the killing of 40,000 people and the torture of 200,000 people during his reign of terror.“The saying used to be that if you kill one person, you go to jail; if you kill 40 people, you are put in an insane asylum; but if you kill 40,000 people, you get a safe haven and a fat bank account in the country of your choosing,” Brody wrote.For 16 years, Reed Brody led a team of investigators, lawyers and victims that spanned three continents as they pursued Habré. This global hunt culminated in Habré’s trial in Senegal in 2016. Habré became the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another country. The dictator, who had lived in seaside luxury in Senegal for 25 years, was sentenced to life in prison. Habré died of Covid-19 during his imprisonment in August 2021.Brody recounts his global quest for justice in his new book, “To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial Of Hissène Habré.”Brody argues that the precedent of holding dictators like Habré and Pinochet to account can also be applied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine. But pursuing tyrants requires patience. “Even assuming that he's indicted for war crimes or for aggression by a special tribunal, which is being discussed, unless there's a radical change in Russia, nobody is going to come in and arrest Vladimir Putin,” Brody said. “That said, these indictments will hang over his head all his life. And we see in other cases like Cambodia and elsewhere that you may not prosecute somebody today or in 10 years, but maybe 20 years or 30 years.”Brody is critical of the double standard in international law, where human rights abuses by western leaders go unpunished. "I spent a long time documenting crimes committed against prisoners during the so called War on Terror in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons," he said. "George Bush, president of the United States authorized torture. He authorized waterboarding ... There has never been accountability for that." Brody has seen the rise and fall of dictators around the world. He knows the fragility of democracy. “I am very worried about democracy in the U.S.," he said. “It's going to require all of our organizing … to preserve or at least to reconquer our institutions.”

A transgender Vermont high school student who was the target of a transphobic hate campaign is breaking her silence.“I want to be able to go out there and kind of just say, ‘I am trans, I am here,’” said the 14-year-old first-year student at Randolph Union High School, who asked to be identified as Rabbit in this interview. The Vermont Conversation and VTDigger are protecting the student’s privacy out of concern for her safety.In late September, Vermont television station WCAX aired a news story about the girl’s volleyball team at Randolph Union High School. Rabbit had recently joined the team, and WCAX featured a single student who objected to Rabbit’s presence in the girl’s locker room.The story was immediately picked up by right-wing media outlets including Fox News, the New York Post, the British tabloid the Daily Mail and the conservative Heritage Foundation. This unleashed a “wildfire of bigotry and hatred,” according to Rabbit’s mother, and a torrent of transphobic hate messages to Rabbit, her family and the school. The school district website was hacked and forced offline after the site was flooded with transphobic messages. Rabbit temporarily left school in fear for her safety.In fact, Rabbit was being bullied by a small group of students, her mother said. WCAX soon removed the story from its website.But the damage had been done. “I was in danger,” Rabbit said. “And not only me, but the trans youth community of Randolph and of Vermont due to this disgraceful and defaming news article.”This incident comes as transgender people are under unprecedented attack, especially in Republican-led states. Four states have enacted a partial or total bans on gender-affirming care, and 20 other states are trying to pass such bills. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot declared that parents and health care providers who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth can be investigated for child abuse. Some 85% of trans or nonbinary youth say their mental health has been negatively affected by these laws, and more than half have considered suicide in the past year, according to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.“So much of Rabbit’s story absolutely mirrors what is happening across the country and here in Vermont,” said Dana Kaplan, executive director of Outright Vermont, an LGBTQ+ advocacy and support organization. “There's a continuous barrage of messages that are targeting queer and trans young people telling them that they are not valued, that they're not cared for, that they're not allowed to exist, that they're not allowed to access their joy, and really typical things that all young people need to be able to do to develop self confidence (and) to thrive.”At the same time, there has also been an outpouring of support for Rabbit from everyone from her volleyball teammates to strangers who sent her letters.“I just want you to remember that we’re children,” volleyball team captain Lilly Patton said to a crowd of about 350 people who attended a public meeting in Randolph in October. “It’s one child on the receiving end of all this hate. You’re saying all these things to a child who is already at high risk, who already doesn’t feel accepted. This child didn’t do anything to anyone, especially you adults. I was there. She was where she was supposed to be.”Rabbit said she appreciates these allies. “Any message of support that you can give to trans youth or trans people in general…make it known because, oh my god, it helps so much,” she said.“My hopes and dreams are to show people that they can just be who they are and that they don't need the approval of others or the approval of even their family members,” Rabbit said. “You just need to be you.”

