June 27, 2010 at 11:00 am

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

Ellen Shell

Low price is so alluring that we may have forgotten how thoroughly we once distrusted it. Ellen Ruppel Shell traces the birth of the bargain as we know it from the Industrial Revolution to the assembly line and beyond. The rise of the chain store in post-Depression America led to the extolling of convenience over quality, and big-box retailers completed the reeducation of the American consumer by making them prize low price in the way they once prized durability and craftsmanship.

The effects of this insidious perceptual shift are vast: a blighted landscape, escalating debt (both personal and national), stagnating incomes, fraying communities, and a host of other socioeconomic ills. That's a long list of charges, and it runs counter to orthodox economics which argues that low price powers productivity by stimulating a brisk free market. But Shell marshals evidence from a wide range of fields-history, sociology, marketing, psychology, even economics itself-to upend the conventional wisdom.

Ellen Ruppel Shell is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, Washington Post, National Geographic, Time, Discover and other national publications. She is the author of “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture”, and “the Hungry Gene.” She is Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism at Boston University.

Shell’s work focuses on the intersection of science, technology, culture and commerce, with special emphasis on medical policy.  She also writes on the politics of science, science and the media, and environmental policy.  

Ellen Shell is the author of three books:  A Child’s Place: a year in the life of a day care center(Little, Brown, 1992); The Hungry Gene: the science of fat and the future of thin, (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002); and Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture (New York: Penguin, 2009).  She writes for publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian (UK), Smithsonian Magazine, Discover, Technology Review, Seed, Audubon,  and the television network PBS. 

July 4, 2010 at 11:00

The Fourth of July Through Music and History

Rob Koch, Greg Scerbinski, Members of Annalivia

Monadnock Summer Lyceum explores the history of immigration to America in words integrated with music.  The music will help to illuminate the history, evoking a mood reflective of those who courageously emigrate from their home lands to arrive at the new.

Robert Koch, noted actor based in Peterborough, NH will provide the narration. Readings will be provided by Greg Scerbinski, a retired teacher of history at the Con Val High School. Music will be performed by area top notch musicians.

The Peterborough Historical Society hosts a Flag Ceremony at 10:00 AM every July 4th, The 11 AM  Lyceum celebration will be coordinated with the flag ceremony. 

July 11, 2010 at 11:00

Pearls, Politics and Power

Madeleine Kunin

The next generation of women will be inspired to lead by seeing women like Nancy Pelosi wielding the gavel, and seeing themselves reflected in the portraits on the walls of statehouses, courthouses, corporate and university boardrooms, and the White House. This inspiration should not be soured or deflected, but channeled into successful candidacies by America’s leaders of tomorrow.

Madeleine Kunin issues a call to action for new political engagement and leadership from the women of America. Informed by conversations with elected women leaders from all levels, former three-term Vermont Governor and Ambassador to Switzerland Kunin asks: What difference do women make? What is the worst part of politics, and what is the best part? What inspired these women to run, and how did they prepare themselves for public life? How did they raise money, protect their families' privacy, deal with criticism and attack ads, and work with the good old boys? 

July 18th 2010 at 11:00 am

The Town That Food Saved

Ben Hewitt

For nearly 100 years, ever since the rapid decline of its booming granite industry, the town of Hardwick, Vermont has struggled to find economic vitality. The unemployment rate for the town's 3200 residents is 40% higher than the state average; the median income, 25% lower. But over the past few years, Hardwick has experienced a rapid influx of agriculture-based businesses and has received international media attention for its attempts to implement and blueprint a localized food system.

Hewitt operates a small-scale, diversified farm eight miles east of Hardwick. He spent over a year exploring the region's rapidly evolving food infrastructure for his new book, The Town That Food Saved. His experiences while reporting led him to consider the ways in which localized food systems can provide economic and community vitality and also the ways in which rapid economic development and media attention can create divisions within small, tight-knit communities like Hardwick.

