Writer/photographer
Co-author of Lonely Planet's Experience New England
Author of 200 Years of the Topsfield Fair
Author of Salem: A Guide to America's Bewitching City
Three magical meals in Salem, Mass.
Salem. The name alone conjures specters of skeletal tree branches stretching toward a misty, moonlit Massachusetts sky, menacing black-cloaked Puritans, and witches, ghosts and ghouls lurking around every brick-paved corner. It’s true that Salem has both earned and cultivated its spooky reputation as the Halloween capital of the world. Yet in recent years, the Witch City has also become a food city, dense with creative restaurants, cafes, patisseries, breweries, a distillery and, just like an...
Smithsonian Institution Brings Traveling History Exhibit to Essex
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.
Salem’s Old Town Hall Reimagined as an Arts and Culture Hub
For more than 200 years, Salem’s Old Town Hall has been a city landmark, its brick, Federal-style edifice presiding grandly over Derby Square. But its municipal building days are long behind it, and today Old Town Hall often stands empty, reserved for special event rentals, seasonal theater performances, and as a backdrop for Hocus Pocus filming location photos.
“This building is such a community icon. It’s so well loved and underutilized with hardly any real transparent means to access,” says Julie Barry, senior planner for arts and culture for the city of Salem. “We want to change all that
Two Brave Souls Will Have a Chance to Sleep in the Witches’ Cottage From Hocus Pocus
Are you brave enough to invoke the infamous Sanderson sisters from the movie Hocus Pocus and sleep in their spooky house? You might soon get a chance to find out without even leaving the North Shore.
Salem Theater Company History Alive Takes Its Abolition Tour on the Road
Salem is known around the world for its connection to witches and draws nearly half a million tourists each year who want to immerse themselves in all things witchcraft and supernatural.
But what many people don’t know—including many North Shore locals—is that Salem was also a hub of the abolitionist movement in the years before and during the Civil War.
History Alive, Inc., tells a small piece of that story through “Charlotte’s Salem,” a walking tour of downtown Salem set in the 1850s that’s led by a costumed actor playing abolitionist and educator Charlotte Forten as a very young woman.
Taking the leap and not having all the answers: How incoming CEO Kate Haviland plans to lead Blueprint
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...
Evofem CEO Saundra Pelletier aims to level the playing field between men's and women's health
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...
During the pandemic, a new appreciation for botanical gardens blooms
One minute I was smack in the middle of the real world, standing in a nondescript parking lot during a global pandemic, hot and sweaty under the mask I wore to fend off the deadly virus.
The next minute I was walking under a white trellis covered in snaking vines, through a narrow evergreen hedge, and into a garden where roses bloomed pink, red and coral in neatly cut beds.
My daughter, Chloe, and I were alone in this little oasis at Fuller Gardens on the New Hampshire seacoast, so we slipped...
5 reasons national parks are a great option for a low-budget getaway
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 makes rapid progress toward net zero goals
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...
HealthLeaders Media Articles
Revenue cycle issues with coverage from 2016-present.
Over touristed: Cape Cod. Underappreciated: Cape Ann
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...
Stockbridge, a small Berkshires town with a big artistic reputation
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...
‘Wheelchair rule’ aims to foster friendlier skies for travelers with disabilities
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...