The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

In 2010, Debra Meyerson, 53, was a Stanford professor and avid skier, hiker and biker. But after dropping her oldest son off at college on Labor Day weekend, she had a severe stroke. In an instant, her life and her identity transformed. She could not speak and was partly paralyzed. Meyerson is one of 790,000 people annually who have a stroke, a leading cause of death and disability in the U.S. Deb...

Liam Madden handily won the Republican primary for Vermont’s lone U.S. House seat, defeating his two opponents by 8 points and 13 points respectively. He now faces Democrat Becca Balint in the November election. There’s just one problem: Madden has renounced the Republican party. The Vermont Republican Party has returned the favor and renounced Madden as its candidate.  “The state party would not...

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His parents, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, were leaders of the Weather Underground, the militant group that formed in 1969 to ignite a revolution in the U.S. and fight American imperialism and racism, sometimes violently. The FBI called Bernadine Dohrn "the most dangerous woman in America." The group backed bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and the...

Emi Nietfeld was like many high school seniors, dutifully filling out college applications. But unlike most other applicants, she was trying to get into an Ivy League school while writing college essays in the front seat of her Toyota Corolla, where she was living. Nietfeld’s family fell apart when her mother, who was a hoarder, could not care for her and put Emi on anti-psychotic medication rathe...

When Michael Colburn was growing up in St. Albans, he dreamed of becoming a euphonium player in a band. He never imagined that the band would be “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band and that he would lead it for a decade, until 2014. As director of the nation’s top military ensemble, Colburn served as music adviser to the White House and regularly conducted the Marine Band and Chamber O...

Somewhere in America each week, two more newspapers call it quits. Some 2,500 dailies and weeklies have closed since 2005, and just 6,500 remain. In places where once there was vibrant local coverage, there are now news deserts. The Community News Service at The University of Vermont thinks it has an answer to this growing blight: student journalists. UVM’s Community News Service, or CNS, partners...

“Children of sect seized in Vermont,” blared the headline on the front page of the New York Times on June 23, 1984.  The newspaper reported, “About 140 state police officers and social service workers raided 20 homes near (Island Pond, Vermont) early this morning and took into custody 112 children of the Northeast Kingdom Community Church because members had refused to answer complaints about chil...

“Support our troops” is a familiar slogan heard when American troops are deployed abroad. But are returning soldiers supported when they return home? Nearly half of troops returning from post-9/11 deployments report having reintegration problems, almost double the number reported by earlier veterans. Former President Donald Trump tapped into this vein of discontent and won 60% of the veterans’ vot...

You never know where you will hear chamber music in Vermont. You could encounter a string quartet performing in a bookstore. In a café. At a bar. Or a retirement community. If it’s July, the musicians are likely to be participants in the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival. Started in 2005, the festival attracts more than 200 young string musicians from high school to graduate school. The progra...

As countries around the world, including the U.S., confront rising authoritarianism, one country may offer insight into how democracy can triumph over minority rule. South Africa was supposed to go up in flames when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. White people feared that the Black majority would take their revenge on those who long oppressed them. Instead, Mandela oversaw a peaceful tran...

“If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts — and in the rule of law itself — can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power, including its power to act as a check on the other branches,” retired Justice Stephen Breyer warned last year. Many Supreme Court observers, and even its own dissenting justices, are wondering if what Breyer forewarned has now come to...

In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion, half of women in the U.S. live in states where they are at imminent risk of losing abortion access. Against this backdrop, Vermont is moving to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. In November, Vermonters will vote on Proposal 5, the Reproductive Liberty Amend...

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, it left each state to decide its own abortion laws. Many Republican-led states are reverting to the anti-abortion laws that were on the books before 1973 when Roe legalized abortion. Vermont legalized abortion a year before Roe. In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a 122 year-old law that made it a crime for a doctor to perfo...

Bill McKibben thought he knew where he came from. He grew up in the tidy, affluent and predominantly white suburban community of Lexington, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he gave tours on the Lexington Battle Green, regaling visitors with tales about the opening shots of the American Revolution. He thought the United States was the greatest force for good in the world. Fifty years later, McKibben,...

When Erica Heilman heard about the death by suicide of 17-year-old Finn Rooney, she initially recoiled from telling the story. It was too raw. But Heilman, an independent podcaster and the creator of Rumble Strip, lives by the credo, “good conversation takes its time.” So she patiently waited and continued talking with Rooney’s mother. The story that evolved was not about suicide. It was about how...

The students graduating from Vermont’s high schools this year are extraordinary in many ways. For most of high school, they have been on the frontlines of a global pandemic. They attended school from their bedrooms. They had to find the strength to forge connection and community while enduring personal isolation. They returned to school wearing masks to keep each other and their families safe as t...

How did abortion rights become a battlefront in the culture wars? Felicia Kornbluh has been a participant observer in the fight for reproductive justice. Kornbluh is a professor of history and of gender, sexuality and women's studies at The University of Vermont. She is also chair of the board of the Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund. Kornbluh’s work to advance reproductive justice carries...

Has rural America turned a permanent shade of red? Or have Democrats abandoned rural voters, competing only in cities? Chloe Maxmin has been pioneering a new style of progressive politics in conservative, rural Maine — and winning, earning her national attention. Maxmin is a climate activist who graduated from Harvard in 2015, where she and classmate Canyon Woodward co-founded Divest Harvard, a cl...

A tsunami of censorship is sweeping across America. In 2021, there were attempts to remove nearly 1,600 books from libraries, schools and universities — a four-fold increase over 2019, according to the American Library Association. Censorship typically focuses on books that cover LGBTQ+ issues or race and racism. But is censorship sometimes necessary? The alleged gunman who killed 10 people in Buf...

Abortion may soon be outlawed in much of the United States. If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the landmark 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, 28 states are poised to ban or further limit abortion access. This would end nearly a half century during which reproductive rights were constitutionally protected. Melinda Moulton vividly remembers the days before abortion was legal. She was 12 years old when he...

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 normally pro-forma certification of President Joe Biden’s election.  But Raskin was blindsided. On December 31, 2020, Raskin’s only son, Tommy, a...

Could feeling bad be essential to feeling good? That’s the contention of clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. She is a professor of psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she directs the Emotion Regulation Lab. She is the author of a new book, "Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good For You (Even Though It Feels Bad)." Anxiety and depression are...

In 1820, The Emancipator became the first newspaper in the country devoted exclusively to the cause of abolishing slavery. It was published in Tennessee, a slave state. Other abolitionist newspapers followed, such as The Liberator, published by famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper founded and edited by abolitionist leader Frederick Dougl...

When residents of Wuhan, China, began mysteriously falling ill in December 2019, the Chinese government quickly moved to quash news about the disease outbreak. That crackdown on information proved to be the perfect accelerant for the Covid-19 pandemic to take off and spread throughout the world. Censorship has been a deadly component of the pandemic, asserts Joel Simon, who is co-author with Rober...

Lois Gibbs knew something was not right when her 5-year-old son began having seizures. She soon discovered the local school and playground in Niagara Falls, New York, was built on a toxic waste dump known as Love Canal. It was 1977. Gibbs soon transformed from a suburban housewife into a crusading activist who changed the face of the national environmental movement and whose work led to the creati...