Daybreak Thursday, 8/27/26

Could be an interesting day out there. With low pressure moving into Quebec from the Great Lakes, a series of passing fronts down here will bring chances of showers and thunderstorms this afternoon and tonight. Some of those storms could be strong, with heavy rainfall, maybe some small hail, and respectable wind gusts. On the other hand, we could also see some sun, especially this morning after the fog lifts. Enjoy the uncertainty! Highs today around 80, tonight’s lows only in the low or mid 60s.

Color. Up high and low down.

Hood Museum names new director. Kim Conaty, currently chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, will succeed John Stomberg, who retired this month after a 10-year run. In addition to the Whitney, where she began her museum career, Conaty has done stints at the Museum of Modern Art and the art museum at Brandeis. She got her undergrad degree at Middlebury. “The Hood Museum stands out as a place where discovery is prioritized and viewers of all backgrounds and levels of experience can find points of entry,” she says in the Hood’s press release. “The museum is at an exciting juncture, with a still-new building, tremendous collections, and a great team.” She starts in October.

At Saint-Gaudens, a chance to see two contemporary sculptors. Amidst the well-known sculptures and stunning grounds—“Who doesn’t need a studio with a giant north-facing, angled glass skylight; a vine-draped colonnade; and a marble fountain fed by gilded fish?” writes Alice Dodge in Seven Days—the national historical park brings in two artists a year. This year’s artist-in-residence, New Orleans’ Heidi Mortensen, is ensconced in the Ravine Studio working on a series focused on “people who are just really strong and interesting individuals.” Meanwhile, Queens sculptor Sarah Peters’ works—plaster working models for eventual finished pieces—are also on display.

SPONSORED: Online Language Programs from Dartmouth’s Rassias Center. Online Semi-Intensive Language Programs run Mondays and Wednesdays for six weeks over Zoom beginning September 28. They are an opportunity to start learning a new language, refresh and reinforce a previously studied language, or master a language. Currently offering French, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, and English. Sponsored by The Rassias Center.

With Alcott Smith’s death, the region loses a champion of the natural world—and of timber rattlesnakes. For a good bit of his life, Smith owned and ran the Hanover Veterinary Clinic in Lebanon—but as his longtime friend Ted Levin writes on his Substack, Smith “spent more time in the field with rattlesnakes than in the clinic, and once accidentally stood on one, which bumped his calf twice with the side of its head, as if to say, ‘excuse me.’” He was a long distance runner (Leb to Lyme to Dorchester and back—before breakfast) and an enthusiastic guide for walks run by the Montshire, VINS, and “virtually every conservation commission in the Upper Valley.” He died Aug. 18 at 88, still volunteering his time at a veterinary clinic in Rutland.

In S. Royalton, Mya Johanson juggles checking out estate sales, running her new thrift store… and law school classes. Johanson just opened Royalton Reclaimed in the space once occupied by a secondhand store that closed last year, reports Marion Umpleby in the VN. A second-year student at VT Law & Grad School, Johanson got started selling some of her own clothes on thrifting apps, and realized that her schoolmates could use a handy spot to buy affordable clothes. She runs the shop around her class schedule, Umpleby writes. “Honestly I would be sitting at a desk anyways,” Johanson says, “so I might as well be sitting in a store that I created.”

SPONSORED: Join Eastman Golf Links now for the 2027 season and get free greens fees for the remainder of the 2026 season starting Sept. 1. Pay 50% of the current individual or family membership rate before playing; the remainder, plus any 2027 increase, is due by March 31, 2027. Membership benefits and 2026 rates can be found at https://www.eastmannh.org/golf/membership. Contact our friendly and professional staff with questions at [email protected] or 603-863-4500. Sponsored by Eastman Golf Links.

An “opportunity to teach our students that democratic processes still have power over emerging technologies.” That line comes from Rafe Steinhauer, a Dartmouth engineering prof who studies how schools make decisions, and who’s been working with the Lebanon School District as it confronts what to do about AI use in its schools. In the VN, Molly Hughes juggles a conversation with Steinhauer about the issues AI raises and how schools should grapple with them, and profiles of The Sharon Academy—which has been locking up students’ cellphones and is about to do the same with personal laptops—and the Leb schools’ work on an AI policy.

