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“Gradually, then suddenly, America reached the precipice of authoritarianism.” That’s how author Richard North Patterson begins his exploration into key turning points in the last quarter century that have altered the course of American history. He breaks it down in his new book, “Tripwires: 15 Twenty-First-Century Events That Undermined American Democracy — and How to Reclaim It.” “The fire hose of stuff around Trump has been so great that we can't keep track of it,” Patterson told me. “If we don't understand how we got here, then we can't figure out how to get out of this place and restore and reinvigorate our democracy.” Starting with the Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore that awarded George W. Bush the 2000 presidential election, Patterson itemizes the fateful turns. There was the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008; the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010 that unleashed unlimited campaign cash; future President Donald Trump’s demand for then-President Barack Obama’s birth certificate in 2011; and Sen. Mitch McConnell's refusal to convict Trump for the Jan. 6 attempted coup by supporters in 2021. The culmination of the events that undermined democracy was Chief Justice John Roberts’ Supreme Court ruling in 2024 that the American president had immunity for his actions, thus creating an unbounded presidency. Patterson is internationally renowned as the author of 23 novels, 16 of which have been New York Times bestsellers, including “Protect and Defend” and “Degree of Guilt.” Patterson is a former trial attorney whose articles have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Times and elsewhere. For the last decade, Patterson has devoted his energies to political commentary because, as he wrote in The Atlantic, “Trump rendered fiction redundant.” As a fiction writer, Patterson recognized Trump’s gift for crafting a compelling story. “Trump creates a fantasy world in which we are beset by numerous forces, some real in themselves, some not real at all, like the great attack of communism and socialism he claims that we are suffering from,” he told me. “And then he creates the heroic narrative where Trump and Trump alone can save us from all of this.”  Patterson understands the allure of the story and its inherent danger. “You had a meeting of the man and his megalomaniacal fantasies in a moment of extreme unease in the American polity, where people were willing to turn to someone who promised to be the all-purpose solution to their unease.” “He claimed to make America great again. I would argue he made America hate again,” Patterson continued. “If you look at authoritarians throughout time, they've always found an enemy. And for Trump, they were racial minorities.” Patterson predicted that “2026 and 2028 are really democracy's last good shot at getting itself turned around.” “If we have a JD Vance or somebody else who's going to pick up on Trump's proto fascism, then we are farther down the road to going from democracy to the authoritarianism in Hungary under (Viktor) Orban and beyond, where we simply can't retrieve what we — what we once believed was secure.”

Hisham Awartani thought he was going to die. That’s what he told a police dispatcher in desperation as he lay on the ground after being shot by Jason Eaton in November 2023. Awartani and two friends, all of whom are of Palestinian descent, were walking down North Prospect Street in Burlington when Eaton, whom they did not know, stepped off his porch and began firing at them without saying anything. All three friends were wounded, but Awartani, who was 20, was the most seriously injured. A Vermont jury delivered a measure of justice this week when it convicted Eaton of three counts of attempted second-degree murder for the unprovoked shooting of the three young men. The weeklong trial included searing testimony from the survivors and the replaying of Awartani’s call to 911. “There was some justice dealt, but obviously it doesn't change what happened,” Awartani told me about the verdict.  Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad have been friends since childhood in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They were classmates at a Quaker high school in Ramallah and were all attending universities in the U.S. They were on Thanksgiving break and were visiting Awartani’s grandmother, who lives in Burlington. The jury delivered its verdict in under two hours and rejected Eaton’s insanity defense, holding him fully responsible for his actions. The verdict offered some closure on a shocking act of violence that drew national and international attention, coming two months into the latest Israel-Hamas war.  Awartani was gravely wounded in the attack. A bullet lodged in his spine, and he is now paralyzed from the chest down. Awartani told me he is grateful for the medical care he received at UVM Medical Center and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, as well as an outpouring of community support in Vermont. But he has had mixed feelings about the extensive attention to his case. “To have access to such great healthcare and then at the same time, just see the large-scale destruction and death that was happening in Palestine … that part was dissonant for me definitely.” “In Palestine, every single person who died, their life is just as rich as mine.”  The death toll from the war in Gaza has topped 73,000 since Hamas forces attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. More than 1,200 Israelis were killed that day.  Awartani said there is a connection between what is happening in Palestine and what happened to him. “Palestinian identity has become vilified,” he told me.  “Violence against Palestinians being excused on a mass scale in Palestine … carried over to here, where simply wearing Palestinian clothing and outwardly identifying yourself as Palestinian is enough to be considered a terrorist and therefore getting shot.” The families of the three young men released a statement after the verdict. “After three years of sorrow, loss, and struggle, our families finally feel relief,” they wrote. Although Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George said the evidence did not support a hate crime charge, the families insist that the young men were targeted in an act of hate. They wrote, “We continue to work toward a world where hateful violence against Palestinians is called out for what it is — and stopped.” Awartani is now 23. He graduated with honors from Brown University in May with a degree in archaeology and math. He plans to return to the West Bank for a year and then pursue graduate studies, perhaps in archaeology.  As a Palestinian survivor of violence, Awartani feels a special responsibility. “I've been given a voice, and I would like to use that voice to amplify other people's voices that have been silent or silenced,” he said.  What gives him hope? “Being surrounded by friends and family, both in the United States and in Palestine … helps us endure and be together,” he replied. He is also encouraged by the shift in public opinion toward Palestine and the campus protests in support of Palestinian rights. “It's building political machinery that hopefully … can effect large-scale positive change both in the United States domestically and internationally.”