The move toward localized food systems is both necessary and urgent. But we must also consider how these systems can be harnessed to benefit everyone within the community, not just those with the means to purchase the sort of value-added products that are so often the result of the modern localvore movement. And we should consider the ways in which our traditional metrics for determining prosperity might be revised to accommodate a rapidly shifting economic and environmental landscape.

Hewitt’s work has appeared in numerous national periodicals, including the New York Times  Magazine.

Ben Hewitt , born in 1971,  writes and farms in Northern Vermont.  His book The Town That Food Saved  (Rodale, March 2010.) tells the story of a rural, working-class Vermont community that is attempting to blueprint and implement a localized food system.

Ben’s work has appeared in numerous national periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired,Gourmet, Discover, Skiing, Eating Well, Powder, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Bicycling, and many others. He lives with his wife and two sons in a self-built home that is powered by a windmill and solar photovoltaic panels. To help offset his renewable energy footprint, Ben drives a really big truck.

Ben is currently working on a book about food safety, to be published by Rodale in 2011.

July 25 2010 at 11:00

The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office, Or Dirty Rotten Secrets of Health Reform

James Morone

It has been a wild ride for the Obama administration and health reform. In their new book, The Heart of Power, Jim Morone and his coauthor, David Blumenthal trace the health reform efforts of every president between Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush. In his Lyceum lecture, Jim Morone will introduce you to the quirky, inspiring, brilliant, foolish, unexpected, and often sickly men who have sat in the oval office. He’ll explain the many dos and don’ts that past presidents teach us about winning health care reform. (Rule number five: hush your economists!). Jim also will share some of the surprising stories he uncovered – like the untold explanation of just how Medicare passed (as reflected in some recently discovered –and very salty—telephone tapes featuring Lyndon Baines Johnson).

James Morone is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at Brown University.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where his doctoral dissertation examined “the dilemma of citizen action: representation and bureaucracy in local health politics.”

Dr. Morone has published eight books, the latest of which is The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (written with David Blumenthal, M.D.) was featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review on September 6, 2009.  Unreliable sources report that President Obama was seen reading the book at Camp David.

Jim comments frequently on political issues for shows like The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, CBS, Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, NPR’s Market Place, Morning Edition, and other shows.  He has testified before the US Congress numerous times, most recently in January 2009 when he addressed the newly elected members of Congress at their orientation weekend.  He contributes regularly to The London Review of Books, The American Prospect Magazine, and The New York Times.

Jim lives with his wife, Deborah Stone, and their terrier Barkley in an old farmhouse in Lempster, NH.  He is the master of ceremonies at the town’s annual Old Home Day talent show.  Jim and Deborah are especially proud of their canned tomatoes.

August 1 2010 at 11:00

You Are What You Learn

Jim Gee

The United States is today caught up in great debates about school reform.  Our students fare poorly on international tests in science and mathematics.  Some people are arguing that our students are no longer learning to innovate in a global age where innovation is crucial.  At the same time, young people today are engaged in their popular culture with complex new forms of language and learning that are in competition with schools as a “new curriculum”.  But more importantly, we live in world endangered by global environmental, economic, political, religious, and civilization problems, a world that requires not just new forms of learning and problem solving, but new kinds of people.  In this talk Gee will discuss the implications of today’s new forms of learning and the debates about learning for our society and the global world.

James Paul Gee was born in San Jose, California. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara and both his M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University. He started his career in theoretical linguistics, working in syntactic and semantic theory, and taught initially at Stanford University and later in the School of Language and Communication at Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusetts. After doing some research in psycholinguistics at Northeastern University in Boston and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Holland, Prof. Gee's research focus switched to studies on discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and applications of linguistics to literacy and education. He went on to teach in the School of Education at Boston University, where he was the chair of the Department of Developmental Studies and Counseling, and later in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California. At Boston University he established new graduate programs centered around an integrated approach to language and literacy, combining programs in reading, writing, bilingual education, ESL, and applied linguistics. From 1993 to 1997 he held the Jacob Haiti Chair in Education in the Haiti Center for Urban Education at Clark University in Massachusetts. In January of this year, Prof. Gee accepted the Tashia Morgridge Chair in Reading in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Prof. Gee's work over the last decade has centered on the development of an integrated theory of language, literacy, and schooling, a theory that draws on work in socially situated cognition, socio-cultural approaches to language and literacy, language development, discourse studies, critical theory, and applied linguistics. This work has served as a theoretical base for a number of school-based projects run by the Hiatt center at Clark University in elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as in an after-school science project funded by the Spencer Foundation. Prof. Gee's recent work has extended his ideas on language, literacy, and society to deal with the so-called "new capitalism" and its cognitive, social, and political implications for literacy and schooling. He has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education. His books include Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Second Edition 1996); The Social Mind (1992); Introduction to Human Language (1993); and, with Glynda Hull and Colin Lankshear, The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism (1996).

