GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Patchy fog, then mostly—but not entirely—cloudy. Drier air is flowing into the region from the southwest today, and it should—though the weather folks are hedging a little—bring us hints of sun throughout the day, along with a high getting to around 60. Winds this afternoon from the southwest, cloudy skies and lows tonight around 40.Taking to the air...
In particular, this magnificent bald eagle. Writes E. Thetford's Erin Donahue, it "was facing backwards on the lower branch, started to pivot and took off exactly framed between the two branches. Just a beautiful moment of grace...."
As well as Alex Torpey's drone, which got this magical shot of the fog rolling over South Royalton on Saturday.
A move to make Route 5 more bike-friendly. On the Hartland Bicycle Club's blog, biking advocate Karl Kemnitzer points to a little-noticed development: the VT legislature wants VTrans to look into creating a biking corridor from MA to QC, so this month the agency is asking towns and regional planning commissions along Route 5 for their input. The road could be "a strong candidate for bicycle tourism," Kemnitzer writes, but it's not clear towns see it that way—though the federal Rails to Trails "would love" to use it to connect the Northern Rail Trail from its end in Leb to the Lamoille Valley Trail in St. J.At Hanover Selectboard meeting, public talks workforce housing vs. conservation concerns. The issue at Monday's forum, Patrick Adrian reports in the Valley News, was the town's plan to develop five acres by the Mink Brook Community Forest for affordable housing. There was plenty of support, Adrian writes, from people concerned about the housing crisis in the region—and concern from others, as Daybreak writer Bea Burack noted back in August, about the project's density and conservation impact. The town remains in closed-door negotiations with Twin Pines on a path forward for the project.SPONSORED: Little Shop of Horrors Is still the best musical Off-Broadway! The beloved, kooky, and somewhat spooky musical Little Shop of Horrors takes center stage at the Grange Theatre just in time to get us in the mood for some freaky Fall fun! The show opens tomorrow, Oct. 19, and runs through October 29. Reserve your seats now! Sponsored by Artistree."We are all grieving different things all the time—sometimes even before they are actually gone." The Yankee Bookshop's Kari Meutsch found herself reflecting on that idea recently, after picking up Melissa Broder's new novel, Death Valley. It's about a writer who escapes to the desert to try to make progress on a novel, Kari writes in this week's Enthusiasms—but also about grief, and about "a series of increasingly surreal and ridiculous events." "Broder is an author you can trust with a ride like that," Kari adds. "Let go, let her do her thing, and you won’t be disappointed."At Northern Stage, "an exemplary production...shows the deep moral impact of war on four people." Sylvia Khoury's Selling Kabul, writes Seven Days theater critic Alex Brown, is a tense, suspenseful thriller, and director Evren Odcikin "stretches a taut string from the play's opening moment." Set after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, it traces the lives and decisions—and secrets—of four characters, three of them family, on the night that one of them, a former interpreter for the US, learns his wife has given birth to a baby boy. With "intense and masterful" performances, Brown writes, the actors "let us read the characters' deepest intentions while maintaining placid surfaces to hide what burns below." Time for a change of pace. Historian and writer Dayton Duncan has worked with fellow Walpole NH resident Ken Burns for three decades, but, he says, he considers their latest project—The American Buffalo on PBS and his companion book, Blood Memory—to be his "swan song," he tells Joseph T. O'Connor in Mountain Journal. Though he adds, "But you know, I considered Country Music my swan song back in 2019." In a wide-ranging interview, they talk over the history of the buffalo, the history of Native Americans, the buffalo's place in US culture—and why, at 74, he thinks it's time to step away.SPONSORED: Sharon Academy Information Session on Sunday, Oct. 22. The Sharon Academy invites families thinking about middle and high schools for their students to an informative and informal gathering to learn how TSA is an empowering community of creative and independent thinkers. The 4-5:30 pm session is an excellent opportunity to meet current TSA students and faculty, Head of School Mary Newman, Director of Middle School Andrew Lane, and to ask questions about our approach to providing a challenging, engaging, and nurturing education for adolescents. Sponsored by The Sharon Academy.Good numbers: $700,000 raised by 3,100 runners and walkers. That's about $100K more than