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Courtesy Apple Studios “F1: The Movie” will put you into the driver’s seat of a Formula One race car.

‘F1: The Movie’ is the film event of the summer

July 2, 2025
If you’ve been waiting for a movie to get you off the couch and into a theater, wait no longer: “F1: The Movie” is the type of film that was tailor-made for summer entertainment. The film, directed by Joseph Kosinski and action producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the duo who brought the movie box office back from…

Pies, parades, and porch chats

July 2, 2025
“America is a tune. It must be sung together.”—Gerald Stanley lee The month of July is the height of summer, bringing a spirit of celebration to all of us. Our town of Killington may be small, but we know how to celebrate the 4th of July. We start early with the annual book sale at…

Inventing a better ski day: the innovations that drew crowds to Killington

July 2, 2025
By Karen D. Lorentz Editors’ Note: This is part of a series on the factors that enabled Killington to become the Beast of the East. Quotations are from author interviews in the 1980s for the book Killington, A Story of Mountains and Men. “We’ve got a million dollars that says you’ll learn to ski at…

‘Almost Heaven’

July 2, 2025
The stage was simple, designed to resemble a wooden board that resembled the siding of any barn, anywhere across America. It could have been the barn behind my house, or the one that my cousins have down in Georgia. It could have been a barn in Colorado or even West Virginia.  Nothing remarkable at all,…

Getting away from it all

July 2, 2025
My family and I went to the beach this past week. The temperatures were hot, and the weather was sunny, making for a classic seaside vacation. The house we rented was in the harbor of the town where we were visiting, so while we didn’t stare out at the ocean, we were able to sit…

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Fish mouths: how anatomy suggests ecology

July 2, 2025
The river roars in the heat of the summer. The water is clear and cool, and a respite from the high sun. An angler leans back, fly-fishing rod in hand, and casts it forward. The fly drops and sinks into the water. Hopefully, a fish will bite. What kind of fish depends on how deep…

The cliff we’re all staring down

July 2, 2025
The astrology of the moment reminds me of something my father often said to me as a kid, “if [insert name here] jumped off a cliff, would you?” I’m sure you heard it too! The question then followed with the regular belligerent teenage eye roll. There was a part of you that knew your dad…

‘F1: The Movie’ is the film event of the summer

July 2, 2025
If you’ve been waiting for a movie to get you off the couch and into a theater, wait no longer: “F1: The Movie” is the type of film that was tailor-made for summer entertainment. The film, directed by Joseph Kosinski and action producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the duo who brought the movie box office back from…

 What’s in a name?

June 25, 2025
There’s nothing like a talk show to spark an idea for a column. Hosts Kelly Ripa and her husband, Mark Consuelos, recently discussed how people’s first names often serve as clues to the decade in which they were born. Some names that are rarely chosen today were popular in previous decades.  The given name that…

No patch left unskied

June 25, 2025
I’m calling it.   I drove around the long way, hoping to catch one last glimpse of the patch before we actually began hiking up into The Canyon. Partly because I wanted to see what I was getting into and partly because I wanted to make sure she was still there. I honestly wasn’t sure…

Pack up your troubles

June 25, 2025
The longest day of the year has officially come and gone, which means we are now on the slow, downhill slide toward winter.  Given that the days are currently long and the temperatures are nearing their peak, my family has opted for the traditional summer beach vacation. This is nothing new since we’ve rented a…

Life in a shell: eastern box turtle

June 25, 2025
As a budding naturalist growing up in the concrete-heavy environs of Boston, I would regularly thumb through my family’s collection of nature books and daydream about the creatures within. One species I was particularly drawn to was the eastern box turtle. These charismatic terrestrial turtles have high-domed shells festooned with colorful yellow or orange markings…

Rutland’s moment: How TIF is the leverage needed

June 25, 2025
For many years—decades even—dreams of addressing Rutland’s downtown core have been deferred. Master plans drawn, community meetings held, revitalization goals articulated, and yet limited change has been possible. There has been no large-scale action. That is, until now. But what makes this effort now, with the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) District in play, so different…

Rockin the Region with the Mojo Birds

June 25, 2025
The Mojo Birds don’t come around often. Most of them hail from Colorado, with one member residing in North Carolina and one local member from Shrewsbury. If you have the chance to see them, I highly recommend doing so. I got to see them last summer at the Killington Block Party. They put on a…

Reset, refocus, realign

June 25, 2025
You could take a look around and see that everything is going wrong. You could also take a look around and see that everything is exactly how it’s supposed to be. Whining, complaining, and pointing fingers will get you nowhere. When you’re pointing your finger, there are three pointing back at you.  The more you…

’28 Years Later’ rises above its genre, providing a fascinating look at how people move forward after an apocalypse

June 25, 2025
Twenty-two years after director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s surprise hit apocalypse film, “28 Days Later” (2002), entered the lexicon of zombie movies, they return with “28 Years Later.” Sure, the math doesn’t quite add up, but it’s an alternate-future sci-fi anyway, and aside from the same setup and world-building, there aren’t any characters…

The great unfurling

June 18, 2025
We have just about come to the end of the great unfurling. That moment in time when the trees have grown and budded and leafed and have stretched as far as they can go. They are bigger, brighter, and fuller than they were last year, and you can feel the canopy thickening. The woods are…

Calling for a friend

June 18, 2025
We’ve all received those dreaded phone calls— the ones where the person’s voice on the other end suggests something dire is coming. The greatest example of this for me was the night I got the call that my father had died.  It happened during my senior year of college around 9 p.m. Upon returning from…

The dapper sparrow of the underbrush: Eastern towhee 

June 18, 2025
From forest edges and thickets on late spring mornings in the Northeast comes what sounds like an exhortation from across the pond: Drink your tea! This is not a British parent’s plea but rather the song of a chunky, colorful sparrow: the eastern towhee.  The eastern towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus, or “red-eyed chipper”) is found in…

‘The Shrouds’ is another erotic techno-thriller from David Cronenberg 

June 18, 2025
Humans have difficulty dealing with death. Canadian auteur David Cronenberg is not immune to this affliction. His wife of nearly 40 years passed away in 2017. Cronenberg said on record that “The Shrouds” is one measure of his grieving process. We all handle grief differently. Maybe not quite as different as Cronenberg or his protagonist,…