by | Jul 3, 2025 8:19 am | Comments (14)
Thomas Breen File Photo
Aboard the 206.
Zohran Mamdani convinced hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to vote for a platform promising to make it free to ride the bus in the Big Apple.
He didn’t change Roland Lemar’s mind about whether to try to make it free to ride the bus in Connecticut.
Continue reading ‘Lemar: Mamdani-Style Free Bus Plan A Non-Starter Here’
by | Jul 1, 2025 4:35 pm | Comments (7)
State Rep. Roland Lemar at WNHH FM; below, his Facebook reaction to gubernatorial housing veto.
One sentence. Seventeen words.
That’s all Roland Lemar needed to express his outrage at Gov. Ned Lamont.
by | Jun 25, 2025 9:27 am | Comments (1)
No Names
By Greg Hewett
Coffee House Press
A poet writing prose about music? Greg Hewett knew he was taking on a challenge.
by | Jun 18, 2025 11:54 am | Comments (1)
Paul Bass photo
Anthony Dawson (at right in photo) with Sean Hardy at WNHH FM.
A half-century of community building came full circle this week for Anthony Dawson.
by | Jun 13, 2025 11:35 am | Comments (3)
PAUL BASS Photo
Owen Whang and Christine J. Ko at WNHH FM.
Owen Whang hit some tough multiple-choice questions the other day in the midst of a 90-minute ninth-grade final exam in his “Revolutionary Freedoms” history course. He decided to exercise a particular freedom of his own — removing the coils of his cochlear implants.
by | Jun 11, 2025 12:54 pm | Comments (1)
Paul Bass Photo
Broken Umbrella's Ruben Ortiz and Jes Mack, Sanctuary Kitchen's Aminah Alsaleh, CitySeed's Christine Kim at WNHH FM.
On the turntable stage, an Italian-American family will serve brick-oven “apizza.”
Offstage, Afghan-American and Syrian-American women will serve pizza served from their own traditions.
In the process, a grassroots cultural group from the west side of town will team up with a grassroots food justice group from the east side.
And everyone gets to watch a show.
There’s a phrase to describe this kind of synergistic only-in-New Haven phenomenon:
by | Jun 4, 2025 2:14 pm | Comments (0)
Kimberly Wipfler file photo
The Tuff Girls 1, led by drummer Livia Doran and captain Christa Doran, competing in the 2022 regatta.
The Tuff Girls are back and ready to row.
The team — teams, actually — of rowers from a local fitness center will seek to win more trophies this Saturday as they lower their paddles into New Haven Harbor to compete in the eighth annual Dragon Boat Regatta.
by | May 28, 2025 1:24 pm | Comments (2)
Atlanta police arresting James Forman Sr. in Atlanta in 1963.
James Forman Jr. Tuesday at WNHH FM.
James Forman Jr. doesn’t need convincing that protests can change America. He just needs to look at a wall in his home.
by | May 20, 2025 4:01 pm | Comments (1)
Paul Bass photo
Community connectors: Reelection-runner Alders Caroline Tanbee Smith and Gary Hogan at WNHH FM.
First-term Alder Gary Hogan is meeting with some of his new colleagues this week to see if they can find more money for nonprofits when they vote next week on a new city budget.
First-term Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith is speaking with colleagues about whether they can find more money for a school system facing up to 129 staff layoffs.
If they find themselves back in City Hall’s alder chambers to help decide the following year’s budget, they hope to bring forward ways to boost library programming and budding catering businesses.
Continue reading ‘Rookies Run To Boost Small Biz, Affordability’
by | May 9, 2025 12:21 pm | Comments (0)
Blob: A Love Story
By Maggie Su
HarperCollins Publishers
In one sense, Maggie Su’s debut novel tells an old story about a young Taiwanese-American woman who creates a human companion out of a blob she finds outside a bar. It’s a modern take on Frankenstein or of the Golem, exploring the limits of how a creator can shape a humanlike creation once it acquires agency.
by | Apr 23, 2025 12:18 pm | Comments (0)
Paul Bass Photo
Elena Urioste performing in the WNHH studio.
Elena Urioste will take a deep breath before performing in New Haven Thursday. She’ll invite her audience to do the same.
by | Apr 21, 2025 9:29 am | Comments (0)
Pete Greco and Wes Lewis in the WNHH FM studio.
Wes Lewis found his passion in his saxophone. He ventured into a neuroscience lab and discovered a second passion — thanks to a saxophonist’s brain tumor.
Continue reading ‘Retro Soul In The Grooves, Sax On The Brain’
by | Apr 18, 2025 12:20 pm | Comments (17)
Norm Pattis came to talk about Donald Trump. He ended up talking about the .22 with which he once planned to shoot his stepfather — and what he takes from the story of Jesus’s resurrection about the possibility of a new life.
by | Apr 11, 2025 10:28 am | Comments (0)
Gary Aronsen was pissed. Instead of doomscrolling, he picked up his guitar.
