By Brett Yates In “Bit Rot,” Douglas Coupland’s recent collection of essays and stories, the author writes, “In the future, every day of the week will be a Thursday. We’re all working toward the grave, and life will be one perpetual fast-food job of the soul. The weekend? Gone. We all pretty much know it…

This article will be published during my first week of recovery from moderate lumbar surgery. The surgery is called foraminotomy, a procedure designed to widen the passageway for my sciatic nerve. The thing I want to talk about this week is snowmaking.  The reason this season has been so glorious and long (skiing well into…

By Kevin Theissen “Try putting your iPhones down every once in a while, and look at people’s faces,” said Amy Poehler, a comedian. Mobile technology: the next generation Faster and more efficient mobile phones are on the horizon. That’s right, 5G is almost here, according to Network World. If you were never quite sure what…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week’s horoscopes are coming out under the light of an Aries Moon, a moon that will turn Void-of-Course for a few hours on the afternoon of June 19, and remain in that state until it enters Taurus at about 6 p.m., EST. Because anything we do…

By Dom Cioffi I was driving through town the other day when my son erupted from the backseat, “Dad, look, it’s a Porsche!” I glanced over to the opposite side of the road just quick enough to catch a bright red sports car rip through the intersection. “That’s a Boxster, but I’d rather drive a…

By Declan McCabe Scanning a sunlit pond floor for crayfish, I was distracted by seven dark spots gliding in a tight formation. Six crisp oval shadows surrounded a faint, less distinct silhouette. The shapes slid slowly and then, with a rapid motion, accelerated before slowing to another glide. I can remember seeing this pattern as…

By Marguerite Jill Dye On the occasion of your 145th day in office, President Trump, and my 45th column in the Mountain Times, I humbly offer Trump and his party leadership this letter which was inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” nearly 45 years ago on Sept. 5, 1973. When Solzhenitsyn was…

By Brett Yates Why do celebrities ever apologize for anything? What does it do, exactly? Does it ever change anyone’s mind about whatever’s happened? When it comes to people whom we don’t know in real life, explanations are probably more appropriate than apologies. Regret and sympathy, contrition and forgiveness—these are the acts and emotions of…

By Brady Crain As always, summer seems to have popped open overnight, and I am always blown away by it.  One of the things I miss most living in Killington versus other more residential towns is magnolia, lilac, cherry, and crabapple trees (even rhododendron, azalea, and forsythia).  There are a few flowering trees around, and…

By Kevin Theissen U.S. markets Shaking off political turbulence in Washington, stocks climbed higher in May amid the strongest corporate earnings growth in years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average picked up 0.33 percent, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index gained 1.16 percent and the NASDAQ Composite added 2.50 percent, according to the The Wall Street…

By Dom Cioffi In November of 2014, a man named Thomas Carey told a large audience at a UFO convention that he had “smoking gun” evidence that extraterrestrials had visited earth. His evidence was purported to be in the form of photographic slides dating back to Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947—the location of the world’s…

By Cal Garrison This week’s horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Capricorn Moon, with a bevy of aspects that are more than interesting, but not quite as remarkable as the long term effects of the last full moon. For reasons that I can’t explain, I have received a lot of questions about…

By Joe Rankin The “fisher cat” is neither of those things. Doesn’t fish. Isn’t a cat. In fact, a lot more of what people think they know about the fisher is wrong. It’s almost like we made up the animal. The fisher, Pekania pennanti, is a big forest-dwelling weasel, related to the American marten, and…

By Brett Yates The University of Vermont’s commencement speaker this year was James Fallows, a journalist for The Atlantic magazine. I’ve followed Fallows’ writing off and on since Obama’s election, more for familial bonding purposes than for his ramblings about China and airplanes and his milquetoast political observations: the educated, reasonable, center-left perspective of Fallows…

By Marguerite Jill Dye A dear friend asked, “Aren’t you afraid of expressing your opinion in such a public venue? I lived through the McCarthy era when people were blacklisted for speaking their truth.” Most of my life I’ve been afraid of voicing my feelings for fear someone might disagree or disapprove. In Argentina, we quickly…