Let's Write about Senator Bernie Sanders and the state of Vermont's synonymous relationship

This report is no "puff piece". It includes a good summary about the post World War II Vermont history.

When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills (of Vermont):

Early in his life, Sanders left the streets of Brooklyn for the woodlands of Vermont. What did the man bring to the state—and what did the  state bring to the man❓

Echo book review essay published in The New Yorker magazine, by Jill Lepore.  Senator Sanders arrived in Vermont before the New Leftists did in the sixties, and he stayed after they left. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and hippies but with the working poor.

Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City Music Hall. The Green Mountains beckoned! Under a shop sign that read “VERMONT,” a wide storefront window exhibited seasonal dioramas that trapped pedestrians like chipmunks in a sap bucket. Inside, you could find out about snow conditions and fishing holes, inspect a woodstove, get advice about the best time to go leaf-peeping, pick up a train schedule, and buy a jug of maple syrup. A year after the center opened, Alfred Hitchcock went to Craftsbury, Vermont, to shoot “The Trouble with Harry.” People in that little town, population seven hundred and nine, brought the crew blueberry muffins and found a 1913 Buick for the production to use, on the condition that no one drive it more than forty miles an hour, which is about as fast as anyone could drive on those roads, anyway. The trouble with Harry is that he’s dead, flat on his back on a hill outside town, on a patch of grass carpeted with red-edged golden oak leaves, near a fallen log on a spot with a sweeping view of mountains blue and green and purple and glorious. In an interview with Vermont Life, Hitchcock said, “If one has to die, can you think of a more beautiful place to do so than in Vermont in autumn❓”🍂

It was in the autumn of the “Trouble with Harry” shoot that Bernie’s brother, Larry, nineteen, brought the thirteen-year-old future mayor of Burlington and two-time Presidential candidate on a subway ride from their three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment, at 1525 East Twenty-sixth Street, Brooklyn, where they took turns sleeping on a bed in the hallway (versus the couch), to Rockefeller Center. Wandering around, they stopped at Vermont, the bureau, and returned home with a brochure titled “Vermont Farms and Summer Homes for Sale.” Somehow, miraculously, Bernie Sanders would eventually own one such property, a stretch of woods in the tiny town of Middlesex, population seven hundred and seventy. “This brook is my brook❗” he said, and “This tree is my tree❗,” 🌳even if he didn’t altogether believe in private ownership. (“I am not a capitalist,” he once told the talk-show host Phil Donahue.)

Mr. Sanders, who i now eighty-four years old, was Vermont’s sole representative in the U.S. House from 1991 to 2007, and he has served in the Senate as an Independent from Vermont ever since. He has been a notoriously ineffective legislator, having introduced only three bills between 1991 and 2020 that became law, two of which concerned the names of post offices. Yet he has wielded nearly unrivalled influence over American politics of a quite particular and distinctively local character: in his career as the country’s leading progressive populist and the second most successful socialist ever to run for President—beaten only by Eugene Victor Debs, the railman of Terre Haute, Indiana—Sanders has brought to the political stage the view not from the streets of Brooklyn but from the mountains of Vermont, and especially from its biggest city, Burlington, which in 1981, when Sanders was elected mayor by a margin of ten votes, had a population, whopping for Vermont but by any other measure minuscule, of a little under thirty-eight thousand. (It’s barely bigger this winter, at forty-five thousand shivering souls.) 

This past summer (2025), Sanders more or less said that he has no plans to run for President again in 2028. (“Oh, God,” he told CNN. “Let’s not worry about that.”) He has, however, filed papers to run for reëlection to the Senate in 2030, when he’ll be eighty-nine, even though there doesn’t seem much chance he’ll really do that. In short, if it’s not quite time to assess the Vermonter’s legacy, it’s getting close.

Aside from Sanders and Calvin Coolidge—born in Plymouth Notch, in 1872—Vermont hasn’t left much of a stamp on American politics, at least nationally. Notionally, well, that’s another question. Vermont is for many Americans something of a mythical place, a land out of time, and there’s a reason for that: a storybook America, all red barns and covered bridges, black-and-white mottled cows grazing in rolling green pastures, and dried-apple-faced farmers leaning on pitchforks, is how the place sold itself, beginning not long before those two teen-agers from Brooklyn got off the train in midtown. Vermont Life, launched in 1946 to promote tourism in the heady days after the end of the war, when Americans had money in their wallets and gas in their tanks, regularly ran as a full-page ad a photograph of a sugarhouse, steam billowing from its cupola, above a few lines of text:  Something of the ruggedness of the granite and marble has entered into the veins of the people of Vermont. They do their own thinking; they make their own decisions; they stand by their own convictions with the unyielding tenacity of their eternal hills.
—Bruce Barton.

This endorsement appears to have been specifically aimed at New Yorkers, since Barton, a Republican, had represented Manhattan in the U.S. House. Barton helped invent Vermont, even though, as far as I can tell, he never lived there. He wasn’t only a politician; he was also, and mainly, an adman, the longtime president of B.B.D.O., the agency that served as a chief inspiration for “Mad Men.” His contributions to a Rockwellian vision of America included creating the fictional all-American home cook Betty Crocker. Was Vermont ever really Bruce Barton’s Vermont? Rugged and flinty and possessing an unyielding tenacity may be how a lot of Americans would like to see themselves, but in Vermont, a place Coolidge called a “brave little state,” what began as an adman’s pitch to tourists became something of an official state attitude that, among other things, transformed the landscape, or, rather, it committed the state to preserving the landscape for tourists. 

Inevitably, the people who paid the price for that preservation have been the poor and especially poor farmers. Today, you can board Amtrak’s Vermonter at Penn Station, heading north, and I promise you’ll know when you’ve crossed the border into that brave and beautiful and hard-luck little state.

Bernie Sanders crossed that border line just about as soon as he was able. His father, Eli, a Polish immigrant, was a travelling paint salesman; his mother, Dorothy Glassberg, born on the Lower East Side, suffered from congenital heart disease. She died in 1960, at the age of forty-seven. Young Bernard Sanders, who had been a high-school track star, watched her die in a charity hospital of a condition from which she might well have survived if the family had had more money. Two years later, Eli died of an apparent heart attack, having crashed his car outside a hospital emergency room to which he’d tried to drive himself. Sanders vowed to escape New York. He transferred from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago, where he became a civil-rights activist and a devotee of the somewhat mystical and entirely sex-obsessed Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. After graduating, in 1964, mop-headed, bespectacled, and already famously slovenly, Sanders married, travelled in Europe and Israel, spent time on a kibbutz outside Haifa, and then went to Vermont with his wife. “We had never been to Vermont in our lives,” he later said. “We just drove up.” For twenty-five hundred dollars, they bought eighty-five mostly wooded acres, where they spent summers cooking on an improvised Sterno rig—old T-shirts stuck into coffee cans—that Sanders’s friends called Berno.

Vermont was at a turning point. In 1945, there had been twenty-six thousand family farms in the state. Twenty years later, when Sanders bought that patch of land, fewer than nine thousand farms were left, many families having lost theirs because the price of wool and milk was falling, or because the state had seized their land under eminent domain, to make way for the interstate highway, but also because, with all those skiers and second-home owners, including flatlanders like Sanders, property taxes had gone up, and farmers couldn’t afford to pay them. In other states, old farms became suburbs and strip malls, but not in Vermont, where most old farms reverted to forest. (Three-quarters of Vermont was farmland by the eighteen-fifties; three-quarters of the state is now forest.)

