Confession: I don’t know how computers work. When mine goes south, I stab random buttons. I turn it on and off. I swear out loud. It usually works again after a while and then I move along. Ditto for my phone, ditto for my car, ditto for the other machinery on which I rely any given day.
Ditto for our social systems. Though I studied both politics and economics in school, I read as widely as I can, and I listen as much as I can, this column still proceeds on more thin ice than I prefer to admit. To be truthful is to be profoundly modest. A peasant from the tenth century, living in a world lit by fire, understood more of that world than I do of my own, with every bit of artificial light I can find. He was just more afraid of the dark.
Modernity requires experts and we live and die by them. They keep our phones humming, they keep our bodies working, they keep our businesses prospering. So when those experts fail, we feel pain: physical, social, economic.
Donald Trump became president because our experts have been failing lately. Economic experts not only impoverished our workers for the benefit of China, they also paid for Wall Street crashes with taxpayer funds, ensuring the rich would stay rich while the poor stayed poor. Technology experts fractured our nation into a thousand rabid pieces, then invented AI to fling our future into the whirlwind. Even our medical experts have caused harm. They’ve given us long lives capped with years of dependent misery and myriad new procedures to plaster over our spiritual poverty and make us want painkilling of every sort imaginable.
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Our experts have also stopped talking to each other, or to us, or to even make sense on their own terms. Academia took all the progress we’ve made in civil rights and used it to propagate the most egregious example of dead-end thinking a satirist could imagine: gays for Hamas.
It’s therefore no wonder that he has stacked his administration with passionate amateurs instead of lukewarm professionals. As always, his most valid role is to act as the measure of past neglect. For every doctor who told us to mask up and stay home, except if you were protesting George Floyd, a vaccine denier was born. For every economist who explained why the good of our country required free trade, who wore silk ties from France while the rest of us choked on cheap plastic, a class warrior came to be. And for every politician who ignored these developments, an election denier gained credibility.
Hegseth at Defense, Kennedy at Health, Musk, whatever he did before he quit, and more. Most have been awful (Kennedy couldn’t put a band-aid on a child’s knee). Some have done okay (two cheers for Caroline Leavitt, whose politics are raw but who does her job with flair). William F. Buckley’s old jab about preferring to be governed by the first two hundred names in Boston’s telephone directory than by the professors of Harvard College comes to mind. Common sense is worth more than any degree and real world experience helps too.
Yet not just avoiding but vilifying expertise is a dangerous game to play. Our president’s line on scientific research makes zero sense and hands China an open promise; his energy policy is similarly short-sighted; his tariff threats make our allies doubt our sanity. As those things are all abstractions, though, their true effect won’t be felt for years. It has taken Minnesota to drive it home.
As a criminal defense attorney, I watch police video regularly. I see our officers show tremendous patience. I see them lose their temper. I see them take down suspects with speed and force, sometimes for good cause, sometimes for less. I see them show a fairly complete range of human emotion; but importantly, I don’t see a complete range. Far from it. While there are always exceptions, our police officers largely hold themselves in check. They pride themselves on being professional. They pride themselves on self-control.
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The video coming out of Minneapolis shows the opposite. Undisciplined, trigger-happy, violence-prone men, seeking their own safety in cowardly anonymity while seething with contempt for the people around them. This is not law enforcement. It’s amateurism run amok. It’s also childish behavior in a grown-up world.
Take this as Trump’s gays-for-Hamas moment. His underlying theory of governance must give way to common sense before more people die. And once that happens, let’s hope that common sense takes root. Our world needs leaders who are not afraid of the dark.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.
This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
WILTON, N.H. (WHDH) – A woman died in a Wilton, New Hampshire, house fire Wednesday morning, according to the New Hampshire State Fire Marshal’s Office.
At 9:08 a.m., Wilton firefighters responded to Burns Hill Road after a caller said their home was filling up with smoke. When they arrived, a single-family home was on fire and they found out two people were still inside on the second floor.
A man and a woman were both taken out of the house by firefighters and taken to Elliott Hospital. The woman was pronounced dead and the man is in serious condition.
Officials have not released the name of the victim at this time.
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At this time, investigators are looking into the cause of the fire and are trying to determine if a power outage in the area played a factor. The fire is not currently considered suspicious.
