Daybreak Friday, 8/28/26

Partly sunny, maybe some showers to the north. There’s a cold front moving slowly from west to east today, and though rain is most likely in the Northeast Kingdom and east of there, you never know . Mostly, though, we’re looking at skies getting a bit clearer this afternoon, highs around 80, and mostly clear skies tonight with lows in the low 50s.

In motion. Two short videos this morning…

I-91/I-89 heads up for next week. For starters, one lane of I-89 southbound from the ramp feeding off I-91N to beyond Exit 20 in NH will be closed Monday-Wednesday next week (weather permitting) as NHDOT work continues on the bridge over the river. And while that’s going on, the Exit 10A NB ramp from I-91N to I-89S will be closed completely; traffic will be detoured up to I-91 Exit 12 (Wilder), then back down 91 to Exit 10A SB onto I-89 South. That’s going to be some traffic fun, eh? Best just to avoid the whole thing if you can.

Such a good time for roasted tomato soup! Most of Jenny Sprague’s entry in this week’s Edgewater Farm blog is devoted to how it came to be that Dolly Parton (especially “Island in the Stream”) came to be “the soundtrack to my 18 years at Edgewater”—hers and others’—but she also notes that a lot of what’s coming out of the fields these days is “welcome back to lunch box season”: cherry tomatoes, lunch box peppers, cukes, melons… So home chef and food writer Mitchell Davis has just the recipe, because as he points out, the sweetness of tomatoes is enhanced by roasting.

So, what if you had no phone or internet for weeks? And weeks…? All over the White River Valley this summer, reports Darren Marcy in The Herald, people from Chelsea to S. Royalton to Tunbridge went without Fidium service. In June, July, and August, for instance, Emily Howe and John O’Brien in Tunbridge had no phone or internet—while O’Brien was running in a contested primary for re-election to the VT House. “We’ve made people furious, missed messages, missed appointments, and have been fearful for our own, and our clients’, safety in case of an emergency,” Howe tells Marcy. Repeated calls for a technician went mostly ignored. A SoRo couple in their 80s had a similar experience. Marcy’s own attempts for comment have all been a bust.

Former Sanders campaign aide to face competency evaluation after Lebanon incident. You may remember Sheila Healy’s chaotic arrest in July after she brought Mechanic Street to a halt, threatened people trying to help her, and tried to grab a police officer’s gun. Since then, reports Alex Ebrahimi in the Valley News, there have been multiple attempts to hold arraignment and bail hearings—including one that was cancelled because Healy refused to leave her cell. The Leb Circuit Court has scheduled a competency hearing for Sept. 21, and granted a motion aimed at easing “immediate admission to … an in-patient mental health treatment facility” if she’s granted bail.

SPONSORED: Explore public art across Dartmouth’s Campus. Did you know the Hood Museum has artwork outside? The collection of public art across Dartmouth’s campus is intended to enhance the environment in which we study, work, and live. The works are for everyone, so we welcome viewers to take advantage of a late New England summer and experience these public artworks in whatever way makes sense to you. Be sure to check out the Campus Art Map and audio tour, which will help guide your experience around campus! Sponsored by the Hood Museum.

Not your typical high school garage band. Back when he auditioned for MINC, 19-year-old mandolinist Sam Acus—who already had substantial bluegrass performing chops under his belt—was taken aback. “When we all started playing, I was like, Whoa. This is seriously good,” he tells Seven Days’ Chris Farnsworth. The band of high school musicians is led by Woodstock Union senior Satori Rossi and it includes plenty of All-State players, offering “a crash course in how to be a professional band for musicians who aim to pursue the a career in the field,” Farnsworth writes, with performances around VT—and, soon, beyond it—and all the logistics handled by members.

A performing arts bounty. In the VT Standard, Tom Ayres surveys the fall scene at Artistree, BarnArts, the Chandler, the Hop, Lebanon Opera House, Northern Stage, Pentangle, Seven Stars Arts, and Shaker Bridge Theatre. There’s too much to mention in just a few lines here, but some of the highlights include the Chandler’s New World Festival on Labor Day Sunday, soprano Luette Saul and pianist Matthew O’Dell with music of Ravel at Artistree in September, Lucinda Williams and John Scofield at LOH, John Proctor is the Villain and Frozen: The Broadway Musical at Northern Stage, a wealth of concerts at the Hop, the US premiere of British playwright Zoe Cooper’s Northanger Abbey at Shaker Bridge… Oh, just go check it all out.

