Nearly three and a half million Puerto Ricans are suffering from the worst hurricane to hit the Island in eighty nine years. And I know this because when I was a child my father would tell me about the hurricanes he had survived as we prepared for another one.

During the excruciating military, political and social tumult of the Vietnam War era, I experienced an intellectual and emotional arc that was probably not unusual.

The Appalachian Trail enters Vermont coincident with the Long Trail and follows it for one hundred miles. It peels off near Killington and heads east to Norwich.

My Mom, if she’d been born in a different era, might have been a candidate for the DACA program. A Dreamer. She was born of German parents in Saskatchewan in 1916. Sometime around 1920 the family crossed the border and headed east. I don’t believe they had work permits or visas. They just came to America to have a better life.

I was there when it happened. Nobody expected it to happen. Nobody was prepared for it to happen. And when it happened, it changed the course of history.

The automated teller machine or ATM turns fifty this year. And while I use it less these days, since I now pay for most things with credit, its anniversary reminds me of how a series of miscalculations and poor planning once stranded me in midtown Manhattan with less than a dollar in my bag.

Proponents of block grants believe that funds can be administered more effectively at the state and local level, and that block grants allow for greater flexibility and innovation.

As human beings we’re living in a time when our evolutionary capacity to understand, regulate, and use technological innovation in a way beneficial to mankind and our planetary home is simply overwhelmed by the relentless speed of discovery and invention.

With their eighteen-hour film on Vietnam airing on PBS, filmmakers Lynn Novick and Ken Burns remind us that this was a war that never goes away – in part because it was never clear at the time how it came about in the first place.

From the re-development of Church Street to plans for a thirty million dollar, two and a half mile Champlain Parkway, Burlington is re-inventing itself.