Two Vermont voices reflect on the Israel-Hamas war

A downtown apartment building stitched Plainfield together. On July 10, floods washed it away. The Heartbreak Hotel was the kind of place where neighbors saw each other every day, where generations of people, from all walks of life, found belonging and someone to wave to in the morning. Twelve people were living there at the time, and they all survived. Most of their beloved cats did not. In the days after the flood, reporter Erica Heilman talked with a number of the residents who lost their homes. They sat on porches and in houses where they were camped out, and in Erica’s car. What was lost that night, and what could it teach us about what comes next?

More than four years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, the state judiciary is still struggling with an enormous backlog of criminal cases and competing public pressures around how justice should be pursued. To better understand how the system is working, Seven Days and Vermont Public embedded two reporters at the Burlington criminal courthouse for one week. Read the accompanying print story on Vermont Public (vermontpublic.org) or Seven Days (sevendaysvt.com).

Two Abenaki First Nations are continuing to call for Vermont institutions not to work with state-recognized tribes, and to reconsider the process that led to the state recognizing those groups as Abenaki tribes. Those nations — Odanak and Wôlinak — are receiving a mixed response.

John Harrison traveled Vermont as a preacher in the 1880s. A racist name in town records preserved his memory. Note: This story contains sensitive material, including racial slurs. Please listen with care.

Ashley Messier is the co-chair of the Corrections Monitoring Committee in the Vermont Legislature, and she’s the reentry services program manager for Vermont Works for Women. She grew up in Essex with an abusive father and with little money, and she found herself repeating the cycle in early adulthood. This is a story about multigenerational poverty and abuse, and the temporary relief of opiates.
"What class are you?" is an occasional series from Vermont Public reporter Erica Heilman. In it, she talks with people from all sorts of backgrounds about money and class and privilege.