Here’s some simple math: A new issue of Seven Days has dropped every week for 30 years, often with 100-plus pages of local content. That’s thousands of articles, columns, reviews and previews published over the decades. Which ones best tell the tale of an upstart arts paper that, against all odds, has become Vermont’s largest-circulation newspaper? Could we pick 30 articles that collectively sum up the story of Seven Days?
Not easily, as it turned out. What defines the “best”? The biggest scoop, the most shocking exposé, the most artfully crafted tale, the most thoroughly reported series? Or does it make more sense to judge a story by its impact, including actions taken and the number of follow-up stories it engendered?
Another approach might be to pick stories that represent the wide range of things Seven Days covers — food, for example, or things to do in Montréal. Also an option: calling out those pieces that turned into something significant. The introduction of columnist Peter Freyne, for example, shaped the history of this paper and, one might argue, some local political careers.
Our story selections include some of each — a sampling of local journalism that made a splash when it was published and, for myriad reasons, has also stood the test of time. All together, these only scratch the surface of our rich archive. Want more? You can read these stories in full and dive deeper into our digital stacks at sevendaysvt.com/archives.
1. Inside Track: “Althea Later?”
October 18, 1995 | By Peter Freyne
Read the story…
Peter Freyne thought Seven Days would be a good fit for his shit-kicking political column, “Inside Track.” He was right! Two months after the paper’s launch, we published the first of hundreds, in which he raked an uppity side judge over the coals. It was the beginning of a beautiful, 13-year publishing relationship. New readers started picking up Seven Days for Freyne’s insightful, funny, sometimes vicious takes on the “talented and colorful cast of characters on the Vermont political stage,” as he once put it. When Howard Dean and later Bernie Sanders ran for president, national reporters found and studied Freyne’s oeuvre, which also included memorable cover stories about local drug kingpin Billy Greer and reporter Paul Teetor‘s lawsuit against the Burlington Free Press. When he sank his teeth into a story, Freyne did not let go. He died in 2009 — along with the nicknames he bestowed on the people he wrote about — and no Vermont writer since has managed to make local politics as entertaining.
2. “From Basra to Bethlehem: A Short Story for the Season“
December 20, 1995 | By Tom Paine
Although it was timed for Christmas, Seven Days‘ first published work of fiction was hardly a holiday story. Narrated in the voice of a disillusioned Desert Storm vet, it was a taut take on modern desert warfare. Vermont author Tom Paine contributed the piece, and Seven Days won a Pushcart Prize for it, a total surprise. The Reading Issue was born. Fiction — and poetry — have always been part of the paper. The very first edition featured a short story by University of Vermont English professor and current state Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth. Many of our past and present contributors — Margot Harrison, Samantha Hunt, Erik Esckilsen, Ruth Horowitz, Emily Hamilton — are published authors. From 1997 to at least 2002, the paper hosted an annual Emerging Writers Contest. More recently, culture coeditor Dan Bolles compiled a pandemic literary journal, Green Mountain Quaranzine, to run in Seven Days. A few weeks into lockdown, it was just what the doctor ordered.
3. “Winning Ticket: A ‘Yes’ Vote for Man With a Plan“
January 31, 1996 | By Paula Routly
“Spread Fred” was one of the slogans to emerge from Man With a Plan, John O’Brien’s brilliant mockumentary about a dyed-in-the-wool Vermont dairy farmer who decides to run for Congress. Seven Days couldn’t help spreading the word about the growing celebrity of lead “actor” Fred Tuttle, O’Brien’s Tunbridge neighbor, who played himself in the charming movie described in this story. Although his formal schooling ended in the 10th grade, Tuttle became a real-life candidate for Vermont’s U.S. Senate seat — the one long held by Patrick Leahy. Tuttle ran against a Harvard-educated carpetbagger in the Republican primary — and won because so many Vermonters embraced his campaign for what it was: a clever publicity stunt for the movie. Tuttle might have made it all the way to Washington, D.C., if he hadn’t endorsed Leahy. He became a local icon, appeared on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and, in 2003, got a proper New York Times obituary. Since 2018, O’Brien has represented Tunbridge in the Vermont House.