Head spinning on mail-in ballots? Here are some answers. Yesterday, a federal judge lifted the second of two injunctions against an executive order restricting mail-in ballots, after the US Supreme Court on Monday lifted the first. In NH Bulletin, Ethan DeWitt lays out where things stand now: Yesterday’s ruling doesn’t affect NH’s Sept. 8 primary (“Voters have requested and mailed [absentee ballots] back to the clerks, and so to, you know, interrupt that process just is not practical or appropriate,” says NH Secy of State David Scanlan); the USPS rule on ballots, published yesterday, requires extensive technical changes that DeWitt outlines, and if they make it through yet more legal challenges, would have a real impact on town clerks’ work.

VT, NH in line for windfalls from Meta settlement. The owner of FB and Instagram yesterday agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to 47 states, DC, and various territories to settle a federal lawsuit brought by a bipartisan collection of state attorneys general alleging that its social media platforms are addictive and dangerous to children. In the Monitor, David Brooks and Sruthi Gopalakrishnan report that NH could see up to up to $224 million over the next decade, while VT will pull in $97 million (and possibly more), if the agreement is approved by a judge. Meta also agreed to a set of limits on both platforms for teens, including time limits and muting notifications during school hours.

Once bitten. In a brisk YouTube video, MinuteEarth dives into the reason some people get bitten by mosquitoes way more often than others. Turns out it’s probably not blood type. Instead, female mosquitoes (the biting sex) locate human targets three ways: the carbon dioxide we exhale; human skin tones, which mosquitoes’ vision picks up; and our body heat. But we all have those signals in common, so it’s the fourth signal that really sets human buffets apart: smell. The particular bacterial mix on our skin, and the chemicals it produces, seems to drive how often we’re bitten. Sadly, that mix is governed by our genes.

Not really like a dahlia, but petal-esque? Just to bring things full circle from up top: The world’s most powerful telescope, the Inouye Solar Telescope, recently captured the sharpest image of the sun’s surface ever taken. What you see here are “deformed boundaries of magnetic elements and ultra-fine scale stripes, both associated with Kelvin-Helmholtz instability,” writes the NSF—or, to the rest of us, magnetic fields as they’re twisted by the motion of hot gas. Whatever, but isn’t there something vaguely floral about it?

The Thursday Crossword. It’s Laura Braunstein’s “midi,” and you’ll definitely want to be an Upper Valleyite for a couple of those questions.

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

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HEADS UP
Jodi Lew-Smith on the history of Vermont poor farms at the Norwich Public Library. The NEK novelist and story writer roots her fiction in history, and today she’ll be talking about the rise and decline of the poor farm system across rural New England—especially as it relates to her novel Asa James, which has at its center a young man raised on a Vermont poor farm in 1875. 5:30 pm in the community room.

Billy Wylder at Feast & Field. Avi Salloway and his indie art-rock band have a global mindset—sparked in no small part by Salloway’s years on tour with Tuareg guitar master Bombino—with “echoes of Talking Heads, Beck, and Tinariwen…throughout, but the band’s sound is uniquely immersive, with hypnotic rhythms and songs that unfold like ecosystems.” At Fable Farm in Barnard, gates and food at 5:30, music at 6.

And it’s a wrap at the Lake Morey Resort with Muscadine Bloodline. After tonight, the resort’s Mark Avery, his sisters, the tech crew, and the many, many people who’ve kept the summer concert series running each week get to take a well-deserved break. But first, the Alabama-based duo of Charlie Muncaster and Gary Stanton have made a name for themselves with songs rooted in strong storytelling about the South in general and southern Alabama in particular. Gates and food at 6 pm, music at 7.

And for today...

Some “Durward” honky tonk from Muscadine Bloodline (tonight at Lake Morey).

See you tomorrow.

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