Stories
When the owners of a generations-old family business in Chester, Vt., announced they were shutting down last year, a local couple took a leap and decided to buy the store. Their story is the next in our series about businesses that have started or substantially changed during the pandemic. At the back of the wood-paneled…
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Most of the Sarah Greenwood School in Dorchester’s Grove Hall neighborhood is surrounded by cement, with four-square courts and some basketball hoops. The corner of its block is occupied by the crumbling facade of a former church — which occasionally sheds trash, even a knife and syringes, into the schoolyard. Then, in between the two, on…
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Just off Route 1 in Newburyport, a bit of the future is under construction. A huge orange crane hoists a three-story concrete slab and flips it precisely in place, forming the wall of a home. The crane accomplished in five days what would have taken weeks using standard building techniques. “The construction system has not been…
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After shutting down his manufacturing plant and sending 2 million unsold face shields to sit in a warehouse, Bing Carbone found himself wondering what was next for his plastics company. His business had “an outstanding 2020,” pivoting from making high-grade plastic parts for the defense and medical industries to producing more than 30 million of…
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Before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway, Bill Whitaker drove every week from his home in Connecticut to New York City, where he performed in “Phantom of the Opera” as a bass trombonist. This was Whitaker’s main gig for 19 years, but he had many others. Throughout those years, he was a union member, and…
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As Vermont’s school districts become larger and more centralized, some kids will feel the impact in how they get to and from school. Every weekday, kids around the state get on the school bus. Damien is one of them. “What the bus does is he goes by our house — ‘cause there’s more kids up…
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Cities around New England have declared racism a public health crisis. Scholar-activist Katharine “Kat” Morris is especially interested in the intersection between racism, health and environmental justice — something she talked about in her 2019 TEDxUConn talk . Morris noted that a fifth of Connecticut’s pollution is concentrated in five cities where the majority of…
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