at last year's CHaD Hero event, thanks in part to organizers' decision to remove registration fees—which boosted both turnout and revenue. If you check out the DH page at the burgundy link, you'll notice that the top fundraiser was Finding Our Stride, whose $74K raised far outpaced the field. And no wonder: The group, which organizes after-school running programs throughout the region, fielded 600 kids and family members.In W. Newbury, change at the top for a quiet community group. The Backroom is a mutual aid project that doesn't talk much about its work, writes Rachel Hellman in Seven Days. "It's not necessarily a big public event [when someone needs help]," organizer Patsy Cole tells her. Volunteers drop off warm meals, stack wood, deliver food baskets—and run a "sharing shed" with books, food, and other goods: "Residents pass in and out throughout the week, dropping off goods and claiming others," Hellman reports. Now, after 14 years, Cole is ready to slow down; she's handing the reins to Carolyn Keck.With protein donations down from last year, NH Food Bank looks to support from hunters. The group's “Hunt for the Hungry” program, writes Hadley Barndollar in NH Bulletin, is once again accepting donations of processed deer and moose—though not wild fowl or bear—to distribute to food pantries around the state. So far this year, the food bank's Dennis Gichana tells Barndollar, meat donations have been running about 10 percent lower than in the past, so donations from hunters “will fill an even bigger need this year.”NH plays catchup on EV chargers. NHDOT is asking developers to submit proposals for fast-charging stations along I-89, I-92, and US Rte. 202. "Such stations," writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog, "are increasingly seen as important for attracting tourists as the number of electric vehicles increases. They are less important for local EV owners, most of whom can charge their vehicles at home." Interestingly, though NH badly lags the rest of New England when it comes to slower Level 2 chargers, thanks mostly to Tesla it's on a par with ME, MA, and CT when it comes to fast-charging stations.The child care system in NH: "like a three-legged stool on the verge of toppling." That was Cora-Lynne Hoppe, who owns a child care center in Rochester, at a Fiscal Policy Institute conference in Concord on Monday. In the Globe's newsletter (no paywall), Amanda Gokee writes that available day care slots have grown slightly, though there are fewer providers as small providers shut their doors and care migrates to the bigger centers. “That also means that we have less geographic coverage of childcare,” UNH's Jess Carson told the gathering, forcing families to search beyond their own towns. It's not every day a Nobel Peace Prize winner drops by your little restaurant. But that's what happened on Sunday, when Malala Yousafzai stopped in to Curry Indian Restaurant on Emerald Street in Keene with her husband and friends, looking for a meal. “We were not expecting her, and all of a sudden I saw her and recognized her right away,” restaurant owner Mohammed Ali—who's from the same region in Pakistan—tells Sentinel deputy news editor Mrinali Dhemba. Yousafzai, in town visiting a friend, also went to the Monadnock Conservancy's annual celebration and got a pickleball lesson.Not a press release you'd want to have to write: VT State Police cruiser, rifle stolen from outside Rutland house. It happened early yesterday morning, and though the cruiser itself was later found, "the Sig Sauer patrol rifle that had been secured in the vehicle had been forcibly removed," the VSP release reported. Authorities circulated an image of the suspect. Asked had been locked or had keys inside, reports VTDigger's Alan J. Keays, a spokesman just pointed to the press release: “The circumstances of the vehicle theft are under active investigation.” As of last evening, no one was in custody."Nobody moved to Vermont say[ing], 'You know, I really want to live in a place where the sense of community is declining.'" Driving around VT villages with radio producer Erica Heilman, Montpelier architect Danny Sagan—who used to live in Tunbridge—mulls a big question: What would happen if the general stores and the grange halls and the churches went away? His answer: "We're going to lose some methods of connection that we almost take for granted now...the physical infrastructure for unplanned connections with people." This one you'll want to listen to, though reading's okay, too."The goal here is to take people out of the loop completely.” Because, explains Alden Bourne of New England Public Media, people don’t know their trash from their recyclables. Especially on a university campus, where the geographically diverse community is used to a range of recycling protocols. Enter Ian Goodine and Ethan Walko, two recent UMass grads, and their "fancy