4. “Pride and Prejudice: Anastasia Biographer and AIDS Activist Peter Kurth Comes Out With His Own History“
June 12, 1996 | By Nancy Stearns Bercaw
In 1995, Burlington native Peter Kurth came home to Vermont to die. The acclaimed author of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson had tested positive for HIV in 1989, at which time there was no effective treatment to manage the condition. Everything changed in 1996, the year Nancy Stearns Bercaw profiled him for Seven Days. The medical establishment rolled out antiretroviral therapy that worked, and Kurth began what he called his “second life.” He described the resurrection in a June 18, 1997, first-person piece titled “Positive Thinking: Swapping a Death Sentence — for Life.” In it he wrote: “Now I’m up to my ears in projects and plans. I’m Charles E. Lindbergh, Helen Keller and La Pasionaria all rolled into one. I’m Scarlett O’Hara after the intermission.” Kurth had so much to say, in fact, that he became a culture columnist for Seven Days. His witty and wise “Crank Call” ran biweekly for five years, until September 2002.
5. “All You Can Eat: A Seven Days Celebration of Vermont Food and Drink“
July 24, 1996 | By Seven Days contributors
“Whether your fancy runs to creemees or crème caramel, fish sticks or filet mignon, food is more than just sustenance. It can be social, political, artistic, sensual,” began our first-ever Food Issue — also our largest paper up to that date, at 40 pages. In recognition of Vermont’s nascent locavore moment, we served up a heaping plate of stories, covering the farm-to-table trend, the emergence of artisanal bread, the popularity of Plainfield’s River Run restaurant and more. Over the years we’ve dished out other treats, from the annual 7 Nights dining guide and Vermont Restaurant Week (both discontinued since the pandemic) to Burger Week (still happening, still delicious). We bring back the Food Issue on occasion, but it’s less necessary now that we have a robust weekly food section powered by two full-time writers. As Ina Garten would say, “How good is that?!”
6. “The Seven Days Sex Survey“
February 11, 1998 | By Seven Days staff
In February 1998, with Valentine’s Day love — or lust — in the air, Seven Days launched our first-ever Sex Survey. It became a red-hot biennial tradition through 2013; you can’t say we don’t deliver on what readers want. The “shocking results” of this first survey are a bit of a time capsule: Men and women alike named Howard Dean the most bangable public figure, and Dave Matthews Band were considered an unironic aphrodisiac, for example. The only-in-Vermont answers are entertaining, too: How to keep things spicy in a marriage? “Plenty of fruits and vegetables.” Locations of a memorable sexual experience? Huntington Gorge and the Stowe gondola. It’s been 12 years since our last Sex Survey. Do tell: Are you hot and bothered for us to bring it back?
7. “Oui Did It Our Way: The Next Best Thing to Europe? An Apartment in Montréal“
March 18, 1998 | By Jeanne Keller
Christmas in Chinatown. Grocery shopping at Marché Jean-Talon. First-class fireworks. Burlington resident Jeanne Keller perfectly described the lure of Montréal in this piece that explained why she and her husband finally decided to rent an apartment there: to avoid the midnight drive back to Vermont. From a downtown pied-à-terre, Keller had the helpful perspective of being a Vermonter in Canada. Her mission, as she saw it? “Learn about this city and tell others,” she wrote. And that’s exactly what Keller did, starting in May 1998, with a column called “Real Ville” that ran biweekly through that summer and then less regularly for years. Seven Days editor Candace Page still keeps a tattered one about IKEA, complete with driving instructions, in the glove box of her car. Keller’s enthusiastic travel writing led the way to our current Québec coverage, expertly guided by another adventure-seeking Vermonter, Jen Rose Smith.