Mr. Sanders moved to Vermont, year-round and for good, in 1968, when droves of young people from all over the country headed for the hills. Much of the New Left, disillusioned with electoral politics after the fiasco of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, went back to the land. In Vermont, back-to-the-landers bought old hill farms for dirt cheap. By some estimates, a hundred thousand young people moved to Vermont between 1965, and 1975; by another, they set up more than a hundred communes. They kept the state rural, but they changed its politics. They started food co-ops and opened vegetarian restaurants and founded artists’ coöperatives and hooked up shortwave radios and published papers like the Vermont Freeman, a twenty-cent newspaper that was something of a radical, countercultural counterpart to Vermont Life, and whose editor distributed it out of the back of his VW. Year by year, under the influence of a movement sometimes known as Free Vermont, the stalwartly Republican state, which had voted for Richard Nixon by a wide margin in 1960, tilted further to the left.

Sanders doesn’t much like to talk about his early life, or, for that matter, his later life, and he declined to be interviewed by Dan Chiasson for the writer’s revelatory new book, “Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place” (Knopf), but he left behind plenty of clues in Vermont. Between 1969 and 1974, Sanders contributed dozens of articles to the Vermont Freeman. In two pieces from 1969, for instance, he wrote about the wretchedness of city life (“the air is poisonous, the noise deafening, and the streets are dangerous to walk” ) and the hard lives of such “miserable people” as his father, taking the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan to do “moron work,” packed into subway cars with a faceless mob, then taking the train back at night to “family, dinner, arguments, TV and sleep”: “The years come and go, suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.” Like a miller whetting a stone, he readied his axe for grinding. A 1969 front-page teaser for one of Sanders’s articles in the Vermont Freeman works just as well for all of them: “Bernard Sanders views the ills of our troubled and dying society.” And that line could have served equally well as a slogan for his 2016, and 2020, Presidential campaigns.

Mr. Sanders, as Chiasson argues, considered himself a chronicler of Vermont’s transformation in the sixties, reporting that led him to a pained awareness of its economic costs. “I think Vermont has changed terrible since I was a kid,” a farmer told Sanders, in an interview published in the Vermont Freeman in 1970, a year when one in six Vermonters lived below the poverty line. (Currently, that number is one in ten.) “Vermont was beautiful, beautiful back in them days. And every farmer always paid his bills. He had the money to pay his bills. . . . And now, today, in the State of Vermont, the taxes is driving people right out of the homes that they own.”

Mr. Sanders boned up on socialism during his freshman year at Brooklyn College. But it was in the hills of Vermont that he witnessed the ravages of a particular kind of capitalism, saw families suffering in the hills the way his own parents had in the tenements. In 1971, he moved to Burlington and made his first run for the U.S. Senate, representing the Liberty Union, something of a counterculture political party. “I have only one donor, and he drove me here,” he said at a campaign stop, pointing to a friend. He won 2.2 per cent of the vote. That same year—blocks away from Sanders’s Burlington apartment, which wasn’t really an apartment, just a couple of rooms in what had once been a workers’ cottage, behind an abandoned glass factory—Dan Chiasson was born.

Chiasson, a poet, a longtime contributor to this magazine, and the chair of the English department at Wellesley, had a front-row seat to Sanders’s rise, and his “Bernie for Burlington” is nearly as much a memoir of its author as it is a biography of its subject and, not least, a history of the Green Mountain State. “It is no small irony that hill farms marketed to well-heeled city people piqued the interest of a thirteen-year-old Brooklyn Jew and future socialist who would arguably do more to impact Vermont’s traditional culture than anyone in the state’s history,” Chiasson writes, about the day Larry and Bernie stopped at that Vermont bureau and picked up that brochure. It is also no small irony that a boy who grew up in Sanders’s Burlington, only to leave it behind, would become its chronicler.

Chiasson’s roots in Vermont go back to his great-grandparents, Wilfred and Laura Delorme, French Canadians who met as teen-agers, in 1915, while working in a woollen mill in Winooski, across the river from Burlington. Burlington is so little, and Chiasson’s family history runs so deep, that his kin pop up all over the place. Wilfred fought in the First World War and then went back to the looms, but after the mills closed, in 1954, he began working for the state while also tending his farm in South Burlington. In the early sixties, one of Chiasson’s grandfathers worked on a crew that blasted a route through the Winooski River Valley to bring Interstate 89 up to Burlington.

That highway, along with Interstate 91, made it easier for the skiers and the second-home owners to get to Vermont from New York and Massachusetts, but highways also risked ruining what had become, after the decline of both manufacturing and farming, the chief source of Vermont’s wealth: its natural beauty. In 1968, the state legislature passed what became known as the Billboard Law, banning billboards so that the view from the highway would not be marred, and two years later it enacted Act 250, known as the Postcard Law, strictly regulating development to insure the preservation of the state’s Vermont Life landscape. In 1978, the legislature passed the Use Value Appraisal Act, which lowered property taxes for owners who agreed to maintain their property for agricultural purposes or forestland. (About a third of all land in the state is now enrolled in the program.) Freezing the landscape in time is what the people of Vermont, and not merely tourists, want, but it’s also left residents with a vexed regard for visitors. “Welcome to Vermont,” one bumper sticker reads. “Now Go Home.”

Vermont’s struggle to stay the same—Vermont Life-worthy—even as its population and its politics were undergoing a transformation as big as any state experienced in the twentieth century, shaped Sanders’s view of what politics can do and what it can’t, and what money can do and what it can’t, or ought not to. In the early seventies, when his relationship with the Vermont Freeman began to sour, he briefly published his own alternative newsletter, Movement. It didn’t last long—and published so irregularly that he told subscribers newsletters would appear “when you least expect it”—but it advanced the Liberty Union, which, in 1972, nominated Sanders as its candidate for governor and endorsed Benjamin Spock for President. (More Chiasson-family cameos: when Sanders took a visiting Dr. Spock out for steak, Chiasson’s great-uncle Esau was tending the bar.) By 1973, Sanders had settled into campaign rhetoric that would hold him in good stead to the present day. “While Vermonters are paying outrageous prices for gas and heating oil, the oil billionaires are getting even richer,” he wrote. More of Vermont’s rural poor sold their land. In 1975, when developers were buying up failing farms and building retail shops and restaurants to support ski areas, Chiasson’s great-grandfather Wilfred sold his small farm in South Burlington—“for pennies,” Chiasson writes.

Mr. Sanders, by now a perennial candidate, perfected his craggy, scolding, mitten-waving style. He’d arrived in Vermont before the 1968 New Leftists did, and he stayed after they’d gone. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and the hippies but with the working poor. In 1976, in a bid for the governorship during the U.S. Bicentennial, he complained about corporate ownership of the media: “We should not have a culture where the three major networks are controlled by the Chase Manhattan Bank.” (The premise that CBS, NBC, and ABC lacked journalistic integrity in the seventies is unsupportable, but the charge that corporate ownership corrupts the integrity of news organizations is borne out daily.) Tourism, Sanders argued, was having a “devastating impact” on the state’s economy. Men and women who’d lost their farms and their factory jobs were working as “chambermaids and burger flippers,” while out-of-state developers were getting rich and the skiers at Stowe were driving Porsches and BMWs. Sanders lost in 1976, but he had found his groove.

Mr. Sanders soon left the Liberty Union and started the American People’s Historical Society, a Howard Zinn-style educational outfit that made filmstrips and documentaries about everyone from Ethan Allen to Eugene V. Debs. The material was every bit as polemical and tendentious as Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and Sanders distributed it to Vermont public schools in his beat-up Volvo. He was also a bit strapped. In 1978, he was evicted. The next year, he made a documentary film, titled “Poverty in Vermont,” that featured penetrating and compassionate interviews with people who were displaced by Burlington’s ill-considered urban-renewal initiatives and living in a public-housing project called Franklin Square. By the fall of 1980, the Burlington Free Press was reporting that Sanders, “the historian and film maker,” was “testing whether he can build a coalition of poor people, blue collar workers and university students” in his race for mayor. It turned out he could. In 1981, he was elected mayor, if not quite the Zohran Mamdani of the Reagan revolution (Mamdani won by two hundred thousand votes, not ten), then at least a sty in the Gipper’s eye.

