Daybreak Thursday, 7/16/26

Mostly sunny, chance of showers, smoke for a bit. The air’s drying out and temps . will stay in the upper 70s, maybe low 80s. There’s a chance of showers this afternoon, but for the most part we’re looking at sun filtering through wildfire smoke this morning and winds from the west—with gusts this afternoon as a cold front arrives and, among other things, pushes the smoke plume southward, at least for now. Lows tonight in the excellent mid 50s.

Air quality is much better in the region first thing this morning. That’s because an overnight eddy in the smoke plume spared us. According to NOAA’s most recent model run, things will get worse again for several hours from mid-morning today until sometime this afternoon or early evening (depending where you are) as the smoke is pushed away from us. It may be back late tomorrow.

Why Tuesday’s predicted severe storms barely materialized: It was the smoke. Writes Washington Post meteorologist Matthew Cappucci: “The smoke shrouded the skies, cutting sunshine by 30 percent or more. That meant closer to 1,500 or 2,000 units of storm fuel—whereas models had initially simulated 3,000 to 3,500 units. That meant fewer storms formed and they were more delayed; even the parts of New England that did get storms didn’t see them until after dark… The smoke absorbed and reemitted solar radiation, creating a level of heating at 30,000 to 40,000 feet. That new warm layer acted as a ceiling that suppressed thunderstorm updrafts from below.”

Low tide on the Connecticut. Well, no, not really—but for the last couple of days, the river has been kinda freakishly low down around the Windsor-Cornish bridge, where Ian Porter got this photo of two boys taking advantage of the exposed land to go fishing.

Ever wanted to be an extra in a feature film? As you probably remember, JAM is working on its first feature film, a real-deal movie called Valley Transit. Filming begins this Saturday, and it needs “background actors” for a variety of scenes. In particular, they write, they’re looking for help with two larger scenes: at Salt Hill Pub, to be filmed starting in the late evening of Tuesday, July 21, where “you will bring the bustling atmosphere of Salt Hill Pub to life”; and a week later as a protester at Lyman Point/River Park in Hartford, also to be shot starting in the evening (and lasting overnight). You can check out the rest of their locations down below. Includes link for signing up.

Enfield zoning board nixes housing variance. In a 3-2 vote Tuesday, members of the board turned down developer Adam Grounds’ request for a variance to put up 38 units of housing on a 16-acre site off Main Street, reports the Valley News’s Liz Sauchelli. She details the public debate after a site visit—and planning director Rob Taylor’s reaction. “The thing that the Upper Valley needs is what he was trying to deliver, the modest small-square-footage homes that can be owned,” he told her yesterday. “I feel sorry for Adam but I trust that he’s going to be fine. He’s got plenty of options to build on this land without any variances needed.”

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Couple plans bookstore for Hartford Village: “We want people to hang out.” “As gay teenagers in the ’90s and early aughts,” writes Marion Umpleby in the VN, “married couple Tamar and JJ Chalker often struggled to find a place where they could be in community with other queer people that wasn’t a bar.” Now, in a spot once occupied by the Simple Store (now KIS Thrift in Wilder) and owned by Tamar Chalker’s boss, a real estate lawyer, they’re planning to open Sylvia Drake’s Books, specializing in LGBTQ+ literature—plus an espresso bar. They’re getting the first year rent-free, have several investors, and are trying crowdfund a portion of what they need for renovations.

Keeping track of the Windsor County Democratic state Senate candidates. There are six of them for three seats: incumbents Becca White and Joe Major, plus Pomfret lawyer and selectboard chair Ben Brickner; Rep. Elizabeth Burrows of W. Windsor; nurse and former Rep. Heather Chase of Chester; and Hartford firefighter and labor organizer Chris Dube. In that crowded field, writes VTDigger’s Olivia Gieger, candidates are “looking to professional experience and personal disposition—as well as more minute policy differences—to differentiate themselves.” She describes them, from Major’s focus on healthcare to Brickner’s on affordability to Chase’s on economic development, and plenty more.

Two Artistree staffers now share more than an employer. Finance manager Robert Kimmerle, writes Sofia Langlois in the Valley News, had been struggling for 15 years with kidney disease, and one day told his colleagues that he needed a kidney “sooner rather than later.” A few years back, art educator Lisa Kaija had considered donating a kidney to someone else, but realized she wasn’t ready. This time around, she was. “I guess I felt the need to do it, that I would regret it if I didn’t,” she tells Langlois. And so, last November, two transplant surgeons made the swap. Kaija’s recovered. Kimmerle, 51, says “I feel better than I did when I was 35.” Langlois tells the story.

