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.”

For 30 years, journalist Amy Goodman has been “going to where the silence is” to report stories that the powerful would rather you not know about and the corporate media have often ignored. She has stared down armed soldiers in Nigeria, survived a massacre in East Timor, documented dogs attacking indigenous pipeline protesters in North Dakota, and been manhandled and arrested while covering the 2008 Republican National Convention. Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!” — the award-winning independent daily news program that she co-founded in 1996. She is also my sister, and we co-wrote four bestselling books. She is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” Now a new documentary film called “Steal This Story, Please!” traces Amy’s career and the growth of “Democracy Now!” from a radio broadcast on nine stations into one of the leading U.S.-based independent daily news broadcasts in the world on television, radio and online. The film is directed by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin. This week, “Steal This Story, Please!” is showing in Vermont in Burlington, Brattleboro, St. Johnsbury and Montpelier.Amy has gone to some of the places around the world where the light is dimmest, often putting herself in danger, and has been persistent in her belief that our freedom of the press is critical to a meaningful democracy at home. “The idea that movements matter, that we have to go to where the silence is as journalists. … It's often not silent. It's raucous, it's rowdy, people are organizing, but it doesn't hit the corporate media radar screen,” she said. “That's where ‘Democracy Now!’ lives, and that's really where the hope is.”Last week came the development that the U.S. Department of Justice is closing its antitrust investigation into a merger that would allow Paramount Skydance to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion, and with it countless media properties that include CBS and CNN.“People who care about war and peace, climate change, reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, racial and economic equality are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority — silenced by the corporate media, which is why we have to take the media back,” she said. “The media can be the greatest force for peace on Earth.”

The birth rate in the U.S. has dropped by an astonishing 22% since 2007. Are smartphones to blame?Yes, according to a groundbreaking new study by Middlebury economist Caitlin Myers. Her smartphone study is garnering national attention this week, confirming an idea that people have long speculated about but until now have lacked data. Myers and co-author Ezekiel Hooper showed that from 2007 to 2011, after the iPhone was introduced, there was a sharp decline in births, up to half of which can be attributed to the smartphone. They say that smartphones have led to “reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.”Myers says a declining birth rate is not necessarily bad, but that there are “many aspects of it that really concern me, aspects that relate to economic growth and supporting older generations, but also questions of what does this mean for humans.”“Everybody's just doom scrolling on their phone alone and isolated and not forming relationships.” Myers is the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is well known for her research into the effects of abortion policy on people’s lives. She has testified in the U.S. Senate about the economic consequences of the 2022 Dobbs decision ending the constitutional right to abortion, and she spearheaded the amicus brief in the Dobbs case that was signed by over 150 economists, highlighting the negative impact of limiting abortion access. Myers also runs a national database of abortion providers.Myers said the Dobbs decision has resulted in about 30,000 additional births “concentrated among people who are younger, have less education and have really limited financial resources.”“The post-Dobbs era is an inequality story,” she told me. “There are parts of the country like ours where the Dobbs decision almost paradoxically expanded abortion access” due to increased availability of telehealth and medication by mail.But in states like Texas, Louisiana and West Virginia that have enacted near-total abortion bans, only 80% to 85% of people who want an abortion are getting one. That leaves up to one-fifth of people who want an abortion “trapped. They aren't finding the means, the information, the resources, the safety and security to travel long distances or to order pills through the mail, and they're giving birth as a result.”Myers grew up in rural West Virginia and Georgia. She empathizes with those who don’t think like her. “As a Southerner it breaks my heart when I hear people dismiss the people I grew up with, the places I'm from, the beliefs that they have.”“We all know it's not just about dismissing far-away Southerners. There are divides within our own state.”Myers wonders “whether we could potentially bridge these divides rather than saying, ‘Yeah, I just don't think this is going to work out,’ like we're never going to agree.” She wants to do her “tiny little part to create a world where we give each other more grace.”