8. “Green Mountain Campesinos: “More and More Mexicans Are Down on the Farm in Vermont“
June 18, 2003 | By Ken Picard
Back in 2003, Vermont had a big secret: Its dairy farms relied increasingly on Mexican farmworkers to milk their cows. But no one in the state would talk about this growing shadow labor force, so the paper’s first news writer, Ken Picard, hired a translator and went out to see for himself. Going farm to farm, he found Mexican campesinos, all of whom were undocumented, toiling long hours for meager wages. Many were totally dependent on their employers for housing, health care and transport to the grocery store. If a conflict arose, such as a pay dispute, they had nowhere to turn. Picard described the appalling conditions in which these men lived and worked — and shared their personal stories to explain what led them to Vermont’s most thankless jobs. Moving and prescient, the piece won a first-place award from the New England Newspaper & Press Association.
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9. “Life Drawing: With a New Graphic Memoir, Cartoonist Alison Bechdel Proves She’s More Than Just a Dyke to Watch Out For“
May 31, 2006 | By Margot Harrison
When Margot Harrison sat down with Alison Bechdel in 2006, it was in between the “Dykes to Watch Out For” cartoonist’s photo shoots with People and Entertainment Weekly. The celeb treatment was new for Bechdel, as was her latest project — a debut graphic memoir, Fun Home, that “has the potential to catapult her into the big time,” Harrison wrote. It did, of course: The story about Bechdel’s complicated relationship with her father, set against the backdrop of her family’s funeral home, went on to become a Tony Award-winning musical less than a decade later. In this revealing cover article, Bechdel opened up about her newfound fame, creative process and insecurities, noting that “People who write graphic novels are clinically insane.”
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10. “High Noon for the Burlington Free Press: Can Brad Robertson Save Vermont’s Largest Daily?“
January 28, 2009 | By Cathy Resmer & Paula Routly
To the extent that Seven Days is an “alternative” weekly, it has been in relationship to the daily Burlington Free Press, which once employed hundreds. Especially in the first 15 years, the rivalry was intense. The Free Press ignored our work and our reporters as if Seven Days didn’t exist. We, in turn, regularly criticized and poked fun at the “Freeps,” as we called it — until 2009, when Cathy Resmer wrote a deeply reported business story about the Gannett-owned daily, which was downsizing and innovating in response to an economic recession and the rise of the internet. The piece explained the changes a young, digitally savvy publisher, Brad Robertson, was making — and why. His wisest words? “How it all shakes out as far as at the end of the day and what it all looks like, I don’t think anybody knows.” The piece included a fun sidebar listing the “Free Press Writers We Love,” three-quarters of whom Seven Days wound up hiring.
11. “The Breakout: Reunited and Revitalized, Death Keep on Knocking“
October 6, 2010 | By Dan Bolles
Two years before the rockumentary A Band Called Death — which chronicled the rediscovery and subsequent rebirth of pioneering 1970s punk band Death for all the world to see — music editor Dan Bolles told the tale in Seven Days. “The story is the stuff of rock and roll legend,” he wrote. Indeed, descendants of Death — Hackney family members living in Jericho — unearthed the band’s tapes in the attic, sparking the release of “lost” material and a string of reunion shows that caught the ear of the national media and celebs such as Mos Def (quoted in this article). The young Hackneys formed the storied Burlington band Rough Francis in tribute. Seven Days covered it all, right up to Rough Francis’ final show in 2025 — but word is that they’ll be back soon under a new moniker. We’ll be among the first to cover that, too.
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12. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Vermont: Finding Religion in America’s Most Godless State“
March 27, 2013 | By Dan Bolles, Andy Bromage, Kathryn Flagg, Megan James, Kevin J. Kelley, Alice Levitt, Ken Picard, Pamela Polston & Paula Routly
When it comes to God, Vermont’s just not that into Him. Or Her. In 2013, our ranking as America’s least religious state was reaffirmed by a Gallup poll that indicated only 23 percent of Vermonters considered religion an important part of their daily lives. Among the 50 states, only New Hampshire was as godless. And yet, there are signs of religion everywhere in Vermont, starting with the ubiquitous and iconic white church steeples across the state’s landscape. So how godless are we, really? In a group cover story, Seven Days sent its staff to places of worship large and small, public and private, to meet the faithful and discover the religious pulse of Vermont. That involved meditating with Buddhists, praying with Muslims, singing with Mennonites, eating snacks with Greek Orthodox and admiring some pagan power animals.