Bess O’Brien is best known for making award-winning documentary films that take deep dives into difficult issues like addiction, hunger and homelessness. With her latest film, she is taking a different approach: She is inviting audiences on a feel-good journey about resilience and joy. “Every Day: Big and Small” is about the unsung ways that Vermonters show up for each other in good times and bad to create change. O’Brien introduces us to a writers group for people in recovery from substance use, a boisterous drag show at the Elks club in Rutland, a group of men talking about domestic violence, a horse farm for people with PTSD, a couple recovering from a recent flood, a military museum run by a 13-year-old boy, and girls who want to go into farming. These are among a series of cinematic vignettes that tell a larger story of how people cross divides and lift each other up. “A lot of times we are told things about how people are acting or feeling that actually aren't true,” O’Brien told me. People “are actually more generous and more open-hearted than we often assume.” The inspiration for O’Brien’s new film was seeing what happened after the floods in 2023 and 2024 that ravaged some Vermont communities. “We all recognize that our neighbors came together to help each other. However, this happens every day, and we don't even know it, and we don't acknowledge it all the time,” she said.  O’Brien’s previous documentary films have raised awareness about vulnerable people and social justice. Her 2013 documentary, “The Hungry Heart,” about the prescription drug crisis in Vermont, sparked a statewide conversation about opioids.  O’Brien’s 2016 documentary, “All of Me,” focused on the lives of people with eating disorders, and in 2018 she directed “Coming Home,” about five people returning to their Vermont communities from prison. Her 2024 film, “Just Getting By,” was about Vermonters struggling with food and housing insecurity. As she does with most of her films, O’Brien is embarking on a statewide tour with “Every Day: Big and Small.” Her goal is to spark a statewide conversation about the issues in the film.  Chronicling recovery and resilience has been a throughline in O’Brien’s work. In 2014 she co-founded Writers for Recovery to help people who are struggling with addiction. She is now expanding what recovery means.  Recovery is “what we do 55 times a day, just as human beings, because we're depressed, or we're bummed, or we're angry at our kid, or we're frustrated, or we can't get our Google to work,” she said.   “It's the old Vermont thing: You get stuck in the mud and somebody comes and pulls you out. That is recovery. That is somebody coming and helping you. So this film is really about all those small little things that human beings do every day that get us through life. Because if we didn't have that, we'd be fricking in big trouble.”

Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark has had a busy summer. Since late June, she has sued the Trump administration an average of twice per week. That brings to 67 the number of lawsuits — as of midday Wednesday — she has filed or joined against President Donald Trump since January 2025. They include lawsuits defending birthright citizenship and challenging cuts to medical research funding, the dismantling of the Department of Education, voting restrictions and tariffs. Clark said her office has prevailed in 92% of the suits, including both final decisions and preliminary injunctions. Many of these decisions are being appealed, but “getting that initial win is hugely helpful in all the work that we are doing battling the unconstitutional and illegal acts of the federal government right now,” Clark told me. In August, the attorney general announced a landmark settlement of $92.7 million with the social media company Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, for designing its programs to addict young people and harm their mental health. The settlement resulted from a lawsuit involving 47 other states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. Meta agreed to limit the time that teenagers can spend on its platforms and impose age restrictions. “I really think this is the dawn of a new era for social media,” Clark said. Clark, 51, won election as Vermont’s attorney general in 2022, the first woman to do so. She graduated from the University of Vermont, then worked as a policy analyst in the office of Gov. Howard Dean. She later graduated from the Boston College School of Law and worked as an assistant attorney general and later as chief of staff to her predecessor, TJ Donovan. In April, she was named Woman of the Year by the Boston College Women’s Law Coalition. She is currently running for a third term as attorney general. In a recent lawsuit, Clark joined 24 other state attorneys general challenging a new rule by the U.S. Postal Service that would grant it the authority to regulate mail-in voting.  “This is such an egregious attempt to overtake the state's prerogatives with voting and elections. But more importantly, it is so wildly impractical,” said Clark, adding that it would take years to implement. “I can't imagine that the United States Supreme Court is going to say, ‘Yeah, we'll just do this and disenfranchise so many of these voters.’ I mean, it would be pandemonium if they did this.” Clark said that despite the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to overturn longstanding legal precedents, “I believe in America.”  “We will keep exercising our rights under the Constitution and standing up for our country,” she said. “We are the patriots fighting for democracy and our Constitution, and we're going to keep doing it until this administration is gone. And we're going to keep doing it whatever the next administration is who comes in in 2028.”

Is technology killing democracy and destroying communities? Yes, argues acclaimed historian Jill Lepore in her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” She writes that the artificial state is “the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations.” It is the fantasy of tech billionaires. And its goal is the end of liberal democracy. The artificial state is a “replacement of the liberal nation state, a constitutional democracy in which we are governed by our own consent, with a government by machine, in which many of the functions of democratic governments are automated, in which humans are replaced by bots as the predominant participant in public life,” she told me. When the titans of Silicon Valley sat behind President Donald Trump at his inauguration in January 2025, it marked “the coming out of the tech right,” said Lepore. Lepore is one of the country’s most acclaimed historians. She is a professor of American history at Harvard University, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the bestsellers “These Truths: A History of the United States,” which Time magazine named one of the top 10 nonfiction books of the 2010s, and “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in history. She hosts the podcast “The Last Archive.” She lives part-time in Brattleboro, which is where she spoke to me. Lepore said that efforts by the Trump administration to sanitize American history are “a form of McCarthyism.”  She said that skewed versions of history have evolved that have deepened social divisions. These range from the “far-right version of American history in which everything is a march of freedom and progress and prosperity and America has never done anything wrong at home or abroad” to the “far-left account in which American history is a litany of atrocities, in which the United States has never done anything good at home or abroad.” “There was nothing that recognized there was plenty of truth in both of those accounts, and there was also unbelievable distortion in those accounts.”  Lepore said history affirms that “the power of ordinary citizens working together has managed to defeat” forces like the artificial state and its techno-authoritarianism.   “But the idea that we can sit in our living rooms and browse the news on our smartphones and post a few thoughts on social media, and that constitutes meeting our obligations as citizens is a false one.”

Journalist Nat Winthrop has been covering Vermont for a half-century, reporting stories that have surprised, infuriated and enlightened readers. From 1978 to 1990, Winthrop was publisher of the pioneering alternative weekly the Vanguard Press, and later the Vermont Times. These publications were launching pads for many journalists and were forerunners to Seven Days, the Vermont weekly that is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. He was also executive producer of “Freedom & Unity,” a six-part documentary film about Vermont that was led by Nora Jacobson. In 1987, he co-founded the online alternative news service AlterNet. Winthrop explained the niche filled by Vermont’s early alternative weeklies. “There's the myth of objectivity in the media,” he told me. But “the Vanguard, in particular, wore our opinions on our sleeves or on the editorial page.” The weeklies differ from newspapers with their “narrative style of storytelling, so that all of the important information isn't necessarily right up at the top of the article.” Winthrop, 74, has a new book, “On the Record,” a collection of 17 of his cover stories. The topics vary widely, from his reporting on a controversial physician at Gifford Hospital in Randolph who championed in vitro fertilization in the 1970s, to his coverage of Iranian cadets at Norwich University just after the 1979 Iranian revolution, to his stories about Bernie Sanders and ice cream icons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield as they rose from obscurity to national fame. The book has many contemporary echoes and includes updates on what has happened with the subjects of each story. Filmmaker Jay Craven wrote in a foreword, “A newspaper in tune with its readers creates common ground and lets us know where we live in ways that are specific to ourselves, our towns, and our neighbors. Nat’s work strengthened our links to each other and helped move our state forward.” Winthrop earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and came to Vermont to attend Goddard College, where he received a master’s degree in media education in 1977. He lives in Montpelier.  “Print media across most of the country are a lot smaller in numbers and some say a dying breed,” conceded Vermont’s alternative media pioneer. But he pointed to VTDigger, Seven Days and Vermont Public as indications that media “are actually doing quite a bit better in Vermont than in most states.”

