The Loneliness of the Long Distance Dialer

Why can’t we communicate? Too much communication. How do you feel while talking with someone who’s reading emails? We’re in the Metropolitan Opera to hear Renée Fleming in La Traviata.… Read More

Vermont’s 2500 Non-profits

Vermont has over 2500 non-profit organizations. They are either mission-driven or overhead-driven. They are focused either on achieving their stated mission or on their survival. There is a great deal… Read More

The Consuming Society

We are often called the “consumer society.” The term has mixed meaning. All societies are in fact consumer societies. An Afghan tribal village consumes, as do people in Williston. The… Read More

Who Should Lead?

What should we look for when we choose a leader? The very person in your small town who really wants to be the cop is probably the one individual you… Read More

Homage aux soeurs

While visiting Québec City last week for the Fêtes de la nouvelle France, we were wandering through Place Royale surrounded by early Québec re-enactors in period pantaloons, rough linen shirts… Read More

An Insular Nation

We are outside security. Through thick glass, we watch our son hoist his backpack onto the x-ray machine and wait to be summoned by a uniformed TSA agent through the… Read More

What’s Wrong with Our Schools?

A number of things… As a community, we have lost respect for our schools. We speak disparagingly of our schools in front of our children. We no longer instill in… Read More

Minding Our Own Business

The State’s “Please Look at Me” strategy — trying to attract major manufacturing or service employers to Vermont — is under-funded and out of date and, quite frankly, hopeless. Vermont’s… Read More

Educational Culture

You can feel it within minutes of entering a school: the demeanor of the students, the bearing of the teachers, the care for the physical plant, the artifacts of discovery,… Read More

Posted Land

As John Donne put it 350 years ago, “No man is an island.” To which we might add, “no matter how rich.” A real estate developer named Radcliffe Romeyn Jr.,… Read More

A Man of Girth

I am a man of girth, overweight, fat….there I said it. But what does it mean? Physiologically it means simply that I consume more calories than I burn, nothing more,… Read More

Leadership

Commentator Bill Schubart has been thinking a lot about leadership lately, what constitutes it and where it went? I am thinking a lot about conflict and leadership these days …what… Read More