13. “Unhappy Endings: Getting a Grip on Vermont’s Asian Sex Market“
June 5, 2013 | By Ken Picard
“Here’s how I landed the seediest assignment of my journalism career — and wound up naked on a massage table in Williston, turning down sex from a Korean woman in a pink thong.” So began Ken Picard’s bombshell exposé of Asian massage parlors in Vermont that serve as fronts for prostitution and likely human trafficking. Although he got his leads from a nationwide online guide for erotic services called Rubmaps, Picard did his own local research. He went to three different establishments and asked for a massage. Then he described each encounter in detail, including being offered various sexual services. He also tried to engage the women in conversation and discovered that some work all day, every day, just for tips. Another was clearly confined to her place of employ. Most shocking of all: In this and follow-up stories, Picard learned that landlords were largely looking the other way and federal law enforcement wasn’t interested in busting these illegal operations. When one gets shut down, another just pops up elsewhere.
14. “Threats, Lawsuits and Dead Animals: An Ongoing Feud in Victory Illustrates the Dark Side of Small-Town Life“
March 18, 2015 | By Mark Davis
In the late 1990s, the Boston Globe twice sent a reporter to Victory, Vt., to document nasty personal feuds between neighbors who couldn’t even recall what precipitated them. Describing the tiny Northeast Kingdom town as “less Norman Rockwell and more Edgar Allan Poe,” the Globe reported on threatening letters, lawsuits, a pet ram that appeared to have been killed and accusations of financial shenanigans. In 2015, Seven Days sent Mark Davis to report on two more recent skirmishes that had intensified the conflict. “While the stakes are laughably small, the enmity is huge,” Davis wrote. “The Essex County Sheriff’s Department provides security at every Victory selectboard meeting.” Last we heard, the feuding continues. As former town clerk and treasurer Carol Easter put it: “We’re screwed up, basically.”
15. “‘Summer of Sanders’: Bern-Storming the Midwest With Vermont’s Favorite Son“
July 15, 2015 | By Paul Heintz
“Ber-nie! Ber-nie! Ber-nie!” By the time U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) arrived in Madison, Wis., in 2015 at the start of a three-state, four-day presidential campaign tour of the Midwest, CNN had declared it the “summer of Sanders.” By the time he departed, new polls and fundraising reports showed him gaining on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Sanders had been training for this race all his life, and political editor Paul Heintz was there to see the self-described democratic socialist during the moment the campaign caught on. His story captured voter excitement in the Corn Belt, giving meaningful insight into Sanders’ appeal before he became taken seriously nationally. Because few media outlets were covering Sanders like this, the story was reprinted in papers in California, South Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
16. Fair Game: “The Gun: How I Bought an AR-15 in a Five Guys Parking Lot“
June 15, 2016 | By Paul Heintz
The day after 49 people were killed with a military-style rifle at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., political editor Paul Heintz asked governor Peter Shumlin whether the massacre had changed his views on gun rights. The gov said no. Five hours later, to viscerally illustrate the laxity of Vermont’s gun laws, Heintz bought an AR-15 from a stranger in a Five Guys parking lot in South Burlington. He paid in cash — $500 — and completed no paperwork or background check. “In Vermont, home to the nation’s most permissive gun laws, everything I did was perfectly legal,” Heintz wrote. Less than two years later, a school shooting plot in Fair Haven caused the new governor, Phil Scott, to radically rethink his stance on gun control. Heintz and reporter Taylor Dobbs followed up with “In Range: The Week That Changed Vermont’s Gun Politics.”
