IKE’S ONE UNFORGIVABLE SIN:

Exit 13 and the Town It Destroyed: Deep Dive on Lewiston, Vt.: One writer investigates Lewiston, Vt. — a town across the Connecticut River demolished in 1967 — and the buildings that remain today (Allison Burg, February 26, 2025, The Dartmouth)

Lewiston had a long history before its 1967 destruction. Four years older than the College, the village was founded in 1765 on the Vermont-New Hampshire border — where present-day River Road, Foley Park and some of VT-10A are now located.

At the time, the hamlet served as a main entry point into the College. According to Norwich Historical Society director Sarah Rooker, the Connecticut River used to be narrower, allowing for foot crossings from Lewiston to Hanover during periods of low rainfall. During the wet season, travelers still had to cross through Lewiston to reach Hanover by boat — the town’s location at one of the narrowest points on the Connecticut River made Lewiston a natural spot for a rope ferry and, later, a toll bridge. The village’s prime river real estate, in turn, led to revenue, as Lewiston charged tolls on river crossings until the mid-1800s.

In 1848, the town’s revenue was further bolstered by the construction of the Passumpsic and Connecticut Railroad. The first railroad line to serve the area, the station built a freight depot in Lewiston and increased the town’s importance, according to Dartmo, a website documenting Dartmouth architecture.

The College used the railroad line to transport its coal supply from 1898 through the late 1920s, when Dartmouth switched from coal to oil. Many Dartmouth students also relied on the station to travel to campus after 1848. Even United States presidents used the railroad — President Ulysses S. Grant stopped in Lewiston in 1869 and President Rutherford B. Hayes made a whistle stop in 1887.

The popularity of the station increased the town’s prosperity, according to The Norwich Times. During the 1930s, Lewiston was bustling, housing dairy farms, a brothel, mills, a general store and a speakeasy, among other businesses, the paper reported.

The town’s fate changed, however, in the middle of the 20th century. First, Lewis Road, which connected Lewiston to Norwich, was nearly impossible to traverse by horse-drawn wagon during the mud season, which further isolated the village from Norwich at this time.

In addition, the construction of Wilder Dam, which began in 1947, “flooded the lower portions of old Lewiston,” including buildings at the river’s edge, according to anthropology professor Jesse Casana. The flooding inundated low-lying farmland and forced some Lewiston citizens to move, Casana said.

The diminishing economy of the 1930s, a decline in passenger train travel and these natural challenges ultimately contributed to the town’s demise — so much that the post office closed in 1954 and the town’s rail station closed in 1959, according to The Norwich Times.

However, the true end of Lewiston came in the 1960s, when construction on I-91 required the destruction of Lewiston’s nine remaining buildings.

“GRAB YOUR THINGS, I’VE COME TO TAKE YOU HOME”:

My Final Days on the Maine Coast: Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, a writer meditates on life, death, and beauty from his small seaside cottage down east. (Joseph Monninger, February 2025, Down East)

I count on his visits and keep two sets of binoculars nearby, wanting to have a pair within reach wherever I happen to be on my two acres of land in Pembroke, a small community that once took its living from the sea. I am aware that the eagle has become something of a project for me. My son, when he calls from his home in New Hampshire, asks if I have seen the eagle that day, and I know that he is asking out of kindness, out of an acknowledgement of my age and the emptiness of my daily calendar, and yet I can’t help playing my part and relating to him the itinerary of the eagle’s visit. Yes, I tell him, the eagle came early this morning, stayed for nearly 15 minutes, and yes, it was on that perch on The Eagle Tree, the name I have for the bird’s favorite pine. Last year, a storm took down the tallest pine overlooking the water, and I worried that the eagle would find another place to rest while the crows and gulls hectored him. But the eagle has taken to the new tree, and so it is a safe, light topic that my son and I can explore without any of the weightier subjects that circle around us. We both know that this beautiful land overlooking this vibrant estuary is the place I am making my last stand. I live here with stage-four lung cancer, each motion, however minimal, underlined by a dry cough, my fist to my lips, my heart and head and breath paused for a moment while I wonder if and how I will continue.

So the eagle is useful and welcome. It is understood now that I am becoming mist, the ghost of my youthful life, an old man who swims in the sea and rivers to bathe, a rough birch cane in my left hand to steady myself and sometimes to help me stand. I have chosen to live this way, to live near the sea without running water, to surround myself with simple beauty. My days have been emptied of all fanfare and complication. I play chess on the computer, read great gulps of books, nap, and study the weather both in the sky and in my chest. I watch the Red Sox replay in the early morning, at first light, and find I have not given up rooting for our beloved nine.

