Daniel's been thinking about Connecticut. He married into a Storrs family — his father-in-law is Emmett Schneiderman, the rhesus monkey jaw anatomist, which is a sentence I never expected to say on this show — and he's been trying to unpack the DNA of the place. He grew up in Ireland, sees America with fairly neutral eyes, and Connecticut strikes him as contradictory. Quiet and grassy, but bound up with the history of psychiatry. Tight alcohol control, but his friend runs a thriving sex therapy practice there. Liberal or puritan? And how does a place so verdant serve as a crucible for so much innovation? He wants you, Herman, to draw on growing up there and give him a guide to connecting with the true DNA of the state. Not Instagram spots — Storrs doesn't have those anyway.
Storrs has exactly one Instagram spot and it's the Dairy Bar ice cream counter.
Which is excellent ice cream, to be fair.
It is. But Daniel's right — nobody's flying in for the ice cream. So where do you start? Storrs is a village inside the town of Mansfield. It exists because of the university. UConn was founded in eighteen eighty-one as the Storrs Agricultural School — Charles and Augustus Storrs donated the land, a hundred and seventy acres and a few barns. Before that there was nothing there but farms and woods. It's not a postcard New England town with a white steeple and a general store. It's a place defined entirely by its institution.
So the first thing to understand is that Storrs isn't a town that happened to get a university. The university is the town.
And that matters because the institution carries Connecticut's whole history inside it. The land-grant mission, the agricultural research, the way the state thinks about knowledge and control. When I was a kid, you could walk from the campus dairy bar — which, yes, excellent ice cream — to the edge of the old Mansfield Training School grounds in about fifteen minutes. The training school was a state institution for what they then called the feeble-minded. Opened in nineteen seventeen, closed in nineteen ninety-three. And that walk, from ice cream to asylum, is Connecticut in a nutshell.
Daniel's prompt circles around a paradox. Tight liquor laws, sex therapists, psychiatric history, innovation. He's asking whether Connecticut is a contradiction or whether the contradiction is the point. You're saying it's the point.
I'm saying the contradiction is the engine. Let me start with the Puritan thread, because everything else grows out of it. Connecticut's Fundamental Orders of sixteen thirty-nine — often called the first written constitution — created a government rooted in religious discipline. The colony was founded by Thomas Hooker and a group of Puritans who left Massachusetts because they thought Massachusetts was getting too lax. Let that sink in. They left Massachusetts for more discipline.
That's like leaving a monastery because the monks are too rowdy.
And that impulse never really left. It just changed clothes. The blue laws restricted what you could do on Sundays — no travel, no recreation, no buying anything. Those laws stayed on the books, in various forms, well into the twentieth century. I remember my father telling me you couldn't buy a hammer on a Sunday when he was young. A hammer. The state decided when you could acquire tools.
And the liquor thing Daniel mentioned — that's a direct descendant.
Direct line. Connecticut still controls the sale of spirits through state-run liquor stores. Not beer, not wine — those you can get at a grocery store. But if you want a bottle of whiskey, you're buying it from the state of Connecticut. The state sets the prices, the state collects the revenue. That's not modern nanny-state liberalism. That's a seventeenth-century Puritan impulse that never died — the government as moral guardian, regulating pleasure because pleasure is suspect.
So Daniel's question about liberal versus puritan — the liquor stores aren't liberal at all. They're theocracy in retail form.
Right. And yet. And yet. The same state that won't let you buy a bottle of bourbon without its permission also produced some of the most radical psychiatric institutions in American history. The Mansfield Training School was part of a wave of progressive institutional psychiatry in the early twentieth century. The idea was humane treatment, specialized care, removing people from abusive conditions and giving them structure and dignity. That was genuinely progressive for nineteen seventeen.
And it went badly.
It went catastrophically. By the nineteen seventies and eighties, the training school was overcrowded, understaffed, and riddled with abuse. Investigations found residents living in what amounted to warehouses — fifty, sixty people to a ward, almost no programming, staff who'd been there thirty years and had given up. It closed in nineteen ninety-three after a long legal battle. The grounds sat empty for years. I used to sneak onto them as a teenager, before they put up the fences. You'd walk through these empty brick buildings with institutional green paint peeling off the walls, and it was completely silent except for the wind. And now part of that land is a UConn agricultural research farm. They grow experimental crops on the same soil where the asylum stood.
The research farm over the asylum. That's the image.
That's the whole state. Connecticut takes its moral impulses — control, improvement, discipline — and when they fail, it doesn't mourn them. It repurposes the land and plants something new. The same institutional energy that built the asylum built the university that now farms on its grave.
Let me push on the mechanism, though. Daniel's asking how a quiet, grassy place becomes a crucible for innovation. You've got Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, you've got Electric Boat and the submarine industry, you've got insurance — Hartford was the insurance capital of the world. What's the connection between Puritan restraint and building submarines?