17. “To Hadestown and Back: Following Anaïs Mitchell’s Musical From Vermont to Off-Broadway“
June 22, 2016 | By Pamela Polston
Taking readers from “500ish BC” all the way to a June 17, 2016, off-Broadway performance of Hadestown, Pamela Polston charted a creative timeline of Anaïs Mitchell’s Vermont-born musical, which went on to win eight Tony Awards when it hit Broadway proper just three years later. As Mitchell told Polston: “It started in the random, cosmic way most art things start, I’d say: A few lines came into my head … [The songs] seemed to be about the Orpheus myth.” Incorporating Greek mythology, interviews with early collaborators and reviews from national press, the story described the players who, working with dark material as old as drama itself, “elevated this Hades to a little slice of heaven.” The Broadway version finally came home to Vermont in fall 2024, touring at the Flynn in Burlington — “a miracle, honestly,” Mitchell told Seven Days.
18. “Lucky Bums: How a Generation of Mad River Valley Skiers Shaped Vermont“
February 22, 2017 | By Sasha Goldstein
Ski bum (noun): “Simply defined, those are individuals who move to a ski town, get a job that provides a ski pass as compensation, and then ski all winter — when they’re not working or partying,” Sasha Goldstein wrote in this cover story about the hundreds of young, college-educated people who moved to Vermont in the 1960s and ’70s. Unlike the estimated 40,000 back-to-the-landers and hippies who flocked to the state during the free-love era, ski bums weren’t motivated by idealism; they just wanted to have a good time. But those who embrace the pejorative term argue that the winter-sports lovers did shape Vermont’s economy, politics and culture. Seven Days shared the colorful histories of several Mad River Valley skiers who were lured by the Green Mountains — and never left.
19. Hooked: “How So Many Vermonters Got Addicted to Opioids“
February 20, 2019 | By Kate O’Neill
Why are so many people addicted to opioids in Vermont? How did this happen? These were the questions Kate O’Neill sought to answer in “Hooked,” her award-winning yearlong series sharing stories and solutions from Vermont’s drug crisis. O’Neill’s credentials included wrenching personal experience. In an obituary for her sister, Madelyn Linsenmeir, O’Neill wrote candidly about the young woman’s struggle with opioid-use disorder: “To some, Maddie was just a junkie — when they saw her addiction, they stopped seeing her. And what a loss for them.” In this first installment of the series, O’Neill told her sister’s story and that of the pill that hooked her and countless others. Later that year, Seven Days launched All Our Hearts, an online project helping families memorialize loved ones lost to the opioid epidemic.
20. “Milking It: Seven Days Finds Out Firsthand Why U.S. Workers Aren’t Employed on Vermont Dairy Farms“
March 13, 2019 | By Chelsea Edgar
“Without workers willing to spend upwards of 15 hours a day engaged in the business end of a 1,500-pound animal,” Chelsea Edgar wrote in this cover story, “Vermont’s $2 billion dairy industry would collapse.” To fully understand the labor, she spent a week with 1,300 cows in the milking parlor on Vorsteveld Farm in Panton. “At some point, I realized that I had stopped seeing cows,” Edgar writes. “I registered only the relevant parts: udders, tails, hooves.” She toiled in muck boots and coveralls, avoiding projectile poop, alongside predominantly young Latino men who had made the perilous trek from Mexico and Central America. “The writer has done considerable digging — literally and figuratively — to bring a microscope to everyday life at a dairy facility,” New England Newspaper & Press Association judges said of the story, which won first place for business/economic reporting.
21. “Burlington Police Chief Admits He Used an Anonymous Twitter Account to Taunt a Critic“
December 12, 2019 | By Courtney Lamdin
When reporter Courtney Lamdin asked Burlington police chief Brandon del Pozo if he had created an anonymous Twitter account to mock a local activist and provocateur, the police chief lied on tape nearly a dozen times and said he had nothing to do with it. But after Seven Days‘ questioning, del Pozo confessed what he had done to mayor Miro Weinberger, who placed the chief on administrative leave; del Pozo subsequently sought mental health treatment. “He’s lost the trust of the public,” city councilor Max Tracy said at the time. “This will follow him wherever he goes.” Days after Lamdin’s scoop was published, del Pozo resigned. Then the scandal expanded: His replacement, Jan Wright, lasted just hours as acting chief after she, too, admitted to operating an anonymous social media account.