As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, two veteran activists are celebrating one of the country’s foundational principles: the right to protest, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. But they warn that this right is under attack.“Our ability to protest is key to moving forward on a whole range of environmental and social issues … which is why I'm so terrified at the thought of losing this democratic right,” said Annie Leonard, who spent 17 years with Greenpeace USA, serving as executive director from 2014 to 2023.She and André Carothers are co-authors of “Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It.” Carothers spent 13 years with Greenpeace USA and co-founded and led the Rockwood Leadership Institute.The two have direct experience of the power of the protest and the ferocity of the pushback.Anti-protest laws are spreading and becoming increasingly repressive. Nearly 400 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 45 states, according to the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law. Activists are now being charged with felonies and accused of terrorism.One of the most draconian anti-protest tools is known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, as was filed against Greenpeace by Energy Transfers, builder of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The company accused Greenpeace of inciting violence and spreading misinformation during indigenous-led protests in 2016 and 2017 that delayed construction. Last year, a North Dakota jury awarded Energy Transfers $660 million, later reduced to a still-staggering $345 million.SLAPP lawsuits “are designed to intimidate, silence, scare, distract and bankrupt critics,” Leonard told me. “It's a kind of corporate legal bullying” intended to prevent people from protesting. Forty states, including Vermont, now have anti-SLAPP statutes.“Protest” describes creative and successful acts of resistance from around the world. Among these are the 2015 protests by “kayaktivists” in Seattle aimed at stopping Shell Oil from drilling in the Arctic. Hundreds of people in kayaks, sailboats and tribal canoes took to the water to block an oil drilling rig, Shell’s Polar Pioneer, as it was being moved to Alaska. The boaters held up signs saying, “Save the Arctic,” “Oil-Free Future” and “Shell No!”After spending $7 billion on Arctic oil exploration, Shell ultimately canceled the project, citing high costs and “the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment,” which protesters took credit for.Leonard said that what made the Seattle protest successful was that it was “part of a long intentional escalating campaign” that included family kayak training each weekend and free kayak rentals. “There were community meetings and art builds. It was a very inclusive and participatory set of activities for a couple of years leading up to filling the actual bay with kayaks to try to stop the Polar Pioneer from moving forward.”Carothers noted that “a lot of these protesters are not honored at the time.” Rosa Parks and her husband lost their jobs and had to leave town after her refusal to give up her seat for a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. It took nearly 40 years before Parks was honored by President Bill Clinton with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.“There are so many ways to get involved,” said Carothers, highlighting how citizens have protested the federal immigration crackdowns in New Orleans, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. He said he counted 27 different ways that people in Minneapolis resisted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “from people driving their neighbors' kids to school because they didn't want to leave the house,” to lawyers offering their services in cars, to people delivering food to their immigrant neighbors, to others “who went to the detention center with a blanket and a cup of hot soup when someone was released.”Leonard and Carothers want their book to be both inspirational and practical. They are speaking at the Patagonia store in Burlington on June 5 and offering a training in nonviolent resistance the following day.“If you're feeling alone and if you're feeling isolated, don't be alone,” Carothers said. “Find a neighbor, find a mailing list that is describing what's available to you in your community … and do what it takes to support the universe of people who are perhaps more inclined to go in the street, or perhaps more inclined to be arrested because they have the social capital (or) the economic flexibility to risk arrest in a way other people don't.”“There's lots of ways to be involved,” Carothers added, emphasizing: “Protest works.”

When Ben & Jerry’s ice cream held its annual Free Cone Day in April, it had to contend with an unlikely protester: Ben Cohen, the company’s co-founder, was standing on the site of the original scoop shop in Burlington, urging customers to Free Ben & Jerry’s.“Ben & Jerry's itself has not given up on” its values, Cohen told me, but its current owner “has prevented Ben & Jerry's from acting on its values and has destroyed the governance structure” of the company. Cohen founded the ice cream company with his friend Jerry Greenfield nearly 50 years ago. The two men ran the company until 2000, when it was acquired by Unilever, a multinational company that owns Dove soap, Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Vaseline, among other global brands. Ben & Jerry’s succeeded in getting Unilever to agree that the iconic Vermont company could continue to pursue its social mission, which would be overseen by an independent board. Cohen and Greenfield remained as employees of the company, but they had no management authority. The company continued to be a strong supporter of racial justice, LGBTQ rights, the Occupy Wall Street movement, climate activism and other issues.But relations between the ice cream company and its corporate masters began to sour, then curdled in 2021 when Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop selling ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Unilever opposed the move, then sold its Israeli business to an Israeli-owned company that has continued to sell the ice cream in Israel and the occupied territories.Ben & Jerry’s sued Unilever in 2024, accusing it of muzzling the company’s support for Palestinian rights and silencing its criticism of President Donald Trump. In March 2024, Unilever spun off its ice cream businesses to Magnum, which is now one of the largest ice cream companies in the world.The hippy-themed Vermont brand may be associated with peace and love, but that does not characterize its current relations with its owners. In March 2025, Ben & Jerry’s CEO David Stever was ousted, allegedly over the company’s progressive activism. In September 2025, Greenfield quit the company in protest. Cohen, who is 75, is now waging a battle to save the soul of Ben & Jerry’s and possibly buy it back, though Magnum says the company, which is valued at over $1 billion, is not for sale.“They've prevented the company from calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. They prevented the company from supporting the student [Palestinian solidarity] protesters, and they've prevented the company from using the word ‘Trump’ in its posts,” said Cohen. “Magnum has become Trumpified.”“The very thing that has built the brand, this values-led way of doing business, is the very thing that they're destroying. So they're taking this investment and reducing the value of it,” Cohen said.When I asked him whether Ben & Jerry’s might leave Vermont, he replied, “It’s possible.” He said that Ben & Jerry’s independent board had earlier prevented Unilever from closing the Waterbury ice cream plant. But Ben & Jerry’s could be moved to a central factory where other Magnum ice cream brands are made. “I don't know what's in Magnum's mind, but I don't think there would be anything to prevent them from doing that.”Cohen urged concerned consumers to boycott other Magnum ice cream brands, but not Ben & Jerry’s, which he said “would be harmful to the people who work at Ben & Jerry's.”“We want to support Ben & Jerry's — that's the issue — but to stop buying the other stuff that Magnum makes.”Cohen continues his brisk pace of activism. He was arrested last year at a U.S. Senate hearing featuring Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accusing Congress of slashing Medicaid for poor children in the U.S. to pay to bomb children in Gaza.Cohen said he has given up on the Democratic Party. “Both parties have presided over this system that drives all this money up to the top. The system is working the way it's designed, and both parties are guilty of that.”But he remains hopeful. “Action is the antidote to despair,” he said, quoting folk singer Joan Baez. “When you're confronted with situations of injustice, you can ignore it, you can complain about it, or you can work on changing it. And personally, I prefer to do that.”