Born: 1971 (age 55 years), Burlington, Vermont

Dan Chiasson grew up as the son of a struggling single mother. He watched Sanders change Burlington, very much for the better, by supporting small businesses, redeveloping the deserted industrial waterfront into parkland and public space, balancing the budget, bringing minor-league baseball to the city, and expanding affordable housing through a municipal land trust. Sanders also established a new culture of citizen participation and engagement. He had a public-access TV show, “Bernie Speaks with the Community,” in which, mike in hand and dressed like a schlub, he interviewed Burlingtonians, especially kids and senior citizens and even the occasional cocker spaniel. It was a program with all the daffy affability of “This Is Spinal Tap.” Chiasson seems to know just about everyone in old clips from the show. He’s the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon of Burlington. When Michel Foucault came to give a lecture at the University of Vermont, where he was to be introduced by Sanders, the postmodern French philosopher sat on an orange sectional in a lounge where Chiasson’s mother had once recruited students to babysit her son. When Jesse Jackson appeared onstage at U.V.M. with Sanders during Jackson’s 1988 Presidential bid, Chiasson, a high schooler, tried, and failed, to get inside. The next year, Sanders’s last in the mayor’s office, Chiasson headed off to Amherst College. On Election Night in 1990, Chiasson climbed to an upper floor of the Amherst library to catch the radio signal from Brattleboro, where he was able to hear that, unbelievably, the socialist mayor from Burlington would become Vermont’s sole representative in Congress. He writes, with astonished and complicated pride, “My guy won.”

Looking back over Sanders’s career in Burlington from the middle of the sixties to the end of the eighties, Chiasson argues that “Bernie did, in important respects, change; and Vermont, in troubling ways, did not.” I’m not so sure I agree with what’s on either side of that semicolon. Sanders has sounded the same for more than half a century, while Vermont has, especially recently, changed a great deal.

 “The Trouble with Harry” movie's plot turns on the question of who killed the poor man, and, as nearly everyone in town tries to work that out, they bury him and dig him up and bury him and dig him up again and finally strip him naked and stow him in a bathtub. Key elements of the mystery include a dead rabbit, a live frog, a pair of loafers, a rifle, a milk bottle, and a millionaire who comes to town in a chauffeured limousine. You could very plausibly shoot a remake in Vermont today, and it would look just about the same. 

Still, it’s a different place, and more different every day. Given the housing shortage that’s afflicted the whole country, the state, in 2024, revised the Postcard Law to allow for more construction, at least in certain areas. Dairy farming has all but vanished, down from more than four thousand farms in 1969, to fewer than six hundred. Fentanyl has devastated Burlington, and much of the rest of Vermont, too, and the prevailing harm-reduction approach has largely, and often spectacularly, failed. The state, which has seen more deaths than births for years, faces a fast-unfolding demographic crisis. In the past few years, it’s suffered disastrous floods owing to climate change; Montpelier, the capital, has been flooded in two of the past three summers.

But Vermont has been buried before, and dug up again, and even brought back to life. Property taxes have risen by an average of forty per cent since 2020, when fugitives made their hopeful escapes from New York and New England, worsening the cycle of rising land values, rising taxes, and bigger bills for longtime locals. Despite the risk of flooding on lower ground, hilly, chilly Vermont is a destination for climate refugees. Other types of farming are replacing dairies. A lot of farmers are growing hops, hoping to make Vermont for beer what the Napa Valley is for wine. The state has about the best rural broadband program in the country, opening doors for small businesses and digital nomads alike. (Even my own scruffy little hill got hooked up last year.) Back-to-the-land movements seem to come in thirty-year cycles: the United States is due for one, and, who knows, maybe a hundred thousand Gen Z-ers, fleeing Brooklyn, will turn up in the next ten years, wearing canvas Carhartt pants and carrying iPads and knitting needles and glossy seed catalogues. More people, in short, are likely to move to Vermont. What they’ll bring, and what they’ll take, is harder to say.

After Bernie Sanders left Burlington for Washington, D.C., he mostly said the same things he’d been saying since the seventies, except louder. “Never before in American history have so few media conglomerates, all owned by the billionaire class, had so much influence over the public,” he declared in 2024. “Today, we have a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.” It can sound like cant, but it is, unfortunately, true in much of America, if, thank God, a bit less true in Vermont, brave little snowy muddy fierce little mountain state. ♦

Let's write about how the author Jane Austen was motivated to create her classics

This is a short article is published the in the Fall 2025, Bowdoin College Magazine, (in Brunswick, Maine) by Associate Professor of English Literature Anne Kibbie*. 

I recommend following this seminar for anyone who appreciates a terrific reading group experience with a very scholarly leader. Thanks to Dr. Kibbie for sharing your Jane Austen scholarship. Her Bowdoin College email is at the link to her name above.

Shocking Jane Austen❗ Born on December 16, 1775 in Steventon Hampshire, England, and died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, Hampshire when she was 41 years old, having written novels like Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. She is buried in the Winchester Cathedral.

In recognition of the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, Associate Professor Ann Kibbie says the great novelist's real message goes beyond the world of love and romance.

During the 205th landmark anniversary for the fans of one of the greatest English language novelists, Jane Austen, who wrote about the lives and loves of the British landed gentry from the female perspective was born on December 16, 1775.

Dr. Ann Kibbie is one of her fans who teaches Austen and whose scholarship includes representations of money and capital in early modern literature.

Dr. Kibbie says her favorite response to Austen's work comes from the twentieth cectury poet W. H. Auden.  "He write that, despite the image of Austen as a prim and proper spinster, 'You could not shock her more than she shocks me'.  What did he consider so shocking❓  Her focus on that forbidden of subjects was not romance, but on money," 💰asserts Kibbe.

(No kidding❓😀😉 Who knew❓😮)

*Dr. Ann Louise Kibbie specializes in British Literature of the long eighteenth century. Her areas of research include representations of money and capital in early modern literature; the eighteenth-century novel; sentimentalism and the gothic; and eighteenth-century property law. Most recently, she has focused on the intersections between literature and medical history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her monograph, Transfusion: Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, was published by the University of Virginia Press (Fall 2019).

She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2021 for her current project, Fatal Labors: Obstetrics and the Disabled Maternal Body in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain.

Let's write about how old books influence who we are: About Old Books

Echo essay published in The New York Times by Roger Rosenblatt

To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution: Throw out whatever you want to throw out — the adorable snapshot of you as a 6-year-old with Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger, that jade bust of President Franklin Pierce (who❓), you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction — but, please, not your old books. 

Oh no❗ 😵😰Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it. And who you became when you read it. It’s part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us.

Books are houses. Once inside, you’re transformed, and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of “Jane Eyre,” and I’m ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws, and I grow to like him, feeling comfortable in the house. But what’s that manic laughter coming from the attic?

Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory. In my books I have lived in King Arthur’s castle and in Ralph Ellison’s basement, each beautiful, startling and revelatory of a universe of thought.

Yet the memories can be jarring. I know what I think of my books. What do they think of me? An ignoramus? An innocent? A tabula rasa on whom all these various influences may leave their marks❓📗 📘

To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution: Throw out whatever you want to throw out — the adorable snapshot of you as a 6-year-old with Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger, that jade bust of Franklin Pierce you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction — but not your old books. Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it. And who you became when you read it. It’s part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us.

Books are lie houses. Once inside, you’re transformed, and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of “Jane Eyre,” and I’m ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws, and I grow to like him, feeling comfortable in the house. 

