Alexandra Pecci

Essex is a perfect place to host “Crossroads: Changes in Rural America,” a traveling exhibit produced by the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum on Main Street program that explores how rural American communities changed in the 20th century. Museum on Main Street works with state humanities councils to bring the traveling exhibit to their states. The councils then select and work with local communities to bring the exhibit to different towns.

Essex is one of six Massachusetts towns that Mass Humanities selected for the exhibit.

Perched on a shelf behind Kate Haviland's desk is a black-and-white photo of a woman soaring through midair, her back arced gracefully as she leaps off a diving board. The backdrop of the photo is all negative space: We can't see the water she's diving into at all, which gives the impression of a free fall. It's an image that's both inspiring and a little nerve-wracking.
"It's just a great reminder that we need to take risks in this business if we're going to really change outcomes for patien...

For years, men have been able to carry around the potential for "sex-on-demand" thanks to the humble condom. Saundra Pelletier wants the same for women, and she's not afraid to say so.
After all, Pelletier says, it all comes back to control: what it feels like to have it, to lose it, and to grab it back.
"You can't control what other people think. You can't control what other people do. You can only control what you think. You can only control what you do," she says. "So do what you can to sw...

Choose a national park that’s perfect for you.

In the summer of 2008, I desperately needed a change of scene. If money had been no object, a Caribbean escape might have been called for, to soak my cares in rum on a sun-drenched beach.
But money was an object, so my husband and I hit the road. We drove through California, Arizona, Utah and Colorado on the cheap, snacking on beef jerky and peanut M&Ms and sleeping in low-budget motels. How low-budget? Well, one motel room rug in Moab, Utah, was so dirty the bottoms of my white socks turned ...

Interface called it Mission Zero. And the company wasn’t sure how to reach it. “I think people tend to set goals that they know they can achieve,” says Paul Hawken, author and founder of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit dedicated to researching how to reverse global warming.
But limiting oneself to achievable goals doesn’t truly achieve anything new.
“Nothing comes out of that in terms of imagination, creativity, innovation, breakthrough, because none is needed, so why would it come out?” Hawken...

Everyone loves Cape Cod. And the packed roads and high prices reflect that.
For New Englanders, going “down the cape” is shorthand for visiting Cape Cod, that storied peninsula jutting 65 miles into the Atlantic Ocean and curving upward through the sea like Massachusetts’s flexing arm. The onetime home of the Kennedys has nearly 560 miles of coastline and even boasts a namesake cocktail.
Summer on Cape Cod is a magnet for tourists who pack its soft-sanded beaches and Instagram-pretty towns su...

The wind whipped up Main Street in Stockbridge, Mass., making the rows of wooden rocking chairs lining the Red Lion Inn’s wide veranda sway gently. As I watched them, my imagination conjured another sunny afternoon 124 years earlier when the sculptor Daniel Chester French, of Lincoln Memorial fame, sat on that porch with his wife, Mary, and fell instantly and deeply under Stockbridge’s spell.
“I don’t know what you’re going to do,” Mary told her husband. “But I am going to live here.”
I had o...

Vilissa Thompson was flying to a conference when she got a terrible piece of news on her layover: Someone had forgotten to load her wheelchair onto the airplane.
Thompson, a full-time wheelchair user who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, was alarmed. Then she was stunned to discover that she wouldn’t get her wheelchair back until the next morning. “My wheelchair is a part of my body,” she said. “When that was missing, it was like a part of me was miss...