Santa Claus is coming to town. But the person shimmying down the chimney may not be the rotund, bearded white man who has long played the role of St. Nick. “Santa Camp” is a new documentary from HBO Max about an effort to diversify who represents Santa Claus. The story begins at the annual summer camp of the New England Santa Society, which represents more than 100 Christmas performers. The Santas realized that they need to look more like some of the communities that they serve. So they welcomed three new Santas: Chris Kennedy, a Black Santa from Arkansas; Levi Truex, aka Trans Santa, from Chicago; and “Santa Fin” Ciappara, a Santa with spina bifida who communicates via an iPad, joined by his mother Suki Ciappara. Santa Fin always dreamed of being Santa in a parade. The movie captures the day in December 2021 when his dream came true and he sat in a sled pulled by elves in the River of Light parade in Waterbury. “Believe in your dreams and don't give up,” he said. "Be kind to people who are different." For some, diversity is a threat. Kennedy set up an illuminated, inflatable Black Santa Claus display in his yard. Soon after, he received a racist letter. That motivated him to become Black Santa. “You're not going to steal my joy,” he told The Vermont Conversation. "I'm appealing to families who want diversity and want to see themselves represented or their adoptive kids want to see themselves represented. That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for the naysayers,” Kennedy said said. The documentary showed the “Proud Boys” protesting Trans Santa Levi Truex outside the Chicago church where he was greeting children last year. Truex talked about violence directed against LGBTQ+ people, including the killing of five people at a Colorado Springs gay bar this week. “We've always experienced hate. It's what makes us resilient. It's what makes us get louder and push harder,” he said. “The more that we feel the pressure from the hate, the more we're just going to be even more visible and more open. It's just what needs to happen.” Truex believes that Trans Santa makes a difference, especially for the LGBTQ+ children who visit him. “I don't have an agenda to make your kids trans or whatever. My agenda is purely to spread joy and just be a good person, to be a good human. And to treat people with respect and dignity and just spread the love of Christmas,” he said.

When a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama addressed the 2004 Democratic Convention, he vaulted onto the national stage through the power and grace of his words. In that speech, he challenged Americans to have “the audacity of hope.” President Obama went on to become one of the greatest political orators of our time.Obama has had a silent partner in crafting his oratory. In 2006, a novice speechwriter named Cody Keenan joined his team. Keenan wrote alongside Obama for 14 years, rising to become the chief White House speech writer. He continued collaborating with Obama, spending four years helping the former president write his memoir, “A Promised Land.” Keenan now runs a speechwriting and communications firm and teaches a popular undergraduate course on speechwriting at Northwestern University, his alma mater.Obama’s silent partner is now telling his story. Cody Keenan has a new book, “Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America.” The book focuses on a fraught period in 2015 during which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act, and a white supremacist murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Obama delivered the eulogy at the church following the massacre, famously singing Amazing Grace.The power of Obama’s oratory, Keenan said, is his ability to reach “into the American people and just talking to folks where they are. That's something too many politicians don't do.”Keenan described writing for Obama as “f-ing terrifying.” “I was never nervous being around the most powerful man in the world,” he said. “I was nervous being around a damn good writer, especially when it's your job to write for him when he is on record saying I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.”Obama’s presidency ended with another famous presidential speech, President Donald Trump’s inaugural “American Carnage” address, which laid out a dark vision of crime and white grievance. “What a way to set the tone for the next four years, not only just with a president who kind of picked at our wounds until they reopened, but then a pandemic that was mismanaged to the point where it killed more than a million Americans,” Keenan said.“President's words matter,” Keenan continued. “If you ever need evidence of that, President Trump's probably your best evidence because his words unleashed something primal … and created a permission structure for political violence — to the point where sitting elected officials are advocating for it. It opened up the floodgates to something like Jan. 6. You had people marching with torches in Charlottesville with their hoods off. All this stuff is only possible because of the president's words.”

