Ways of Seeing: Being OK, even if confronting ‘all this’

With the threat of authoritarianism on the rise and daily news stories of one or another government agency being gutted by an unelected plutocrat, I am disturbed, but also aware that I can choose my emotional response. I will use my voice to express disapproval and to encourage my representatives to oppose the President, but I will not despair.

As a business and property owner in Middlebury, homeowner in Cornwall, and taxpayer in both, I would like to express my categorical support of Mary Cullinane for the ACSD School Board.

While I appreciate the Independent’s effort to highlight the grit on display by downtown Middlebury businesses in John Flowers’s Aug. 6 article, “Middlebury shops tough it out,” I take exception to the statement that, “not all downtown stakeholders have t … (read more)

(Grove Press) A 2019 National Book Award winner and a New York Times Top 10 Book, Sarah Broome’s “The Yellow House” is the history of a home, the story of a family, a treatise on urban planning, and a deeply personal memoir — all in one extraordinary pack … (read more)

The Nickel Boys — by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys” is a masterpiece of fiction rooted firmly — and disturbingly — in fact. Inspired by the real life horrors which occurred at a boys’ reformatory in northern Florida well … (read more)