As a lawyer, I’m well acquainted with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but I’m beginning to think our notion of what the truth really means is shifting - and that isn’t good.

For many years, I taught real estate courses at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and lately people have been asking if I think this is a good time to buy a home in Vermont. And my answer is a qualified yes.

For weeks, I slogged my way through the almost seven hundred page American Ulysses: A life of Ulysses S. Grant , one of the two recent big biographies of our 18th president, of whom I knew embarrassingly little.

Apparently perceiving a conspiracy of Democrats, the press and liberal elites, the president is seething. Those around him have never seen him so angry.

My brother and sister-in-law have given the parents and me an Amazon Echo - or, as many know it, an “Alexa.” They love theirs and thought the more technologically “slow” of us should have one too.

Clean water. Good schools. Two excellent reasons to live in Vermont. But it’s easy to take them for granted.

Searching for perspective on today’s national climate of reckless self-interest some historians find an apt comparison in another decade of unparalleled greed and corruption, the so-called “Roaring Twenties."

My sixth-grade son came home from school last week and told me he’d heard about the new law legalizing marijuana. “Don’t they have any idea how stupid that is?!” he said in his pre-teen voice that just oozed disdain for grown-ups.

The President is the country’s Commander-in-chief – and as such, has a responsibility to ensure that his – or her - behavior and actions are always a model of inspiration for the most professional and probably the most racially diverse military in the world.

Many years ago I worked with someone who went to Attica - yes, that Attica - for possessing a small amount of pot, and it probably didn’t help that he was also Native American. The prison experience nearly wrecked him as a human being.