Abortion was on the ballot in this week’s midterm elections and the results were emphatic: Voters, even in conservative states, want abortion rights over abortion bans.This election featured the most ballot measures on abortion in a single U.S. election. Vermonters voted by a more than 3-to-1 margin to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. California and Michigan also approved constitutional protections for abortion. Voters in Kentucky and Montana defeated anti-abortion ballot measures. And in August, voters in Kansas rejected a ballot measure that would have amended the state Constitution to say it contains no right to an abortion. “Abortion won,” said Oren Jacobson, co-founder and co-executive director of Men4Choice, a national prochoice advocacy group that organizes male allies.Politicians “who attempted to mess around with people's intimate decision making in that way should really take a message here … that people do not want their lives to be interfered with,” said Felicia Kornbluh, professor of history and gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Vermont and vice chair of Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund.“They want to be able to choose when and whether and under what circumstances to have children. And that means access to abortion. It means access to contraception. It means access to vasectomy procedures if people want that. It means access to a full range of reproductive health care no matter who you are — if you're in a same sex relationship, no matter what your gender identification is. We want that freedom. It's a bedrock freedom, and I think it's time that everybody in the political system recognizes that and take it as the kind of high value that it really is.”Jacobson argued that it is essential to enlist men and other allies to protect reproductive rights. One in five men in the U.S. have impregnated someone who has had an abortion. "About half of these men already had children and supported ending the pregnancy to better provide for their existing family," according to one report. Jacobson said that men are typically passive supporters of reproductive rights, and that has to change. “The mere act of men speaking up and lending their voices will normalize the idea (of abortion). This is to shift the culture and bring the majority of men who are pro-choice more actively in this fight. So I think it's really important that guys do share their story and do raise their voices.”Three Vermont men shared their abortion stories on this episode of the Vermont Conversation.Carl Werth of Waterbury Center recalled when his college girlfriend became pregnant. “She did not want to carry a baby, and neither of us wanted to be responsible for one. … If we had had to have the child, if it was a forced birth as they say, I think it would have dramatically changed the path of both of our lives.”Werth said of the role that men should have in an abortion, “100% they should be supporting what the woman wants to do. Because it's her body. Period.”Jon Williams, a grandfather in Waterbury Center, said he and his wife decided to have an abortion when they were in their 20s. He said the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade is “absolutely nuts.”“A lot of women and families are in the position where an unplanned pregnancy could be absolutely devastating to the family. It's just such a fundamental right,” Williams said.David Bolger, a school teacher from Moretown, is unapologetic about the abortions that he and his girlfriend had in college. “I don't feel regret it at all,” Bolger said.He and his girlfriend Amy broke up after college but got married 20 years later. “That was when we were really so ready and able and capable to do a good job … at raising a family,” he said. “And we have.”“It was Amy's right to choose, and we talked a long time about it. And I absolutely supported her in that decision, and I'm glad. I still have no regrets about that whole thing,” Bolger said.