Once again, NH governor vetoes “bathroom bill.” Gov. Kelly Ayotte issued three vetoes yesterday, report NH Bulletin’s Ethan DeWitt and William Skipworth, bringing her total for this session to 29. Among them was the House version of a measure to “allow business owners to separate restrooms and locker rooms by sex at birth, allow sports teams to keep transgender girls and women off female teams, and allow transgender inmates to be placed in jails or prisons corresponding with their sex at birth,” they write. This marked the fourth time Ayotte has knocked down a version of the legislation, which she contends is “overly broad” and “poorly drafted.”

After road veto, NH officials debate the state’s highway and transportation needs. Last week, Ayotte axed the latest 10-year transportation improvement plan, objecting to its highway-toll boost for drivers without an NH EZPass. The move, writes NH Bulletin’s Ethan DeWitt, “has ignited a long-simmering debate over the health and long-term future of the state’s highway funding system and who should pay to support it.” For one thing, the highway fund faces a $400 million shortfall, and two big needs—upgrades to interstates 89 and 93 in Concord and two Manchester exits on I-293—are whoppers, which leads some legislators to think a toll increase is inevitable.

Data center heist was “a bid for criminal immortality.” Terry Ellis stole his first item at age 8, and honed his craft over decades. But the big one, “his criminal Mount Everest,” seemed out of reach. Until 2007, writes Nathaniel Rich in the NYT Magazine (gift link), when Ellis was hired by some shady bankers to put together a team of pros and break into a Verizon data center in London that held incriminating files. Their goal: steal the servers that held those files. (All true, though Rich learned the story doing research for his novel with a similar tale, Cloudthief.) The building seemed impenetrable, but with a stolen police van, uniforms, and a tetchy Alsatian dog …

Yeah, sure, our sky’s a weird color. But think about these guys. A CN Rail crew near Armstrong, Ontario, absolutely surrounded by fire as they’re stalled, waiting for another train to pass. As PetaPixel’s Jeremy Gray writes, the footage “understandably includes coarse language,” which may be why most news coverage of it has announcers speaking over the crew’s comments. Gray embeds the full video, which was originally posted on X by Kingfisher Lake First Nation and Ontario Provincial Parliament member Sol Mamakwa.

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

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HEADS UP
The Wormdogs at Feast & Field. The five-piece, Burlington-based Americana band—Will Pearl, Danica Cunningham, Braden Lalancette, Rick Soszynski, and Nick Ledak—goes from bluegrass to rock to what they call country freak folk. Gates and food at 5:30, music starts up at 6.

In Brookfield, VT: “Moses Robinson: Vermont’s Founding Father You’ve Never Heard Of.” Retired Superior Court Judge Robert Mello has a full-length biography out about Robinson, long considered a minor figure in the state’s founding era, but who—based on archival and other materials—Mello considers “one of the most significant figures in the founding of Vermont and the development of its state institutions.” 6 pm at Brookfield Town Hall.

StoryJam at the Literary Arts Bridge in Hanover. The regular just-show-up storytelling session’s theme this time around is “mishaps.” The space, they write, “is behind Talbot's between Lebanon and South Streets”—maps link in the headline—and “as always, feel free to interpet the theme in whatever way you like.” 6 pm.

At the Howe Library, Russ Cohen and “Edible Plants.” This is the first part of a two-part series with the Hanover Conservancy. Tonight, Cohen—author of Wild Plants I Have Known...and Eaten—will talk about edible plants in the Upper Valley, foraging ethics and techniques, recipes, and more. If you’re there in person (in the Mayer Room, 6:30 pm), you’ll get a chance to try some of his cooking, but you can also just tune in online. On Saturday, he’s leading a field walk in the Mink Brook Nature Preserve, demonstrating field identification skills. That event is full up, but you can join the waiting list by emailing [email protected].

Canaan Meetinghouse Reading with Tomás Q. Morín and Adam Giannelli. Two writers read from their works: Morín’s a novelist, poet, and memoirist, with the novel Cat Love just out and a new poetry collection due next year; Giannelli’s a poet, essayist, and translator, and is the Frost Place poet-in-residence. 7 pm in the Canaan Meetinghouse.

Hop Film screens Ex Machina. Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, and Alicia Vikander in Alex Garland’s 2014 film, in which a young programmer (Gleeson) is brought to a remote mountain fastness by a reclusive CEO and scientist (Isaac) to check out whether the robot he’s created (Vikander) is in fact truly self-aware or just simulating it. What could go wrong? 7 pm in Spaulding.

Larkin Poe returns to the Lake Morey Resort. The force of nature that is singer-songwriting sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell swings from Americana to Delta blues to Southern rock—their roots are in Georgia—with what some people call a “gothic blues” sensibility that blends the blues with Southern Gothic storytelling. Though they can go sweet on their ballads, too. As always, gates and food at 6 pm, music at 8.

And for today...

Larkin Poe (tonight at Lake Morey) last year in Basel, Switzerland, with “Easy Love, Pt. 1”

See you tomorrow.

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