The first hour of “Contagion,” the new movie by Steven Soderburgh, is as taut and terrifying as any horror movie or thriller I’ve ever seen. After a prologue in which only a few hoarse coughs are heard, it starts with “Day 2” typewritten on the screen, as Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), looking a bit green about the gills, talks on the phone to an unseen lover. Sweaty and pale, she completes her business trip in Hong Kong and heads home, by way of Chicago, to Minneapolis, where her young son and husband await her. The movie cuts back and forth between her, quickly getting sicker, and a few others — a Japanese traveler, a young man wandering the streets of Hong Kong, a pretty young blonde on her way home to Europe. All are sick and all are touching a lot of stuff in their path: The camera lingers on a water glass, a credit card, a door handle, a pole on a bus. Beth has a seizure, is rushed to the hospital and dies, to the disbelief of her husband (a warm and understated Matt Damon), who repeats, “But she just had jet lag!”Within days, the number of victims multiplies and the government gets involved. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) starts tracking the growing epidemic. The movie is not just a cautionary tale: “This really can happen here, so wash your hands and stockpile canned beans.” Rather, the message is that in today’s atmosphere of paranoid politics and Internet-spread conspiracy theories, there is something you can trust — science. Seen here in the form of CDC doctors (Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet, sober and intense as they follow the movements of the early carriers), they track the disease’s spread and identify its genetic makeup so a cure can be found. Jennifer Ehle stands out in the superb all-star cast as Dr. Ally Hextall, the scientist who figures out that “the wrong pig met the wrong bat” to create a very very bad germ. The bad guys here aren’t the usual bureaucrats trying to stop crusading truth-tellers — just the opposite. An opportunistic blogger (Jude Law, sporting snaggled teeth and an Australian accent) hits all the familiar notes of today’s online rage-mongers as he pushes an alternative cure he claims the government doesn’t want anyone to know about because it can’t be patented and thus there are no profits in it. “I have 12 million readers, and if I tell them not to get the vaccine, they won’t,” he says, chillingly, late in the movie. The ethical and legal questions such a widespread emergency poses aren’t glossed over — Who pays for the hospital wards set up in stadiums? Who gets the vaccine first? — but they don’t bog down the plot, which moves as quickly as the virus spreads. Although there are plenty of gruesome scenes (Paltrow haters have been exulting in her character’s unfortunate fate), Soderbergh is mostly restrained. This is no zombie movie. Even when martial law is imposed and thugs loot stores and homes looking for food, it still feels recognizable as the world we live in now. Teenagers still text their boyfriends, TV newscasters keep on talking and the scientists keep on working. When we finally find out what happened on Day 1, it’s as jarring as it’s meant to be — happy people, touching things and other people, as we are wont to do, only now we know the terrible consequences. What’s going on in that restaurant kitchen? Who touched that subway pole? Why is that guy coughing? And do I really touch my face 3,000 times a day? After watching this movie, you might not touch anyone, or anything, ever again. “Contagion” is showing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY and elsewhere. It is rated PG-13 for disturbing content and language.
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Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.
“I was a library kid. I walked to the library after school,” she said.
For Sher, the library is as much about the people as it about the books.
“Part of the job I love so much is that running the library is such a community,” she said.
She treasures the relationships she has built, whether recommending books, celebrating accomplishments or helping patrons through difficult times.
“I am thankful that our community is so supportive of the library, unlike what is happening in some other places where librarians are villainized,” Sher said.
Sher takes pride in the Hunt Library’s reputation for being “open and welcoming to everyone. People come in and see things and get pulled into things they weren’t expecting. Our library is seen as a positive force.”
Sher came to Falls Village after being awarded a fellowship at Adamah Farm, then a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. She worked at pickling, in the greenhouse and later in the development office. She also worked as a nanny.
At the same time, “I was in the library all the time,” she recalled. “I’m a voracious reader. The library is where I met a lot of my first friends in Falls Village.”
She became assistant librarian at Hunt and worked in that position for almost a decade before becoming the executive director four years ago.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino
Sher met her husband, Adam, while working at Adamah. They had their wedding there in 2012. He now emcees many events which she co-organizes with the Falls Village Recreation Commission.
Sher and her family live near the library.
“It’s an easy commute,” she said with a smile. “My kids run back and forth. I can go home to walk the dog if I need to.”
“My kids have grown up here.” Her oldest son, Eli, “loves volunteering. He helps with Augustfest and often helps set up chairs for ArtWall gatherings.” Her younger son, Noah, is often at events and was eager to taste cookies at last year’s holiday cookie swap.
When she is not at the library, Sher likes to hike with her family. Bella, their Portuguese water dog, often accompanies them.
