The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

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 col...

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 c...

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 documen...

Erika Nichols-Frazer was like many kids growing up in the resort town of Stowe. She loved to snowboard and play hockey. But Erika hid a dark secret: She was at war with food. By eighth grade, she had anorexia, an eating disorder. She was starving herself, and her weight dropped below 80 pounds. Erika ended up in a psychiatric institution as her family worked to help her with her eating disorder. B...

For this 10th anniversary Vermont Conversation , we invited back our first guest. Bill McKibben was on the inaugural broadcast of the Vermont Conversation on Jan. 16, 2013. As a journalist, he has eloquently chronicled the impact of the climate crisis across the globe and put a human face on what too often is cast as a political or scientific problem. He is the author of some 20 books, including “...

The past week has been filled with images of high conflict. There was the shocking violent right-wing attacks on government institutions in Brazil, which appear to be a copycat of the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. Then there was the chaotic election of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a madcap four-day, 15-round epic in which a small far-right fact...

On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy ended his remarkable 48-year career as the senator from Vermont. Leahy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1974 at the age of 34. He is now 82. He was the first Democrat elected to Congress from Vermont, and until this week, the only Vermont Democratic senator, since Sen. Bernie Sanders is an independent. Leahy was also the last of the Senate's "Watergate Babies" elect...

As one news outlet after another downsizes and closes, who is going to do the journalism in the future? That’s the question asked by Ken Tingley, the former editor of the Post-Star, the newspaper in Glens Falls, N.Y. Over the last decade, Tingley watched as his newsroom went from a staff of about 50 to just 7 people today. He chronicles what has happened to local news in his new book, “The Last Am...

“Greed is good.” That idea was famously uttered by a fictional stockbroker named Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.” That line leapt out at Jon Erickson. He was an undergraduate studying economics at Cornell University in the late 1980s and he was coming to believe that the misguided priorities of conventional economics did not lead to prosperity, but to a fail...

International human rights lawyer Reed Brody has been dubbed the “Dictator Hunter.” He has helped pursue and bring to justice notorious dictators including Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti and Yahya Jammeh of Gambia. One dictator became a special focus of Brody’s global pursuit of justice. Hissène Habré was the former despot who ruled Chad from 1982 until he was...

A transgender Vermont high school student who was the target of a transphobic hate campaign is breaking her silence. “I want to be able to go out there and kind of just say, ‘I am trans, I am here,’” said the 14-year-old first-year student at Randolph Union High School, who asked to be identified as Rabbit in this interview. The Vermont Conversation and VTDigger are protecting the student’s privac...

Santa Claus is coming to town. But the person shimmying down the chimney may not be the rotund, bearded white man who has long played the role of St. Nick.   “Santa Camp” is a new documentary from HBO Max about an effort to diversify who represents Santa Claus. The story begins at the annual summer camp of the New England Santa Society, which represents more than 100 Christmas performers. The Sant...

When a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama addressed the 2004 Democratic Convention, he vaulted onto the national stage through the power and grace of his words. In that speech, he challenged Americans to have “the audacity of hope.” President Obama went on to become one of the greatest political orators of our time. Obama has had a silent partner in crafting his oratory. In 2006, a no...

Abortion was on the ballot in this week’s midterm elections and the results were emphatic: Voters, even in conservative states, want abortion rights over abortion bans. This election featured the most ballot measures on abortion in a single U.S. election. Vermonters voted by a more than 3-to-1 margin to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. California and Michigan also approved const...

When Rue Mapp goes for a hike, she does more than smell flowers and enjoy vistas. She breaks barriers. Mapp is challenging the idea that the outdoors are just for white people. In 2009, she founded Outdoor Afro, a blog to “reconnect Black people with the outdoors through outdoor education, recreation, and conservation.” Today, Outdoor Afro is a national nonprofit operating in 60 cities with more t...

In 2016, Sky Yardley, then 66, was diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable and fatal condition. Sky and his wife, Jane Dwinell, decided to face Alzheimer’s in their own way. The Vermont couple began blogging and speaking about Sky’s increasing dementia in an effort to reduce stigma about the disease. Their blog was called Alzheimer’s Canyon, which was Sky’s term for a place wi...

John Irving, widely hailed as one of America’s greatest novelists, is back, and he has a lot to say. John Irving, 80, is the author of 15 novels, including the international bestsellers “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which is his top-selling book. Irving’s latest novel, “The Last Chairlift,” was released Oct. 17. It has been seven years in the...

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 change, to encounters on the street — or in his case, on th...

Danielle Prescod is done being the “Token Black Girl.” Prescod was one of the only Black students in her prep school in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was captain of the tennis team, attended Tufts University and New York University, and went on to jobs at prestigious and influential fashion and beauty magazines including Elle, InStyle and BET, where she was style director. As Prescod grew older, she...

Sixty years ago this week, author Rachel Carson published the landmark book, "Silent Spring." Carson argued that pesticides, especially DDT, were poisoning people and the environment. and that the chemical industry was spreading disinformation in order to profit from this disaster. "Silent Spring" inspired the modern environmental movement and led to the banning of DDT in 1972. Today, DDT is back,...

American democracy may rise or fall on whether or not citizens succeed in preserving the right to vote. The battle to save voting rights has reached a critical phase. Following former President Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, nearly 400 Republican-written bills restricting voting access were introduced in legislatures nationwide. Last year, legislators in every state except Vermont introduced at le...

Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist, an evangelical Christian and a Texan. Those three parts of her identity do not always play well together. That’s why she is determined to find effective ways to communicate with people who do not agree with her. Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist who studies climate change. She is a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist at The...

Ralph Nader is America’s most famous consumer rights advocate. He is a relentless critic of corporate corruption and a former presidential candidate. Nader, now 88, achieved early fame in 1965 with the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of auto safety problems with Americans cars. He went on to become a key leader in the anti-nuclear power movement. He has run for president several tim...

Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, progressive talk radio host Thom Hartmann introduced a new segment on his radio show on WDEV in Vermont. He invited then-Rep. Bernie Sanders on for a segment he dubbed “Brunch With Bernie.” The program featured Vermonters calling in to pepper Sanders with questions, and the representative took on all comers and all issues. The program was a hit, and...

Becca Balint is on the cusp of making history. On Aug. 9, Balint decisively won the Democratic primary for Vermont’s at-large U.S. House seat, defeating Lt. Gov. Molly Gray by a margin of 24 points. If she wins the general election in November, Balint will become the first woman and the first openly gay person to represent Vermont in the U.S. Congress. Vermont is the only state that has never elec...