SPONSORED: You've seen him in Glee. You know him as Coalhouse Walker in Ragtime. Now come hear the two-time Tony-winning star Brian Stokes Mitchell at the Hop on September 15. He’ll be singing iconic Broadway hits in an unforgettable evening celebrating the American Songbook. Get tickets today! Sponsored by the Hopkins Center for the Arts.

Hiking Close to Home: French’s Ledges Trails, Plainfield, NH. This entire trail network is perfect for hiking and snowshoeing, and most of it is readily accessible to cross-country skiers and mountain bike use as well, says the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. Ascending the final section of the red-blazed French’s Ledges Trail leading up to the 1,310-foot-high Ledges is well worth the climb to the top, where you can take in spectacular 360-degree views of Croydon and Grantham Mountains, Mt. Ascutney, and the village of Meriden.

Daybreak’s Upper Valley News Quiz. Were you paying attention this week? Because we’ve got questions! Like, what have Dartmouth and DHMC researchers discovered about alpha-gal syndrome? And what did that NH guy whose house was on fire do that made the news? You’ll find those and more at the link. Meanwhile, here’s NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz, while Seven Days’ Vermont quiz is here.

Federal court rules that NH school district discriminated against parents silently protesting transgender athlete. You may remember that back in 2024, two parents at a Bow High girls’ soccer match wore pink “XX” wristbands to symbolize their opposition to a transgender student’s participation. The district removed them and banned them from future games for harassment. Initially, a lower court backed the school district, but on Wednesday, reports the Monitor’s Sruthi Gopalakrishnan (via NHPR), the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, ruling that the wristbands “fell short of harassment and disruption” and that the school district’s actions amounted to discrimination against a viewpoint.

VT House speaker’s race gets a Republican entrant. Given national trends this year and an already robust Democratic majority in the chamber, it’s unlikely that Gina Galfetti, who represents the Barre area, will emerge with the gavel when the House organizes in January. Majority Leader Lori Houghton is a clear favorite so far, and Woodstock Democrat Charlie Kimbell is in the race, too. But as Guy Page writes in the VT Daily Chronicle, Galfetti thinks voters should have their say before a speaker is anointed. She says she would establish a hard adjournment date of April 15, and would appoint committee chairs regardless of party.

Researchers in VT, NH, and ME will be studying this winter’s snowpack. In particular, reports VT Public’s Abagael Giles, they’ll be setting up automatic sensors on mountaintops, at middle elevations, and in the states’ valleys to measure both snow depth and density—replacing a system that depended on measuring snow by hand. The idea, thanks to a $5.9 million NSF grant, is to make real-time data available to resorts, weather forecasters, hydrologists, municipalities, and others whose work—and ability to forecast and plan for snow and wintertime rain impacts—depends on understanding the state of the snowpack.

A 25-foot fall from a nest: “Don’t worry, this is perfectly normal.” Each year, goslings that have been nesting high up in the Julia Butler Hansen Refuge for the Columbian White-tailed Deer—a US Fish & Wildlife Service refuge in Washington State—have to join their parents on the ground. So they launch themselves into thin air. And Jake Bonello, the refuge manager and a photographer, was there to capture it. As the Interior Department explains, “Goslings are incredibly lightweight, and their fluffy down helps cushion the fall. After the big jump, they'll spend the rest of the summer sticking close to their parents until they're ready to take flight on their own.”

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak.

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HEADS UP

As always, you’ll find plenty going on tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday in the Weekend Heads Up.

And for today...

Whatever you think you know about K-Pop, Leenalchi will shake it. The band’s roots do not lie in the studio-system factory that shapes much of what the world sees. Instead, they rest in 17th-century Korea and the tradition of musical storytelling known as pansori that came out of it; the band takes its name from a 19th-century regional pansori master. One of its creators is longtime film composer Jang Young-gyu, who also played bass for Ssingssing, a rock band rooted in shamanistic tradition that in 2017 had a highly unlikely viral appearance at NPR’s Tiny Desk, which then inspired Jang to team up with Ssingssing’s drummer and a group of pansori singers they’d met to explore the form’s potential. It’s easy to get all high-falutin’, but Jang insists that for the band, the pop mostly comes first. Here’s “Bird”.

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