SOUL MEN:

In search of Denmark’s soul : Jutland, land of bad beer and cheap pork, of beautiful heaths and shifting sands, of millennia-old corpses preserved in peat bogs, of Viking myths, and of wind, lots and lots of wind, continues both to define and contradict contemporary Denmark. (Michael Booth, 7/08/24, Englesberg Ideas)

Jutland, or ‘Jylland’ in Danish, is the bit of the country which thrusts phallically from Northern Germany towards the Oslofjord. To its west is the North Sea; making it Northumbria’s nearest neighbour to the east (something Northumbrians had cause to regret when Danish Vikings sailed on Lindisfarne in 793 AD).

Jutland occupies a strange place in the Danish psyche. It is part soul-of-the-nation, part embarrassing relative. For the 2.2 million Jutlanders who call it home, it is, well, home. For the 3.7 million other Danes, it is myriad things, but not least a place most are glad not to call home.

In a sense, Jutland is where Denmark began. The so-called ‘birth certificate’ of the nation, the Jelling Stone, still stands in the south-eastern Jutland town after which it is named, and is a pilgrimage destination for every Danish schoolchild (handily, Legoland is 25 minutes away). The 10th-century stone’s red-painted runic inscription proclaims Harald Bluetooth to be king of all the Danes. Bluetooth (after whom the wireless technology is named) was the first monarch to unite the nation and the first christian king of Denmark.

Despite being ground zero for the Danish monarchy, Jutland was never as dominated by a feudal ruling elite as Zealand (Sjælland). Instead, the monarchy and aristocracy gravitated to the largest Danish island to the east where, first Roskilde, and then Copenhagen became the capitals. And, so, relatively free of meddling kings, Jutland’s farmers tended to own their own land, or leased it from a distant monarch.

STARKVILLE:

The growing appeal of the ‘Live Free or Die’ state (Jeff Jacoby, January 7, 2025, Pundicity)

For years, Massachusetts has been forfeiting more residents to other states than it attracts from other states. As far back as December 2003, a study co-produced by MassINC and the University of Massachusetts warned: “Massachusetts has been losing in the competition for people. … [T]he rate of loss has been accelerating over the last five years.” Two decades later, the picture is no prettier, especially with regard to New Hampshire. Between 2018 and 2022, according to the Census Bureau, 22,047 Massachusetts residents moved to New Hampshire — significantly more than the 19,189 who moved to Florida, the 18,933 who went to New York, or the 14,818 who relocated to California. By now, so many Bay Staters have pulled up stakes and headed north that former Massachusetts residents account for more than 25 percent of New Hampshire’s population. In 2021 and 2022, notes demographer Kenneth Johnson, nearly 44 percent of migrants to New Hampshire came from Massachusetts.

People move for all kinds of reasons, of course, but it would be hard to deny that what prompts so many to abandon Massachusetts and make a new start in New Hampshire is its lower cost of living and its much lighter tax burden. “With no income or sales tax, New Hampshire’s tax burden is a fraction of what it is in Massachusetts,” the Boston-based Pioneer Institute noted in July 2022. The contrast between the two states’ approach to taxes grew even sharper later that year, when Massachusetts voters unwisely approved a steep annual income surtax on earnings above $1 million, which raised the top marginal tax rate in the state to 9 percent.

Now New Hampshire has upped the ante. It has scrapped its last vestige of taxation on investment income and given tax-weary Massachusetts residents even more reason to flee.

WHEN GIANTS ROAMED THE EARTH:

New England stone walls lie at the intersection of history, archaeology, ecology and geoscience, and deserve a science of their own (Robert M. Thorson, December 15, 2024, The Conversation)

Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That’s due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels.

Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fencelines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the oldest walls date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War.

The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind – an estimated 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide. That’s long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the Moon on its closest approach to Earth.

NO ONE SUPPORTS ROE:

Why Dems’ abortion messaging might not be enough to flip the NH governor’s office
(Lisa Kashinsky, 11/05/2024, Politico)

Democrat Joyce Craig, the former mayor of New Hampshire’s largest city, has built her campaign around expanding abortion rights in the only state in New England where access to the procedure is not guaranteed in the state constitution. And Craig has relentlessly attacked her rival, former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, over her past support for restricting abortion access. [..]

In New Hampshire, where abortion rights are widely supported, a series of surveys from Saint Anselm College shows likely voters ranking abortion behind the economy, democracy and border security as the top issues facing the country — even among women. Other polls show similar results.