But. wait❗What’s that manic laughter 😜coming from the attic❓👻

Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory. In my books I have lived in King Arthur’s castle and in Ralph Ellison’s basement, each beautiful, startling and revelatory of a universe of thought.

Yet the memories can be jarring. I know what I think of my books. What do they think of me? An ignoramus? An innocent? A tabula rasa on whom all these various influences may leave their marks? Someone with the wrong ideas, no ideas?

Someone with the wrong ideas, or no ideas❓😕

Yes, there were times when I’ve heard my books talk to me with mocking condescension. “Are you shocked by me❓” says Vladimir Nabokov with “Lolita.” 

Disgusted❓ Made uncomfortable in the cellar of a darker (not to say creepier) mind❓ “Are you frightened by me❓” says Mary Shelley with “Frankenstein.” 

Confused❓ Astonished❓ Made sad 😞and sympathetic❓ And who is the monster in the story, anyway❓ The creation or the creator❓ And if all that weren’t enough to wonder at, how did this tale come to be written by a 19-year-old girl❓

We read books, and books read us, especially if we approach them with easy assumptions. Before I gave it serious thought, I took “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for a story about a dope addict with mood swings. 

What Robert Louis Stevenson teaches is that under the influence, a person may be completely and irredeemably changed. The book says, in effect: Here in your facile judgment, learn something about our species. Whatever you think impossible in life is possible. Life is stranger and more dangerous than anything you may ever imagine.

And yet more forgiving, too. Here on my shelves is the autobiography of the early 20th-century Scottish poet, novelist and translator Edwin Muir. He resists psychotherapy at first but then sees a therapist and understands its value, writing, “I saw that my lot was the human lot, that when I faced my own unvarnished likeness I was one among all men and women, all of whom had the same desires and thoughts, the same failures and frustrations, the same unacknowledged hatred of themselves and others, the same hidden shames and griefs.” If one is searching for absolution, look no further.

That was a passage I dog-eared years ago, one among hundreds of dog-eared pages in my books. I wonder what sort of book would be produced by linking all the dog-eared pages. Incoherent or inspired❓ Or the infinite columns of marginalia, standing like beefeater guards beside the original texts. What secret books have I written that hide in all the jottings in the margins❓

Bright new books gleam like actors in tryouts, destined to grow gray with faded titles and bends and bruises on the covers.

“Bleak House” went with me to Crane Beach in Ipswich, Mass., when I was studying for a university exam. You can still feel grains of sand in the spine. A beaten-up book, “Childcraft,” came from my parents’ house — a children’s book my mother read to me. I drew pictures next to the poems. A squirrel, a fish, my father’s derby hat.

To say nothing of the nothing of missing books, the spaces created by those reluctantly lent to visitors who never returned them. Does one ever learn not to lend books? It’s grumpy bad manners to deny the borrowers, to be sure. But look at the holes that once held your valuables. Kidnap victims. If only there had been a ransom. Anatole France wrote that the only books he had in his library were those that others had lent him.

Every time one recommends a book to someone else, that book becomes an ambassador, informing and changing minds one will never know about. And who knows how these minds will use their newly gained knowledge❓

Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound — all three wrote or were inspired to write in prison❗

Indeed, the thoughts that informed their works were their way of breaking out. Writing a book from prison, Adolf Hitler nearly destroyed the world. With another book, Nelson Mandela nearly rescued it.

My books are teachers but also companions who know more than I do and who in the long run wish me well. I would no sooner get rid of them than I would an old friend.

More like neighbors, standing in their front doors on my shelves, forever extending their welcomes. 

At night, when my house is dark and I am asleep, do they whisper to one another❓ Do they gossip about me? Does Hamlet have the last word, as usual❓

Books of poems. Of maps. Of adventure. Of cartoons. Books of photographs. Books on philosophy, psychology, philately, history, mystery, art. Short stories. Tall stories. Ghost stories. Right now I am trying to retrieve a passage of poetry that expresses the power of all my books, making the case for holding on to them more forcefully than I ever could.

Ah. Here it is, “The Far Field,” by Theodore Roethke: “A ripple widening from a single stone / Winding around the waters of the world.”

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”

Let's write about the Buddhism tradition of Bodhi Day

 Found this essay in The Conversation, by Megan Bryson, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee. 

In the article's lead, the importance of lighting lamps🪔 to combat darkness reminds me about how creating light to conquer darkness is a common theme in Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. A trifecta of enlightenment symbolized by candles and lamps.

(Just an FYI, in the Catholic church calendar, December 8 is a major Marian holy day. many celebrate as a Holy Day of Obligation.) My husband Dick and I visited the bronze Great Buddha of Kamakura, when we were in Japan.

We took the bullet train from Tokyo. The statue dates back to the 13th century; it is a huge iconic sight and a tourist attraction.

On Bodhi Day, Buddhists commemorate Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment by lighting lamps 🪔 to combat darkness. December 8, marks the celebration of Bodhi Day in Japanese Buddhism. Bodhi means enlightenment or awakening in Sanskrit. It commemorates the enlightenment of Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha. Buddhists throughout the world celebrate Bodhi Day, but they do not all celebrate Siddhartha’s enlightenment on December 8.


In China, South Korea and Vietnam, his enlightenment is observed on the eighth day of the 12th lunar month. In 2025, but they do not all celebrate Siddhartha’s enlightenment on Dec. 8. In China, South Korea and Vietnam, his enlightenment is observed on, this falls on January 7.

In the Theravada form of Buddhism, followed in Southeast Asia, Gautama’s enlightenment, is commemorated along with his birth and death during the Vesak festival celebrated in April or May. This is similar to Tibetan Buddhism, which also combines the observation of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death in the springtime Saka Dawa festival.

As a scholar of Buddhism in East Asia, I study how people adapt Buddhism to their own cultural contexts. Bodhi Day is a good example of how Buddhists in different parts of Asia developed their own versions of important Buddhist holidays.The story of Bodhi Day: No matter when Buddhists celebrate the Buddha’s enlightenment, the story behind the holiday is consistent.


Biographies of the Buddha describe how young Prince Siddhartha became disillusioned with the fleeting luxuries of palace life. He eventually left home to find a cure for the inevitable suffering caused by old age, sickness and death. Siddhartha sought guidance from various religious masters, including one who taught his students to practice extreme self-denial, such as eating only a spoonful of gruel per day. Following this method, Siddhartha wasted away until he was just skin and bones, but he got no closer to resolving the problem of suffering. It was at just this time that a young woman named Sujata* came by with milk porridge, which she offered to the skeletal Siddhartha.

This meal gave Siddhartha the energy he needed to resolve the problem of suffering once and for all. He realized that no external teacher could give him the answers he sought, and he would have to solve this problem on his own.

Siddhartha decided to meditate under a pipal tree, also known as a sacred fig tree, until he reached enlightenment.

Over the next seven days he meditated, deepening his insights into the true nature of existence. On the seventh day, Siddhartha attained complete awakening to become a buddha. Buddhas are people who reach full enlightenment on their own, like Siddhartha, without direct guidance from a teacher.

Monks and nuns in Japanese and Korean Zen Buddhism follow this model by meditating intensively for the seven days leading up to Bodhi Day.

As a buddha, Siddhartha began sharing his insights with other spiritual seekers, attracting a group of followers who were the first Buddhists. Buddhist monks and merchants spread the religion to the north, east and south, and by the fourth century C.E. it was well established in China.The Laba Festival and congee: China already had its own religious and philosophical systems, along with its own calendar of holidays, when Buddhism came onto the scene. Buddhists in China adapted their religion to Chinese language and culture, including some existing holidays.


