Bonny Carmicino, who lives in Cold Spring, has had an interesting career path but primarily is a clothing pattern maker. We spoke near the end of her term as president of the Association of Sewing and Design Professionals about when she learned to sew, her winding route from Capitol Hill to MIT to Wall Street and law school, and what she calls her life work: creating a way to have our clothes fit us better.

Rupert Holmes, who lives in Cold Spring, is known for many things. In 1979, his song, "Escape (The Pina Colada Song") hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. In 1985, his musical whodunit, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, won five Tony Awards. We spoke with Rupert not about any of that but about his New York Times bestselling mystery, Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide. A sequel, Murder Your Mate, is due in 2025.

Todd Haskell, a resident of Beacon and a member of the Current board of directors, discusses his nearly 20 years as balloon handler and then clown during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City.

Peter Stevenson speaks with Dinky Romilly, a Philipstown resident who was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and also has a famous mother, the investigative journalist and writer Jessica Mitford, best known for her book The American Way of Death, and for her eccentric family of sisters, the Mitford sisters, who were Dinky’s aunts. 

Beacon resident Guy Felixbrodt recently became the first person ever to complete a full Ironman triathlon with no shoes on. In this interview with Current reporter Brian PJ Cronin, he talks about why he did it, and shares his unique worldview focused on ambitious athletic feats, community service and the practice known as "earthing," which emphasizes maintaining direct contact with the ground. 

More than 300 U.S. newspapers have closed in the past three years, on top of the 2,500 that have shut down since 2004. In this episode, we present a conversation last year between Highlands Current editor Chip Rowe and Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post media columnist and author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, about the effect of this loss on our country.

Susan Allport is the author of Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York. In this episode she talks with Chip Rowe about the origin and uses of these rocky ruins that criss-cross New England's landscape. 

Carl Bon Tempo, who lives in Cold Spring, is a history professor at SUNY Albany. He is the author, with Hasia Diner, of Immigration: An American History, which Yale University Press published in May. 

In our second episode tied to The Current's series on the Black history of the Highlands, historian Myra Young Armstead discusses the life of James F. Brown, who was the longtime gardener in the 19th century at Mount Gulian and may have been the first Black man to vote in what is now Beacon. Armstead's book "Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America" details what we've learned about Brown's life and times from a meticulous journal he kept for 37 years, from 1827 to 1866. 

In a conversation with Current Editor Chip Rowe, Michael Groth, author of Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley, discusses the overlooked early history of Black people in our area and the African American struggle for freedom.