Daybreak Thursday, 10/8/26

Clouds, sun, chance of showers. We get it all today, as low pressure tracks eastward with a cold front behind it. Slight chances of showers all morning, but we should also get sunshine for a good part of the day. Highs today again in the low or mid 60s, overnight lows in the lower 40s.

Just chillin’. Geese out for a stroll in Lyme, from Janice Fischel, and a chipmunk embedded in a Hartland sunflower, helping itself to the last seeds of the season, from Rendy Strawbridge.

So much road work! Here’s a trio of things to be aware of:

NH is draining Goose Pond. Again. And the locals are steamed. “This has dragged on for so long,” Goose Pond Association president Michael Riese tells new Valley News staff writer Sophie Levenson. “It’s like Groundhog Day. It’s been very frustrating.” That’s because the pond is being drained for the third time in four years as the state’s Dept. of Environmental Services works to rehab the dam. As Levenson writes, the first project ran behind schedule; then the new gates weren’t sealing properly so the dam had to be drained again. The pond was refilled this spring but now the gates turn out to have a manufacturing defect. Draining started Oct. 1.

SPONSORED: Immigrants and refugees need your help now more than ever. Hearts You Hold currently has 440 requests from individuals and families trying to make a new start in this country, including 49 in Vermont alone. They’re just waiting to be funded by caring people like you. Some are local, others are in New York, Ohio, and elsewhere. You can sort the requests by state or category to find the folks you want to support. You’ll find them all at the burgundy link or here—from basic household goods to clothing to laptops to swimming lessons to diapers to a young mother from Argentina in VT who needs help with baby goods. Sponsored by Hearts You Hold.

Dartmouth study finds alpine peaks in the Northeast are greening. Trees don’t grow at the top of the 500-mile long chain of mountains that runs from the Adirondacks through the Greens and Whites and ultimately out Québec’s Gaspé Peninsula. But flowering plants, rare grasses, and other species do. Now, writes Amy Olson for Dartmouth News, a team using satellite imagery and Appalachian Mountain Club fieldwork results has found that 69 percent of the alpine zones they studied have seen increases in vegetation over the last 40 years; the tree line is advancing and alpine plants are being replaced by shrubs and grasses—especially on the leeward side.

Got $4.2 million? You could own an old Killington lodge. Plus 310 acres that include old ski trails. It once hosted Sunrise Mountain skiers, part of an early Killington expansion, reports WCAX’s Connor Ullathorne; now it’s home to Snowmobile Vermont and ATV Tours, whose owners are moving on. The property, says the listing, is “more than just real estate—it’s a gateway to endless potential.”

SPONSORED: Shaker Bridge Theatre presents the American Premiere of Northanger Abbey by Zoe Cooper. This playful and surprising reimagining is infused with the spirit of Jane Austen's original novel and fizzes with imagination and humor. Catherine Morland knows little of the world, but who needs real-life experience when you have novels to guide you? Seizing her chance to escape her claustrophobic family and join the smart set in Bath, she meets worldly, sophisticated Isabella Thorpe— and her own adventure begins.  "Hilarious" - The Guardian. Runs tonight through Oct. 26. Tickets at the burgundy link or here. Sponsored by Shaker Bridge Theatre. 

NH Supreme Court rejects sole death row inmate’s appeal. Michael Addison was sentenced to death in 2008 for fatally shooting Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs two years before. In 2019, the NH Legislature abolished the death penalty. Addison and his lawyers appealed his sentence, arguing that if the state’s forbidden by law from putting anyone else to death, it shouldn’t be allowed to execute him, either. But on Tuesday, reports NH Bulletin’s William Skipworth, the state Supreme Court turned the appeal down, arguing that it had already ruled that his punishment wasn’t excessive, and if legislators had wanted to make the law retroactive, they could have.

Those lines all seem to be headed in the wrong direction. There’s a set of charts in Greta Solsaa’s VTDigger story about how colleges in VT are faring in the face of declining numbers of college-age students and real financial challenges. They show net income for nine private colleges from 2011 to 2025, and only two were above 0 in 2025: Middlebury and Landmark. In her story, Solsaa looks at what higher ed in the state is doing, from St. Mike’s efforts to boost both enrollment and donations to Middlebury’s budget cuts, sale of a satellite campus, and push to persuade grads to stay in Vermont, to curriculum redesigns at Champlain College and Bennington.

“A traitor with daddy issues.” That’s one way to sum up Benedict Arnold, but as Dan Bolles writes in Seven Days, he was a complicated guy. Traitor, son of the town drunk, but also: “America might not exist without Arnold and his actions at Valcour Island, Ticonderoga, Saratoga and other battles.” Sunday marks the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Valcour Island in Lake Champlain, and Seven Days has a set of articles on it. For his part, Bolles talks to Arnold historian Willard Sterne Randall about why the man synonymous with treason might have turned coat, his remarkable exploits until that moment, and his discontent with Congress and with George Washington.