(Copyright (c) 2025 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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Diane Durgin, 67, is accused of shooting at a Black man who inadvertently drove to her property after a prearranged truck part sale, prosecutors said.
A New Hampshire woman is accused of violating the state’s Civil Rights Act four times after she allegedly shot at a man because he was Black, prosecutors said.
Diane Durgin, 67, of Weare, N.H. could face up to a $5,000 fine for each violation she is found to have committed, the office of New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said in a press release Tuesday.
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Durgin is also charged with criminal threatening against a person with a deadly weapon and attempted first degree assault with a deadly weapon, Michael Garrity, a media representative for the New Hampshire Attorney General, said in an emailed statement to Boston.com.
Durgin had a final pre-trial conference last week, Garrity said.
In a civil complaint filed Tuesday, Durgin is accused of threatening physical force against the victim, the AG said. Prosecutors asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction barring Durgin from repeating her alleged behavior and from contacting the victim and his family.
During the morning hours of Oct. 20, 2024, the victim claims, he “mistakenly” drove to Durgin’s home after a prearranged purchase of a truck part with a seller online, prosecutors wrote as part of their request for an injunction.
When the man — whom prosecutors identified in court documents as X.G. — arrived, Durgin allegedly stepped out of her home and approached his car with a gun “holstered by her waist,” prosecutors wrote.
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Upon noticing that X.G. was Black, Durgin allegedly “removed her gun and pointed it at X.G.,” prosecutors said in the injunction request.
While X.G. explained that he was lost, Durgin called the victim a “Black mother[expletive],” and threatened to “kill him,” prosecutors allege.
As the victim attempted to drive away, Durgin allegedly took her gun and fired two shots at the fleeing man’s car, missing both times, the AG’s office said.
While on the phone with a dispatcher, Durgin allegedly said she shot the man’s car because the victim is Black, the AG said.
“The guy is Black. And he, he…he says he’s meeting someone here and I think he’s coming here to steal,” Durgin allegedly said.
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Police located X.G. and brought him to the Weare Police Department, stopping along the way at the correct seller’s home to complete the truck part purchase, prosecutors wrote in court documents.
To prove a violation of the New Hampshire Civil Rights Act, the AG must show that Durgin “interfered or attempted to interfere with the rights of the victim to engage in lawful activities by threatening to engage in or actually engage in physical force or violence, when such actual or threatening conduct was motivated by race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, or disability,” prosecutors said.
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The streets of Portsmouth are still in the process of being cleaned up, as seen the afternoon of Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026, following a huge snow storm.
It may be March, but winter in New Hampshire is far from over. Just one week after a blizzard tore through the state with heavy snow and high winds, the state is getting another round of snowfall.
The state will get three to five inches during the evening and night of Tuesday, March 3, says the National Weather Service (NWS) of Gray, Maine. While the accumulation will not be significant, the snowfall may cause dangerous road conditions and a layer of ice on the ground in certain parts of the state.
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Here’s what to know before tonight’s snow in New Hampshire, including snow totals and timing.
When will it snow in NH tonight?
According to the NWS, it will start snowing in New Hampshire during mid-afternoon or early evening and continue through the night. Specifically, snow will arrive to the southern part of the state around 2-3 p.m., spreading northwards through the rest of New Hampshire by 5 p.m.
Rain or freezing rain will mix in later this evening across southern New Hampshire, creating a wintry mix. All precipitation should move out of the state by midnight.
Due to the timing of today’s snowfall, the Tuesday evening commute will be affected, with the NWS warning to slow down and exercise caution while driving.
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Warmer weather: It may not look like it now, but spring is on its way: Nature News
How much snow will NH get tonight?
New Hampshire will get one to four inches of snow tonight, with one to two inches in northern New Hampshire, two to three inches in southern New Hampshire and three to four inches in the center of the state, with the possibility for five inches in localized areas.
In the Seacoast specifically, Portsmouth, Rye, Hampton and York are expected to get between two to three inches of snow, while Dover, Exeter and Rochester may get up to four.
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The wintry mix may also cause a light glaze of ice across southern New Hampshire.
Blizzard snowfall totals: Latest snowfall total from New Hampshire, Maine after blizzard
NH weather watches and warnings
The NWS has issued a winter weather advisory for the state of New Hampshire, in effect from 1 p.m. on Tuesday, March 3 through 4 a.m. on Wednesday, March 4.
