GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Daybreak is brought to you this week with help from The Sharon Academy. What if school meant more connection and less screen time? The Sharon Academy serves grades 7–12 with tech-intentional, relationship-centered, individualized education. Come see a different kind of school at our Fall Information Session, Sunday, Oct 18. Register today.
More showers. Things remain cool and generally wet as this weekend’s coastal storm drifts slowly eastward, with rain chances highest in the afternoon and evening, and totals highest to the east and south. The showers and cloud cover will keep things cool: highs today in the upper 50s, lows around 50. Clouds will start to drift apart overnight.
Happy hour at a highland lodge. That’s Jay Davis’s perfect title for his photo from a Lyme beaver pond.
At Dartmouth, Beilock announces review of provost’s AI writings. In an email to campus on Friday, college President Sian Beilock wrote that she’s creating an “independent advisory committee” to look into Provost Santiago Schnell’s use of AI in his public writings, first disclosed by the national news site Semafor related to a Schnell Washington Post op-ed about AI, and then notably expanded last week by The Dartmouth, which found a series of his articles were marked as “AI-written” by the AI detector Pangram. “Leading on something this new and fluid is messy,” Beilock wrote in Friday’s email. “There will be missteps, and that’s part of how an institution learns.” Article by Max Hubbard and Vidushi Sharma in The Dartmouth at the link.
Meanwhile, the campus tempest over the issue also went national on Friday with a Boston Globe article by Brooke Hauser (sorry, paywall), who notes not only the core issues, but the fact that when Schnell initially responded to The Dartmouth’s findings, he used AI to write his email. “In other words, according to The Dartmouth, a provost accused of using AI to write an op-ed about using AI even used AI to write a statement defending his use of AI,” Hauser writes. “It’s a textbook case of exactly what we tell our students not to do,” one prof tells Hauser, who reports a faculty petition circulating calling for Schnell’s removal.
Celebrated Chelsea VT vintage motorcycle racer recovering slowly after freak crash. Tim Courts, a champion racer who restores and races classic European motorbikes, was riding in Vershire on Sept. 10 when the sidecar on his 1965 BMW R50/2 rose as he was rounding a corner, causing him to lose control, cross the center line, and crash into a school van. The van had no passengers and the driver was mostly unscathed, Darren Marcy reported in The Herald last Thursday, but Courts was taken to DHMC with eight broken ribs, a badly fractured humerus (upper arm bone), and badly injured leg and foot. Marcy details the aftermath and an outpouring of support for Courts and his wife, both in Chelsea and from around the world.
“I don’t like to see good food go to waste. I want to see it go to hungry people.” That’s Lyme’s Kathy Waste, who’s a volunteer gleaner for Willing Hands, talking to Valley News intern Sophia Sahni. Last week was Vermont’s first “Week of Gleaning,” which put the Norwich-based nonprofit in the spotlight, and Sahni used the occasion to outline Willing Hands’ work: sourcing fresh produce, dairy, eggs, meat and bread through gleaning, its own vegetable plots, and donations from area food purveyors, then passing it on. With high prices all around, director Gabe Zoerheide tells her, “Folks who normally wouldn’t think of themselves in need of a charitable food system” now do.
SPONSORED: Toast the Upper Valley’s Best at the 2026 Reader’s Choice Awards!Join the Upper Valley Business Alliance and the Valley News on October 28 at the Hilton Garden Inn in Lebanon for an unforgettable evening honoring our top local businesses, from restaurants to gift shops to businesses with the friendliest employees. Enjoy cocktails and hors d'oeuvres while connecting with the people and businesses that make our region thrive. Space is limited, so: Get Tickets Now! Sponsored by the Upper Valley Business Alliance.
For reading teachers around the country, Louisa Moats is “a late-in-life heroine.” Time mag’s Belinda Luscombe visited the 81-year-old Moats at her Fairlee lakehouse for last week’s profile, which focuses on her longstanding advocacy for the notion that “reading is a skill that must be painstakingly taught, first through an understanding of the way sounds make up speech and get represented as letters, then through explicit instruction.” The rigorous, science-based course for teachers Moats developed is now the standard in many states—though as Luscombe notes, it requires many teachers to unlearn what they were taught in college. (h/t Alex Nuti-de Biasi)
Plainfield Pumpkin People hit the roadsides. The annual displays of extreme pumpkin creativity in Meriden, E. Plainfield, and Plainfield officially began their run yesterday, and will last through October. At the link, the PPP FB page, with a whole series of photos already underway.
And speaking of photo series: Dogs. Well, plus their walkers. Demo Sofronas hadn’t planned it, but as he writes on his About Norwich blog, he was out for a morning walk the other day and “I saw David Macaulay and his dogs out for a morning stroll. I was not sure if he was taking them out for a stroll or the other way around, but anyway I thought I would ask him to tell me a little something about them.” Macaulay obliged—and then Demo ran into Worth Parker and his dog, Georgie. And Rowan and Serena Wade and their dog Charlie. And before you know it: a photo (and video) essay.
A good rule while hiking: Listen to your body. On Saturday, a group of four hikers from NJ started up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail to climb Mt. Washington. One 48-year-old member was struggling, so his companions told him to turn around, which he did—and caught a shuttle up to the summit, where he met up with his group again. It was late morning, and he decided to hike down with them. But as NH Fish & Game writes, it took him two hours to go a half mile—and he refused to turn around. The group tried to help him down, including taking turns carrying him on their backs, and called 911 several times. A rescue team eventually met up with them early yesterday.
The Monday Jigsaw: More traveling buildings. The Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross has been on a roll recently with his series about buildings being moved. Today, in the last of the series, he features a city block in Chicago lifted out of the mud, with the shops open. At his Curioustorian blog, he writes about that, and about the reolcation of a Boston hotel and a church in Norwich. As he writes, “Once you know that buildings walked, the Upper Valley reads differently. A Greek Revival house facing the wrong way. A hotel with mismatched halves. A church a few hundred feet from where it was built, facing south….”
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
Dartmouth’s Dickey Center hosts “Who Makes Peace Now? Diplomacy, Conflict, and the Changing International World.” Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Anne Witkowsky, international affairs scholar and policy adviser Elizabeth McClintock, and Dickey Center Director Victoria Holt will talk about the current trend of rising international conflict, efforts to avoid it, and what works on that front. 4:30 pm in Haldeman 41 as well as livestreamed (register here).
And for today...
The widely traveled British vocal ensemble VOCES8 with “Only in Sleep” by Latvian choral composer Ēriks Ešenvalds, with lyrics by poet Sara Teasdale and the solo by its newest member, soprano Virginia Grabovsky.
See you tomorrow.
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