International human rights lawyer Reed Brody has been dubbed the “Dictator Hunter.” He has helped pursue and bring to justice notorious dictators including Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti and Yahya Jammeh of Gambia.

One dictator became a special focus of Brody’s global pursuit of justice. Hissène Habré was the former despot who ruled Chad from 1982 until he was deposed in 1990. Habré met with then-President Ronald Reagan and was armed and backed by the U.S. Habré, who was dubbed “Africa’s Pinochet,” was accused of ordering the killing of 40,000 people and the torture of 200,000 people during his reign of terror.

“The saying used to be that if you kill one person, you go to jail; if you kill 40 people, you are put in an insane asylum; but if you kill 40,000 people, you get a safe haven and a fat bank account in the country of your choosing,” Brody wrote.

For 16 years, Reed Brody led a team of investigators, lawyers and victims that spanned three continents as they pursued Habré. This global hunt culminated in Habré’s trial in Senegal in 2016. Habré became the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another country. The dictator, who had lived in seaside luxury in Senegal for 25 years, was sentenced to life in prison. Habré died of Covid-19 during his imprisonment in August 2021.

Brody recounts his global quest for justice in his new book, “To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial Of Hissène Habré.”

Brody argues that the precedent of holding dictators like Habré and Pinochet to account can also be applied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine. 

But pursuing tyrants requires patience. 

“Even assuming that he's indicted for war crimes or for aggression by a special tribunal, which is being discussed, unless there's a radical change in Russia, nobody is going to come in and arrest Vladimir Putin,” Brody said. “That said, these indictments will hang over his head all his life. And we see in other cases like Cambodia and elsewhere that you may not prosecute somebody today or in 10 years, but maybe 20 years or 30 years.”

Brody is critical of the double standard in international law, where human rights abuses by western leaders go unpunished. 

"I spent a long time documenting crimes committed against prisoners during the so called War on Terror in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons," he said. "George Bush, president of the United States authorized torture. He authorized waterboarding ... There has never been accountability for that." 

Brody has seen the rise and fall of dictators around the world. He knows the fragility of democracy. 

“I am very worried about democracy in the U.S.," he said. “It's going to require all of our organizing … to preserve or at least to reconquer our institutions.”

A transgender Vermont high school student who was the target of a transphobic hate campaign is breaking her silence.

“I want to be able to go out there and kind of just say, ‘I am trans, I am here,’” said the 14-year-old first-year student at Randolph Union High School, who asked to be identified as Rabbit in this interview. The Vermont Conversation and VTDigger are protecting the student’s privacy out of concern for her safety.

In late September, Vermont television station WCAX aired a news story about the girl’s volleyball team at Randolph Union High School. Rabbit had recently joined the team, and WCAX featured a single student who objected to Rabbit’s presence in the girl’s locker room.

The story was immediately picked up by right-wing media outlets including Fox News, the New York Post, the British tabloid the Daily Mail and the conservative Heritage Foundation. This unleashed a “wildfire of bigotry and hatred,” according to Rabbit’s mother, and a torrent of transphobic hate messages to Rabbit, her family and the school. The school district website was hacked and forced offline after the site was flooded with transphobic messages. Rabbit temporarily left school in fear for her safety.

In fact, Rabbit was being bullied by a small group of students, her mother said. WCAX soon removed the story from its website.

But the damage had been done. 

“I was in danger,” Rabbit said. “And not only me, but the trans youth community of Randolph and of Vermont due to this disgraceful and defaming news article.”

This incident comes as transgender people are under unprecedented attack, especially in Republican-led states. Four states have enacted a partial or total bans on gender-affirming care, and 20 other states are trying to pass such bills. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot declared that parents and health care providers who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth can be investigated for child abuse. Some 85% of trans or nonbinary youth say their mental health has been negatively affected by these laws, and more than half have considered suicide in the past year, according to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

“So much of Rabbit’s story absolutely mirrors what is happening across the country and here in Vermont,” said Dana Kaplan, executive director of Outright Vermont, an LGBTQ+ advocacy and support organization. “There's a continuous barrage of messages that are targeting queer and trans young people telling them that they are not valued, that they're not cared for, that they're not allowed to exist, that they're not allowed to access their joy, and really typical things that all young people need to be able to do to develop self confidence (and) to thrive.”

At the same time, there has also been an outpouring of support for Rabbit from everyone from her volleyball teammates to strangers who sent her letters.

