Gazing down Church Street, Brian Sisco takes a drag off a Marlboro and ponders a city proposal that would snuff out his regular smoke breaks.

“How far can the government go?” asks Sisco, a 25-year-old Burlington resident who works at his father’s store, Designers’ Circle Jewelers. “I realize children and families come here, but I’m not blowing smoke in babies’ faces.”... Read more

Mona and Leo Boutin used to raise beef cattle on their picturesque Williston farm. The cows would graze in the grassy field that sweeps up to the forest line, and drink from the babbling brook that cuts through the couple’s land.

That was before the Boutins worried about lead contaminating their groundwater. Water experts have since collected samples from the creek, and the couple has stopped drinking the well water.... Read more

Back in 1997, novelist David Foster Wallace reviewed John Updike’s latest for the New York Observer under a headline that asked, “Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?” In his review — later republished as an essay — Wallace coined the term Great Male Narcissist (G.M.N.) for writers such as Updike and Philip Roth, explaining,... Read more

At the end of Maple Street in Derby Line, just before the roadway becomes rue Ball in Québec, stands a set of engraved granite pillars. The 6-foot-tall stanchions loom on either side of the blacktop, spanned by a steel gate with black painted bars spaced wide enough for an adult to squeeze through. The gate looks like something you’d find in a suburban housing development — not exactly high class, but innocuous enough.... Read more

Peter Guetti’s home these days is a modest dorm room at a small Catholic liberal-arts college on a wooded campus in Rutland. He left his family’s home at age 11 and hasn’t lived there since. Having spent three years in guardianship and four years in two foster homes, he finds the concept of “home” something of a moving target. “The College of St.... Read more

Disc golf. Waterfront Manager Adam Cate. For the Burlington Parks & Recreation Commission, the controversies keep on coming. The latest: an entrepreneur’s proposal to bring guided tours, via Segways, to the Burlington Bike Path and some city sidewalks. Interested parties expect a lively public hearing on the issue next Tuesday.... Read more

Is it a coincidence that Winooski public schools have been dragged into two political controversies within months of each other? Some say both episodes were instigated by school board member Doug Isham, a news junkie who describes himself as “leaning conservative.”... Read more

Bright rays of sunlight flooded the sanctuary of Burlington’s Unitarian Universalist Church last Saturday afternoon in fitting tribute to a man who spent much of his life illuminating injustice. John Whitehead Tucker III, a civil rights activist and leader of Burlington’s African American community, was being eulogized.... Read more

Deep recession, rampant unemployment, disaffected youth — Road, staged this weekend by the Middlebury College Theatre Department, seems to feature ripped-from-the-headlines themes. But Jim Cartwright’s play doesn’t take place in Anytown, U.S.A., in 2009. These circumstances grip an unnamed town in the playwright’s native Lancashire, England, in 1986.... Read more

A piece of painted wood in the University of Vermont’s Davis Center bears these words: “I try to remind myself that I am on the outside free looking in at my mother who is trapped in this prison. But in reality I live in a cage as well, a cage without love and affection.”

The words, written by the child of an imprisoned woman in Columbus, Ohio, pop off their makeshift canvas. They bring to mind urban graffiti, only far more poignant.... Read more