Vermont-born rock star Grace Potter releases her seventh studio album on Aug. 21. “Trespasser” is the latest offering from the four-time Grammy nominee. Potter burst onto the music scene in 2002 with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. Since that group disbanded in 2015, Potter has gone on to tour with some of the country’s top musical acts, including the Rolling Stones, Kenny Chesney and country star Chris Stapleton, with whom she is touring this fall. Potter will bring her act to Burlington on Sept. 18 when her annual Grand Point North festival kicks off. Profits will go toward Potter’s Grand Point Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the arts in Vermont. Potter, 43, divides her time between homes in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, where she grew up and attended high school, and Topanga Canyon, California. “Trespasser” was produced by her husband and frequent collaborator Eric Valentine. The two have a son together. “Trespasser” was partly inspired by a line from the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land.” Potter sang it: “As I was walking that ribbon of highway, there was a wall that said private property, but on the other side it didn't say nothing. That side is made for you and me.” That idea of crossing boundaries “was the engine that was running all of my lyrical landscaping at that point.” The title song includes a refrain, “As I hurried home … I heard an icy refrain … bow to the master.” What did she mean? Potter said she wrote the lyrics “in an early round of rounding up immigrants, and it wasn't called ICE at the time. … Little did I know that a few years later there would really be this icy refrain.” Potter — who says she got kicked out of band at Harwood Union High School when it was discovered that she could not read music — said she feels she has been trespassing her whole career. “I will often get off stage and look at my bandmates or look at whoever is there side-stage and go: I just got away with it again, like I'm robbing a bank,” she said. “My passion and my commitment to basically all forms of art is mostly based on my fascination with how I'm able to get away with this over and over again. I don't think I've ever said that out loud.”  “If you want a scoop,” she told me, “it's just that I continue to be rewarded for something that comes extremely naturally to me, and I'm lucky enough to have been kind of cattle prodded into it by really encouraging, inspired, wonderful family members and friends and cohorts who saw what I had better than I— better than I did.”

As President Donald Trump intensifies his campaign of retribution against his political opponents and unleashes masked federal agents on immigrant communities, many American citizens are asking: What can I do? For answers, we can look to dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism. “Authoritarianism is about stealing your rights and stealing your money,” said Ami Fields-Meyer, co-author with journalist Julia Angwin of “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.” The authors spoke with over 100 dissidents in their research. These include a 73-year-old abortion escort in Virginia, young activists in Egypt who have challenged a dictator, students in Hong Kong defending democracy, and a civil rights lawyer who lost his job in the Trump administration while fighting for fair housing. Together, they offer a modern roadmap for resisting authoritarianism. Authoritarians start by targeting vulnerable groups, then extending to political opponents and the broader population. They say, “It's not me who's taking your money or your rights. This is happening because of somebody else. It's happening because of the trans people. It's happening because of the undocumented people,” Fields-Meyer told me. “The response has to be to expand the circle of who we are committed to.” Fields-Meyer has been a senior policy adviser to then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a strategist to national civil rights organizations and political candidates. His articles on democracy and public policy have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and other outlets. The authors share lessons from global dissidents. Fields-Meyer described how dissidents “repurposed their communities into extraordinarily powerful political forces. The dissident movement that helped bring down communism in Czechoslovakia was a group of theater actors (who) repurposed their theaters into organizing hubs. They stopped printing playbills on their printers and started printing protest leaflets. This is something that we see all over the world.” This includes Fields-Meyer’s home community of Brooklyn, where mutual aid groups formed during the Covid-19 pandemic are now using the same texting groups “to protect people from the federal agents who are waiting outside their doors.” Fields-Meyer said that strengthening community helps counter the ways that autocrats seek to divide people. “Authoritarianism is all about saying, ‘Don't believe your lying eyes. You thought that you saw Renee Good shot in the street? No, you didn't. You thought that you saw Alex Pretti shot in the street? No, you didn't,’” said Fields-Meyer. “What we learned from Soviet dissidents is that when lies abound, you can work with other people and be with other people and be emboldened to say, ‘I do see what I see.’” “We need to be able to hold hope and hopelessness at the same time,” said Fields-Meyer. “If we do, history tells us that we're going to win.”