When Rue Mapp goes for a hike, she does more than smell flowers and enjoy vistas. She breaks barriers.Mapp is challenging the idea that the outdoors are just for white people. In 2009, she founded Outdoor Afro, a blog to “reconnect Black people with the outdoors through outdoor education, recreation, and conservation.” Today, Outdoor Afro is a national nonprofit operating in 60 cities with more than 100 volunteers leading 60,000 participants on everything from strolls in the forest to bird walks to climbs of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.“It was not a part of our national narrative to just even think about Black people and their connection to the outdoors, and so I set about trying to change the narrative of who we imagine gets outside,” Mapp told the Vermont Conversation.The problem does not lie with nature. “The outdoors are welcoming. The trees don't know what color you are. The flowers are gonna bloom no matter how much money is in your account. The birds are gonna sing no matter who you voted for. So the outdoors is not at fault. It's just people and policies,” she said.Mapp referenced the Jim Crow era when public swimming pools and recreation areas had “whites only” signs. One consequence: Black children did not learn to swim and die from drowning at up to 10 times the rate of white children.“Alongside that exclusion, alongside that blatant racist reality, was a perseverance among Black people to find their places of purpose in nature,” Mapp said. In 2019, Outdoor Afro launched an initiative to teach 100,000 Black children and their caregivers to swim.Mapp’s efforts have brought her national attention. She was invited by the White House to participate in America’s Great Outdoors conference and took part in the launch of former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative. She has taken Oprah Winfrey hiking and canoed with the interior secretary. Mapp was named a National Geographic Fellow, Heinz Awards Honoree and is a recipient of the National Wildlife Federation Communication Award.Rue Mapp has a new book, “Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors.” It is a collection of essays and photos of Black people intended to “inspire Black communities to reclaim their place in the natural world.”When confronting a challenge or just in daily life, Mapp wants Black people "to recognize the power of nature as both a healer and a connector." "Nature never closes," she said.

In 2016, Sky Yardley, then 66, was diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable and fatal condition. Sky and his wife, Jane Dwinell, decided to face Alzheimer’s in their own way. The Vermont couple began blogging and speaking about Sky’s increasing dementia in an effort to reduce stigma about the disease. Their blog was called Alzheimer’s Canyon, which was Sky’s term for a place with “no trails, no landmarks, nothing.” Yardley and Dwinell talked about their Alzheimer’s journey on the Vermont Conversation in 2017.Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. and the leading cause of dementia. One in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia. According to the Vermont chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 13,000 Vermonters have Alzheimer's disease or another form of dementia, and more than 25,000 friends and family are providing care.Yardley and Dwinell, who were together for 36 years, movingly chronicled Sky’s decline until his death in February 2021. Jane Dwinell has now published this real-time journal in a new book, “Alzheimer’s Canyon: One Couples Reflections on Living with Dementia,” posthumously co-written with her late husband.Jane Dwinell is a retired nurse, freelance writer and Unitarian Universalist minister. Her 1992 book, “Birth Stories: Mystery, Power and Creation,” described her experience as a labor and delivery nurse at Gifford Hospital in Randolph. Sky Yardley was a family mediator.Dwinell said that publicly chronicling his illness “was all Sky's idea. He wanted to do what he could to erase the stigma of dementia. … He wanted to meet other people with dementia to be able to talk about it.”Friends and family often do not know how to respond when a loved one receives a life-changing diagnosis. “Don't give them advice. Don't leave them, and just be a good listener,” Dwinell said. “Some of our friends and family kind of fell away, and I'm grateful for the ones who stuck around.”Sky Yardley said on The Vermont Conversation in 2017 that Alzheimer’s taught him to “pay attention to the present. The only thing we have is the present, which is something that I think all humans could benefit from.”

