Issue: Fall 2024: Related Content

By Ashley Brenon Jowett
Illustration by Nate Padavick

As a homage to Dylan Thuras ’04’s Atlas Obscura, we’re sharing seven of the website’s wondrous Bennington-area places. You will barely be able to resist using the map for a spooky road trip this fall.

More than 100 people attended the Ben Belitt Colloquium on Arts and Literary Culture in Tishman Auditorium on Bennington College’s campus on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. They joined panelists Pulitzer Prize Winner Jericho Brown, the MacArthur Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem ’86, celebrated poet Camille Rankine, and moderator and Bennington faculty member Benjamin Anastas to learn about the life and work of Queer Black poet and essayist Reginald Shepherd ’88, an underrecognized member of the Bennington literary community in the eighties. Below is a piece Lethem wrote for and read at the event.

Almost a century ago, under the looming threat of fascism, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned Americans about global conflicts pitting representative governments founded on individual liberty against emerging fascist dictatorships. Reflecting on John Dewey’s progressive education philosophy, FDR said, “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”

By Louise Roug Bokkenheuser

Sunlight filters through the curtains onto the desk by the window. Books, papers, and pens suggest a creative mind at work. The writer has just stepped away, leaving their glasses on an open notebook. A gooseneck lamp conveys the long hours, the flowers in the vase a consideration for beauty.

Inspired by American democracy and its potential, his faculty members, and his fellow students, Abraar Arpon ’26, who studies Computer Science and Public Action at Bennington, built a website that aims to make voting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election easier for everyone.