“I just want you to remember that we’re children,” volleyball team captain Lilly Patton said to a crowd of about 350 people who attended a public meeting in Randolph in October. “It’s one child on the receiving end of all this hate. You’re saying all these things to a child who is already at high risk, who already doesn’t feel accepted. This child didn’t do anything to anyone, especially you adults. I was there. She was where she was supposed to be.”

Rabbit said she appreciates these allies. 

“Any message of support that you can give to trans youth or trans people in general…make it known because, oh my god, it helps so much,” she said.

“My hopes and dreams are to show people that they can just be who they are and that they don't need the approval of others or the approval of even their family members,” Rabbit said. “You just need to be you.”

Santa Claus is coming to town. But the person shimmying down the chimney may not be the rotund, bearded white man who has long played the role of St. Nick.

“Santa Camp” is a new documentary from HBO Max about an effort to diversify who represents Santa Claus. The story begins at the annual summer camp of the New England Santa Society, which represents more than 100 Christmas performers. The Santas realized that they need to look more like some of the communities that they serve. So they welcomed three new Santas: Chris Kennedy, a Black Santa from Arkansas; Levi Truex, aka Trans Santa, from Chicago; and “Santa Fin” Ciappara, a Santa with spina bifida who communicates via an iPad, joined by his mother Suki Ciappara.

Santa Fin always dreamed of being Santa in a parade. The movie captures the day in December 2021 when his dream came true and he sat in a sled pulled by elves in the River of Light parade in Waterbury. 

“Believe in your dreams and don't give up,” he said. "Be kind to people who are different."

For some, diversity is a threat. Kennedy set up an illuminated, inflatable Black Santa Claus display in his yard. Soon after, he received a racist letter. That motivated him to become Black Santa. 

“You're not going to steal my joy,” he told The Vermont Conversation. 

"I'm appealing to families who want diversity and want to see themselves represented or their adoptive kids want to see themselves represented. That's what I'm here for. I'm not here for the naysayers,” Kennedy said said.

The documentary showed the “Proud Boys” protesting Trans Santa Levi Truex outside the Chicago church where he was greeting children last year. Truex talked about violence directed against LGBTQ+ people, including the killing of five people at a Colorado Springs gay bar this week.

“We've always experienced hate. It's what makes us resilient. It's what makes us get louder and push harder,” he said. “The more that we feel the pressure from the hate, the more we're just going to be even more visible and more open. It's just what needs to happen.”

Truex believes that Trans Santa makes a difference, especially for the LGBTQ+ children who visit him. 

“I don't have an agenda to make your kids trans or whatever. My agenda is purely to spread joy and just be a good person, to be a good human. And to treat people with respect and dignity and just spread the love of Christmas,” he said.

When a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama addressed the 2004 Democratic Convention, he vaulted onto the national stage through the power and grace of his words. In that speech, he challenged Americans to have “the audacity of hope.” President Obama went on to become one of the greatest political orators of our time.

Obama has had a silent partner in crafting his oratory. In 2006, a novice speechwriter named Cody Keenan joined his team. Keenan wrote alongside Obama for 14 years, rising to become the chief White House speech writer. He continued collaborating with Obama, spending four years helping the former president write his memoir, “A Promised Land.” Keenan now runs a speechwriting and communications firm and teaches a popular undergraduate course on speechwriting at Northwestern University, his alma mater.

Obama’s silent partner is now telling his story. Cody Keenan has a new book, “Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America.” The book focuses on a fraught period in 2015 during which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act, and a white supremacist murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Obama delivered the eulogy at the church following the massacre, famously singing Amazing Grace.

The power of Obama’s oratory, Keenan said, is his ability to reach “into the American people and just talking to folks where they are. That's something too many politicians don't do.”

Keenan described writing for Obama as “f-ing terrifying.” 

“I was never nervous being around the most powerful man in the world,” he said. “I was nervous being around a damn good writer, especially when it's your job to write for him when he is on record saying I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.”

Obama’s presidency ended with another famous presidential speech, President Donald Trump’s inaugural “American Carnage” address, which laid out a dark vision of crime and white grievance. 

“What a way to set the tone for the next four years, not only just with a president who kind of picked at our wounds until they reopened, but then a pandemic that was mismanaged to the point where it killed more than a million Americans,” Keenan said.

“President's words matter,” Keenan continued. “If you ever need evidence of that, President Trump's probably your best evidence because his words unleashed something primal … and created a permission structure for political violence — to the point where sitting elected officials are advocating for it. It opened up the floodgates to something like Jan. 6. You had people marching with torches in Charlottesville with their hoods off. All this stuff is only possible because of the president's words.”