Few people have turned adversity into opportunity as dramatically as Kelly Brush. Brush was on the Middlebury College ski team when she was paralyzed in a ski racing accident in 2006. Twenty years later, Brush is a leader of a national movement to empower people with spinal cord injuries. “I'm so glad that I'm able to do that and support … thousands of other people that I don't even know and their families and create things that just feel a little bit better,” Brush told me. I asked Brush what enabled her to stay positive following her accident. “Whenever something happens in life, you have a choice on how you respond,” she replied. “Even when there's things that are really hard or really sad, you feel that, and then you make the choice to move you forward in a good direction.” Brush has mixed feelings about people calling her an inspiration. If “an understanding of who I am and what I've done creates inspiration, that's great. But not the inspiration that comes just because I exist and I'm in a wheelchair.” Brush is concerned about how people with disabilities are especially vulnerable to delays or cutbacks in health care. She has personal experience of this: she recently had to undergo major back surgery and had to seek care in an emergency room when her primary care provider couldn’t see her for several weeks. “People with disabilities have greater health care needs,” she said. “When the health care system isn't set up well, we are then paying more for those greater needs. I see it time and again with complications that come from spinal cord injuries.” Brush, who recently turned 40, is the founder and spokesperson for the Kelly Brush Foundation, which grants about $1 million per year to people with spinal cord injuries to purchase adaptive sports equipment and maintain an active lifestyle. Its best known fundraiser is the annual Kelly Brush Ride, which draws nearly 1,000 bike riders and will take place this year on Sept. 12 in Middlebury. There are also Kelly Brush Rides in Park City, Utah, and the Bay Area. Brush is especially proud of the community that she and her foundation have helped build. “When I got hurt, I didn't know anybody else with a spinal cord injury,” she said. Now her foundation connects people with spinal cord injuries with one another.  “There's something really different about being able to build community with people who are doing things similarly to you, as well as just the ability to feel seen and be seen by other people who are living a similar life to you outside of adaptive sports.” Brush lives in Charlotte with her two young daughters. She worked for 10 years as a pediatric nurse practitioner, but is taking a break from that to lead her foundation and look after her children. I asked Brush what she hopes people take away from her story. “To be excited about the fact that I've been able to live such a full life and continue to have all the same highs and lows that so many people have and I do it from my wheelchair,” she replied. “I definitely have some more struggles than others. But my life is awesome and really fun. I hope people can see that and see the beauty in life, no matter what comes up and what happens, and find and follow that.”

A teen golf prodigy launches a powerful drive that kills a golf caddy at a tony New York country club. Investigations and hidden scandals soon follow. So begins best-selling Vermont author Chris Bohjalian’s spellbinding new book, “The Amateur.” His 26th novel is classic Bohjalian: a riveting tale told by a female protagonist that weaves together mystery, intrigue, romance, betrayal and secrets that had me frantically turning the page to find out what happens next. Bohjalian is among Vermont’s most beloved and prolific authors of literary and historical fiction. His work has been translated into more than 35 languages, and three of his novels — “Secrets of Eden,” “Midwives” and “Past the Bleachers” — have been made into movies. “The Flight Attendant” is an Emmy-nominated series on HBO Max. He has also written three plays. The New York Times Book Review named “The Amateur” one of “The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.” Bohjalian often writes from the perspective of a female protagonist. “I do it because I think a woman is more likely than a man to go on the emotional odyssey that the tale demands,” he told me. He said he considers it high praise when a reader tells him, “I thought you were a woman.” Bohjalian, who lives in Weybridge, has won numerous literary awards. He wrote the “Idyll Banter” column for the Burlington Free Press for nearly 25 years, has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and writes periodic essays on his Substack. He is a graduate of Amherst College. Bohjalian has also been recognized for his efforts to educate Americans about the Armenian genocide. He has family who survived the genocide, which was launched in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and resulted in the deaths of as many as 1.2 million Armenians. He has written regularly on the topic, including his 2012 book, “The Sandcastle Girls,” which is a love story with the genocide as its backdrop. He is keenly aware that history often repeats itself. “Genocide begins with language, by demonizing the minority, by reducing them to something less than human, something like an insect, a vermin, a parasite, a germ,” he told me. “Just as the Ottoman Empire used that language about the Armenians, or the Nazis used that sort of language about the Jewish citizens of Europe, increasingly in the United States we see immigrants or people from other countries demonized in much the same way.” He cited the example of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance “demonizing Ohio Haitian citizens, claiming that they were so animalistic they ate dogs and cats.” “I vacillate wildly between whether I believe that democracy in America is really in jeopardy or simply believing that we are in a cycle right now where there is a stupidity, a cruelty and a savagery that is cyclical, and eventually we will swing back,” he said. Bohjalian kicks off a national book tour for “The Amateur” with an event at the South Burlington Public Library on Saturday. He has another novel due out in 2028 and is at work on a play. His advice to aspiring writers?  “Write because you love it. Write in the genre you love to read. Write every day.”

