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…

We don’t have to be very old before we acquire items that are dear to us and just can’t be thrown away. When you’re a child, it could be a doll, a toy fire engine or a baseball card. It just means too much to you, so into a storage box it goes. If you…

By Kevin Theissen The road to better health may sometimes involve an extra expense here and there, but you should be careful about wasting money on diet ideas wit  promises that are based more on myth than fact. If you’re considering a diet, you should consult your physician to determine the best approach for you. Identified…

By Dom Cioffi In 2006, a tinted piece of paper with a rushed sketch of a comic book character sold for $75,000. The image was the work of illustrator H.G. Peter and featured the first recorded drawing of Wonder Woman. (Google this to take a look; the rendering is very close to the superhero we…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week’s Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Scorpio Moon, with aspects that make me smile and breathe a deep sigh of relief. The geometry of the chart for this week is suspended within the framework of three Mystic Rectangles. This may not mean…

By Susan Shea If you take a walk in the woods on a summer evening, you may be treated to the ethereal, flute-like song of the hermit thrush, often the only bird still singing at dusk (and the first bird to sing in the morning). In 1882, naturalist Montague Chamberlain described it as a “vesper…

By Kevin Theissen We are all, inexorably, marching toward old age. By 2030, 72 million Americans will be age 65 or older. The good news is longevity has been improving, and people are remaining healthy and vibrant at older ages. The bad news is cultural perceptions of “old” people have not kept pace. A 2016…