Abortion was on the ballot in this week’s midterm elections and the results were emphatic: Voters, even in conservative states, want abortion rights over abortion bans.

This election featured the most ballot measures on abortion in a single U.S. election. Vermonters voted by a more than 3-to-1 margin to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. California and Michigan also approved constitutional protections for abortion. Voters in Kentucky and Montana defeated anti-abortion ballot measures. And in August, voters in Kansas rejected a ballot measure that would have amended the state Constitution to say it contains no right to an abortion. 

“Abortion won,” said Oren Jacobson, co-founder and co-executive director of Men4Choice, a national prochoice advocacy group that organizes male allies.

Politicians “who attempted to mess around with people's intimate decision making in that way should really take a message here … that people do not want their lives to be interfered with,” said Felicia Kornbluh, professor of history and gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Vermont and vice chair of Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund.

“They want to be able to choose when and whether and under what circumstances to have children. And that means access to abortion. It means access to contraception. It means access to vasectomy procedures if people want that. It means access to a full range of reproductive health care no matter who you are — if you're in a same sex relationship, no matter what your gender identification is. We want that freedom. It's a bedrock freedom, and I think it's time that everybody in the political system recognizes that and take it as the kind of high value that it really is.”

Jacobson argued that it is essential to enlist men and other allies to protect reproductive rights. One in five men in the U.S. have impregnated someone who has had an abortion. 

"About half of these men already had children and supported ending the pregnancy to better provide for their existing family," according to one report. 

Jacobson said that men are typically passive supporters of reproductive rights, and that has to change. 

“The mere act of men speaking up and lending their voices will normalize the idea (of abortion). This is to shift the culture and bring the majority of men who are pro-choice more actively in this fight. So I think it's really important that guys do share their story and do raise their voices.”

Three Vermont men shared their abortion stories on this episode of the Vermont Conversation.

Carl Werth of Waterbury Center recalled when his college girlfriend became pregnant. 

“She did not want to carry a baby, and neither of us wanted to be responsible for one. … If we had had to have the child, if it was a forced birth as they say, I think it would have dramatically changed the path of both of our lives.”

Werth said of the role that men should have in an abortion, “100% they should be supporting what the woman wants to do. Because it's her body. Period.”

Jon Williams, a grandfather in Waterbury Center, said he and his wife decided to have an abortion when they were in their 20s. He said the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade is “absolutely nuts.”

“A lot of women and families are in the position where an unplanned pregnancy could be absolutely devastating to the family. It's just such a fundamental right,” Williams said.

David Bolger, a school teacher from Moretown, is unapologetic about the abortions that he and his girlfriend had in college. 

“I don't feel regret it at all,” Bolger said.

He and his girlfriend Amy broke up after college but got married 20 years later. 

“That was when we were really so ready and able and capable to do a good job … at raising a family,” he said. “And we have.”

“It was Amy's right to choose, and we talked a long time about it. And I absolutely supported her in that decision, and I'm glad. I still have no regrets about that whole thing,” Bolger said.

When Rue Mapp goes for a hike, she does more than smell flowers and enjoy vistas. She breaks barriers.

Mapp is challenging the idea that the outdoors are just for white people. In 2009, she founded Outdoor Afro, a blog to “reconnect Black people with the outdoors through outdoor education, recreation, and conservation.” Today, Outdoor Afro is a national nonprofit operating in 60 cities with more than 100 volunteers leading 60,000 participants on everything from strolls in the forest to bird walks to climbs of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

“It was not a part of our national narrative to just even think about Black people and their connection to the outdoors, and so I set about trying to change the narrative of who we imagine gets outside,” Mapp told the Vermont Conversation.

The problem does not lie with nature. 

“The outdoors are welcoming. The trees don't know what color you are. The flowers are gonna bloom no matter how much money is in your account. The birds are gonna sing no matter who you voted for. So the outdoors is not at fault. It's just people and policies,” she said.

Mapp referenced the Jim Crow era when public swimming pools and recreation areas had “whites only” signs. One consequence: Black children did not learn to swim and die from drowning at up to 10 times the rate of white children.

“Alongside that exclusion, alongside that blatant racist reality, was a perseverance among Black people to find their places of purpose in nature,” Mapp said. In 2019, Outdoor Afro launched an initiative to teach 100,000 Black children and their caregivers to swim.