John Irving, widely hailed as one of America’s greatest novelists, is back, and he has a lot to say.John Irving, 80, is the author of 15 novels, including the international bestsellers “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which is his top-selling book. Irving’s latest novel, “The Last Chairlift,” was released Oct. 17. It has been seven years in the making and at 900 pages, it is his longest work. He says that “The Last Chairlift” will be his last long novel.John Irving wrote his first novel at age 26. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years and coached wrestling until he was 47. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Irving has won a National Book Award, an Oscar and a Lambda Literary Award, among numerous other recognitions. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages.John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. He lived for many years in Vermont, first in Putney and later in Dorset. He sold his Vermont home in 2014 and now lives in Toronto. He is a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.Irving has long tackled controversial issues in his novels. “The World According to Garp” (1978) has a transgender character, “The Cider House Rules” (1985) deals with abortion and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989) confronts the fallout from the Vietnam War. His books have periodically been banned.“What are they banning? They’re banning books about abortion and they’re banning books on LGBTQ subjects,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “What they're saying to young, gay, lesbian, trans kids, they want them to feel even more alone and isolated than they already feel. They don't want those kids to have access to material that will let them know they're not alone. They already feel alone. There's a cruelty to that that is unspeakable.” Irving is a sharp critic of American politics today. Speaking about the recent Supreme Court decision striking down abortion rights, he said, “What they did is more in step with the Vatican than it is with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”Irving’s advice to young writers: “You can't let outside factors get under your skin. You have to stick to your purpose and be a kind of horse with blinders on. … You also can't get down on yourself after somebody's just kicked your tail. You've got to do it again and get better.”

When the New Yorker published Ed Koren’s first cartoon 60 years ago, it marked the beginning of a relationship that has come to define both the magazine and the artist. Koren’s cartoons feature hairy, long-nosed characters that poke fun at issues from the serious to the mundane, ranging from rural life, to politics, consumerism, climate change, to encounters on the street — or in his case, on the dirt road where he lives in Brookfield, Vermont, his home since the 1970s with his wife, Curtis. He has been a volunteer firefighter in his community for over three decades.Koren, 86, is one of America’s most celebrated and beloved cartoonists. He has contributed some 1,400 cartoons to the New Yorker over the past six decades. He was Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate from 2014 to 2017, and his cartoons have also appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to Sports Illustrated to numerous books. His latest collection of cartoons is Koren in the Wild.Fellow New Yorker contributor Bill McKibben says of Koren, “Sometimes one thinks of the cartoonist as 'making fun.' But though Ed's drawings have long been the funniest thing in the New Yorker, it's because they're essentially kind, filled with the understanding that we're all trying hard. And that kindness, of course, is what makes him such a remarkable neighbor to all of us in Vermont.”The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction recently launched the Ed Koren Scholarship Fund to support “an emerging cartoonist who is also looking to enrich the cultural and civic life of Vermont.” Koren’s work is also featured in an exhibition about the climate crisis at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., “Down to the Bone,” which includes his cartoons and the images of nature photographer Stephen Gorman.Ed Koren continues to make people laugh even as he faces a serious predicament: He has incurable lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2020. Koren, who I’ve known for many years, has long politely declined my interview requests, protesting that he didn’t think he was that interesting. I begged to differ, and finally, last week he agreed to talk. I found him in his studio at his home doing what he loves, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker.“I'm an inhabitant of two worlds,” he tells me, sitting in a wheelchair in front of his drawing table in a room that overlooks a lush autumn forest. “My early work was based on the Upper West Side.” By contrast, “Vermont has always had its own milieu that I've drawn from, and I oftentimes mix and match.”I ask him why he draws hairy creatures. “It makes it funnier. There's some cartoons that I've done that just aren't funny enough without hair. And I love hair. I love to draw hair. I can't suppress my hand. … The hand really is the key instrument here. It keeps working and keeps flying along.”Koren’s advice to young people is to “find your own voice. It's what I tell young cartoonists. Don't accept situations where you have to work for so many decades of your life in something you really don't like. …Don't hesitate to change if it's not what you want.”Koren has been a brilliant chronicler and satirist of the human condition. “I'm irrepressible when it comes to seeing other people's folly and missteps and kind of haplessness. So I just kept doing it because I love to do it," he said.“I love my life. I love my work. I would hate to say goodbye to it.”