Conflict of Interest

The strike. The future of streaming. The future of theaters. What makes a great film. What is your favorite film and why? It’s all here with writer, editor and producer Keenan Ellis, who joins his Dad to talk about the same stuff they usually talk about at dinner.

Public defender Robin Steinberg couldn’t accept that people without money are housed in jails all over the country, not because they are guilty, but because they can’t afford bail.

So she started the Bail Project, an organization dedicated to eradicating the use of cash bail. The Bail Project actually pays the bail of the accused so they can be free from prison while the charges against them are dealt with by the criminal justice system.

Steinberg has been a public defender for more than 35 years. She has represented thousands of low income people accused of crimes, trained other public defenders and founded other organizations - namely the Bronx defenders In NY and Still She Rises, in Oklahoma. She has taught at Columbia and UCLA, given a TED Talk and is a featured speaker worldwide on criminal justice reform.

Steinberg is the author of the new book - The Courage of Compassion - A Journey from Judgment to Connection, about her experience inside the system.

Arthur Ashe would not recognize the U.S. Open Tennis championships played this summer in New York City. He won the tournament in 1968 as a US Army Captain and received NO prize money. Coco Gauff won millions for her victory, which she played in the shadow of Ashe and in the presence of Billie Jean King, not to mention the execs at JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley.

How did America turn from a fairly health democracy into an angry, bitter group of tribes that believe their own stories and reject facts, science, government institutions and intellectual inquiry. Or have we always been this way? Journalist Nina Burleigh has been writing about these issues for years. You can draw a line from JFK’s affairs to the election of Donald Trump and the handling of the COVID pandemic for clues to how it got this way. Burleigh is the author of many books on politics and culture, including our handling of the pandemic and the assassination of Mary Meyer, the mistress of JFK and ex-wife of a high level CIA official. Burleigh connects the dots.

Last month the NY Times Wirecutter taste testers wanted to determine the best vanilla ice cream in the world. They tasted all the cool ones. Five tasters tested 16 vanilla ice creams blind. Their conclusion? A 40 plus year old vanilla made by a couple of guys in a Vermont gas station. Yes - those guys. And a short time later, a food guru named Peter Lind joined the company and helped create the big ones - Chunky Monkey, Rainforest Crunch and Cookie Dough - my daughter’s favorite. But before all of them - there was vanilla. Peter Lind takes us through the history. I interviewed him on my VT Viewpoint radio show on WDEV last week and wanted to get this exciting episode to you ASAP. It was so much fun.

Come with us to a bygone era when a U.S. Senator from Idaho undertook a sprawling investigation of the CIA and its secrets. Drugging U.S. citizens, assassinating foreign leaders, overthrowing foreign governments. It all happened in this country and it was all revealed by the so-called Church committee in the 1970s. The details are all in the new book by Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen. At the NY Times, Risen wrote stories about CIA secrets and surveillance that angered President George Bush, whose Justice Department threatened the writer with prison. Risen refused to reveal his sources to the government, which eventually backed down.

Well it happened. Trump has been indicted a fourth time before we could get the podcast out on the first three. But our conversation with former federal prosecutor Jerry O’Neill is still relevant because we explore the two indictments by a federal grand jury for Trump’s handling of top secret documents AND his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. We do NOT discuss the fourth indictment - this week - by a grand jury in Georgia. This one charges Trump with a broad conspiracy to overturn the election. But this time there are 18 additional defendants, including his lawyer Rudy Guiliani. This charge - if it sticks - can not be erased by a presidential pardon and REQUIRES jail time.

It’s been three weeks since the Winooski River jumped its banks during a torrential rain and flood Vermont’s state capitol. There is still garbage in the streets. The iconic corner of State and Main is still dusty. No lunch crowd from state offices. The entire downtown is ghostly. And despite the determination and pluck of store owners and landlords, there is a growing anger and bitterness about how this could have happened and why there wasn’t more help.

When floodwaters raged through the tiny state capitol of Montpelier, everyone was tested. Business owners, workers, homeowners, renters, government officials. Everyone is still being tested a week later. And the results of the test are coming and will determine whether the moniker of Vermont Strong is real - or a slogan for social media and fundraising.

After 25 years of searing Vermont’s northern bogs, the naturalist and writer Bryan Pfeiffer made the discovery of a lifetime. He spotted the shy butterfly that had eluded him and raised questions in his own life about life and death, nature and moving slowly. A former newspaperman who covered everything from fires to health care and politics, Pfeiffer is Vermont’s leading naturalist, spending much of his time searing bogs and fens (there is a difference) for the life that makes our own lives worth living.