August 8th, 2010

The Voices of New England

Mel Allen

For over 30 years Mel has written about the people and places of this region, and edited hundreds of stories by others.  In 2010 Yankee celebrates its 75th year. Throughout those decades, Yankee Magazine has become the "Voice of New England". Expanding on stories researched and developed over the years, Mel Allen will talk about his role, and Yankee magazine's role, in giving a voice to our beloved New England.

Mel's talk will bring the voices of people he has have met into the room. He will explore the nature of New England in large part through the actual stories of people he has met and people he has introduced to others in Yankee.  From droll farmers to lighthouse keepers, from the famous and the unknown, the people who have graced Yankee's pages present us with a unique look at the region

Mel is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His career at Yankee spans nearly three decades, during which he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel. In his pursuit of stories, he has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, picked potatoes in Aroostook Country, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. Mel teaches magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and is author of A Coach's Letter to His Son. His column, "Here in New England," was 2009 National City and Regional Magazine Awards Finalist for the category "Column."

August 15, 2010  10 am due to MacDowell Colony Day

Ties That Bind

Henry Knight

What in our lives, in our respective traditions, binds us to life, and each of us to the other?  For those of us who work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies these questions illumine an abiding concern for people sensitive to the ways in which our most fundamental attitudes contribute to how we relate to the other in our midst and hold our most cherished beliefs and values.  These ties bind and ground us.  They can be wholesome and expansive, drawing us into good and respectful relationships with the world in which we live.  They can be small-minded and restrictive binding us in ways that diminish our lives and others.

 Our most cherished ties are often ones we know well but they can also be ties we take for granted and never examine.  And sometimes, the ties that bind are those unexpected ones that bring healing when we have been deeply wounded in ways we didn’t understand until the binding has done its healing work.

Dr. Knight comes to New Hampshire from Tulsa, Okla., where, over the course of 16 years, he served the Jewish Federation of Tulsa as Director of the Council for Holocaust Education, taught The Christian Problem of the Holocaust at Phillips Theological Seminary, and was University Chaplain and the Applied Associate Professor of Hermeneutic and Holocaust Studies at The University of Tulsa.

A graduate of the University of Alabama (English Literature) and Emory University's Candler School of Theology, Dr. Knight is an ordained Methodist minister who specializes in post-Holocaust Christian theology. His publications include Confessing Christ in a Post-Holocaust World, "The Holy Ground of Hospitality: Good News for a Shoah-Tempered World" in Good News After Auschwitz? Christian Faith Within a Post-Holocaust World, and "Locating God: Placing Ourselves in a Post-Shoah World" in Fire in the Ashes: God, Evil, and the Holocaust.

He is the Director of the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College.  In 1996, Dr. Knight co-founded the Pastora Goldner (now Stephen S. Weinstein) Holocaust Symposium, an international gathering of Holocaust and genocide scholars that meets biennially at Wroxton College in northern Oxfordshire, England. He co=chairs the symposium with Dr. Leonard Grob of Fairleigh Dickinson University.

