Rumble Strip

Irfan Sehic grew up in Bosnia and spent most of his childhood living in a civil war. One day the kids across the street were his best friends, the next day they were enemies. His father would fight in the war a few days a week and then be back for dinner. It was complicated. He told me I couldn’t understand war because I had not experienced it, which is true.  But I kept asking him to explain it t...

My friend Bryan Pfeiffer is a writer, educator and field naturalist. He used to be a professional birding guide. He knows all about birds and dragonflies and moths. He knows where they live and what they eat and what it smells like where they live and eat. And even though we’ve been friends for a long time, Bryan has never taken me birding because I’ve never been interested in birds. Then I turned...

Jane Lindholm recently left her position as host of Vermont Edition, VPR’s midday public affairs show. In her fourteen years on the show, Jane interviewed governors, senators, authors, wildlife biologists…she interviewed me once, which was awful because I couldn’t think fast enough. I have no idea how she does it, which is why I wanted to talk with her. What is it like to be live every day with a...

It’s been too long since I’ve reported on police activity here in Vermont and it’s been a challenging time for law enforcement. Calls to police are countless, and complex. I asked Scott Carrier to read from recent police logs, as reported in the Barre Montpelier Times Argus , and the Lamoille County News and Citizen . Scott Carrier is the producer of my favorite podcast, Home of the Brave .

Vaughn Hood was a 118-pound barber when he was drafted into the Vietnam War. And in Vaughn’s war, most men didn’t survive their first three-month tour. Now Vaughn Hood runs a hair salon in St. Johnsbury with his wife, Bev. For a couple days, I sat and talked with him in the back of his salon. We talked about war, about hard work, about survival, and hairdressing. Here is the story of an extraordin...

I met Leland when he was in school with my son Henry at Calais Elementary. I interviewed him when he was over playing at our house when he was in fourth grade, and I’ve been interviewing him every spring ever since. We’ve talked about deep space, death, girls…sometimes we don’t talk much at all. Leland’s a junior in high school now. He spends most of his time at a technical school working on carpe...

Here is a little musical about the beautiful minutia of your lives. And I just keep adding to it because our lives just keep going on and on and on. So just keep sending songs and now and then I’ll add them to the Longest Song.

The first time I meet Han MeiMei, we were standing on my deck in Vermont. She looked at the fields around my house and she said, ‘That’s a lot of fields. Have you ever thought of writing messages to airplanes?’ I had not thought of this. Han is a brain scientist. She studies the nature of memory, and she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She grew up in a state-run factory compound in Gui...

Rose Friedman and some friends decided to start making free meals on Wednesday nights for anyone who wants them. They set up outside the East Hardwick Grange Hall. A lot of people around here are making food for neighbors during Covid. But Rose isn’t making food because of Covid. Or not exactly. She wants to see what will happen. Who will come and get the food and what will it be like when they co...

We’re a year into Covid and in Vermont we’re almost into the last stretch of winter and I’ve been thinking a lot about married people, or people partnered with other people living in houses and apartments day after night for days and months and now a year. I wonder what goes on in those houses and what they talk about and how they get on day after day, night after night. I found a young couple wil...

In most of New England, town citizens become legislators for one day a year. They get together in school gyms and town halls and vote in person, and in public. This centuries long practice of towns doing the slow and hard work of disagreeing and arguing and compromising on how to govern themselves—this has a profound impact on a place, and what it means to be from a place. Sometimes it’s contentio...

This is a FUN show to celebrate FRICKIN’ INAUGURATION DAY which we’ve been waiting for for 1000 years!!!!!!  It’s from the Shaking Out the Numb , a series I made with Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso . The show is called Party Is Everything. It’s about being young and getting ready to go to parties and then going to parties. And all of the things you think about when you’re getting rea...

It’s been a challenging year. Families are trying to figure out how to be together for the holidays when they can’t be together physically. Welcome to Problems, a Christmas special. Problems is a series about comfortable, upper middle class people who have a lot to complain about. This year, Pam and her two sisters, Andrea and Amanda, are planning a Christmas caroling zoom call to their parents. I...

