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.

Robert Kennedy died by assassination 55 years ago. It was an event that altered the nation’s history forever. Whenever I think about it I go down a deep rabbit hole of sadness thinking about what might have been. Ever so strangely, Kennedy’s son Robert Kennedy Jr. is now running for president. Both campaigns were and are quixotic efforts that bring all the sadness and tragedy back to a generation that were so young when Kennedy was shot and now retired or dying today. Remembering Robert Kennedy is to grapple with what might have been.

A growing field of ecological economics sees the world through a more collective, shared prosperity that values human beings over never-ending growth that destroys the planet. University of Vermont Professor Jon Erickson is driving this change from the University of Vermont. He calls our current system “fairytale economics,’’ and urges us to understand the ecological reality that can no longer withstand the human onslaught of unending growth. Erickson’s new book is the Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.

Two men, one black, one white, collide on the streets of this midwestern city in the wake of the George Floyd killing with tragic consequences. What happened tells us a lot of about modern America and how it is to separate fact from fiction. Author and former NY Times Editor Joe Sexton tells us how the truth is obscured by tribalism and social media in a way that damages communities and pits us all against each other.

Ashley Moore and Conor Kennedy are not elected to anything. But they make sure the Vermont House and Senate stay on schedule and their bosses can carry out their agendas. They spend more time on their IPhones than anyone! They join me to talk about how the Vermont legislature works. Biggest surprise of the interview? The high level of idealism they bring to this work.