“It’s not an unimportant issue, it’s just not an issue driving the election” the way it did in 2022, Sununu said in an interview.

AND WE ALL RECOGNIZE SOLIDITY:

A Comedian of Order (Titus Techera, 7/23/24, Law & Liberty)

The moral authority of the decent American is the running theme of Bob’s first big show, in which he plays Robert Hartley, a psychologist. On the one hand, it’s as normal as you could want—he plays a Midwesterner, he works in Chicago. On the other hand, life is crazy and psychology isn’t going to fix it, all it can really do is foster forbearance and even that is difficult. Freedom is hard to deal with, because everyone else is also free. […]

The comedy show as a whole suggests that there is something that endures in America, despite social transformations. Put otherwise, what’s funny about people is the variety of ways in which they fail to be solid. You want to think the best of people, in part because it helps you can go on with a sense of your own dignity; comedy suggests that’s much harder to do once the difficulties of life set in—in fact, you might go mad. In this sense, the show is all about a sound man confronting reality.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse (WILLIAM FEAR, 7/22/24, Englesberg Ideas)

As one would expect, Jeeves has a rather more precise grip on philosophy than Bertie. He is a keen reader of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century rationalist philosopher. This is noteworthy because Spinoza was known for his ardent determinism and his denial of free will. Jeeves is also familiar with Marcus Aurelius. He offers a quote of his to Bertie in a time of difficulty:

Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.

Bertie responds by saying: ‘Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.’

In Wodehouse’s world, the ‘the great web’ doesn’t equate to the bleak, windswept attitude of a pessimistic fatalist. Instead, it represents a kind of optimistic determinism. In other words: there’s a certain degree of equanimity that comes with resigning oneself to the fact that the future is decided, one being unable to change its course.

Wodehouse’s stoical optimism doesn’t just appear in the Jeeves novels, but in Wodehouse’s earlier work. His 1909 school story Mike makes a similar observation:

When affairs get into a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says ‘All right,’ and goes to sleep in his arm-chair.

Wodehouse wasn’t merely a champion of the stiff upper-lip, but a true stoic. He believed in adapting the self to the world, rather than trying to change the world to fit around the self.

LIFE IS COMEDY:

Can jokes in terrible taste ever be funny?: Wisecracks is clearly the work of an academic philosopher adept at teasing out fine distinctions between “offenses” and “harms” (Matthew Reisz, 6/28/24, The Critic)

Whilst mockery can be culpably cruel and often deserves to be condemned, Shoemaker notes, it can also “serve to bond those who engage in it”, work as “a kind of initiation rite” and act as “a genuine expression of affection amongst people who otherwise have trouble expressing affection”. This leads him to some uncomfortable questions about whether declaring a group such as the disabled “beyond mockery” can’t itself act as a form of exclusion. […]

It is crucial to his case that Shoemaker himself should practise what he preaches. When he was “diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer”, he recalls, he found he could cope with “a wee bit of sympathetic concern”, but what he really wanted were “emotionally detached wisecracks” from close friends on the lines of “C’mon out for a drink, you’re not dead yet.”

When he chose to treat his suffering as a joke, the last thing he needed were “empathetic” friends saying “Oh, you poor thing, that’s horrible! How can you laugh at that?” Genuine “emotional empathy in such circumstances requires, ironically, that I emotionally detach from your pain or trauma along with you”.

Indeed, although we rightly condemn people who lack all empathy for the suffering of others, Shoemaker is convinced that there is “significant underappreciated value in our sometimes empathising less with, and being more amused by, pain, suffering and misfortune. It is a powerfully effective way to cope with life’s curveballs, and it’s often the most appropriate way of responding to life’s ultimate absurdity.”

Mocking everyone and everything is liberalism.

COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE BECAUSE TRUE:

Camille Bordas on What Stand-Up Comedy Can Teach Writing Workshops About Growing Thicker Skin: Adam Ehrlich Sachs in Conversation with the Author of “The Material” (Adam Ehrlich Sachs, June 13, 2024, LitHub)

*

Adam Ehrlich Sachs: The Material is set in a dystopia where MFA programs in Stand-Up Comedy have spread across the country. Until recently you taught at an MFA in Creative Writing. I couldn’t help (forgive me) but wonder about the relation between them.

Sometimes you seem to imply a reductio ad absurdum: Now we think we can teach good writing, next we’ll imagine we can impart a sense of humor. But sometimes the Stand-Up students seem like the sane ones, pragmatically honing punch lines, believing only in laughter, while writers chase phantoms like epiphany, truth, and meaning.

Punch lines are effective because they bring epiphanies of truth and meaning out of the absurd.