Daniel Kirk is a children’s book author and illustrator and he lives with his wife in New Jersey, about twelve miles outside of Manhattan. They were both infected with COVID last March, before it had spread in the United States. They still don’t know where they got it. By now we know a lot more about COVID. We know the symptoms. We can recite the symptoms. But what does it actually feel like to st...

Bill Schubart is a writer and a cultural and political commentator. He’s chaired a lot of important boards here in Vermont. He’s really smart and he talks a lot and a lot of people listen to him. What he talks less about is that he’s struggled with being fat his entire life. He’s not averse to talking about it. In fact he wrote a brilliant collection of stories called Fat People in 2010. But it’s...

I first interviewed them when they played in Vermont in 2017 and we became friends. In fact Amelia is the only person with whom I have two-hour phone conversations that start like this: ‘Hey. What are you doing?’ ‘Nothing. What are you doing?’ ‘Nothing.’ This podcast was an experiment. The interviews were all recorded over the phone during Covid….on back porches at night, by rivers, in fields, and...

François Clemmons was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1945 on the plantation where his great great grandmother Laura May’s family had been slaves, then he moved with his mother and siblings and aunts and cousins to Youngstown, Ohio during the Great Migration. Youngstown is where he started singing, and he never stopped singing. He sings in the middle of sentences, he sings on the way to the bathroo...

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/230694656″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /] Mark Utter was born with a form of autism that makes it impossible for him to say what he’s thinking. For the first thirty years of his life, Mark did not have access to the world of words, except as a listener. An observer. When...

I’ve been doing a couple freelance jobs for extra money. One requires a great deal of video conferencing. I have learned that I do not excel at video conferencing and at the moment I knew this with certainty, my recorder was close by, so I recorded some thoughts on the subject. Then an audio producer in London heard it and did a remix version of it. So here is a short dip into my state of mind dur...

Karl Hammer is the founder and president of the Vermont Compost Company in East Montpelier, right up the hill from Montpelier, the state capital. I first heard about Karl from my friend Rosana, who used to be married to him. She told me about how they had puppies one winter, and Karl decided to compost their poop on the floor in the house, which he sweetened with donkey manure and hardwood bark an...

A GUEST SHOW from one of my favorite radio producers….Bianca Giaever. During a period of personal loneliness, radio-maker Bianca Giaever set out into New York City, hoping to connect with another lonely stranger. She began visiting Catholic churches, and eventually, she met Sophia — a school crossing guard. In this piece, Bianca documents Sophia’s life for many months… weaving between the ordinary...

Winnie Wilkinson is originally from Jamaica but she spent half her life in New York City before moving up to St. Albans, Vermont, where black people make up 2.52 percent of the population. Winnie has family all over the country, and she has a lot of family members who’ve been harassed by the police, which is what I went to talk with her about. But it’s not what we talked about. Instead, we talked...

Clare is the curator of the Museum Of Everyday Life, which lives in a barn on Route 16, about eight miles from Glover, Vermont, population 2000. Over the years, the Museum of Everyday Life has given us the toothbrush, the mirror, bells and whistles–celebrations of objects we use everyday in our unglamorous everyday lives. This year’s exhibit features the knot. It’s not quite finished, because as C...

I met my friend Leland when he was in first grade and he came over to play with my son Henry. For six years now, we’ve been having a yearly conversation about how he’s doing and what he’s thinking about. He just finished his sophomore year at the Central Vermont Career Center in Barre, which is a technical education school. He was never big on regular school, even though he knows more about geogra...

Last month a friend of mine sent me a picture of miles and miles of cars lined up waiting for food that was being distributed by the National Guard here in Vermont. Nineteen hundred cars . I’d never seen anything like it, and it took me a minute to even believe it. And when I told a friend about it…a perfectly smart and thoughtful friend…he said,  “Well, they probably don’t really need it. I mean,...