The Highlands Current Podcast Chip Rowe

Todd Haskell, a resident of Beacon and a member of the Current board of directors, discusses his nearly 20 years as balloon handler and then clown during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City.

Peter Stevenson speaks with Dinky Romilly, a Philipstown resident who was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and also has a famous mother, the investigative journalist and writer Jessica Mitford, best known for her book The American Way of Death, and for her eccentric family of sisters, the Mitford sisters, who were Dinky’s aunts. 

Beacon resident Guy Felixbrodt recently became the first person ever to complete a full Ironman triathlon with no shoes on. In this interview with Current reporter Brian PJ Cronin, he talks about why he did it, and shares his unique worldview focused on ambitious athletic feats, community service and the practice known as "earthing," which emphasizes maintaining direct contact with the ground. 

More than 300 U.S. newspapers have closed in the past three years, on top of the 2,500 that have shut down since 2004. In this episode, we present a conversation last year between Highlands Current editor Chip Rowe and Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post media columnist and author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, about the effect of this loss on our country.

Susan Allport is the author of Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York. In this episode she talks with Chip Rowe about the origin and uses of these rocky ruins that criss-cross New England's landscape. 

Carl Bon Tempo, who lives in Cold Spring, is a history professor at SUNY Albany. He is the author, with Hasia Diner, of Immigration: An American History, which Yale University Press published in May.