The 12th and final month of the Chinese lunar calendar was already a time for making sacrifices for ancestors in advance of the new year. In fact, the 12th month is called La, which originally referred to the cured meat that people offered to their ancestors at this time of year. “Ba” means the number eight, so Laba translates to “the eighth day of the La month” or “eighth day of the 12th month.”
Buddhism entered China in the first century C.E. By the third century, Chinese Buddhists identified the eighth day of the 12th month as the date of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Celebrating the Buddha’s enlightenment – or Bodhi Day – at the same time as the Laba Festival required adaptation.

The Laba Festival involved meat offerings and hunting, both of which violate Buddhist rules against killing animals. Over time, a compromise emerged, and rice porridge, or congee, became this holiday’s signature food for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. Rice has been used in Chinese religious offerings since at least the eighth century B.C.E., and rice congee also recalls the offering of milk porridge that helped Siddhartha on his journey to Buddhahood.
Light in the darkness: Another aspect of the Laba Festival, or Bodhi Day, is that it falls around the winter solstice, the darkest part of the year. Like other holidays at this time of year, Bodhi Day involves lighting lamps to combat the darkness. 

For East Asian Buddhists, these lamps 🪔 symbolize the Buddha’s enlightenment, which lights the path for others to follow.
Bodhi Day is celebrated in Japan and throughout the Japanese diaspora on December 8, because Japan switched from the lunar to solar calendar in 1873. Buddhists in other East Asian countries, such as China, Vietnam and South Korea, will observe Bodhi Day on January 7, 2025.

East Asian Buddhists will celebrate the holiday in different ways – some by lighting lamps 🪔, some by eating congee, some others by meditating for a full week straight. But for all Buddhists, Bodhi Day represents hope and the potential to overcome suffering.

*Julie's personal editorial comment, stands to reason, a woman brought Siddhartha the nourishment he needed to achieve enlightenment, just my opinion.

Let's Write about Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny and the Derby Line Haskell Free Library book signing

US-Canada border library hosts author Louise Penny

Her book tour stop at the Haskell Free Library was full of symbolism.  (I wrote about the US-Canadian border library in a substacks article and published on my Facebook page at this link here.)

This "Let's Write" blog was published by New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) and Vermont Public by Myla van Lynde.

For the first time in 20 years, bestselling mystery writer Louise Penny did not tour the U.S. after releasing a novel — except for one stop: the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which famously sits on the border between Vermont and Quebec.

Ms. Penny spoke onstage to a crowd of around 400 people in the Haskell Opera House. The event was completely sold out, as is the event she is hosting on Sunday. She was promoting "The Black Wolf", number 20 in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mysteries, about the Sûreté du Québec and his team, that uncovered and stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal, arresting the person behind it. A man they called the Black Wolf.

Penny is Canadian, and canceled her planned appearances in the U.S. this fall in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff threats and other actions.

“I don’t think there is a country that has been invaded, or peoples that have been rounded up, or individuals who have been targeted, who haven’t thought… when was that moment we could’ve stood up and said something?” Penny said Saturday. “This is my moment, and I could, and if I didn’t, then shame on me.”

Penny’s books have sold more than 18 million copies worldwide.

The Black Wolf, released Tuesday, is the 20th book in her Chief Inspector Gamache novels. The series is set in the fictional border town of Three Pines, Quebec.

Penny said one of the questions her book asks is, “What happens when certain elements decide Canada should be the 51st state of the United States?”

When she wrote the book, she said she wondered if she’d gone too far. Now, she wonders if she went far enough.

Ticket-holders line up at the Derby Line side of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House for a sold-out evening with Louise Penny.

“This book was written a year before any of this happened — before Trump was elected, before the whole 51st state debacle, before this whole attack on the library,” she said.

For 121 years, Canadians were able to enter the library through the door in Derby Line, Vermont without having to go through customs. A recent U.S. Customs and Border Protection directive requires that Canadian citizens enter through Canadian soil.

The Haskell has been raising funds to update the back entrance to be wheelchair accessible, and to build a new sidewalk and parking lot.

A portion of the proceeds from this weekend's ticket sales will be donated to help offset the costs of updating the library's Canadian-only entrance. That donation will also be matched by Penny.

Outside at the Derby Line entrance, people began lining up to see Penny an hour before the doors opened.

Cathy Byrne and Robert Casale drove across the U.S. from their home city of Anacortes, Washington, to attend this event.

The two are big fans of Louise Penny, and were drawn to the symbolism of seeing her speak at the Haskell.

“I think it’s really great to support the unity between Canada and the U.S.,” Byrne said.

Ellen and Richard Levesque live in Putney. Richard is also a Canadian citizen. They both support Penny’s decision to cancel her U.S. tour.

“We’re trying to make friends with some Canadians,” Ellen said on the way into the building.

Penny said she finds hope in believing in the decency of most people, regardless of their political beliefs.

“Goodness exists. I think we need to remember that,” she said. “And that is a choice, that’s an act of will, that is a revolutionary act: to choose decency.”

Let's write about Christmas card history

Louis Prang, Father of the American Christmas Card, Santa Claus of American Art- published in the New England Historical Society news by Leslie Landrigan.

Also an immigrant success story

Louis Prang put Christmas cards into millions of American mailboxes and fine art into millions of American homes.

He arrived in Boston at the age of 26, a German revolutionary with a dream of democracy and equality. Over the course of his long career he evolved into an astute businessman and the leading color printer of his age.

From his factory in Boston he dominated the Christmas card industry in the decades following the Civil War. He also brought beautiful art to the masses, lucrative work to women artists and art education to children. Kids today still use the paints and crayons he developed more than a century ago.

Just before Louis Prang died in 1909, a contemporary paid a slightly overwrought tribute to him.

“The Santa Claus of American art showered his greeting card favors alike upon the just and the unjust, the rich and the poor, the humble and the proud. Where have they not gone, those loose leaves from the world’s book of beauty! Everywhere! 

Into the homes of the poor, into the miner’s cabin, the invalid’s chamber, the nursery, the schoolroom, the drawing room. Millions of lives have been brightened by the fair and pleasant things that have been sown broadcast over the country by Mr. Prang.”

Louis Prang was born March 12, 1824, in Prussian Silesia, the son of Jonas Louis Prang, a Huguenot textile manufacturer, and Rosina Silverman, a German Calvinist. He apprenticed to his father and learned engraving, printing and calico dyeing. In the 1840s he traveled around Europe working as a printer and in textiles.

By 1848 he had gotten involved in the Revolutions of 1848 in the German States — making him a Forty-Eighter. The revolutionaries aimed to unify the German states. They also wanted to create a more democratic government and guarantee human rights.

The revolution failed and the Prussian government banned Prang. He fled to Switzerland.

In Paris, he met and fell in love with Rosa Gerber, a beautiful Swiss woman bound for Ohio. He followed her to the United States and married her there. They had one daughter.

Prang was a true German romantic who loved nature, art, flowers, strong emotion and his wife. He gave his first color print, Four Roses, to Rosa. He would later sign some of his Christmas cards with a rose.

Fighting the Know-Nothings (FYI this group eventually morphed into the Ku Klux Klan)

In 1851, he went to work for the engraver Frank Leslie in Boston. Five years later, Rosa persuaded him to go out on his own. He went into business with a partner to create lithographs of buildings and towns in Massachusetts.

Prang and his partner soon parted, He then laid the foundation for his success with lithographed labels for cooking extracts and printed trade cards.

As a German in Boston during the rise of the Know-Nothing Party, Louis Prang spoke out against the ‘two-year amendment.’ The Massachusetts Legislature in 1860 passed the amendment, which deprived naturalized citizens of the right to hold office or to vote until two years after they became citizens.

Prang and other German leaders held a rally in Turner Hall, urging listeners only to support a political party that “does not measure civil rights by place of birth, or human rights by color of skin.”