Sher enjoys seeking out people to offer events at the library.
“I do a lot of different community programming. It is one of my favorite parts of the job.”
Augustfest, featuring food, music and an auction, is the library’s biggest fundraiser.
“This summer we had a record 152 attendees, which was pretty incredible.”
Yonah Sadeh, a filmmaker from Falls Village, inaugurated the VideoWall this year, Sher explained.
“I’ve known Yonah since he was two. It’s wonderful to work with him as an adult.”
The VideoWall complements the library’s ArtWall, which showcases a new artist each month. Sher praised the ArtWall committee for its work and highlighted December’s popular “12x12 Show,” featuring works by local artists, each measuring 12 by 12 inches and priced at $150.
Sher added that some of the artists who exhibit at the ArtWall offer workshops to students at Kellogg School, next door to the library. In September, artist Danielle Mailer worked with the children. Vincent Inconiglios taught a class last November.
Being next to the school, said Sher, is a great advantage.
“Kids are coming after school, to see friends, work on projects, find a great book. Kids that love the library end up using the library as grownups.”
This past year, in partnership with Adamah, the library and school created a garden, with excess produce made available at The Center on Main.
This year is Sher’s second year participating in the Troutbeck Symposium in Amenia with James King, director of the library at Salisbury School. The Troutbeck Symposium is “a gathering of a year of student historical inquiry across the region” in which students “uncover stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or never recorded.”
Last year, Sher and King began a project with a group of students researching Irish immigrants in Falls Village, exploring ancestry and creating small magazines about their findings.
They continued this year, visiting St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Dublin Road, cleaning seven gravestones and even righting one with the help of stonemason and gravestone restoration expert Karl Munson. Paul Kozeazny, a representative of the Catholic archdiocese, helped secure access to the site.
A film documenting their activities will be shown at the symposium in spring 2027.
A full schedule of programs and events, ranging from tech help to ceramic mug-making, can be found on the library’s website.
Despite spending her days surrounded by books, and a busy schedule of programming, Sher still loves to settle in with a book at home.
For more information on library programs and events, visit huntlibrary.org
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Touré was born in northern Mali in 1981. His father, the renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré, came from a family of soldiers and wanted his son to join the army. The younger Touré studied drums and the calabash and practiced guitar in secret. He earned his father’s blessing to pursue music shortly before Ali died in 2006, and they played two tracks together on Vieux’s debut album.
Touré is known for his deft, polyrhythmic playing, and his songs grow out of riffs that repeat and layer to hypnotic effect. He draws on rock, blues, Latin music and various African traditions. This distinctive blend builds on his father’s work adapting the sonic traditions of Mali’s arid north to the guitar.
Vieux’s album “Mon Pays” (“My Country,” 2013) honored Mali’s culture after Tuareg separatists and extremist groups seized the north in 2012. “Samba” (2017) was recorded before about 50 listeners in Woodstock, New York. In 2022 came “Les Racines” (“The Roots”), a return to his father’s desert blues, and “Ali,” on which he and the trio Khruangbin reworked eight of the elder Touré’s songs.
Touré leads the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, which focuses on cultural and educational work in Mali. Around the anniversary of Ali’s death, it holds a festival in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Bamako has been under blockade for much of the past year, besieged by JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Against this backdrop, Touré continues to carry the music of Mali to audiences abroad.
At the Nov. 5 concert, Touré’s desert blues will share the bill with Gnawa, the music LanGus plays, which developed in Morocco among West Africans who were brought north across the desert as enslaved people. Gnawa is religious music traditionally performed at all-night healing ceremonies called lila, intended to carry participants into trance.
Samir LanGusProvided
LanGus was born and raised outside Agadir, Morocco, and began learning Gnawa from its masters at age 8. He plays the sintir, a three-stringed bass lute made of wood and camel skin. The player strikes a low string with the thumb to create a deep, resonant pulse. Iron castanets clatter over the sintir’s bass line, and vocalists trade call-and-response refrains.
LanGus infuses the tradition with jazz and improvisation. In New York, he founded the ensemble Innov Gnawa. His first solo album, “Gnawa Love,” came out in February.
Touré and LanGus’s Nov. 5 concert is one of the last public events at Race Brook Lodge, which is for sale and ended full-service operations at the end of 2025. The lodge’s final scheduled event, on Nov. 6, is an evening of Rumi’s poetry with translator and vocalist Haleh Liza Gafori, cellist Isabel Castellvi and ceremonial bard James Bird.
For tickets, visit rblodge.com.
James FitzGerald is a student at Yale Law School, where he focuses on ecological restoration and international environmental cooperation. He splits his time between Lakeville and New Haven.
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