22. “‘It’s in the Building’: How COVID-19 Overwhelmed a Burlington Nursing Home“
June 3, 2020 | By Derek Brouwer & Colin Flanders
On March 30, 2020, Burlington’s Birchwood Terrace Rehab and Healthcare became the second eldercare facility in Vermont with a confirmed case of COVID-19. The outbreak was already out of control: Over the next six weeks, Birchwood would become fully engulfed. Sixty-one of the home’s 112 residents, plus 30 employees, would test positive for the virus. The total estimated number of infected residents would top 80. One in five residents would die. To understand how the unthinkable toll advanced, Seven Days gave a detailed account of the virus’ asphyxiating grip in the chilling early days of the pandemic — despite COVID-19 protocols preventing reporters from stepping foot inside the facility. According to Underhill reader Amy Bombard, whose mother experienced the Birchwood outbreak, “Writers Colin Flanders and Derek Brouwer conveyed every sense of the surreal emotions.”
23. “Battery Power: How Black Lives Matter Protesters Occupied a Park, Captivated a City — and Got Some of What They Wanted“
September 23, 2020 | By Chelsea Edgar
For approximately 35 days in late summer 2020, Black Lives Matter activists camped out in Burlington’s Battery Park to demand police reform, fueled by fury over police violence against Black people in Vermont and beyond. Reporter Chelsea Edgar hoped to tell, through organizers’ eyes, the story of Vermont’s largest public manifestation of the national reckoning with racism. But the story became about the activists’ ideological clashes and antipathy toward the media. After its publication, protesters rounded up copies of Seven Days and burned a small pile in the street to denounce the coverage. The following week the encampment was over, not without its victories: The movement led to a resignation package for a Burlington police officer accused of excessive force, as well as the hiring of a new, temporary director of police transformation.
24. “The Doctor Won’t See You Now: Patients Wait Months for Treatment at Vermont’s Biggest Hospital“
September 1, 2021 | By Chelsea Edgar & Colin Flanders
Wait times for specialty care at the University of Vermont Medical Center had long been a problem, but 18 months into the pandemic the situation seemed to have reached a crisis point. While no state agency regularly tracked those waits, Seven Days crowdsourced patients’ stories and received an avalanche of responses, learning that some waited up to a year to see specialists. Response to Chelsea Edgar and Colin Flanders’ groundbreaking reporting was swift: State officials announced an investigation into the issue just a few hours after the story dropped; the probe later confirmed that Vermont wait times were far worse than in neighboring Northeast states. As a member of the investigation put it, “We’re learning some hard truths.”
25. “Capitol Offense: Nicholas Languerand’s Quest for ‘Belonging’ Led Him to QAnon, the Insurrection — and Now Prison“
January 31, 2022 | By Derek Brouwer & Colin Flanders
Nicholas Languerand was riding high after the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riots. On social media, he posted a selfie from the Capitol terrace of himself wearing a Trump beanie and QAnon sweatshirt; in a video, he called the melee “legendary.” Just over a year later, the Vermonter was sentenced to 44 months in prison. Because his arrest occurred in South Carolina, “His case has gone virtually unnoticed in his home state,” Derek Brouwer and Colin Flanders wrote. “But he is further proof that insurrectionists come from all corners of the country.” The reporters broke the news that a Vermonter had been charged in the wake of the ignominious event and tracked how he got swept “into a vortex of far-fetched conspiracy theories and radical politics.” The piece earned first place for right-wing extremism coverage from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia; judges called it “one of the best examples of journalists capturing a confusing, contradictory, and often inscrutable period of our nation’s history.”
26. “Circus of Life: Inside Bread and Puppet Theater as Founder Peter Schumann, 89, Contemplates His Final Act“
August 30, 2023 | By Chelsea Edgar
Not since a 1983 Vanity Fair piece had Glover’s Bread and Puppet Theater allowed a journalist such unfettered access to its inner workings as Seven Days reporter Chelsea Edgar was granted 40 years later. She embedded with the troupe and spent a full month reporting during a particularly fraught moment — as members of the leftist quasi-commune in the Northeast Kingdom, including 89-year-old founder Peter Schumann, considered its future. In masterful storytelling, Edgar wove together her findings from those intimate interviews with a vivid first-person account of her own puppeteering experiences, including as a papier-mâché-headed garbageman (“You must, at all costs, resist the urge to sneeze”) and almost being trampled by the behemoth contraption of Mother Earth (“So this is what it’s like to die in a stampede”).