Nine thousand castles, fortresses, palaces, and ruins around the world, all at your fingertips. Not to mention chateaux, forts, and grand residences. Castle Map pulls them all together in one interactive map. Hitting “surprise me” might land you in Jinshanling, China, in a castle built into the Great Wall, or in a 17th century fortress in Guatemala. Closer to home, Maine’s Fort Knox, built between 1844 and 1869, was the first fort in the state built entirely of granite. Or click on the Cranston Street Armory, in Providence, RI, whose “distinctive yellow bricks, crenellated turrets, and decorative stonework mark it as a historically significant building and neighborhood icon.”

The Thursday Crossword. Here’s Laura Braunstein’s “midi” for the week.

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

Daybreak doesn't get to exist without your support. Help it stick around by hitting the maroon button:

HEADS UP
A Little Lunch Music with George Fowler and Sue Hunt. The two musicians have decades of experience on the traditional music scene, and will share songs, stories, and tunes from New England and beyond. Noon at Upper Valley Music Center.

The Rumney Sessions at Fable Farm in Barnard with Fjord Pinto. The acoustic trio of Josh Berlin on fiddle, Marc Cantlin on bass, and Chris Wiedemann (lead singer for the indie band Fjord Pony) on guitar and vocals will range across Americana, indie folk, and classic folk rock. Plus pizza, soups, wines and ciders. It all starts up at 5:30 pm.

Northanger Abbey opens at the Shaker Bridge Theatre in WRJ. As you saw above, it’s the US debut of Zoe Cooper’s adaptation of the Jane Austen novel. When it opened in London in 2024, The Guardian wrote, “The 21st century swings easily into the 19th…Northanger Abbey may not tread the Empire line but it will make readers and audiences think twice and hear better.” “Pay What You Will” tonight at 7 in the Briggs Opera House, runs through Oct. 25.

Skye Consort & Emma Björling at the Chandler in Randolph. The “Celtic-Scandinavian Chamber-Trad” band lit up a packed house at last year’s New World Festival and are stopping through in the midst of a Quebec and New England tour, with their boisterous arrangements and original compositions using, fiddle, nyckelharpa, cello, bouzouki, banjo, and percussion. 7 pm.

The Hop and the Rockefeller Center screen The Alabama Solution. Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s Oscar-nominated 2025 documentary exposes inhumane conditions and brutal treatment of prisoners in the state using footage shot by several of them on contraband cellphones. Discussion follows. 7 pm in the Loew.

At the Norwich Bookstore, Katherine Wolff reads from and talks about Eleven Kinds of Blue. The middle-grade author’s debut centers on an art-obsessed 12-year-old whose mother’s boyfriend moves into the house and sends things askew. “With equal parts heartache and hope, this debut novel about one girl and her resilience is also a colorful picture of family love, even in the face of crisis,” the publisher writes. 7 pm.

At Still North Books & Bar, yasser elhariry, Jill Jarvis, and This Book is Full of Holes. Chair of the French & Italian Studies department at Dartmouth, elhariry launches his new book this evening tackling, well, holes: “juxtaposing the holey relationships between ancient Hebrew riddles and Hollywood space movies, ’90s grunge and Black astrophysics, Swiss cheese and philosophy, sacred ritual and post-colonial feminism.” He’ll talk it all over with Yale prof Jarvis at 7 pm.

An Evening with Lucinda Williams and Her Band at Lebanon Opera House. There are just a few seats left for the singer with “the heart of folk and the grit of blues-rock,” fresh off a summer tour with Dylan. Grab ‘em now. 7:30 pm.

And anytime, check out JAM’s video highlights for the week: Community tree-planting day in Lebanon last month; baby sparrows in the Gates-Briggs Building in downtown WRJ; and Ali T, Brooks Hubbard, Bow Thayer, Krishna Guthrie, Jim Yeager, and Jenna Rice pay homage to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album in the event organized by Pat Halpin at the Briggs in August.

And for today...

Proof that the world of music is wild and woolly. Fr. Dionysios Tabakis is a Greek Orthodox priest in the coastal city of Nafplio, Greece. As a kid, he taught himself to play on a little plastic guitar, then on a plank with some nails driven in to anchor wires, then on a travel guitar. “In a poor family, there was no spare money for music conservatories,” he told Guitar World this summer. “My father would not even discuss it.” The reason he was being interviewed is that eventually he bought himself an eight-string Harley Benton electric guitar, removed the frets, tuned it like an oud, and began putting tunes—church hymns, ancient Byzantine melodies, modern riffs—on YouTube. A small indie label producer in Greece stumbled on them and convinced Fr. Tabakis to release them as an album on cassette, which the producer cannily entitled Paradise Metal. Just 150 of them. And they went absolutely viral. Now the album’s getting released on vinyl and Fr. Tabakis is headed to London to headline a live show next month. “I never had such ambitions,” he tells Guitar World. “The bad and the good in our lives always come uninvited and without warning. That is the unexpected beauty of life.” Here’s “Hymn of Euripides,” straight from 480 BC.

See you tomorrow.

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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt      Poetry editor: Michael Lipson    Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt

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