GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Patchy fog, then sunny. It’ll be a lot like yesterday, with clear skies and highs getting into the mid 60s, with breezes eventually settling down to come from the east. Once again, clear skies mean overnight temps will drop into the upper 30s, lower in the hollows.
Such a handsome silhouette! This, writes Jay Cary from Lyme, is “a longtailed giant ichneumonid wasp I photographed recently before it laid its eggs in one of our maple trees. It is a parasitic wasp, and that long tail is its ovipositor, not a stinger. It has the uncanny ability to tell which borer hole in the maple tree has a larva in it.”
Introducing “Ask Maggie”: Just what the heck is Lebanon’s Milkweed Mug Exchange? I am thrilled today to launch a new Daybreak feature by Maggie Cassidy, former Valley News editor and VTDigger managing editor, and current KIS Thrift marketing manager. In the months ahead she’ll be answering your questions about life in the Upper Valley (more on that just below), but to kick things off, she decided to answer one of her own: Who has that super cool yard with a bunch of neat art projects in downtown Lebanon? An Instagram message led her to Honor Hingston-Cox—and to not just the mug exchange, but a whole way of looking at re-using what we use.
So what’s “Ask Maggie?” Well, you know how we’ve all got questions about life here? Like, Who is this person I’ve been hearing about? Or what’s that odd-looking piece of roadside art I pass every day? Or when is that new restaurant opening? Or how do I take advantage of this local program that looks helpful—but probably has some fine print? And don’t you wish you knew someone who could answer them? Now you do. As Maggie writes at the link above, send along your questions, silly or serious, “big, small, bright, or heavy,” and she’ll do her best. Email her at [email protected], and please include your name and the town you live in.
VT closes West Woodstock bridge until further notice. The bridge over the Ottauquechee on Mill Rd. was ordered closed yesterday, pending an engineering and safety inspection. The move came “after a routine inspection found an issue with the structure of the bridge. The bridge will not be reopened until a full inspection is completed,” reports ABC22/FOX44’s Ben Breen.
Spanish. Mandarin. Wolof. Tagalog. Those are just some of the 21 languages spoken by people taking the free English classes at Lebanon Adult Ed, reports Molly Hughes in the Valley News. The program, which runs out of the SAU 88 Adult Learner Services office in West Leb, has doubled in size since last year, with 85 students currently, down from 115 in the spring. The students, director Colby Price says, might be working construction or hold advanced degrees in their home countries. What they have in common is a profound desire to navigate life in the US. And the value, Hughes writes, is straightforward: “Moving up even one reading level, the data show, roughly halves a person’s likelihood of living in poverty.”
SPONSORED: Primary care physician Dr. Brian Rodriguez is now open and accepting new patients in Montpelier. He provides personalized, preventive care and conveniences not usually available from traditional practices, including advanced screenings and diagnostic tests and a personalized wellness plan. Members of his practice can also book same- or next-day appointments and reach him after hours for urgent needs. Learn more here or at the burgundy link, or call (802) 778-7731. Sponsored by MDVIP.
Looking for a story to take you away? So was the Norwich Bookstore’s Carin Pratt, who despite her taste for literary fiction with thorny moral dilemmas or dark and twisting plots, sometimes just wants a good historical read. In this week’s Enthusiasms, she writes, she’s found one: Ariel Lawhon’s The Pirate Queen, about the real-life 16th-century Irish pirate and clan leader Grace O'Malley, “a doughty, rebellious rule-breaker of a heroine (and, of course, a redhead), [who] leads her loyal troops with courage and determination”—and even winds up in a parlay with Queen Elizabeth I. Carin’s got some quibbles, she writes, but the book did what she wanted: It carried her off.
“I don’t think it’s my job as an author to tell you what to think. I do believe it’s my job to ask you why your opinions are what they are.” On Oct. 2, Hanover novelist Jodi Picoult will keynote the NH Book Festival in Concord, so looking ahead, the Monitor’s arts and community editor, Rachel Wachman, sat down with her. They talk about her latest novel, Hollow Bones, and its roots in a postcard sent in to the Instagram feed “Post Secrets”: “Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks that I’m dead”; about the role books can play in encouraging readers to question themselves; about how she chooses topics (“something that I can’t stop thinking about at all”), and lots more.
SPONSORED: Upper Valley Music Center welcomes award winning Pan-Latin ensemble Sol y Canto for a very special residency this fall! Sol y Canto will offer a workshop and performance open to the general public on Friday, October 2 at the Norwich Congregational Church. Led by Rosi and Brian Amador, Sol y Canto is known for making their music accessible to Spanish- and non-Spanish-speaking audiences of all ages. Participants will learn vocal improvisation techniques in the workshop, then perform with Sol y Canto during the concert! Registration and concert tickets are available online now at the burdundy link or uvmusic.org. Sponsored by UVMC.
It might not feel like it, but drought in the Northeast decreased from 1901-2022. That’s the conclusion of Dartmouth researchers who looked both at rainfall rates and the loss of water from plants and surfaces through evaporation. In essence, lead author and geography prof Jonathan Winter tells Dartmouth News’ Amy Olson, it’s been “a tug of war” between rising rainfall and how much water is lost to evaporation. Using historic data from NOAA and other sources, they concluded that drought was “59 percent less frequent and 19 percent less intense from 1984 to 2022 as compared to 1901 to 1983,” Olson writes—due mostly to increased precipitation.