Mapp’s efforts have brought her national attention. She was invited by the White House to participate in America’s Great Outdoors conference and took part in the launch of former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative. She has taken Oprah Winfrey hiking and canoed with the interior secretary. Mapp was named a National Geographic Fellow, Heinz Awards Honoree and is a recipient of the National Wildlife Federation Communication Award.

Rue Mapp has a new book, “Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors.” It is a collection of essays and photos of Black people intended to “inspire Black communities to reclaim their place in the natural world.”

When confronting a challenge or just in daily life, Mapp wants Black people "to recognize the power of nature as both a healer and a connector." 

"Nature never closes," she said.

In 2016, Sky Yardley, then 66, was diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable and fatal condition. Sky and his wife, Jane Dwinell, decided to face Alzheimer’s in their own way. The Vermont couple began blogging and speaking about Sky’s increasing dementia in an effort to reduce stigma about the disease. Their blog was called Alzheimer’s Canyon, which was Sky’s term for a place with “no trails, no landmarks, nothing.” Yardley and Dwinell talked about their Alzheimer’s journey on the Vermont Conversation in 2017.

Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. and the leading cause of dementia. One in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia. According to the Vermont chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 13,000 Vermonters have Alzheimer's disease or another form of dementia, and more than 25,000 friends and family are providing care.

Yardley and Dwinell, who were together for 36 years, movingly chronicled Sky’s decline until his death in February 2021. Jane Dwinell has now published this real-time journal in a new book, “Alzheimer’s Canyon: One Couples Reflections on Living with Dementia,” posthumously co-written with her late husband.

Jane Dwinell is a retired nurse, freelance writer and Unitarian Universalist minister. Her 1992 book, “Birth Stories: Mystery, Power and Creation,” described her experience as a labor and delivery nurse at Gifford Hospital in Randolph. Sky Yardley was a family mediator.

Dwinell said that publicly chronicling his illness “was all Sky's idea. He wanted to do what he could to erase the stigma of dementia. … He wanted to meet other people with dementia to be able to talk about it.”

Friends and family often do not know how to respond when a loved one receives a life-changing diagnosis. 

“Don't give them advice. Don't leave them, and just be a good listener,” Dwinell said. “Some of our friends and family kind of fell away, and I'm grateful for the ones who stuck around.”

Sky Yardley said on The Vermont Conversation in 2017 that Alzheimer’s taught him to “pay attention to the present. The only thing we have is the present, which is something that I think all humans could benefit from.” 

John Irving, widely hailed as one of America’s greatest novelists, is back, and he has a lot to say.

John Irving, 80, is the author of 15 novels, including the international bestsellers “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which is his top-selling book. Irving’s latest novel, “The Last Chairlift,” was released Oct. 17. It has been seven years in the making and at 900 pages, it is his longest work. He says that “The Last Chairlift” will be his last long novel.

John Irving wrote his first novel at age 26. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years and coached wrestling until he was 47. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Irving has won a National Book Award, an Oscar and a Lambda Literary Award, among numerous other recognitions. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages.

John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. He lived for many years in Vermont, first in Putney and later in Dorset. He sold his Vermont home in 2014 and now lives in Toronto. He is a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.

Irving has long tackled controversial issues in his novels. “The World According to Garp” (1978) has a transgender character, “The Cider House Rules” (1985) deals with abortion and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989) confronts the fallout from the Vietnam War. His books have periodically been banned.

“What are they banning? They’re banning books about abortion and they’re banning books on LGBTQ subjects,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “What they're saying to young, gay, lesbian, trans kids, they want them to feel even more alone and isolated than they already feel. They don't want those kids to have access to material that will let them know they're not alone. They already feel alone. There's a cruelty to that that is unspeakable.”

Irving is a sharp critic of American politics today. Speaking about the recent Supreme Court decision striking down abortion rights, he said, “What they did is more in step with the Vatican than it is with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

Irving’s advice to young writers: “You can't let outside factors get under your skin. You have to stick to your purpose and be a kind of horse with blinders on. … You also can't get down on yourself after somebody's just kicked your tail. You've got to do it again and get better.”

When the New Yorker published Ed Koren’s first cartoon 60 years ago, it marked the beginning of a relationship that has come to define both the magazine and the artist. Koren’s cartoons feature hairy, long-nosed characters that poke fun at issues from the serious to the mundane, ranging from rural life, to politics, consumerism, climate change, to encounters on the street — or in his case, on the dirt road where he lives in Brookfield, Vermont, his home since the 1970s with his wife, Curtis. He has been a volunteer firefighter in his community for over three decades.

