Utopian communities: Dolores Hayden’s Seven American Utopias; Spencer Klaw’s Without Sin; Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do?; Horizon magazine; the Book of Mormon.

Pelton Pond; the Civilian Conservation Corps and Forrest W. Gaz’s “Taps”; conic sections.

Ice on the Muhheakantuck – the “River that Flows Two Ways”; the New York Times on “Beating the Lightning Train.”

Visiting Clarence Fahnestock State Park; Robert Frost’s “The Ovenbird.”

Time and change; a rural reawakening? Thomas S. Wermuth’s Rip Van Winkle’s Neighbors: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle; Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.

Stargazing on a winter’s night; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther; Ann Charters’s A Portable Sixties Reader; and Richard Hinkley Allen’s Star Names.