Episodes

As the 2024 presidential campaign hurdles to a climactic finish on Nov. 5, the two major candidates made their closing arguments. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke on Tuesday at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where she promised to be a unifier, casting Trump as a “petty tyrant” who wanted Americans to be “divided and afraid of each other.” Trump made his final case in a six-hour long rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that featured a comedian describing Puerto Rico as a “floating islan...

America is drowning beneath a tsunami of lies. The 2024 presidential campaign may be distinguished by the sheer volume and audacity of lying. Donald Trump has made embracing The Big Lie—the false claim that he won the 2020 election—a condition of entry into the MAGA universe. Once you accept The Big Lie, similarly brazen but smaller lies flow easily. And so Trump falsely claims that immigrants are eating pets and that disaster relief money is being stolen by Democrats and given to immigrants. ...

Can social media bring people together rather than divide and deceive us? In the world of corporate social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, the notion of a nontoxic public forum seems quaint. These are places where political and personal brawling goes on 24/7 and disinformation flows as freely as cat videos. The platforms rely on high conflict to attract eyeballs and make money. Vermonters have another option. Front Porch Forum (FPF), co-founded in 2006 by Michael Woo...

The war between Israel and Hamas is now grinding into its second year. The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking civilian hostages. In retaliation, Israel launched a devastating bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip. The toll of the war is staggering. In the past year, some 42,000 people in Gaza have been killed and nearly 100,000 injured, according to the Gaza health ministry, and about 8,700 Israelis have...

In the last week, Israel bombed Beirut, assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, and launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Israel claimed that its attacks were a response to rockets being launched by Hezbollah into northern Israel. The invasion of Lebanon marks an escalation of Israel’s year-long war in Gaza that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians. In the past few days, Iran fired missiles at Israel in retaliation for the attacks on Hezbollah, and there are now fears that these...

In 2017, Timothy Snyder wrote a short book, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” It was a cautionary tale drawn from Snyder’s studies of totalitarian regimes. He mused about how lessons from foreign regimes like Hungary, Russia, and Eastern Europe applied to the U.S. The lessons were warning signs that signaled when a country was veering toward totalitarianism. “On Tyranny” was the New York Times bestelling nonfiction book of 2017 and stayed on bestseller lists for years. Timoth...

What do Nazis, fascists, incels, skinheads, misogynists, insurrectionists and Proud Boys all have in common? Many of them confide in reporter Elle Reeve. It was around 2015 and Reeve was reporting for Vice News about the rise of the “alt right,” a term coined by its leader, Richard Spencer. She spent time on internet message boards like 4chan and 8chan where far right activists communicated, trolled liberals, and began to coalesce as a movement. These were often ordinary people who increasingly...

The much-anticipated debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump took place on Tuesday night. It was the first time the two politicians had met. With national polls showing the race for the White House a tossup, this debate, currently the only one that is scheduled, has outsized significance. In a CNN flash poll following the debate, 63% said that Harris performed the best. This flipped the script from the Trump-Biden debate in June, when 67% of respondents sai...

When Corinne Prevot was attending high school and ski racing at Burke Mountain Academy in 2008, her colorful hand-sewn hats were an instant hit with her friends and fellow racers. As she moved on to attend Middlebury College, where she raced on the ski team, her stretchy form-fitting hats continued to be a hot item both around campus and on the ski racing circuit, where she sold them from a shoebox. With lots of enthusiasm but little business acumen, Prevot turned her side hustle into the cloth...

What used to be called 100-year floods are now annual occurrences. Summer 2023 was the wettest ever in Vermont, with 2 feet of rain falling on the state. One storm submerged the capital of Montpelier. This July saw towns such as Plainfield ripped apart by raging rivers. In Connecticut this month, a storm dropped more than a foot of rain, leading to deadly and destructive flooding. Author Porter Fox says the source of these deluges — as well as heat waves, fires, and floods — is the ocean, where...

Among the thousands of delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, two dozen represent Vermont. On Tuesday, these delegates cast their ceremonial votes for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz to be the Democratic nominees for president and vice president. The Vermont delegation includes elected officials such as Sen. Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint. But the delegation is mostly composed of party activists who may not be well known but are fiercely committe...

Zephyr Teachout has blazed a high-profile path on state and national political stages. But lately, the 52-year-old law professor and politician has been spending her time on a tiny stage in Vermont, directing a play about the saga of Israelis and Palestinians. Teachout, who grew up in Norwich, gained national attention in 2004 when she was director of internet organizing for former Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, helping to vault the small-state governor to briefly run at the front of...

