The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

What would you do if you knew that your father fought for the Nazis? For years,  Alexander Wolff harbored this dark family secret. Wolff, a staff writer for  Sports Illustrated for more than three decades, longed to know more about his family’s role in Nazi Germany. Was his father, Niko Wolff, involved in the worst Nazi crimes, including the extermination of Jews? How did Niko hide the fact that h...

In 2019, producer Bess O’Brien set out across Vermont to capture the stories and lives of teenagers. She wanted to hear about their joys and struggles in their own words. O'Brien did this in 2005, and the result was an award-winning musical, The Voices Project. This time, following a year-long delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the students who comprise the cast of the Listen Up musical are final...

When 32 year old Peter Fatovich died by suicide in 1994, he left behind his adoring wife, four children under five years of age, and a million questions. Fatovich’s widow, Jenny Grosvenor, pushed the questions aside — until now. Grosvenor, who lives in Stowe, has spent the past few years pursuing the truth behind what tormented her young husband to take his own life in the waters of Huntington Gor...

Could the next presidential election be stolen? Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University, is concerned that that’s precisely what may happen in 2024. Levitsky is co-author, with fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt, of the international bestseller,  How Democracies Die . The book argues that modern democracies are subverted not by military coups, but by weakening key insti...

“We’re not done with this,” warns Stanford epidemiologist Steven Goodman about the Covid-19 pandemic. I believe my big brother. In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading and lockdowns were being imposed, I asked Steven to join me on the Vermont Conversation to share publicly what he was telling me privately about this novel virus. While President Trump assured us that the coronavirus w...

How did German democracy collapse and give way to Nazism? Jack Mayer, a recently retired Middlebury pediatrician, has a personal interest in answering that question. His parents were lucky: They fled Nazi Germany in 1939 just as their neighbors were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where most of them died. Mayer has written two books about Nazi Germany. His first book,  Life in a...

Can reducing reliance on fossil fuels benefit low-income people?   For Jared Duval, the answer is personal. Duval, a ninth generation Vermonter, grew up shivering around a propane stove in a small apartment because his single mother struggled to afford her heating bills. Duval’s father lived for a time in a tent behind a flea market in Clarendon, using a space heater to survive relentless Vermont...

“If the prime role of a free press is to serve as critic of government, cartooning is often the cutting edge of that criticism," declared legendary Washington Post political cartoonist Herb Block. Jeff Danziger has lived on that cutting edge since 1975 when his cartoons skewering the powerful began running in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald. His wit and art have also appeared i...

Is there hope in rural America? Or is it a place in decline that young people just want to flee? Author Gigi Georges traveled to Washington County in Maine, the remote easternmost county in America, to explore the hopes, dreams and hardships of five young women in high school. Washington County suffers from the problems plaguing many pockets of rural America. It has among the highest per capita ra...

United States troops are now pulling out of Afghanistan, bringing to a close America’s longest war. U.S. intelligence predicts that  the Taliban will take over the country within six months , returning the country to much way we found it when we invaded following the 9/11 attacks. Since 2001, the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan  has resulted in the deaths of 800,000 people,...

Alex Showerman had a secret. Growing up in Thetford Center, Alex competed on boy’s teams in cross-country, running and hockey. But Alex was actually running from who she was. Like more than half of transgender or nonbinary youth, she considered suicide rather than reveal her secret. Showerman went on to graduate from St. Lawrence University and work in progressive politics. In her free time, she t...

    This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers , the secret official history of the Vietnam War that was leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. The Pentagon Papers revealed that multiple U.S. presidents and top government officials had been lying about the Vietnam War to the American people and to Congress. To mark the anniversary of America’s most famous exposé, we are reb...

Mark Redmond was on a glide path to success. Fresh out of Villanova University, he landed a plum job with a major insurance company and had a cushy apartment on Park Avenue. Money, status, and job security were all firmly in his grasp. Then he walked away and left it all behind. Redmond moved into  Covenant House , a shelter for homeless youth located in Times Square, described by  Rolling Stone a...

Martha Hennessy is a grandmother of 8, a retired occupational therapist, and a federal prisoner. The 65-year old resident of Weathersfield, Vt. is in jail, along with six other pacifists, for  breaking into a Georgia submarine base in 2018 , spilling blood and spray-painting anti-war slogans to protest against the threat of nuclear weapons. The group is known as the  Kings Bay Plowshares 7 . The n...

The  2021 legislative session is in the books. The historic Covid-19 session was conducted entirely online over Zoom. Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham, was often eerily alone in her office at the Statehouse in Montpelier. The session confronted — and then deferred on — some intractable issues such as state pension reform, but it was largely notable for the lack of rancor betwee...

“Critical race theory” is the newest front in the culture wars, and conservative activists are intent on making Vermont one of its battlegrounds. At least  16 states with Republican-led legislatures or Republican governors are considering or have signed into law bills to limit the teaching of critical race theory, which, simply stated, considers how racism has been a powerful force in American his...

One of the most striking consequences of the murder of George Floyd is just how far reaching the movement for Black lives and against racism has been. Rallies and protests spread from Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered by police, to small towns across America. One of those communities is the village of Morrisville, Vermont, population 2,000. On the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder,...

The world is awash in misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foremost among them is the  “big lie” that President Trump won the 2020 election (he lost by 7 million votes), that Covid-19 is a hoax (it has killed nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. and over 3 million worldwide), that the Covid vaccine implants a microchip created by Bill Gates ( it doesn’t ), and that Antifa stormed the US Capitol on...

Americans were shocked by the violent insurrection carried out by a pro-Trump mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. President Trump had spent months goading his supporters to rally behind him and dog whistling to white supremacist groups to rise up, and they heeded his calls. Susan Corke is not surprised by the rising tide of hate that exploded into public view at the Capitol. She is directo...

Gov. Madeleine Kunin is an open book. Vermont’s only female governor has been  chronicling her life in books since the mid-1990s, when she penned a memoir,  Living a Political Life. Since serving as Vermont’s governor from 1985 to 1991, Kunin went on to jobs as deputy secretary of education and ambassador to Switzerland. Along the way she has been sharing her insights about women and leadership in...

Alison Bechdel is obsessed. Her passion is exercise – karate, cycling, running, skiing in all its forms, to name a few of her pursuits. This obsession is the focus of Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. A  New York Times book review declares, “This is a true delight of graphic literature, and nobody does it better. You feel as if you’re peering through a plexiglass pan...

When President Ronald Reagan conjured  the “welfare queen” in his 1976 presidential campaign, he created an enduring and damaging myth that people living in poverty were lazy, cheating, minority, urban and female. In fact, more than half of Americans will live part of their life below the poverty line at some point in their lives. And most Americans in poverty are white and do not live in cities....

Syd Ovitt’s life changed forever in November 2017. The student from Pittsfield, Mass., was a freshman at the University of Vermont. She was excited about her new classes and meeting new people. But in her first semester, Ovitt says, she was sexually assaulted by a fellow student. When she reported the attack to UVM officials, a months-long ordeal followed. Her alleged perpetrator was found not gui...

When Anne Sosin contracted Covid-19 in early April, a disease that had been the focus of her academic work suddenly became personal. Sosin, a  policy fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College, has worked globally on public health initiatives. Lately, she has been studying how rural communities in Vermont and New Hampshire have responded to the pandemic. She...

Bestselling Vermont author  Jessica Lahey is done with keeping secrets. In her new book,  The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence , she reveals her best kept secret: she is an alcoholic. The story begins before she sips her first glass of wine, when she becomes aware that alcoholism runs in her family. Acutely conscious of this, she takes precautions to stay away...