Episodes

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 d...

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 u...

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 handfu...

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 Democr...

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 Oberg...

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 mi...

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. Han...

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 Suprem...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ch...

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 col...

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 worki...

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 denie...

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 chil...

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 nor...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ap...

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...

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...

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 Stateho...