Koren, 86, is one of America’s most celebrated and beloved cartoonists. He has contributed some 1,400 cartoons to the New Yorker over the past six decades. He was Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate from 2014 to 2017, and his cartoons have also appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to Sports Illustrated to numerous books. His latest collection of cartoons is Koren in the Wild.

Fellow New Yorker contributor Bill McKibben says of Koren, “Sometimes one thinks of the cartoonist as 'making fun.' But though Ed's drawings have long been the funniest thing in the New Yorker, it's because they're essentially kind, filled with the understanding that we're all trying hard. And that kindness, of course, is what makes him such a remarkable neighbor to all of us in Vermont.”

The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction recently launched the Ed Koren Scholarship Fund to support “an emerging cartoonist who is also looking to enrich the cultural and civic life of Vermont.” Koren’s work is also featured in an exhibition about the climate crisis at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., “Down to the Bone,” which includes his cartoons and the images of nature photographer Stephen Gorman.

Ed Koren continues to make people laugh even as he faces a serious predicament: He has incurable lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2020. 

Koren, who I’ve known for many years, has long politely declined my interview requests, protesting that he didn’t think he was that interesting. I begged to differ, and finally, last week he agreed to talk. I found him in his studio at his home doing what he loves, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker.

“I'm an inhabitant of two worlds,” he tells me, sitting in a wheelchair in front of his drawing table in a room that overlooks a lush autumn forest. “My early work was based on the Upper West Side.” By contrast, “Vermont has always had its own milieu that I've drawn from, and I oftentimes mix and match.”

I ask him why he draws hairy creatures. “It makes it funnier. There's some cartoons that I've done that just aren't funny enough without hair. And I love hair. I love to draw hair. I can't suppress my hand. … The hand really is the key instrument here. It keeps working and keeps flying along.”

Koren’s advice to young people is to “find your own voice. It's what I tell young cartoonists. Don't accept situations where you have to work for so many decades of your life in something you really don't like. …Don't hesitate to change if it's not what you want.”

Koren has been a brilliant chronicler and satirist of the human condition. “I'm irrepressible when it comes to seeing other people's folly and missteps and kind of haplessness. So I just kept doing it because I love to do it," he said.

“I love my life. I love my work. I would hate to say goodbye to it.”

Danielle Prescod is done being the “Token Black Girl.” Prescod was one of the only Black students in her prep school in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was captain of the tennis team, attended Tufts University and New York University, and went on to jobs at prestigious and influential fashion and beauty magazines including Elle, InStyle and BET, where she was style director.

As Prescod grew older, she began to understand that she was molding herself to fit in a world of white supremacy. She had to be perfect — better than anyone else. That led to undergoing painful hair straightening in elementary school and developing an eating disorder when she hit puberty.

The murder of George Floyd was a turning point for Prescod, who is now 34. Following Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, she posted a searing Instagram video that went viral in which she laid out the many ways that white colleagues and media figures had marginalized and ignored her and other African Americans all while claiming to be anti-racist allies.

Prescod has a new memoir, “Token Black Girl.” She has a newly formed consulting agency 2BG (2 Black Girls), which advises fashion and beauty brands and influencers on anti-racism. 

Prescod writes: “The Token Black Girl is characterized mostly by her proximity to her white peers and her nonthreatening and friendly nature. She is non­threatening because she is almost never the romantic interest, and her primary function is to provide ‘attitude’ and ‘sass,’ either as humor or as an attempt to elevate the sex appeal of the otherwise all-white entity. She is a good student because she has to be. She actually feels like she has to be good at everything. She’s almost always a good dancer, and even if she’s not, it doesn’t matter because everyone will still think she’s a good dancer. She either has or can get the requisite social signifiers of acceptance—everything except white skin, of course. She will be well spoken, well dressed, and well groomed. She likes all the things her friends like, including boys, but they will not like her. She almost never acknowledges her position as the sole Black member of a group because talking about race makes white people uncomfortable. She can never make white people uncomfortable. Her most critical responsibility is providing protection against the ‘racist’ label that might otherwise be hurled at a gaggle of white women devoid of ethnic variety.”

“When you are a person of color in these environments, you go into survival mode because you're very convinced that … it's assimilate or die,” Prescod told The Vermont Conversation. “You are not developing into a whole individual because you're so defensive. You're like a caged feral animal. … I don't want kids living like that. It's very stressful.”