President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is intensifying. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained over 10,000 people just in the last week of June. This month, ICE agents killed two men in less than a week, including a young Columbian father in Maine who reportedly had legal status. Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that it is only arresting “the worst of the worst,” most of the people arrested by ICE have no criminal convictions. Fear is now a constant in immigrant communities. “It's like watching a slow car crash every day,” said Jill Martin Diaz, an immigration attorney and executive director of the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project. VAAP is a rapidly growing legal services and technical assistance organization for immigrants. Since becoming VAAP’s first paid staff member in January 2024, Martin Diaz now oversees a paid staff of 10, a network of 28 volunteer attorneys and over two dozen volunteer interpreters, among others. VAAP is also the hub of a newly formed network that now offers coordinated immigration legal services throughout the state. The network includes the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School, Vermont Afghan Alliance, and Vermont Legal Aid.  “We've seen a really steady stream of people being arrested in Vermont,” said Martin Diaz. VAAP attorneys make weekly visits to Northwest State Correctional Facility and report encountering an average of 12 to 18 immigrants in detention. Martin Diaz warned that “rights and protections are being stripped away every day in mundane-seeming memos and orders from courts. And we're just watching the system slip between our fingers as we're trying to support Vermonters to access their needs.” Anxiety has been compounded by a Supreme Court decision that allows the Trump administration to end temporary protected status. The decision may result in the loss of legal protection for over a million immigrants who have fled war or environmental disasters in their home countries. Martin Diaz said this Supreme Court decision will impact several dozen Haitians, some of whom have lived in Vermont for decades and “find themselves now without temporary protected status, vulnerable to being arrested by ICE and prosecuted for removal proceedings, and most acutely unauthorized to work.” Martin Diaz formerly taught immigration law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, directed its Center for Justice Reform Clinic and practiced at Vermont Legal Aid, and was a lecturer in the department of social work at the University of Vermont. In 2023, Martin Diaz was named by the LGBTQ+ Bar Association as one of the 40 best LGBTQ+ lawyers under 40 and has received awards from the Vermont Bar Association and American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont.  Martin Diaz said “that for every terrifying story about ICE hurting people, killing people in the streets, the stories about unfair things happening in courts of law, there are also stories of hope, of the system working as it should, of things going well, that doesn't make the news.” The attorney and activist concluded with a message for immigrants who are fearful: “I'm just so sorry that this is happening. I'm sorry that this isn't what we promised.”

Summer reading is often about traveling to far-away places and meeting fascinating people. But for two Vermont authors, the exotic destination for their new books is their home state. Hardwick author Brett Ann Stanciu’s latest book is “Call It Madness.” It features a young protagonist, Avah Lavoie, who journeys to a remote village in northern Vermont to salvage an old farmhouse that offers answers to mysteries about her family. The book’s title is taken from a David Budbill poem and “reflects the sorrow and stubbornness of family life,” says the author.  Stanciu told me she “wanted to write about a small Vermont village that has people who are very wealthy … people who are in the middle and people who are really scrambling in the bottom.” If her fictional village sounds suspiciously like the real town of Greensboro, there is a reason: Stanciu is the treasurer and zoning administrator for the Northeast Kingdom town. The Marlboro College graduate is the recipient of two Vermont Arts Council grants and was a 2025 nominee for the Pushcart Prize, the prestigious literary award. She is editor-at-large for Vermont Almanac. Stanciu was a guest on Vermont Conversation in 2021 to discuss her nonfiction book “Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal.” For Corinth author Catherine Tudish, the title of her latest book, “A Thousand Souls,” refers to the population of the fictional village of Neptune, Vermont. The characters include a boy who travels to South Carolina to meet his father for the first and only time, a shy girl who loses her stutter when she befriends a black bear, and a beloved sheriff who breaks up a drug operation only to get arrested himself for helping undocumented workers evade immigration enforcement. Tudish is the author of three books and has taught writing and literature at George Washington University, Harvard, Dartmouth and the Bread Loaf School of English. Tudish said she is drawn to writing about Vermont because of “the qualities of observation of the people who live here, a very particular kind of sense of humor, and a great interest in people who come from away and what we're like and how we behave. We can sometimes be objects of humor, but I think that there's also a great kindness inherent in people in Vermont.” Tudish said her fictional town of Neptune is based loosely on Strafford, which is enjoying a moment of fame for its illustrious son, musician Noah Kahan. It turns out that Tudish knew Kahan as a child. Kahan “was a very interesting 3-year-old. He seemed very curious and focused and asked a lot of questions in a way that I think other 3-year-olds didn't. So I'm not surprised that he's ended up doing something sort of extraordinary.” Stanciu said a common thread between the main characters that she and Tudish write about is that “Vermont is a place of multiplicity, that people come from all kinds of walks of life, they do all kinds of different things, have many different skills, lots of different experiences, some joyous, some tragedy. But between that, there's this sense of respect for the individual for what they're doing.” “It doesn't always mean that the characters in these books are behaving well,” said Stanciu. “But they're struggling in one way or another to try to figure out their lives within this complicated network of the people around them, the village, the rural communities and the influence of the landscape.”