Granite Staters want single-family homes on small lots, survey shows. Public policy may be driving towns and cities toward multi-family housing, writes NH Bulletin’s Ethan DeWitt, but a survey released last week by St. Anselm College last week shows three-quarters of the respondents supported “having parts of every town where people are allowed to build single-family homes on smaller lots”—up from 59 percent support a year ago. Over 90 percent of NH zoning codes prohibit single-family homes on less than an acre; the new survey “could energize efforts to pass state laws requiring cities and towns to allow small lot sizes,” DeWitt writes.
“A kind of real-life, full-contact game of chicken.” A couple of weeks ago, Patrick McNameeKing—who hosts Weekend Edition for NHPR—visited the Hopkinton Fair so that he could hang out with the demolition derby crew. As you’d expect for an event in which cars repeatedly ram into each other until only one is still driveable, getting them ready “is not your typical auto-maintenance plan,” McNameeKing says. Among other things, one 15-year-old driver tells him, you have to cut a 12”x12” hole in the hood so rescuers can put out any fires. McNameeKing talks to drivers and organizers—and explores why the Hopkinton derby is considered one of the top in the state.
A blow for squirreldom! The town of Castle Rock, CO was plunged into darkness twice in one week recently when squirrels broke into an electric substation, “going out in a blaze of glory,” reports Colorado news anchor Kyle Clark. Those acts of sabotage prompted Clark to dig into the fractious relationship between the state and its squirrels, starting in the 1940s, when Denver took aim at bushy tails, despite “collaborators at city hall willing to put rodents ahead of residents.” The squirrels retaliated with “decades of destructive assaults on the power systems that illuminate America as they fried transformers along with their furry little behinds.” (Don’t miss the comments: “Made me spray my Cherry Coke across my lap.”)
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At Dartmouth, Yale prof Gregory M. Collins on “Burke's Conservatism . . . and Ours.” Collins, who directs his university’s Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics, specializes in the origins of liberalism and conservatism. He’ll be tackling how Edmund Burke’s “conservatism” compares to what we call conservatism in our own time. 5 pm in Rocky 003.
Los Lorcas at the Tunbridge General Store. The poetry/music trio of Peter Money, Partridge Boswell, and Nat Williams recently launched their new album, Wild Island, and is out on tour with it. This is your chance to catch them before they head to Ireland next week. They’ll be the general store’s Music Night starting at 5 pm.
“Anne Frank’s Neighbors: What Did They Do?” As VT Humanities writes, “Although Anne Frank’s Diary is the most widely read nonfiction book in the world after the Bible, little attention has been paid to her neighbors—the people who lived alongside the Jewish population as persecution intensified.” In this online talk (hosted by the Lanpher Memorial Library in Hyde Park, VT), novelist Mary Fillmore “examines the choices they faced and the decisions they made in the face of those choices.” 6 pm via Zoom, and you’ll need to register.
At Dartmouth, mathematician David Mumford on the future of AIs. Mumford, a professor emeritus at Brown and former MacArthur fellow, argues that “future AIs will benefit by borrowing more ideas from the brain and from human life. Looking at human development,” he writes, “it is not until age 18 (or 21) that people are considered adults, hence given rights to act as they wish. They are then given AGENCY, to plan and take actions in the world freely. Silicon Valley today assumes that limited agency can be grafted on large language models easily. But is that true?” 6:30 pm, Kemeny 008.
At Dartmouth’s Literary Arts Bridge, Allison Markin Powell talks translation. Powell, a Dartmouth grad, specializes in translating Japanese literature into English, and will both read from her most recent translation, Kanako Nishi’s international bestseller Sakura, and talk about her work in literary translation and translation advocacy. 6:30 pm.
At the Norwich Bookstore, Stefan van Norden talks over Nature Revisited with Jeffrey Ryan. The gardener and filmmaker (you may remember his history of Leb’s Densmore Brick Company) has a new book that looks at nature “through the perspectives of leading authors, scientists, philosophers, gardeners and others who share wisdom about the state of our planet and opportunities for positive change.” He’ll be joined by author and adventurer Jeffrey Ryan. 7 pm.
John Proctor Is the Villain debuts at Northern Stage. Kimberly Belflower’s stage play (soon to be a film) is set in a rural Georgia high school, where an English class reads Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and, pushed by their teacher, draws all sorts of parallels to modern (well, 2018) times. “As the class starts re-examining the Salem trials, #MeToo allegations erupt at their own school, cracking open their world and assumptions,” Northern Stage writes. It had a highly successful Broadway run, got nominated for a Tony, and is now one of the most-produced plays in American theater. Previews tonight thru Friday at 7:30 pm, opens Saturday at 6:30 pm, runs thru Oct. 11.
Versa-Style Street Dance Company at the Hop. The LA-based troupe bops through a medley of their two decades of street dance with choreography that “interweaves diverse forms and influences, from popping and whacking to breaking to Afro-Latin styles,” the Hop writes. “Dance is life, and Versa-Style gives us a joyful blast of movement born from communities that have shaped American popular culture today.” 7:30 pm tonight and tomorrow night in the Daryl Roth Studio Theater.
Comedy Roast Battle at Sawtooth Kitchen. It’s Sawtooth’s first, with 10 local and regional comics “throwing their funniest barbs at each other. Comics will take turns roasting each other, with judges deciding who gets cooked!” 8 pm.
And for today...
Dearest Dear—the Boston area’s Rose Jackson and Helen Kuhar—at the Anonymous Coffeehouse Sept. 11, with a dance tune filmed by Chad Finer.
See you tomorrow.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editors: Jonea Gurwitt, Sam Gurwitt