Six songs and six weeks later, he put out an EP on Bandcamp called Shout Fight Sing Cry Dance Love. He’s charging people $6. He’s giving the money to IRIS, the refugee resettlement agency whose federal budget cuts pissed him off in the first place.
by | Apr 3, 2025 4:21 pm | Comments (14)
Professor Shore: "People on the Titanic said, 'Our ship can't sink.'"
Marci Shore decided she didn’t want her teen-aged kids living in a “reign of terror.”
So she and her husband Tim Snyder decided to stay put in Toronto rather than return home to New Haven.
by | Apr 1, 2025 4:32 pm | Comments (8)
Contributed Photo
Inside the Hamilton Street food pantry, kept alive to a nonprofit partnership.
Paul Bass Photo
Community connectors: Winston Sutherland, Caroline Tanbee Smith, Ana Cardenas, Greg DePetris at WNHH FM.
A food pantry run by a budget-slammed agency for refugees gained a new owner Tuesday — and a new mission as a neighborhood soup kitchen.
Meanwhile, dozens of East Rockers responded to a call for new volunteers to help the refugee agency continue its work amid vanishing federal aid.
by | Mar 28, 2025 11:54 am | Comments (11)
Paul Bass photo
Reinvention team: LCI's Rosario, Brennan and Williams at WNHH FM.
Rosaly Rosario discovered that a rundown vacant house on Sylvan Avenue wasn’t so vacant after all.
by | Mar 27, 2025 12:18 pm | Comments (1)
Author Boris Fishman: Hold the humor for a moment.
The Unwanted
By Boris Fishman
Harper
330 pages
I forgot to laugh when I read Boris Fishman’s new novel about a family escaping civil war and totalitarianism.
by | Mar 25, 2025 3:00 pm | Comments (41)
Paul Bass photo
Steve Orosco, at right, filing campaign papers with City Clerk Michael Smart.
An east side Republican jumped into New Haven’s mayoral race Tuesday with a mission to bring Donald Trump’s political momentum to the city’s low-income neighborhoods.
by | Mar 21, 2025 11:09 am | Comments (0)
Psycho Brat at WNHH FM.
Don’t mess with Ava.
You might treat her like dirt. But when the romance ends, she’s gonna write and deadpan-chant the following lyrics about you:
The silver hoop on my finger was a noose
Emotional suicide whenever I was with you
Why would you date me if you fucking hate me?
And why would you fuck me if you think that I’m ugly?
I hope it hurts when you think of me
I hope you know that you sicken me …
I’m choking on all the breath I waste
while blood and vomit’s all I can taste
by | Mar 19, 2025 9:39 am | Comments (6)
Paul Bass Photo
CTVIP CEO Len Jahad at WNHH FM ...
FILE PHOTO
... and working on the agency's garden.
New Haven’s street outreach workers had a new challenge: dealing with kids as young as 11 caught up in community trouble.
They also took on the new challenge of focusing on teenaged girls whose group spats could lead to bigger trouble.
Those two challenges reflect the growing mission of the CT Violence Intervention & Prevention (VIP) project as it passes its fifth anniversary hitting the streets to defuse beefs and mentor young people in New Haven and Hamden.
Continue reading ‘"Credible Messengers" Expand Street Outreach’
by | Mar 14, 2025 9:31 am | Comments (30)
Paul Bass Photos
Rabbi Brockman Thursday at WNHH FM.
Kica Matos and Rabbi Herb Brockman (at left) with Nury Chavarria in 2017 at Fair Haven's Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal, where she was being housed to prevent federal agents from arresting and deporting her.
Donald Trump is back at raiding immigrant communities and deporting people. So Herb Brockman is back at working with other religious leaders to step in to help targeted immigrants and their families.
Continue reading ‘With Raids Looming, Rabbi Returns To Resistance Trenches’
by | Mar 6, 2025 2:40 pm | Comments (0)
Paul Bass Photo
Operatic and concert soloist and recording artist Adriana Zabala at WNHH FM.
Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper-Chekhov never made it to a villa they dreamed of on Italy’s Lake Como. Adriana Zabala shed a tear about that the other day.
Zabala, a mezzo-soprano, also lifted her voice. You can argue that she helped make the Chekhovs’ dream come true.
by | Feb 28, 2025 10:40 am | Comments (1)
Paul Bass Photo; Contributed
Jennifer Klein, Rhoda Zahler Samuel, and Nicole Zador at WNHH FM; Ruth Grannick.
As men rushed off to war in Europe, Ruth Grannick took on a new mission back home — top-secret message decoding for the U.S. Navy. Laura Levine took a job as a lathe operator.
by | Feb 25, 2025 4:20 pm | Comments (2)
Paul Bass Photo
Human brains at work: AI deployers Colleen Bielitz and Tom Goldenberg at WNHH FM.
Colleen Bielitz noticed something missing from the Otter AI summary of a discussion she had with colleagues: the “juiciest” comment one of them had made.
Thankfully Bielitz is a human being. She was able to think for herself about what she heard — and what seemed to matter most.