Civil War and After- Twenty-four hours after Louis Prang heard about the attack on Fort Sumter, he engraved, printed and distributed maps of Charleston Harbor to Boston newsstands. Through the Civil War he produced war maps, selling them with red and blue pencils so people could mark the location of opposing armies.

After the war he went to Europe with his wife and daughter to study chromolithography, a method for making multicolor prints. At the time, American printing was pretty much a black-and-white affair.

When Prang returned to Boston he began to make color reproductions of famous works of art. No one else in America had the chops to do it. Prang’s chromolithography required as many as 40 stones. In contrast, Currier & Ives used one stone, and underpaid factory girls slapped on color with brushes.

Prang’s first two color reproductions, of landscapes, fell flat. But then he printed two paintings, Chickens and Ducklings by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait. They were a hit, and soon Prang was building a factory on Elliott Street in Roxbury, Massachusetts. 

By 1868 he had 40 presses and state-of-the-art litho-stone equipment.

Prang’s biographer, Larry Freeman, explained the appeal of color in the previously black-and-white world of print. “People in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries were starved for color print replicas of what their eyes revealed directly in nature,” wrote Freeman.

Prang also did something else no one else in America could do. He embossed the print to resemble brush strokes and printed it on linen cloth. Then he put it in a gilt frame, so it could add panache to middle-class parlors.

The Christmas Card: Christmas cards were then popular in England, where Christmas had been celebrated with far more enthusiasm than in Puritanical New England. Sir Henry Cole is credited with inventing the first ever Christmas card in 1843. Cole, the story goes, didn’t have time for the English tradition of writing notes to friends and family over the holidays. So he asked his friend, the artist John Calcott Horsley, to design a card. He had about a thousand of the cards printed and hand-colored. Cole didn’t use them all, and sold the extras for a shilling apiece. It caused a sensation in Victorian society because it showed a child drinking wine.

Prang probably picked up the idea to make Christmas cards while traveling in Europe.

The American Christmas Card: In 1875, Louis Prang printed his first Christmas cards and exported them to London. They were a success. The next year, he sold them throughout the Northeast. It took but two more years for him to corner the greeting card market in the United States. By 1881, he printed more than 5 million Christmas cards a year. His Prang Lithographic Factory in Roxbury became a tourist attraction, and he often conducted tours himself.

The author Edward Everett Hale considered Prang’s printing shop the most interesting place in Boston.

“Whenever I have a very grand friend visiting me, I always take him there to see how Christmas cards are made,” Hale wrote.

Prang signed the cards ‘L. Prang and Co.’ at the bottom, or hid his mark on a shoe or a leaf. Or he just printed a rose. Young ladies recorded in their diaries how many “Prangs” they received over the holidays.

Collectors today still seek out Prang’s beautiful Christmas cards.They are considered to be graphic masterpieces. Prang printed them on high-quality paper and lavishly decorated them with as many as 30 colors applied to a single print. Some were embossed, varnished and embellished with fringe, tassels and sprinkles.

Women’s Work: Prang looked to women for help in finding new designs for his prints and keeping in touch with popular taste.

Women didn’t have many ways to make money outside of the home then. Decent occupations for women were limited to low-paying domestic service, teaching, millwork or sewing.

In 1870, Prang advertised his first art contest in the women’s rights journal Revolution. He asked the Ladies’ Art Association to announce the contest to its members, select and judge the artwork and award the prizes. Then he offered to buy the winning artwork at the artist’s price.

He also bought paintings from women artists such as Rosina Emmet and Fidelia Bridges. By 1881, L. Prang & Company employed more than 100 women artists and designers, including Maude Humphrey Bogart, mother of the actor.

Ten years after Louis Prang’s first art contest for women, he held another for Christmas card designs. The winners would have their designs published and share $3,000. Nearly 800 people entered the first contest in 1880, mostly women.

This was no ordinary contest. Prang exhibited the entries in the prestigious Doll & Richards art gallery in Boston and the American Art Gallery in New York. He then selected as judges architect Richard Morris Hunt, artist Samuel Colman and Edward C. Moore, Tiffany’s head silver designer.

Prang held three more contests for Christmas card designs, each one more elaborate than the next. The final exhibit traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Institute of Art in Chicago.

European printers caught on to Prang’s approach. By 1890, they could lower their printing costs and drive Prang out of the American Christmas card business with cheap imitations. But Prang refused to lower his quality.

Art Education: During the late 18th century, cultured young ladies were expected to be able to draw and paint in order to enter the marriage market. Some reform-minded school officials in Boston thought poor children should also have the chance to draw and paint. So Prang in 1875 took up the cause of art education.

He started to produce classroom art materials as a public service. In 1878 he hired Mary Dana Hicks, a widowed New York art educator, to help with art education products. Rosa died in 1898, and he married Hicks two years later.

Prang cornered the school art supply and instruction business. The company published art textbooks and drawing books, taught art teachers and ultimately developed the “Prang Method of Instruction.” The Boston school system used Prang’s methods for many years.

In 1897, Prang closed his lithographic factory in Roxbury and moved to Springfield, Mass., which had a large German population. The Louis Prang Company merged with the Taber Art Co. of New Bedford. He continued to produce high-quality work and made child-safe art materials.

In 1909, the American Crayon Company bought the rights to his art material, which eventually became Dixon Ticonderoga. Louis Prang died on Sept. 14, 1909.

Let's write about how vampires are connected to the history of tuberculosis! Really! A physician reviews two books

The Plague That Won’t Die two book reviews published in The New York Review of Books by Pria Anand

As my recent diagnosis shows, tuberculosis is not a relic of medical history. It remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide—and America is hardly immune.

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History

by Vidya Krishnan

By the time Mercy Lena Brown was born, in 1872, her New England farming community was becoming a ghost town. Young farmers were leaving the barren, rocky soil for jobs in the city, and the people who remained were suffering an outbreak of consumption, which seemed to move through households with no clear pattern, causing one out of every four deaths in the area.

Of the nine members of the Brown family, Lena’s mother was the first to die of consumption, in 1883. Seven months later Lena’s sister Mary Olive, a twenty-year-old dressmaker, died too, becoming so pale and emaciated in the final days of her illness that she knew in advance to choose the hymn she wanted sung at her funeral.

Lena’s brother, Edwin, a store clerk, fell ill next. Desperate, he went west to Colorado Springs, following the prevailing medical wisdom of the time that dry air and sunshine could arrest the illness. They didn’t. He returned home after eighteen months, weaker than ever, and by then Lena, who had been well when he left, was gone too, her own consumption the “galloping” variety. Edwin’s dreams became even more fevered. “She haunts me!” he called out in his sleep.

After Lena’s death, in 1892, an article in The Providence Journal reported that neighbors “besieged” her father, George, insisting that Edwin’s symptoms were a sign of something otherworldly: some spirit must be sucking the life from his thinning body. Because he fell sick after his mother’s and Mary Olive’s deaths, and because he quickly worsened after Lena’s, the three Brown women were the chief suspects. The only way to save his life, the neighbors told his father, was a morbid practice that had caught on in New England in reaction to the gothic horrors of consumption: exhume the bodies of his mother and sisters before Edwin entirely wasted away.

Four local men dug up the remains of the three Brown women. By then Lena’s mother and sister had been dead for nine years, and only their skeletons remained. Lena had died in the winter, and her body had been left in a crypt until the spring thaw softened the frozen earth enough for burial. Her doctor was enlisted to perform an autopsy; her body was still largely undecomposed. From beneath Lena’s rib cage he removed her liver, the twin pink slabs of her lungs, and her heart. This he slit open with a scalpel to find that it was filled with dark clots of rotting blood.

