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If you go way back to the foggy beginnings of an average Vermont town, the building blocks of the community stack up something like this: First came the church, and then the town hall, the one-room schoolhouse, the tavern, the harness shop, the blacksmith, the itinerant traders and, last but not least, the general store.... Read more

Put away your old-school cameras with that reassuring click, click, click sound — it’s the end of the darkroom era. After 30 years of business, Burlington’s Light-Works, Inc. has closed down its film stock processing operation due to the abundance and ease of digital technology available to photographers. The studio will continue to process digital work for consumers and business clients.... Read more

For millions of Americans, summer is synonymous with traveling. But as gas prices rise with the temperature, would-be wanderers are getting off the road in droves. Instead of ocean views in Maine or Cape Cod, we get “stay-cations.” Instead of weekends camping in New Hampshire, we get . . . well, we get weekends camping in Vermont. So maybe that part isn’t so bad. Still, ever-climbing fuel costs are forcing Americans to fundamentally revisit their lifestyle choices.... Read more

While some eateries are adding options, for others, the game is over. River’s Edge Coffee Shop and Grill, on Riverside Avenue in Burlington, closed its doors last Sunday.

Ann Marie Silva, who owned the quick stop with her husband Bert, attributes the loss to the widening of Riverside Avenue, which wound up last summer. “We were the new kids on the block before the construction started; we really didn’t have our feet planted in the ground, and when it hit, it hit hard.”... Read more

Four. Thirty. Five.

That’s the price per gallon of gas in Saranac Lake, N.Y., and the motivation behind a marketing ploy at Pendragon Theatre.

To encourage carpooling and relieve a parking crunch, the Pendragon is giving drivers of high-occupancy vehicles $5 off admission to summer series shows. Drive in with three people or more, and you can buy a gallon of gas, a couple of cookies at intermission, whatever.... Read more

It’s no secret that the current economic climate is tough on restaurants, which rely on folks feeling flush with disposable income. The trend has been illustrated by the shuttering of such diverse eateries as Sean & Nora’s in Barre, award-winning Christophe’s on the Green in Vergennes and Tortilla Flat in Burlington.

This week’s casualty is River’s Edge Coffee Shop and Grill on Riverside Avenue in Burlington. More on that later . . . (Click here)... Read more

Think a single Vermont politician or party has the answer to rising gas and home heating prices? Think again. But anyone who’s pulled up to the pump recently sure wants something to be done, by somebody.... Read more

Marx believed that the edifice of capitalism was built upon misery, and misery would bring the edifice down. To increase productivity and profit, he reasoned, bosses assembled workers in factories. Once there, though, the workers would soon notice that they were all similarly miserable — and that they outnumbered the bosses. The workers would organize and overthrow the bosses. Capital created its own revolutionary proletariat, Marx concluded: The system contained “the seeds of its own destruction.”... Read more

You’ve no doubt noticed how awful life is here in Vermont. Awful and getting worse, what with wages so low and prices so high — especially the sale price of a nice house, or the rent on a decent apartment.

You’ve noticed because the newspapers and the radio and television keep telling you. Across the political spectrum, important people keep proclaiming our woes, especially Gov. James Douglas, who has made “affordability,” or lack thereof, the dominant theme of his tenure.... Read more

In an infamous 1989 article in Harper’s, author Tom Wolfe referred to the world as the “billion-footed beast.” That metaphor is colorful, but these days it’s far from accurate: With about 6.6 billion people on the planet, humanity is closer to a 13-billion-footed beast — and growing larger every day. Census estimates indicate that the human population will reach nine billion by 2050. All those people will need a place to live, a place to work, and transport between them.... Read more