Sitting in a second-floor conference room overlooking Keene’s Central Square, Luca Paris recounted a recent breakfast. 

Kymra Kurinskas used to drive 50 minutes from her home in Peterborough to her job in Concord. The pandemic changed that — she had to commute only as far as her dining-room table.

Anyone in the live events industry saw their calendars empty at the start of the pandemic last spring.

When you get to be my age, you get reflective. Recently Bill Mahr hosted a guest named Johann Eduard Hari on his TV show. I had never heard of the gentleman, nor would I vouch for the validity of his work. Nonetheless, the subject of his latest book, “Stolen Focus” intrigued me on multiple levels.

The calendar has turned another page. That means it’s time to reflect upon the year that was and the year that will be. As for the year that was, grade-wise, I’d give my prognostications a borderline B: directionally correct, but the timing was slightly off.

No, you haven’t been transported into the Twilight Zone, where you’re living in a scene from Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” That darkened mass in the sky is not a flock of birds; it’s all the free money the Federal Reserve and the Biden Administration are dumping from helicopters.  

The young are filled with optimism borne from life’s possibilities and an ignorance of reality. Conversely, age slowly robs you of the future and teaches you harsh life lessons, often resulting in higher levels of cynicism. It’s the cycle of life and why we find ourselves turning into our pa…

Mary Potter O’Neill, 32, creator of Billies & Tilli of Keene, lives in Harrisville with her husband, Brian, a talented welder. She grew up in Jaffrey, attended Conant High School and then went off to college at Suffolk University in Boston. After about two years there, she decided to tra…

Megan Lagaso Hercher & Will Hercher

Alexis Drury, 27, of Keene, has lived in this area her whole life, only moving away briefly for a year. She graduated from Monadnock High School in 2012 and then went on to Keene State College for management and communication and graduated in 2016. After college, she got her real estate lice…

Sarah Blake grew up in southern Vermont and went to college to study psychology. She returned to Brattleboro, working for a time at Health Care and Rehabilitation Services as a peer-support specialist. At the same time, Blake was bartending and picking up odd jobs. It wasn’t until she starte…

Karen Guastella of Keene, owner of Karen’s Kosmic Cookies, had been selling her cookie mixes at a few local stores and craft fairs before the pandemic hit last winter.

The struggles facing communities dealing with the impact of COVID-19 on personal lives, jobs and businesses are well documented. With this in mind, the organizers of Radically Rural, the summit that showcases ideas of importance to small cities and towns, will stage its event this year on on…

Name: Debra Caplan

NAME: Katherine McLaughlin

At Keene State College, sustainability is more than just about recycling or reducing water usage on campus.

The Monadnock Sustainability Hub has a lofty goal. It wants to help communities across the Monadnock Region meet all their energy needs with renewable energy by 2030. As if that’s not lofty enough, the Hub hopes to see all of the region’s heating and transportation needs met by renewables by 2050.

At Antioch University New England, ecological stewardship and social justice are two of the cornerstones of the educational foundation that underlies the school’s graduate programs. Perhaps the other two cornerstones are the university’s faculty and the people from around the world who trave…

Five towns in the Monadnock Region — Peterborough, Sharon, Rindge, Hancock and Fitzwilliam — were the first participants in Monadnock Energy Hub’s “Solarize Monadnock” campaign. Solarize Monadnock is a community-based solar energy group purchasing campaign that makes solar more accessible an…

Translating cutting-edge, highly-technical ideas to the world from a rural landscape seems ironic. Yet that kind of entrepreneurship is exactly what’s possible in New Hampshire and Vermont, what’s continuing to develop here, and now what’s needed living in the “new normal.”

It seems like passive investing — index and exchange-traded funds — have won the performance battle in today’s financial market. Trillions of investment dollars now rest in massive pools, while investors question why they pay active managers anything for investment advice.

High stress workplaces are like psychological Petri dishes; they are perfect places to grow nasty things.

At the end of June of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, or the “internet sales tax case,” which overturned its prior case law that required “physical presence” before a state could subject a retailer to its sales tax collection and remittance l…

In the face of COVID-19, pressure on a global scale has made it obvious that a changed economy is imminent. On a local level, businesses are confronting an “innovate or exit” reality and are thinking carefully about their next steps. Hope, it seems, lives in an altered, or could we even say …

Darci Hammer

On a pleasant spring day a few years ago, Jill Carson was enjoying some outdoor play time with her granddaughter. The focus of the play: bubbles. It was fun, but with her instinctive sense of quality control, Carson noticed that the bubbles and the medium of play were generally deficient. Th…

Suzanna Kamphuis’ startup, TotumVos, produces and sells multi-collagen chews in Keene. Collagen, if you weren’t sure, is the most common protein found in the body, offering support to everything from bones to skin.

When people talk about downtown Keene, they use words like “vibrant,” and “vital.”

A small New Hampshire downtown fights back rising tide of online shopping, absentee landlords and years of Main Street vacancies

While Webster might associate “malaise” with depression, dejection and good old ennui, Marlborough’s Malaise is having quite the opposite effect.

It’s all about the bones. The bones of the old buildings in Bellows Falls, Vermont. That’s what’s bringing back this town in Wind­ham County that went through some bumps, scrapes and bruises for almost 100 years.

Depending upon what type of farmer you talk to, the pandemic has been either a boon or bane for the business of agriculture.

What started as a “rosy” year has taken an unprecedented and historic turn with the threat and reality of COVID-19 sweeping through the region.

Right off the bat, the nonprofit sector was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, with 92% of those organizations who responded to a New Hampshire Center for Nonprofits survey said that they’d had a loss in revenue, more than 61% of responders having suspended some operations and more than…

Med Kopczynski, Keene’s director of economic development initiatives and special projects, says progress may have slowed due to the pandemic, but projects are not being canceled or shelved. He notes that the city has a list of capital improvement projects that could become candidates for pot…

The COVID-19 data on the hospitality industry is dire, catastrophic, really, with $800 million lost so far since the pandemic reached New Hampshire; roughly half of the industry’s 70,000 employees have been laid off or furloughed, according to New Hampshire Lodging and Restaurant Association…

The spring 2020 season was forecasted to be a tornado of transactions in the real estate market with eager buyers waiting to snap up new listings. However, for locals, coronavirus has disrupted or perhaps just delayed that prediction.