Amid the rolling fields of the Litchfield Hills, you’ll find the unlikely merger of dairy cows and high-end shoes. Arethusa Farm is where George Malkemus and Tony Yurgaitis, co-owners of Manolo Blahnik USA (of Sex and the City fame), have brought their philosophy of superior quality to the world of livestock breeding. In 1999, when […]
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Stone Wall Defender Robert Thorson
SLIDE SHOW: New England stone walls by William Hubbell, from Good Fences: A Pictorial History of New England’s Stone Walls (Down East Books, 2006; $29.95) When geologist Robert Thorson came to work at the University of Connecticut in 1984, he was smitten by stone walls. In all his travels–from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest to […]
Boston Art Awards and Beyond
Almost one year ago, in my March 6, 2008 posting, I called your attention to Greg Cook and his indispensable website, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. NEJAR is probably the best regional art site in the country, so I was flattered when Cook invited me to submit nominations and to vote on the just-released […]
Poetry of Claire Hersom
Anadama Bread Get Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations Guide! Email(Required) Subscribe Winter was the worst. The farm windows iced inside, wind howled down off the upper field; through the gauze curtains it kissed our foreheads, noses buried in featherbed crazy-quilts. Wooden spindle framed our heads. It was too cold for ceiling mice. […]
The Rise and Fall of Eddie Perez
The Rise and Fall of Eddie Perez Hartford’s Mayor on the Hot Seat I don’t know Eddie Perez, the embattled mayor of Hartford, Connecticut. But when you assign a story, edit the story, work with the photographer, see the story in layout, write a title, then see the story in the June 2006 Yankee (Eddie […]
Which State Is the Most Frugal?
Welcome to the February 2009 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. Which State Is the Most Frugal? Opinions vary, but from strictly a tradition point of view, the Granite State wins hands down…Get Our FREE Yankee […]
Ubart at USM
To honor and celebrate the forty-year creative career of artist, educator, and collector Juris Ubans, who is retiring from the University of Southern Maine faculty in August, the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery has mounted a sumptuous exhibition that fills the little gallery on the Gorham campus (through February 15) not just with art […]
John Updike’s ‘The Wallet’
NOTE: In memory of Pulitzer-Prize winning author and New Englander John Updike, we share this short story from Yankee Magazine September 1985. Fulham, with a history of hypertension, had taken early retirement from his brokerage firm and managed his own investments and those of a favored few old clients in an upstairs room of his […]
While not actually a blues album, Mercuryhat’s Blinding Blues, Stinging Bees serves the same purpose. Composed by lead singer Eric Ott during a death-and-divorce-plagued period, the record treads into some pretty dark areas. Lonely nights, second thoughts, and sleeping pills are the common images that tie these songs together. But Mercuryhat’s sound isn’t indulgent or […]
Small Towns, Big Stories
Saturday night I gave a speech to the Hillsborough, New Hampshire, Chamber of Commerce. It was their annual awards evening, where a business of the year and citizen of the year would be recognized, and generally a time when all the members could gather and sit at long tables in the American Legion Hall, have […]
Dorothy Eisner (1906-1984) was a thoroughly modernist painter who worked her way through most of the artistic trends of the 20th century from the Ashcan School and Social Realism to Abstract Expressionism. Her mature work, however, took the form of a rather Matisse-like application of painterly expressionism, very loose, free, and colorful, to paintings of […]
Rising Tide on Plum Island
Plum Island was deserted except for a slightly offbeat mother, her twelve-year-old daughter and four young sons, including five-year-old twins. I was that mother. If there were another whose children were running wild and free on the island that Easter Sunday, she was nowhere in sight. A winter chill hung on the breeze. Ripples furrowed […]