Sometimes numbers just don’t make the impact they should when first encountered. I reread some this morning that snap an unforgettable shot of the Great Recession and its…
I started this post on Wednesday, a brilliant late fall day just as Nov. 22, 1963, was in southern New England. Like everyone else alive that day, I…
I’ve been reading Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale Univ. Press, 2013) by Ohio State history professor Geoffrey Parker. Parker has…
I know a hero when I see one. Bob Cousy is one. The basketball Hall of Famer’s wife of 63 years, Missie, declined into dementia a dozen…
Primordial. Deadly by nature. Unsuspected. Relentless. And, preferably, repulsive. That’s how I like my horror-movie threats. The jellyfish, 550 million years old, has of late taken over vast regions of…
An eagle stealing a toddler? ‘No way’ was my reaction to N.C. Wyeth’s illustration ‘“Just as the baby’s feet cleared the ground Padfoot leaped into the air…
Yellowed newspapers and old readers reveal what preceding generations thought important, what shaped our ancestors’ perceptions and ours. At a farm auction in 1958 when I was 12, I found…
‘Why bother about winter?’ says Aesop’s grasshopper to the ant. Southern Vermont has enjoyed a stretch of days that half convince you winter can’t ever come. The…
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