Podcasts about Vermont, United States

The Vermont politics on this page keeps coming back to where people will live. On Vermont Viewpoint, Barre City Representative Michael Boutin describes getting angry when his housing amendment to H-632 stopped moving. In an April 17th episode, a guest says Burlington quadrupled its housing production after twelve years of zoning and infrastructure changes, and another clip explains that a 200-square-foot addition could face Act 250 review under proposed new rules. The politics works at close range: a bill number, one city's zoning, a single room. Around it are two history shows about how hard rural life used to be, a show that goes town by town, a public-affairs conversation show with a very wide range, and an interview series with Black and Brown LGBTQ+ Vermonters.

What Vermont is

Vermont is a small, mostly rural state in northern New England. Quebec lies to the north, New Hampshire to the east, Massachusetts to the south and New York to the west, with Lake Champlain along much of the western edge. The Green Mountains run the length of the state. It is one of the least populous states. Burlington is the largest city, and Montpelier is the smallest state capital in the country by population. Vermont is known for dairy farms, maple syrup, ski areas and town meeting.

Politics, from the bill number up

Vermont Viewpoint's episode titles read like agendas: the public education system, the Fair Share tax proposal, bill H.955, Republican Party head Paul Dame, updates in Montpelier. Not all of it is statehouse business. In the Boutin episode, Rob Roper says he likes baseball's new automatic balls-and-strikes system. Former Burlington City Council member Kurt Wright is also a Yankee fan, and by Roper's account he is adamantly opposed.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman, from VTDigger, takes a wider view, and its register is grave and measured. The question put to journalist Garrett Graff is "What should we be paying closest attention to?" The Graff clips describe a Congress captured by Trump loyalists, where checks and balances only work if Congress actually cares. They also trace the Tea Party and a reshaped Republican Party back to the 2008 crash. In another episode, Mohsen Mahdawi says every ceasefire feels temporary because it has been broken over and over. Vermont stays in frame through titles such as "Alternative media pioneer Nat Winthrop on a half-century of covering Vermont".

Vermont Movement News is politics as organizing. In its "No Coal No GAS, Stop Project Maple" episode, Leif says Merrimack Station's shutdown means New England will have no coal-fired electric plants after 2028. The campaigners describe crashing a stakeholder advisory group event at the Bretton Woods Hotel to say "we are the rate payers of New England", then offer Vermonters a carpool to a meeting in Connecticut. Other clips deal with speech and policing, including one about two police detectives arriving at Lee Morrigan's home within three hours of a critical investigation article.

The hard past

Most of the history here is about what Vermont cost the people who lived in it. These Dark Mountains says as much in its description, setting the beauty of the woods and mountains against the hardship and poverty Vermonters endured. It tells that history through crimes, several of them in parts. In "Atherton and Almon (Alice Meaker, Part 2)", Frank Atherton finds Alice's body in a muckhole near the Little River settlement. The narration is written as a scene, with lamps throwing shadows, a watering trough and "branches overhead like a net closing round". Other clips have Joseph LePage confessing to killing Josie Langmaid and Marietta Ball before his execution, and Agnes Willis found at 18 Cherry Street in an apartment still lit by an oil lamp.

Before Your Time approaches the same hard past through objects and oral history. "Call it a New Life" draws on a series that told 20th-century Vermont through archival recordings and oral history interviews. Jack Starr of Troy recalls the ice house and kerosene lanterns of the years before electricity reached his neighborhood. George Sibley remembers farm lights appearing after thirty farmers organized for electricity in East Montpelier. In "The Library Map of Vermont", Carolyn Picazio explains how the Kellogg Hubbard Library delivered Wi-Fi and printing after Montpelier's flood.

Halls, dance floors and later life

Happy Vermont goes town by town. Its titles name Rochester, Sharon, Townshend and Brattleboro, along with maple season and general stores. The clips stay with buildings and the people who reworked them. In Sharon, Michael Barsanti explains how donated acoustic panels transformed the nearly three-second reverb at Seven Stars. The building went from Baptist church to Grange Hall, garage, healing center and arts venue. In Rochester, Sandy Lincoln describes living in a teepee while building an off-grid castle. Someone who built a bakery-and-books business room by room explains that "the bagels bring them in, but the books kind of help to make the bottom line work".

Vermont Edition, hosted by Mikaela Lefrak, covers the widest range of any show on this page. Its titles go from spring peepers and salamanders to the history of blackface and minstrelsy in Vermont to Rep. Becca Balint. In her clip, after traveling through New Mexico, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Balint says the phone is not real life. In the contra dancing episode, Luke Donforth says newcomers can walk in off the street and be dancing within 10 minutes. The gray divorce episode deals in specifics. A lawyer, Nancy, talks about health insurance and choosing who will be the health care person, and she returns to a listener who wrote in about looking back on a relationship with fondness. Una Metz cites a 21 percent rate for husbands leaving wives after major illness in long-term marriages.

Queer, Black and Brown in the Green Mountains

Brown 'n Out Podcast works at the scale of a single life. Reggie Condra, a Vermont resident, interviews Black and Brown LGBTQ+ Vermonters, and the episodes are titled by guest name. The conversations are warm and patient, and the material is allowed to arrive slowly. Noa Coffey-Moore talks about thesis work directing, producing and acting in a theater production. A car-accident concussion made reading and writing impossible; that is where Black Film Survival started, and why listening became the only way to finish a thesis. Sean Brewer Jr. says Burlington's Grindr scene is full of blank profiles and dishonest anonymity. Golden Mystique remembers being the bookworm, with Christina Aguilera one week and Mudvayne the next.

Where to start

• For Vermont politics at the level of bills and zoning: Vermont Viewpoint, especially its housing clips.
• For national questions in a grave, measured interview: The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman.
• For history as story: These Dark Mountains and its Alice Meaker episodes, or Before Your Time for history built from objects and oral history.
• For towns and the people in them: Happy Vermont, and Brown 'n Out Podcast for Vermont lives in the guests' own words.

The Vermont feed on this page plays clips from these shows.