The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

For Noah Dines, life has been an uphill climb. And that is his dream come true. Dines, a 30 year-old Stowe local, is in the process of setting a new world record for human powered vertical feet skied in one year. The previous record had been 2.5 million feet set in 2016 by Aaron Rice, another Stowe skier. Dines broke Rice’s record in September, then surpassed his original goal of skiing 3 million...

Ben Jealous has a long and deeply personal perspective on the fight for social and environmental justice. Jealous was elected president and CEO of the NAACP in 2008 at the age of 35, making him the youngest person to lead America’s oldest civil rights organization. Since 2022, he has been the executive director of the Sierra Club, the first person of color to lead one of the country’s oldest and l...

John Rodgers is the most interesting man in Vermont politics. And he just may be its future. The Democrat-turned-Republican who just won the race for Vermont's lieutenant governor did something that has not been done since 1815: he became lieutenant governor by defeating the incumbent lieutenant governor in a general election.al election. Rodgers’ 6,000 vote victory over sitting Lt. Gov. David Zuc...

One year ago, Elizabeth Price was awoken by a phone call with news that every mother dreads: Her son, Hisham Awartani, had been shot, along with his two best friends. It was Thanksgiving 2023, and the three 20-year old college students — all of them Palestinian or Palestinian-American — were taking a walk while visiting Awartani's grandmother in Burlington. The shocking, unprovoked attack against...

It has been nearly two decades since a Vermonter won a coveted Rhodes Scholarship, widely considered the most prestigious scholarship in the world. The Rhodes Scholarship pays for international students to pursue postgraduate studies for up to three years at Oxford University in England. This week, Lena Ashooh of Shelburne was named a 2025 Rhodes Scholar. She is one of 32 Rhodes Scholars chosen fr...

President-Elect Donald Trump has vowed to take revenge on his enemies. He promised to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on Day 1 and to further restrict reproductive rights. And he is threatening to overturn longstanding environmental protections and public health measures. With Republicans now in control of all three branches of government in Washington, state attorneys general a...

America has chosen a strong man — with an emphasis on “man.” Donald Trump wagered that that a key to victory was appealing to men. His misogynist comments, his contempt for social and political norms, his embrace of authoritarian strongmen around the world was aimed at winning over men, especially young non-college educated men. It worked: the 2024 election results reflected an historic gender gap...

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 M...

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...

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...

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 kill...

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 fire...

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...

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, tro...

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 performe...

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 shoebo...

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 Fo...

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...

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 Dea...

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 esta...

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 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...

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 Tru...

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 nat...

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 floodin...