27. “The Loss of Grace: In Vermont’s Juvenile Lockup, a Girl Endured Violence and Isolation. She Wasn’t the Only One. And It Was No Secret.“
October 25, 2023 | By Joe Sexton
Sixteen ad-free pages — that’s the record-breaking space we devoted to this important and disturbing story by Joe Sexton, a reporter and editor who had worked for 25 years at the New York Times and eight years at ProPublica. Newly living in Waitsfield, the self-described “lifelong journalist, muckraker and shit-stirrer” went looking for untold stories on our behalf and came back with this one — about a girl named Grace Welch and the chilling abuse she and other young Vermonters endured at the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Essex. Exhaustively reported from hundreds of pages of court, medical and police records; audiovisual materials; and interviews with Welch’s family, Vermont officials and others, Sexton determined that “what happened in the North Unit at Woodside was allowed to go on for years — much of it known to the most senior officials at the Department for Children and Families.”
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28. “Noah’s Arc: Strafford Songwriter Noah Kahan Is Vermont’s Biggest Pop Culture Export in Years. How the Hell Did That Happen?“
January 31, 2024 | By Chris Farnsworth
There was just one problem with crafting this cover story about the meteoric rise of Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and Strafford native Noah Kahan: He wasn’t in it. Coming off a wildly successful year of chart-topping hits and sold-out world tours, the artist wasn’t available for an interview with music editor Chris Farnsworth. So instead, he wrote about the “Kahan phenom” — the perfect storm of songwriting savvy and extreme relatability that spawned a musical breakout the likes of which the Green Mountain State hadn’t seen since Phish — by talking to die-hard fans, aka the Busyheads, and locals who knew him when. Farnsworth did catch Kahan playing at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital, where the global star swapped out lyrics about alcohol and smoking weed with “apple juice” and “climbing trees.” Can’t beat that Northern Attitude.
29. “The Fight for Decker Towers: Drug Users and Homeless People Have Overrun a Low-Income High-Rise. Residents Are Gearing Up to Evict Them.“
February 14, 2024 | By Derek Brouwer
“A grim battle is being waged inside Decker Towers,” began Derek Brouwer’s eye-opening cover story, which sensitively portrayed a Burlington apartment complex full of vulnerable tenants and the shelter-seeking homeless people and drug users who had overwhelmed its hallways, laundry rooms and stairwells. The unflinching exposé on the horrible living conditions earned a coveted Excellence in Journalism award from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, with a judge calling it “a great example of public service journalism.” Indeed, the story and residents’ dogged activism brought a flurry of attention to the safety debacle; subsequent response from public officials led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in new security spending. Attending a tenants’ karaoke night 10 months after Brouwer’s story was published, resident Debbie Phelps said: “It feels safe. I don’t have the stun gun or the pepper spray or any of that.”
30. “Year of the Dogs: Stories of Grit and Grace From UVM Men’s Soccer’s Championship Run“
January 29, 2025 | By Joe Sexton
When Max Kissel of the University of Vermont men’s soccer team scored a heart-stopping goal on a chilly mid-December night in Cary, N.C., what had been unthinkable since UVM’s 1791 founding suddenly became certain: Vermont was going to win its first-ever national crown in any sport other than skiing. To fully appreciate that NCAA championship required digging into the stories of the coaches and players who, over long years and in dramatic recent moments, made it happen. Veteran reporter Joe Sexton did just that, giving an inside account of the culture and characters of the Vermont team through tales of hardship and triumph, of doubt and faith, of recovery and tenderness. “The piece reads like a page-turning thriller,” reader Michael Caldwell of North Wolcott wrote in. “Who will make the movie?”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Read All About It | Thirty standout stories from Seven Days’ 30 years”
This article appears in 30th Birthday Issue.
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