August 22, 2010 at 11:00 am

The New World Coming - Climatic Disruption and The Clash of World Views

George Woodwell

The climatic disruption is bringing drastic changes in the world, literally pulling the environment out from under this civilization. We are told that the cost of changing our ways to avoid the disruption is economically and politically unreasonable and we must accommodate a series of continuous environmental changes into the indefinite future, an absurd and irrational conclusion for a world of nearly seven billion people already pushing every resource to its limits and beyond. Continuing on the present course leads to the abyss of the contemporary Haiti.

The fact is that the disruption is finite and open to immediate cure, if we have the will. Required is the immediate removal of five billion tons of carbon from the total annual releases by human activities of about ten billion tons. The cure requires the global management of forests in ways that not only contribute to a reduction in the annual flux of carbon into the atmosphere but also improve land management and water supplies globally to great human benefit. A reduction of 2.5 billion tons in possible by those steps alone. It also requires, of course, a program for reducing reliance on fossil fuels to the extent of 2.5 billion tons annually immediately, also possible. The process must continue and become more stringent year by year, but the benefits are broad, obvious, global and essential.

The product is a new world, one we want, deserve and owe to our children. It is also possible. We have the tools, the plans, the technology, examples of success, and no reason for ignoring them. It is time to start and the US must take leadership.

George M. Woodwell founded the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1985, and was its Director from 1985 through 2005.  He is currently Director Emeritus and Senior Scientist at the Center.

Dr. Woodwell’s research has been on the structure and function of natural communities and their role as segments of the biosphere.  He has worked extensively in forests and estuaries in North America and has made well-known studies of the ecological effects of ionizing radiation and the circulation and effects of pesticides and other toxins. 

Dr. Woodwell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of many scientific prizes.  He has published more than 300 papers in ecology.  He has edited books on the effects of nuclear war, the global carbon cycle, biotic impoverishment, and satellite imagery used in measuring the area of forests globally. 

August 29, 2010 at 11:00 am
Cultural Geology: On the Science Beneath the New Hampshire Identity

Robert Thorson              

“Granite State.” “Old Man of the Mountain.” “Live Free or Die.”  “Eagle Pond.”  This nickname, creation myth, state motto, and book title combine to tell a seamless cultural story that resonates deeply within the New Hampshire identity. This refers to the tough foundation from which the landscape was carved; the natural artistry that became the state emblem; the freedom cry of 18th century patriots; and the ruminations on all this from Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States.  Beneath the state cultural story is a compelling geological narrative of: hot granite succotash; postglacial prying of the resulting rock by frost (not Frost); the undignified engineered life support for the “Great Stone Face” before its liberating collapse; and poetic, transcendent reflections from the shore of a kettle pond far less famous than of Thoreau’s Walden.   Professor Thorson’s talk will embrace what he calls “cultural geology,” the fusion of pre-history and modern identity. 

Robert Thorson, was the second of seven children of a Scandinavian-American Family with roots in Minnesota and North Dakota.  In sequence, he lived in Wisconsin, Illinois, North Dakota, and Minnesota before leaving for Alaska in 1973.  After eleven years of adventure, which included having two children born in the far north, he moved to New England in 1984.  Along the way he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (Seattle), spent five years in California and Washington with the U.S Geological Survey, and contracted with international, federal, state and private agencies ranging from the Japanese Ministry of Culture to the National Geographic Society.  Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Connecticut, he served on the faculty of the University of Alaska (Fairbanks) where he established the center for ice-age science, and at the University of Wisconsin (Oshkosh) where he experimented with rural living in a farmhouse on a kettle moraine..

In 2002, Dr. Thorson’s academic career took an unexpected turn after publication of Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History of New England’s Stone Walls.  Within a year, the accidental writer has also become an accidental journalist as a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant’s Place, and other newspapers and magazines.  His book titles demonstrate his current fascinations:   Exploring Stone Walls; Stone Wall Secrets (coauthored with Kristine Thornson); and Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds; and Walden to Wobegon. 

Professor Thorson lived a largely settled (middle-age, middle-career, middle-income) life in southern New England, where his hobbies are reading, writing, cooking, walking beaches, and learning the rules of journalism through trial and error.  He and his wife of 34 years, Kristine, raised four children together.