For more than a century, New Hampshire sent its troubled youth to the same juvenile jail. It was called the Youth Development Center, or YDC. The young people were supposed to be cared for and then live productive lives. Instead, many of them were physically and sexually abused. More than a thousand people have said that the adults in charge at the YDC abused them. A statewide settlement fund established by NH lawmakers has so far paid out over $95 million to settle lawsuits filed by former deta...

Last week, I received an unexpected call from Bill Mares, an old friend. Bill told me that he had terminal lymphoma and had only days to live. He was home in hospice care, which focuses on a person’s quality of life as they near death. And he had chosen to make use of Vermont’s medical aid-in-dying law, which passed in 2013. He had a few things on his mind that he wanted to share. He was medicated when we spoke but still sharp, thoughtful and funny. Bill died on Monday, July 29, just a week af...

When the covid pandemic hit in March 2020, stores ran out of toilet paper. Then it was infant formula, personal protective equipment, computer chips and everything else on which our modern lives depend. What caused these worldwide shortages? In his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything,” New York Times global economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman explains how and why the global supply chain broke – and why it might happen again. In it, he says that inequality and corporate greed hav...

A political tsunami rolled ashore on Sunday, July 21, in the form of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. This move, about 100 days before Election Day, is unprecedented in American history. Biden’s withdrawal followed his disastrous performance in a debate last month with former President Donald Trump, during which Biden struggled to find words, trailed off mid-sentence and often stared blankly at...

Ethan Allen is lionized as the founding father of Vermont. But filmmaker Jay Craven has reimagined the story of the Revolutionary War figure and leader of the Green Mountain Boys to tell a fuller story of patriotism laced with greed and ambition. In Craven’s latest epic film, “Lost Nation,” Ethan Allen meets Lucy Terry Prince, a formerly enslaved woman in Guilford who scholars believe was the nation’s first African American poet. The improbable duo have a shared conviction to protect their land...

When flood waters tore through parts of Vermont last July, countless lives were upended. Barre, the Granite City, was especially hard hit. Parts of downtown were buried in thick mud, and the city public works department spent days sending snowplows through the streets to clear them. This week, virtually everyone I talked with in Barre expressed anxiety about heavy rains and potential flash flooding expected on Wednesday and Thursday. I stopped by Dente’s Market, Barre’s last corner grocery. Th...

Democrats, stop freaking out. That is the message — or plea — of veteran campaign consultant Stuart Stevens following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week. Numerous pundits on cable news, some Democratic donors and the editorial board of the New York Times have called for Biden to drop out and let a younger candidate take on Trump. Stevens thinks that dumping Biden is “insane.” "Is Joe Biden up to being president? I find it sort of an absurd question because he is pre...

This Vermont Conversation with Jackson Beecham originally aired in July 2022. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, it left each state to decide its own abortion laws. Many Republican-led states are reverting to the anti-abortion laws that were on the books before 1973 when Roe legalized abortion. Vermont legalized abortion a year before Roe. In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a 122 year-old law that made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion, thou...

Is our car-centric society ready to ditch automobiles for bicycles? It is already happening in a number of cities, and it may be part of the solution to the climate crisis. This is the case made by Daniel Piatkowski in his new book, Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future. Piatkowski, a former New York City bike messenger, is now a professor of land use and transportation planning at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway. Piatkowski says that e-bikes have revolutionized the wa...

In 1969, with the country in the grips of protests against the Vietnam War, Rob Mermin took a different path. He ran off to join the circus. So began his career as a performer that has touched the lives of thousands of people. For the next decade, Mermin performed in circuses throughout Europe, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union. He studied with the legendary pantomimist Marcel Marceau, who would become his mentor and friend. In 1987, Mermin came to Vermont ...

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky is the co-author of the 2018 international bestseller, “How Democracies Die.” It’s a book that President Joe Biden has cited often. In it, Levitsky and fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt documented the rise of authoritarian movements and the decline of democracies around the world. But Levitsky was still shocked when Trump supporters launched a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He thought it wouldn’t happen here. The Jan. 6 insurrection...

Are the kids all right? This question is foremost on the mind of parents, educators, and young people themselves. Students today are still grappling with the lingering effects of the covid pandemic, during which their schools closed and their education continued alone — or in many cases, their education and development stalled. Significant covid-related learning gaps continue to pose a challenge for many students. As graduation and summer approaches, the Vermont Conversation wanted to hear fr...