Summer in Vermont is chock full of outdoor distractions, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out. To help you catch up, here are our monthly top picks from around the web in July, plus the top five stories from here on the Change Conversations blog.

Last year may have been declared the “Golden Age of Podcasts”, in no small part due to the run away popularity of the weekly NPR podcast Serial but it wasn’t until 2015 that the President of the United States appeared on comedian Marc Maron’s WTF. Today there are 285,000 podcasts up and running, heard by an estimated 39 million Americans a month, many of them affluent and highly educated[1]. Whether or not you’ve been hooked since 2005, as I must confess I’ve been, now is the time for communicators to explore podcasts. As the Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi noted: “Opportunity? I certainly think so.”

It’s summertime in Vermont. Time for sunny days and warm weather. And time to catch up with friends over a great meal for lively conversation. Here are our monthly top picks for conversation starters this month — a recap our five favorite links from around the web in June. And read on to discover the top five stories from here on the Change Conversations blog.

June is here and that means that summer will soon be officially in full swing! Summer means our indoor-outdoor time allotment shifts, but there’s always time to check out what’s new on our radar. Let's recap our five favorite posts from around the web in May. And read on to discover the top five stories from right here on the Change Conversations blog.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit.

Are you interested in what happens in the next sentence?