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Pursuits: Stage of Life
On an unseasonably hot September afternoon, Sheyenne Brown ’09 eats fried Oreos on the front deck of a Manhattan restaurant where she used to work. It’s right down the street from Columbia University,...
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And Then There Was Football
It’s not all in the history books, but 1936 was a year to remember. Germany occupied the Rhineland. Italy annexed Ethiopia. The Rome-Berlin Axis was proclaimed, and in Schenectady, New York, in ideal...
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After the Storm
What does it take to rebuild from the largest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded? Keelah and Harry Helwig lived on a dirt road in Far Rockaway, New York. When Hurricane Sandy struck, and their house...
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Some Kind of Place: Middlebury, Vermont
On opposite walls in my room on the top floor of Gifford in the fall of 1991: a world map with National Geographic pastel borders and a somewhat pretentious Kandinsky poster. Between them was a...
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Some Kind of Place: Nuiqsut, Alaska
I. Path to the Sea The blades of the fiberglass kayak paddles rise and fall to a rhythm as balanced as a pendulum’s. In the deafening Arctic quiet, they splash into the murky water with deep chops,...
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Some Kind of Place: South Sudan/Congo Border
From above, this place is endlessly vast. We fly for hours and hours in planes and helicopters; then we walk by foot. From above, this place is smooth—a smooth, vast wilderness, beyond history, before...
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Some Kind of Place: Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire
I’ve lived in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, three times now, each occasion as Emily Webb, the protagonist of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town. The people who live in this...
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Some Kind of Place: Auschwitz, Poland
There are few place names on the planet that are associated with the heightened level of grotesque depravity as Auschwitz. Carved out of the quiet Polish village of Oświęcim by Nazi invaders in 1939,...
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Civility, Please
On the afternoon of September 11, 2013, a Middlebury student and four acquaintances, who are not enrolled at the College, removed 2,977 American flags that had been placed in the lawn in front of Mead...
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