To the neighbors, who had watched many of their own loved ones waste away of consumption, the heart seemed like proof: Lena had been feeding on the living, sapping their blood and leaving them wan and feeble. They burned her liver and heart to ash, which they mixed with water and administered to Edwin as an exorcism and cure. He died two months later. In the end, only George and one of his seven children survived the disease. Lena’s lungs, the doctor later told a local newspaper, had been filled with “diffuse tuberculous germs.”

Lena’s death and exhumation—and a cultural history of this tradition of disinterment, common throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England—are recounted in careful detail in the Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell’s Food for the Dead (2011). Drawing on decades of census data, death records, newspaper clippings, and oral histories, Bell argues that this model of disease—consumption caused by a vampiric spirit—had an internal logic no different from the explanations of doctors and scientists at the time. The myth could explain why the disease clustered in certain houses, cursing entire families. And it accounted for the visceral horror of the affliction, the way it consumed each of the body’s vital organs in turn.

A decade before Lena’s death the German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch, informed by the nascent germ theory of disease, had discovered the bacterium—Mycobacterium tuberculosis—that causes consumption. But the first antibiotics were not discovered for another half-century, and the medical establishment, loath to attribute consumption to a pathogen that could not yet be treated, was slow to accept Koch’s explanation. Instead doctors clung to the older theory that consumption was caused by damp lungs, prescribing therapies—like Edwin’s sojourn in the West—intended to desiccate their patients’ failing bodies: “What cures and hope for recovery were medical practitioners offering their consumptive patients?” asks Bell.

If you judge by sheer number and kinds of treatments, they offered a great deal. But if you measure the effectiveness of these treatments, then, unfortunately, they were still groping in the dark.

Among these treatments were leeches and opium, warm sea air and cold baths, milk from the breasts of a pregnant woman, and dried seaweed placed beneath one’s pillow.

Therapies have changed, but tuberculosis remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide. 

Nearly a century and a half after Koch’s first attempts to devise an inoculation, we still have no effective vaccines. Globally, one in four people carries tuberculosis, though most are neither contagious nor symptomatic. In the United States, where the prevalence is closer to three in one hundred, the disease thrives primarily in the conditions created by social injustice: overcrowded prisons, for instance, or temporary shelters. Yet programs to curb the spread of TB are among those hit hardest by both the Trump administration’s closure of USAID and its assault on the National Institutes of Health, attacks that are projected to lead to millions of avoidable TB deaths over the coming decade.

Tuberculosis can seem inscrutable, a protean disease that can settle in virtually any organ in the body. In the lungs it causes the bloody cough and gasping breath that ravaged the Brown family; in the lymphatic system it causes swollen masses that can press on the soft muscles of the vocal cords, robbing victims of their voices; in the guts it causes raw, bleeding ulcers and obstructed bowels. The disease is airborne: colonies of bacteria are exhaled from the lungs of a person with pulmonary TB in a fine mist of particles that can linger suspended in the air for hours. How long the bacteria survive in the air depends on the surrounding conditions; in spaces with poor ventilation—an enclosed car, for instance, or a windowless room—they can last hours or even days.

Our lungs are a strange paradox: they are protected by the hard carapace of our ribs but also tremendously exposed to airborne bacteria, which can slip in with a single breath. To prevent infections, the labyrinthine passages that make up each lung are lined with white blood cells. But Mycobacteria tuberculosis are impenetrable. Each cell is surrounded by a thick barricade made of fats and proteins. In the lungs they are consumed by white blood cells but not digested, surviving undisturbed as more white blood cells arrive to wall off the infection, forming scarred balls called tubercles. Here the bacteria can live for decades or even a lifetime, forming a latent infection and replicating slowly within an unwitting host, undetected until they take advantage of an aging or suppressed immune system to explode into full-blown consumption. A multitude of factors can determine whether a person living with latent TB is likely to develop the active disease, as Lena, her mother, and her siblings did, or whether they will survive into old age with an infection that remains latent, as her father probably did. Malnutrition, pollution, and illnesses like HIV and diabetes can all contribute to TB activation.

Fossils show the marks tuberculosis leaves on bones, tiny holes that resemble the work of termites, the result of the human immune system’s futile attempts to ferret out islands of bacteria lodged in the hard tissue. In hips or wrists, the disease knits joints together into an immobile mass. In spinal vertebrae, which are particularly prone to tuberculosis because they are traversed by innumerable tiny arteries that can deposit the bacteria deep into each bone, the holes cause successive vertebrae to collapse into one another until the spine contorts into a painful curve. The telltale hunched back of spinal TB is immortalized in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings, ivory carvings, and the bodies of unearthed mummies.

The earliest evidence of tuberculosis comes from the Natural Trap Cave, in northern Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. The cave lies along an ancient game trail that connects the mountains with lower-lying grazing lands. Shaped like an iceberg—the small opening is about the length of a compact car, while the floor, nearly a hundred feet below, is as wide as a cruise ship—the cave is nearly invisible from the snow-covered ground above it. Its unusual shape has made it particularly interesting to paleontologists: the steep fall caused the deaths of innumerable animals, and the temperature at its floor never rises above forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, preserving their remains. Among the animals that have died there since the last ice age—dire wolves and woolly mammoths, American cheetahs and an ancient species of camel that once wandered the American West—are a multitude of Pleistocene bovids, from bighorn sheep to long-horned bison, with the eroding bones and genetic traces of tuberculosis.

We once thought tuberculosis arrived in humans with the advent of agriculture, acquired from cattle as hunters and gatherers became settled farmers during the Neolithic revolution. The bovine form of the disease—caused by the closely related Mycobacterium bovis—can jump the species barrier to humans through unpasteurized milk, causing an infection that is clinically indistinguishable from one caused by the human variant.

But more recent studies suggest that Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium bovis evolved separately, from an even more ancient common ancestor long before the Neolithic Period. As far back as we can imagine, TB has been a human disease.

I practice neurology at a so-called safety-net hospital—a designation unique to the deeply flawed and segregated American health care system—where the many inequities that drive tuberculosis infection rates are evident. “Safety net” is a euphemism for hospitals that care for people who, because of their health insurance or lack thereof, their citizenship status, or their bank balance, are denied care everywhere else. Nearly all my patients are in some way displaced, and more than half recently arrived in the United States. My hospital includes centers for refugee health, the treatment of addiction, and the treatment of trauma.

Roughly once a year I care for someone whose tuberculosis has entered their brain, resulting in a vicious meningitis that can clot the arteries and cause strokes, dangerous swelling, and inflamed tuberculous abscesses of the brain that often look at first glance like tumors. Still, I have always felt removed from TB, as though it were a curious relic of medical history rather than a contemporary plague.

But early in my first pregnancy, when I felt it only in the wave of nausea that woke me every morning, my own blood tested positive for TB. That week doctors X-rayed my lungs to be sure I wasn’t contagious, a lead vest laid over my belly to protect the baby. My lungs were clear, my infection was latent, and my baby was unscathed—the spongy layer of placenta that funnels nutrients from pregnant bodies into a fetus also keeps many infections at bay—but if I ever require chemotherapy or another immunosuppressive medication, I will need to be treated to make sure my tuberculosis does not become active.

The treatment regimen for an active tuberculosis infection is crude: months of toxic antibiotics that have the potential to harm nearly every part of the body. One of the treatments can strip the nerves and leave patients’ feet numb and tingling, while another turns both tears and sweat orange—patients are advised not to wear white T-shirts when taking the drug. Both medications can damage the liver. The treatment can take anywhere from three to nine months depending on the drug combination, and once it has begun, a patient cannot miss a dose. The first-line drugs we use to treat TB were all developed decades ago—one more than a century ago—and many of our second-line treatments for drug-resistant TB were originally developed to combat other infections before they were repurposed for the burgeoning plague of consumption.

How the world treats—or fails to treat—tuberculosis has everything to do with where the disease takes its greatest toll. In his new book Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green writes, “TB doesn’t just flow through the meandering river of injustice; TB broadens and deepens that river.”