Vermont journalist Jasper Craven has spent a decade investigating and exposing the culture of toxic masculinity that pervades the American military.In 2018, he wrote a multipart exposé for VTDigger about sexual misconduct and abuse in the Vermont Air National Guard that resulted in hearings at the Vermont Statehouse, reforms in the Guard, and the departure of the adjutant general. His writing on the military and veterans has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Politico and Mother Jones, among other publications.Craven’s investigation into the Vermont Guard showed him how “the military holds unique elements that can make these problems worse than in civilian life, and also that many of the systems developed to combat that behavior are themselves flawed and easily exploited and can leave women in particular really feeling betrayed by an institution that they've given their lives to.”Craven, who is 33, has a new book, “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” He argues that the U.S. military shapes American masculinity, especially through military schools, academies, and programs such as Junior ROTC in middle and high schools and ROTC in colleges. But the form of masculinity that these institutions advance has taken a heavy toll, as evidenced by a suicide crisis throughout the military.“The idea that the military is the single and most effective reform program for boys is just completely untrue,” said Craven. “Since the 1800s there are many stories of mostly young boys who have been deeply damaged while under the care of military school officials — some have died, some have committed suicide, some have been hospitalized for psychiatric crises.”Craven points to the chest-thumping hypermasculinity of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as emblematic of how some men are responding to the growing diversity of the military, including the rising status of women. “Women are being elevated for the first time into senior roles where they are often outshining men in both physical and academic pursuits, and that is majorly threatening to people like Hegseth,” Craven said. “The military response to that is violent subjugation, and that is what we see with Hegseth. … He is just psychically hung up on all of these old school ideas around manliness and military service.”Craven’s reporting on the military earned him an unexpected visit from the U.S. Secret Service. After he covered protests at West Point during a speech by President Donald Trump for a story for Politico, a Secret Service agent paid a visit to his parents’ home in Vermont.The agent was “alleging without merit, completely falsely that I was acting suspiciously on campus and that I had been asking around to meet the president — again, not true — though if I had been doing that, (I was) certainly well within my rights as a journalist.” Craven quickly concluded that “it was a pretty clear-cut act of intimidation from West Point.”Craven has not been deterred. He is moving back to Vermont to continue his work in journalism. He hopes that his work leads to “alternative ideas around shaping American masculinity and aiding American men.”

The documentary "Best Day Ever" features the world's first adaptive mountain bike trail network and the athletes who are changing lives.In 2022, Allie Bianchi, a 23-year-old outdoor enthusiast and special educator from Richmond, broke her neck while mountain biking. She is now paralyzed below her chest.In 2025, Bianchi was rolling again, this time on a specially adapted mountain bike. Now, she is the star of a new film.“Best Day Ever” follows the story of several adaptive mountain bikers — including Bianchi, Greg Durso and Ryan Manning — as they rediscover a sport they love. Central to their return to biking is the story of the world’s first adaptive mountain bike trail network, which was built with the help of volunteers from Richmond Mountain Trails. The Driving Range opened in Bolton in 2024. Last week, the Vermont Land Trust signed an agreement with the DesLauriers family, the owners of Bolton Valley resort, to conserve the land where the Driving Range is located. Richmond Mountain Trails and the Catamount Trail Association will hold recreation easements.Berne Broudy, a veteran Vermont outdoor journalist who is also president of Richmond Mountain Trails, produced and co-directed “Best Day Ever” with filmmaker Ben Knight. The 48-minute film has been winning awards at film festivals around North America since its release last fall.The film and the trail project it chronicles show how a community can not only open the outdoors to people with disabilities. It can change culture.Broudy recalled that when a group of local teenagers came to help build the trails, they didn’t know how to interact with people with disabilities. “Within one trail night of digging together, riding bikes together, eating hot dogs together, hanging out together, that dynamic totally changed,” Broudy said.“It's not so much about the trail as it is about changing the mindset to include everyone and being inclusive and allowing for these small changes that make huge differences in other people's lives,” said Manning, who works as an account manager at Burton Snowboards and has quadriplegia.Bianchi has seen how her participation in adaptive sports has changed attitudes. “When you spend time with someone with a disability, you learn that there is no difference,” she said. “It's just normalized. And I think we need more of that in this world.”One of the film's most powerful moments features Bianchi returning to the scene of her accident. She is riding an adaptive mountain bike and accompanied by the two friends she was with when she was injured. Returning to ride the trail again was a milestone for her.“You're continuing to conquer and do even greater and better things,” she reflected. “It hasn't really stopped you. And I think that is really cool."