We asked freelance writer and tea blogger Katrina Avila Munichiello to take a break from developing her new tea anthology to share her five favorite New England tea spots. She says that choosing just five was daunting, but her list of the best tea houses in New England includes “something for everyone.” 1. Clipper Merchant […]
Yankee
Here are two remarkably similar stories about remarkably dissimilar works of art. Maryalice Huggins calls hers “a love story” as in Aesop’s Mirror: A Love Story; Erica Hirshler prefers “biography of a painting” for Sargent’s Daughters: Biography of a Painting. In fact, both are mysteries. The mystery is why certain works of art seize our […]
AUDIO: Captain Richard Phillips Andrea Phillips Interview The first December snow has come to Underhill, Vermont, and that makes Richard Phillips happy. “My kind of weather,” the 54-year-old Merchant Marine captain says. It’s been only eight months since Somali pirates took him from the helm of the Maersk Alabama, the American container ship they seized […]
Magazine
Early Spring | Mary’s Farm
At this time of year, when the ice is disappearing from the ponds and some fields are greening up, patches of snow or ice stay along the edges of shaded roads and in the north corners of fields. They’re a shock of white in a spring landscape. Sometimes, if it’s a warm day, I think […]
Yankee
Drawing Out of Line
In the 1970s, when I first began paying attention to contemporary art, Pat Steir was one of an emerging cohort of artists that included, among others, Elizabeth Murray, Joan Snyder, Jennifer Bartlett and Judy Pfaff. Forty years later, Steir is a long established presence on the New York and international art scene, an accomplished artist […]
Magazine
Divorcing Harriet
Harriet has been acting up lately. I wish I knew what triggers these rough patches. She turned one year old two weeks ago and I felt that she had finally become a dog, a well-mannered dog, an adult I could trust. She had been so good for so long, I was telling everyone we had […]
In this day and age when religious extremism threatens us both at home and abroad, it is both proper and necessary to be reminded that, at their benevolent hearts, most of the world’s religions say pretty much the same thing about the human condition. All religions are manifestations of a human will to believe in […]
Magazine
J. D. Salinger on the Road
I live in Cornish, New Hampshire, just up a dirt road from J. D. Salinger. Every year dozens of tourists and students, mostly guys, come up Dingleton Hill looking for J. D. Salinger’s home. It’s hard to imagine what they think they’ll find in an 90-year-old man who wants to be left alone. When I […]
Frankly, I had no idea what to expect when I drove down to Portsmouth yesterday to check out the Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art. I had only heard about it a week before from one of the 35 artists in Sacred and Profane: Eye of the Beholder, the museum’s current (through April 24) exhibition. I […]
Magazine
Winter’s Fire
Farmer Jay has been clearing logs from around the edges of the big field to the southeast of my house. He’s gone back into the cordwood business, he tells me, after a brief hiatus. He did not say why but I assume the favorable price of cordwood might have something to do with it. Cordwood […]
History
February, a Month of Questions
Welcome to the February 2010 edition of “Jud’s New England Journal,” the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, editor-in-chief of Yankee Magazine, published since 1935 in Dublin, New Hampshire. To most of us, the month of February means Washington’s birthday (celebrated this year on the 15th, although he was born on the 22nd), Valentine’s […]
Yankee
Divide and Conquer
Fred Lynch is one of my favorite painters. He is a painter’s painter, rigorously disciplined about his work and primarily intent upon pleasing himself. In the catalogue of his 2005 Form & Counterform 20-year retrospective at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, Lynch wrote as succinct an artist’s statement as I have ever read: […]