photo booth for trash.” Drop an item in the AuditPRO and within moments it sends images to the cloud and does the sorting. The team aims to capture up to 90 percent of recyclables, more than doubling current rates.Want to stretch your mind? In the world of math puzzlers, Dartmouth prof Peter Winkler is considered "the connoisseur's connoisseur," as The Guardian put it a few years back. That's in no small part due to his much-celebrated 2000 book, Mathematical Puzzles. When it came time to publish his third collection, he cut a deal with the publisher: After 2 1/2 years, it would become free and online. And so it is: You can find the whole thing on the Math Department's website (burgundy link). "This book belongs to math mavens all over the world," says Winkler. "It should be free to the world that created it." Background here.The Canadian wildfires, in one minute, 22 seconds. For the last few years, Peter Atwood, a digital cartographer and data visualization expert who lives in Nova Scotia, has been making online maps that make it easier to see everything from cityscapes to Joshua Slocum's 1898 sail around the world. Now, using NASA satellite data and smoke models, he's put up an animation of what happened: from a couple little pinpricks at the beginning to May to... well, it's one thing to read about (and breathe) what happened, quite another to see it from above.The Wednesday Vordle. If you're new to Daybreak, this is the Upper Valley version of Wordle, with a five-letter word chosen from an item in the previous day's Daybreak.
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At 4 pm today, Dartmouth's history department hosts Swarthmore College historian Bruce Dorsey for a book talk about Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation. It centers on the 1832 death of Sarah Maria Cornell, a pregnant factory worker in Fall River, Mass., who was found on the outskirts of town, hanging—after she had confided to her doctor that a preacher named Ephraim Avery coerced her into sex. Based on a class Dorsey taught for 16 years, the book touches on everything from the entry of women into the industrial workforce to the spread of evangelical religion and the rise of tabloid journalism. In Haldeman 041.
At 6 this evening, the Enfield Public Library hosts essayist and writing teacher Joni Cole for a reading of—and behind-the-scenes conversation about—her new collection,Party Like It’s 2044: Finding the Funny in Life and Death.
Also at 6, an intriguing public lecture sponsored by Dartmouth's math department: the NFL's senior director of football data and analytics, Michael Lopez, will talk about "How the National Football League leverages Next Gen Stats to better understand the game." Historically, analysis has rested on play-level data, which tends to ignore a wide variety of variables. New player-tracking data, though, allows for much more pinpoint analysis—and calls into question earlier studies on fourth-down strategies. In Carpenter 13.
At 6:30, pianist and "landscape enthusiast" Ben Cosgrove will be at the Lyme Congregational Church, sponsored by the church and Northern Woodlands magazine. In a Boston Globe profile last week, Lauren Daley wrote, "Geography is Cosgrove’s muse. Like a sonic plein air painter, [he] uses his piano as a paintbrush — and he’s made a name for himself doing it", composing for NASA, the White Mountain National Forest, and others. "I must now just be Googleable as 'a guy who will come with your team of scientists and write songs about it,'" he says. By donation.
At 7 pm, the Norwich Public Library presents a Vermont Humanities lecture by Middlebury anthropologist Kristin Bright, "Coming of Age in Vermont." Bright, who specializes in the anthropology of the digital world, will look back on the legacy of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa and consider "the entanglements of AI and coming-of-age today by drawing on ethnographic research in Vermont and Canada and exploring how youth imagine themselves in ways that stretch, use, and refuse digital technologies." Both in-person at the library and online.
Also at 7 pm, the Center at Eastman presents video-game AI expert Jeff Orkin talking about "AI in 2023: Fact, Fiction, and Reality." Orkin will explain (in lay terms) how AI models work and are constructed, what algorithms do, and where they excel and fall short. In the Draper Room.
And at 8:30 pm, Valley Improv takes the stage at Sawtooth Kitchen in Hanover for a night of short-form, seat-of-the-pants improv comedy.
A little escape today...
, reinterpreted by the French composer and musician William Rezé, who goes by the performing name Thylacine. With the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire led by the French-American composer and conductor Uèle Lamore.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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