In 2016, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was an insurgent candidate taking on Hillary Clinton, the heavily favored pick of the Democratic establishment for the presidential primary. As Sanders barnstormed the country and brought out millions of people to hear his message, the Clinton machine’s operatives and super-PACs swung into action to stop him by any means necessary. Tad Devine was deep in the trenches of this fight. He is a veteran Democratic political consultant and was chief strategist for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Prior to that he had been a senior adviser in the presidential campaigns of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Devine has written an explosive new book about the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie.” His inside account comes as a new generation of populist Democrats, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, is once again challenging the Democratic establishment and receiving fierce pushback from the old guard. Devine writes that “the entrenched leadership of the Democratic Party seems determined to forget the mistakes it made during the primary season of 2016.” He blames the Democratic elite for “two catastrophic defeats in the recent past and who knows how many more to come in the future.” Devine insists, “The Democratic Party must stop impeding voters from determining the outcome of primaries.” Could Bernie have beaten Donald Trump in 2016? “Donald Trump's own pollster showed up at Harvard for the post-election review, and when asked what would have happened if Sanders was the nominee, he said he would have won,” Devine told me. “He understood that those white working-class voters who fled Hillary Clinton would have gone back to Bernie Sanders.” Devine said the reason the Democratic Party is “completely out of touch with the American people” is because it participates in “a rigged system” in which the richest donors can buy elections. He said that in other countries, “if they threw money into campaigns anonymously, they would go to jail.” “We have to break from that stranglehold of money in politics and establish ourselves as a party that is willing to seek funding through people at the grassroots level.” There are two ways to fix the corrupt campaign financing system, Devine said. “One is elections, and the second is the Constitution and overriding the Supreme Court. That is the only way home right now for America.” Devine said that “overwhelming majorities of Democrats, Republicans, independents support changing the system of campaign finance.” What they need is “a visionary leader or leaders to come out and to move the nation in that direction.”  Is there any particular leader who he thinks has promise? Devine suggested Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or California Gov. Gavin Newsom might emerge. But he noted that Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator until 2004 when he was elected a U.S. senator, and then won the presidency four years later.  “People can come up very quickly in this day of instant communication.”  When that leader emerges, he predicted, “I think politics will change in America and will give it back its soul.”