Green, an unlikely source for an instructive book on TB, is perhaps best known as the author of The Fault in Our Stars, among other young adult best sellers. Online he is the cohost of the Vlogbrothers, a wide-ranging YouTube channel that, since 2007, has featured spots on everything from Harry Potter to microfinance. Green’s interest in twenty-first-century TB came about by accident, he writes, on a visit to Sierra Leone as part of a philanthropic program focused on the global maternal mortality crisis. In the coastal town of Lakka, he spent time at a tuberculosis hospital and met a teenager with a drug-resistant strain whose painful experience forms the central story of the book. Everything Is Tuberculosis, Green told The New York Times, is intended to foster awareness among American readers who would otherwise remain entirely ignorant of the communities ravaged by the disease.

Green uses the disease as a way to see more clearly the many injustices that have shaped our world. In Sierra Leone, where it is epidemic, TB is a product of centuries of British colonial rule. One Sierra Leonean physician tells Green to look at a map of the railroads if he wants to understand why the country is so impoverished. By extension, Green seems to imply, there is nothing inevitable about the ravages of tuberculosis; rather, it was fertilized by the devastation that colonialism left behind: housing insecurity, malnutrition, and poverty.

At times Everything Is Tuberculosis feels thin, a litany of historical and cultural anecdotes from New Mexico’s statehood to the Stetson cowboy hat, both born of the same “travel cure” that sent Lena’s brother, Edwin, west in search of open air. (Green notes that California became known as the “land of new lungs.”) The book never does the messier work of reporting and research to explain how colonization or development might propel an epidemic—why a country’s colonial-era train system or overcrowded cities are just as implicated in the spread of TB as any feature of the bacteria itself. Among the book’s greatest strengths is its bibliography, which includes a reference to Vidya Krishnan’s heftier Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History.

Phantom Plague tells the story of tuberculosis in India, where roughly a quarter of the world’s tuberculosis cases are found and where Krishnan has spent more than a decade reporting on the ways that antibiotic overuse, housing policy, casteism, and patent law have collided to create an epidemic of drug resistance, including TB strains that one Mumbai doctor calls “totally drug resistant”—TDR–TB. “The global battle against tuberculosis…will be won, or more likely lost, in India,” writes Krishnan.

Krishnan calls her book a “biography of the bacteria,” but it often reads more like a history of medical science itself, the story of tuberculosis bound up with that of germ theory. Krishnan traces Koch’s intellectual lineage from Ignaz Semmelweis, the unlucky Hungarian obstetrician who was ostracized from the medical establishment for suggesting that invisible “cadaverous particles” carried on doctors’ unwashed hands might be responsible for a devastating infection killing the women under his care, to Joseph Lister, the English surgeon who first said that surgical instruments ought to be sterilized.

The book includes fascinating digressions. Spittoons were counterintuitively introduced to curb the spread of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases once germ theory was widely accepted. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who supplemented his floundering medical practice with popular writing, wrote a scathing rebuke, after being turned away from one of Koch’s lectures, of his earliest attempts to devise a remedy for tuberculosis.

But Phantom Plague is strongest when it shifts to our own time, examining policies that, Krishnan argues, have driven the long-lasting crisis:

One bad decision at a time, the global TB epidemic has been socially constructed by us—humans who are reliably small-minded, casteist, and racist every time we face a pathogen that is highly unpredictable, mutating, and thriving.

One chapter examines housing policy in Mumbai, particularly the construction of “vertical slums,” airless high-rises designed to crowd the impoverished as close together as possible, well away from the city’s fabulous wealth but still within “serving distance.” “No city in the world had segregated the rich from the poor, the lower caste from the upper castes, as efficiently as Mumbai,” Krishnan writes. The buildings are perfect breeding grounds for tuberculosis. As one young woman living with drug-resistant TB tells Krishnan, you can get it “just by breathing” in certain parts of the city.

Despite more than a century of scientific advancement and the development of countless antibiotics, when it comes to TB twenty-first-century medicine is not unlike the New England townspeople digging up graves in search of a ravenous spirit. Krishnan blames the epidemic of drug resistance on doctors who dose antibiotics incorrectly or prescribe drug regimens without testing their patients to find out what their disease is likely to respond to. Among her most agonizing examples are the stories of two young women who were treated for months with a toxic drug that had no effect on their tuberculosis but rendered them profoundly deaf.

Worse still are the pharmaceutical companies that have produced remedies for the drug-resistant strains but have made them inaccessible where they are most needed, offering meager donations of medications in lieu of a sustainable pricing model, and arguing that people in India and other TB-endemic areas lack the health literacy to take them correctly. (Krishnan makes analogies to the early rationing of antiretroviral therapy for those with HIV, which was withheld from much of the world for racist reasons, including the presumption that people living with HIV in Africa couldn’t tell time and would not remember to take a twice-daily pill.) “Inherent in that argument,” one American scientist tells Krishnan, “is the fact that infectious diseases that affect poor people could someday affect rich people—or white people…. We, the rich and the white, want to save these medications for us, for later.”

While Green hopes to close the sympathy gap by bringing the stories of tuberculosis to readers oceans away, Krishnan is more direct. Her book, she writes, “has one intended audience: readers who have the good fortune to have remained ignorant of TB but can ill afford to be so any longer.” To imagine that Black and brown people, incarcerated people, and poor and unhoused people are somehow uniquely vulnerable is to be ignorant of TB’s long history, forever linked with our own. “No one is safe,” she writes, “until everyone is.”

Iwas born in the United States, but I spent my first four years in the urban India that Krishnan writes about, and stories of tuberculosis are enshrined in my family mythology. One great-aunt nearly lost her hands to a childhood TB infection that ravaged her joints, yet she learned to write despite her pained, frozen fingers. In what was then British-occupied India, where nearly all Indian women married young and bore children without ever learning to read, she studied economics and became the principal of a college. In the US my latent disease makes me an anomaly, but it also makes me feel part of a larger, ancient lineage. 

Yet, even though I am a doctor, even though I am not contagious, I have kept my condition a secret until now, afraid of some nebulous stigma.

The autumn I was diagnosed, I left work early on a Thursday afternoon and drove an hour south from my hospital in Boston to visit the Rhode Island grave of Mercy Lena Brown*. More than a century after her burial, Lena’s grave has become something of a pilgrimage site. When I visited, the headstone was piled with offerings—some acorns and pennies, a freshly cut pumpkin, a bouquet of zinnias. The stone itself has been stolen so many times that it is bolted to the ground with an iron strap. Nearby is the crypt from which Lena’s body was exhumed. The cemetery is tidy, but the crypt, shaded by an overgrown swamp oak, is wild, its wooden door hanging loose from its hinges, and its stone walls blooming with starbursts of lichen.

Over the years, souvenir hunters have chipped away at Lena’s gravestone, stealing bits of marble as eerie mementos, but her epitaph remains: “Mercy L., daughter of George T. and Mary E. Brown, died January 17, 1892, aged 19 years.”

Neither a vampire nor a martyr, just a girl who suffered before she died, one of an uncountable number.

Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains. She teaches at Boston University and practices at Boston Medical Center. (December 2025)

*Mercy Lena Brown's grave is in the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island, marked by a headstone secured with metal to prevent theft, where visitors leave offerings for the famed "New England Vampire". Her plot is near a cedar tree, and a triangular stone structure, the crypt where she was first stored, is nearby in the cemetery, a site known for folklore about consumption victims believed to be vampires.

About the case of Mercy Lena Brown, a 19-year-old resident of the town of Exeter, was the last known instance in the state of Rhode Island of a large group of otherwise sensible folks exhuming, mutilating, immolating, and cannibalizing a corpse to kill a vampire.