Daybreak Monday 8/24/20

WAIT. IT'S MONDAY?

Because it may seem a lot like Sunday. Starting out cloudy, becoming mostly sunny, temps warming into the mid-80s, and a decent chance of rain and thunderstorms this afternoon, which if they show up could produce heavy rain. Up above, the high pressure that saw us through the weekend is giving way to a low that's moving in and may produce showers overnight. Lows only in the mid-60s.A quick request... For many of you, Friday's Daybreak may have been unceremoniously dumped in your spam filter; if you missed it, that's where you'll find it. To avoid this happening again, you can "whitelist" it or add it to your contacts so that your email provider knows you actually want to see it. Here's how to do it if you use Gmail, or use Yahoo, or have a Dartmouth.edu email address (you'll want option 3, "mark as not junk" or "never block sender"). Use that Dartmouth link if you're on Microsoft Outlook. Thanks! 

Okay, now let's catch up. 

Warring letters at Dartmouth. On Friday, faculty members sent off an open letter to the college leadership urging that Dartmouth “adopt a fully remote, non-residential plan” rather than bringing back undergrads as planned. It's been signed by over 170 members of the faculty, including the chairs of several departments. Not to be outdone, the Student Assembly—the official student government on campus—responded with a letter urging the administration "to not be swayed by events at other institutions" and to reopen as planned. It's gathered over 1,000 signatures from students and recent alums.Health officials really want you to get your flu shot. They just haven't figured out how yet. Flu symptoms are similar to Covid symptoms, of course, and they're trying to keep hospital beds from filling up with both this fall and winter. But local health organizations are still sorting out how to hold flu clinics safely for the public, in schools, and elsewhere, reports the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr. One likely option: drive-thru clinics."I guess I was 'forest bathing' before I had ever heard of the term..." Jason Berard is the stewardship director for the Upper Valley Land Trust. He talked to Northern Woodlands about how he got into it—he started as a volunteer for the Dartmouth Outing Club helping maintain the AT—and where the field is headed. These days, he helps the UVLT oversee 54,000 acres of conserved land with over 200 miles of trails, and focuses partly on "making land conservation meaningful to the whole community," like using wood from a timber harvest for heating assistance or growing produce for people who are food-insecure.A note of caution about threats "blown out of proportion." Friday's coverage of Vermont Law School's campus evacuation after a faculty member received an "ambiguous" letter from a student included the SoRo police chief's suggestion that the school had over-reacted. Steve Lawson was on the faculty at Virginia Tech at the time of its devastating 2007 mass shooting, and in a letter to Daybreak notes that that school was accused of over-reacting to an earlier incident, and so responded "less diligently" to the first sign of trouble in 2007. "It's right to err on the side of caution," he writes. Full letter at the link.Crossed fingers in Folkestone. You may remember that early last month, Vera Rivard, the 16-year-old open-water-swimming phenom who trains at the Upper Valley Aquatic Center, swam around Manhattan. She's now in England waiting for her chance at the second piece of open-water swimming's triple crown: swimming across the English Channel. Her assigned weeklong window opened today, but her mom, who's updating regularly on FB, posted yesterday that the support-boat pilot—who gets final say on when the attempt happens—says the weather for the next few days looks unpromising.Big-screen indoor movies are going to be limited for a while. That's the upshot of John Lippman's column in the VN yesterday. The Nugget in Hanover reopened last month, then closed 13 days later after customers failed to show up and studios shut down the release pipeline. Meanwhile, the Miracle Mile cinemas have been "closed since March and the manager’s phone line at the theater says it is out of service," Lippman reports. Claremont's Cinemas Center does have "throwback" movies on Friday and Saturdays.With NH's Democratic primary for governor on its way... The two candidates for the nomination to oppose likely Republican nominee (and incumbent) Chris Sununu, like their counterparts in Vermont, have struggled to command much coverage ahead of the Sept. 8 primary. The Concord Monitor's Ethan DeWitt profiles Senate Majority Leader Dan Feltes and Executive Councillor Andru Volinsky. You want racial disparity data on policing in New Hampshire? What data? Last week, the Vermont State Police released its yearly report on the demographics of traffic stops. On the other side of the river, writes Monitor columnist Ray Duckler, tracking progress on the racial makeup of police forces in the state or on traffic stops is near-impossible. "We lack a centralized system that documents race and other demographic information about the police themselves and the people they stop," Duckler writes.Disparities in NH teacher salaries hamstring districts. A starting teacher in the highest-paid district can make $17,000 more than his or her counterpart in the lowest-paid district—and the gap widens over time, writes Sarah Earle of Reaching Higher NH. The result? Poorer school districts lose teachers at a high rate. Superintendents on the low end say they’re forced to "hire inexperienced teachers, train them, then lose them within a few years to better-paying districts," Earle writes—just as those teachers are hitting their stride.“I swear, everybody...has a new pressure-treated deck on or something.” Bike shops are full out, canning supplies are flying off the shelves, cash registers are running dry of coins... and now you can't find pressure-treated lumber. Jason Larabee, who runs a building-supply shop in Danville, VT, says the cost of treated wood has doubled during the pandemic as homeowners build their own decks or hire someone else. "The general public," says the head of the VT builders association, "they've been staying home."The VT Legislature's coming back into session. They start up this week on the pandemic-era state budget, as well as on a plan to tax and regulate marijuana, a bill legally requiring the state to meet carbon reduction targets, reforming Act 250 (the state's basic land use law), and pressing forward on criminal justice and police reform. VTDigger's Xander Landen and Kit Norton run through what's ahead. Sunset before the storm. Mt. Ascutney was a hulking shadow to the south and a thunderstorm was moving in when William Daugherty got his drone up over Plainfield yesterday evening, the sky dramatic, the clouds pink-orange, the lights twinkling on below....Oh, and if you want to see what it looked like over Ascutney during the storm... Jennifer Hannux caught it on video. Of course, you can only see when the lightning's flashing.

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As you can see, everyone else is easing into the week, so let's join them. Here's Anoushka Shankar

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