The Supreme Court ended its term with a series of blockbuster decisions on birthright citizenship, immigration, transgender rights and campaign finance. I spoke with U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., who is the vice ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. “It's shocking to me that we ever got to this place that we were having the Supreme Court weigh in on birthright citizenship,” Balint told me, sounding incredulous about the decision. “It's so clear that white nationalism has absolutely taken hold here in D.C. among my colleagues in Congress, certainly in the White House, and on the Supreme Court,” Balint said. “You see that when you don't have a unanimous decision saying actually that the Constitution says what the Constitution says. They're trying to redefine citizenship to leave out a whole lot of people.” Balint asserted that the Supreme Court “is beholden to white Christian nationalism right now, and it's terrifying to me.” “It is past time” that the U.S. Supreme Court be reformed, said Balint, who was first elected to Congress in 2022 and is running for a third term. “I want actual ethics with teeth, with consequences. I want term limits. I am absolutely open to expanding the court. I think that when (Democrats) have had power, (they) have not used it to its fullest extent.” Balint spoke to me after stepping away from a tumultuous scene Tuesday afternoon on the House floor, which was paralyzed by infighting among Republicans. House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled votes and sent members home for two weeks when far-right GOP lawmakers rebelled over the stalled SAVE America Act, the elections bill that President Donald Trump has demanded be passed despite a lack of votes in the Senate. The Supreme Court also issued a decision last week revoking temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria who fled violence and political repression. The status has enabled over 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians to live and work legally in the U.S. The specter of mass deportations looms. “The ending of TPS is a death sentence for some of these people,” said Balint. “The whole point of having this protected status is to protect people from having to go back to a dangerous, unstable, unsafe place for them.” Many Haitians work in healthcare, especially long-term care for the elderly. “They are doing the hard work of keeping us healthy, and they are already not compensated enough for their labor,” said Balint. “They're starting to feel like Americans see them as expendable.”  “It is heartbreaking and infuriating that we are treating people so poorly that have contributed so much to our communities, to our states and to our nation. I know that we will get through this dark time, but for some people it will be too late.” Balint also addressed the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran. “We have lost 13 service members, and thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed for no good reason,” she said. “We're in no better position … in Iran now than we were before the war.” Balint has voted several times to end military aid to Israel. This week she led 75 House colleagues in sending a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemning Israeli military engagement in Lebanon. “I don't know how you can look at what is happening and what has happened in Gaza, and what continues to happen in the West Bank — I mean, it's a bunch of terrorist vigilantes in the West Bank — and now what I see is indiscriminate bombing in Lebanon. I don't know how you can look at that and think that we're on the right track.” I asked Balint her thoughts on America’s 250th birthday this week. “I've been thinking about this a lot,” she replied. “Growing up as a gay woman, I always felt like a second-class citizen. I never imagined that there would be a time when I could marry my spouse. I never imagined that I would have employment protections,” Balint said. “This country is going to break your heart, and also the freedoms that are guaranteed in the First Amendment are an incredible, beautiful thing to behold. There are very few places in the world where you have that kind of freedom. But we have to protect it. We can't accept it as a given.  We have to be vigilant.” “Americans perhaps are understanding in a new way that nobody is coming to save us. That we have to be the ones day in and day out protecting both the beautiful things that we have and also continue to strive for that more perfect union that we give voice to.” “We all have to have the skin in the game.”

In the early 1800s, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake spent 44 years as life partners living together in the small Vermont town of Weybridge. They are one of the earliest lesbian couples in America whose story is documented, thanks in part to a new graphic novel by Tillie Walden. Walden is a rising star in cartooning. She served as Vermont’s fifth cartoonist laureate from 2023 to 2026, following cartoon luminaries such as Alison Bechdel and the late New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren. In 2018 at the age of 22, Walden won the first of her two Eisner Awards, known as the Oscars of cartooning, becoming one of the youngest Eisner Award winners ever. Walden’s latest book, “Charity & Sylvia,” has been named the 2026 selection of Vermont Reads, a program of Vermont Humanities that invites communities around the state to read the same book and hold discussions and events. Walden moved to Vermont from Texas to attend the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction and became a professor there in 2022. Walden, now 30, is the author of 16 books. She lives in Norwich with her wife, the cartoonist Emma Hunsinger, and their young son. Walden faced many challenges in reconstructing the lives of Charity and Sylvia. For one, she did not know what they looked like. The closest image she had was a silhouette of the couple, framed by locks of their hair. “When it came to deciding their faces, it was mentioned in a letter way back when that Charity looked a lot like her brother, so I went to Massachusetts and found the portrait of her brother, and I based her off of what her brother looked like,” Walden told me. She based her depiction of Sylvia on a photograph that she had of her niece. Walden also found another source for inspiration: her Vermont neighbors. “I needed actual human beings to populate Weybridge, Vermont, in 1810, but there was nothing to go off of, so I really did just look at my neighbors and I drew their faces and their bodies and their personalities into the book,” she said. “Small town Vermont hasn't changed that much, really.” Walden wants “Charity & Sylvia” to offer a more realistic view of queer love. “Marginalized groups often have to represent themselves in media as very digestible and very acceptable, because that's how you find mainstream appeal.” “What I'm actually interested in is how gayness, queerness — whatever you call it — interacts with more complex parts of life, like faith, like conservatism, like being an American, like being a Vermonter. And I was very moved that Charity and Sylvia were not perfect role models,” she said. “Queer people aren't perfect. No marginalized person is perfect. No person anywhere is perfect.”