I think the quietness is the connection. Connecticut is small. It's the third smallest state by area. It's dense but not urban in the way New York or Boston are urban. There's a lot of space between things, and that space is quiet and green. When I was growing up, the dominant sensory experience of Storrs was... green. Trees, fields, stone walls running through the woods from farms that disappeared a hundred years ago. And in that quiet, ideas had room to breathe. UConn wasn't a commuter school when I was a kid — people came and they stayed, and the campus was its own world. You'd have physicists and dairy scientists and playwrights all eating at the same terrible dining hall. The quiet isn't emptiness. It's a blank canvas.
So the Puritan restraint creates the container, and the container fills with ideas.
That's one strand of the helix. The other strand is Yankee ingenuity — the practical, build-it-yourself ethos. Connecticut Yankees were famous for it. They made clocks, they made guns, they made ships. Eli Whitney didn't just invent the cotton gin — he pioneered interchangeable parts, which is the foundation of mass production. That's a Connecticut mind at work. Not theorizing about manufacturing. Building a system where any part fits any gun.
And the submarine thing — Electric Boat in Groton. That's not an obvious industry for a small New England state.
But it makes sense when you look at the coastline and the rivers. Connecticut has deep water access and a long tradition of shipbuilding. The first American submarine was built in Connecticut during the Revolutionary War — David Bushnell's Turtle. It didn't work very well, but the impulse was there. By World War Two, Electric Boat was cranking out submarines, and they're still doing it. The quiet state with the strict liquor laws builds the Navy's attack submarines. That's not a contradiction. That's the same institutional competence aimed at different targets.
Daniel mentioned his friend's sex therapy practice. That feels like a third thing — not Puritan, not industrial. Where does that fit?
That's the sediment layer Daniel's picking up on. Connecticut has this enormous professional class — therapists, academics, insurance executives, medical researchers. They're concentrated in places like West Hartford and New Haven and the shoreline towns. They're liberal in the modern American sense, but they exist inside a state whose legal framework is still shaped by seventeenth-century Puritans. The sex therapist isn't a rebel. She's a product of the same institutional ecosystem that produced the asylum and the university. Connecticut has more therapists per capita than almost any state. It has Yale's psychology department. It has the Hartford insurance companies funding mental health parity research. The therapeutic culture isn't fighting the Puritan culture. It grew out of the same soil.
The double helix metaphor — you said Puritan restraint and Yankee ingenuity. But the therapist doesn't fit neatly into either strand.
She fits into the helix itself. The tension between the strands is what drives the whole thing. The Puritan impulse says control yourself, regulate desire, structure your life around discipline. The ingenuity impulse says build something, solve the problem, make it work. And the therapist sits at the intersection, saying let's understand the desire before we control it, let's build a framework for the self. It's not a contradiction. It's a synthesis that keeps happening, over and over, in different forms.
So when Daniel looks at Connecticut and sees contradiction, what he's actually seeing is a palimpsest. Layers of writing, one over the other, each one partly visible through the next.
And the trick to understanding the place is learning to read the layers. The state liquor store is a fossil from the sixteen forties. The therapist's office is a fossil from the nineteen seventies. The submarine yard is a fossil from the nineteen forties. The research farm is a fossil from the nineteen nineties, growing over a fossil from nineteen seventeen. None of them cancel each other out. They all just keep existing, stacked up like sedimentary rock.
Daniel asked for a guide. He wants to know how to connect with the real DNA of the place. Not Instagram — he said that explicitly. What do you tell him?
Three stops. First, walk a town green. Almost every Connecticut town has one — a central common, usually with a church on one side and a few old houses around it. The green is where the Puritan mind made itself physical. It's ordered, it's restrained, it's beautiful in a severe way. Stand there and imagine a Sunday in sixteen fifty when you weren't allowed to do anything but pray and sit still. That's the bedrock.
That's stop one. What's stop two?
Stop two is a state liquor store. I'm serious. Go to one. It's the most banal retail experience you can imagine — fluorescent lights, bottles lined up on shelves, a clerk who works for the state of Connecticut. But once you know why it exists, it becomes this incredible artifact. You're standing inside a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old argument about whether pleasure should be regulated by the government. And the government won.
It's a museum where you can also buy bourbon.
And the bourbon is reasonably priced, I'll give them that. Stop three is the hard one. Go to the UConn campus in Storrs, and find the agricultural research fields on the north side, off Route forty-four. That land was part of the Mansfield Training School. There's no plaque. There's no interpretive sign. You just stand at the edge of a field where someone's growing experimental kale and know that underneath you, figuratively and almost literally, is a century of institutional ambition and failure. The asylum was progressive, then it was a nightmare, then it was empty, and now it's kale. That's Connecticut.
The research farm over the asylum. You keep coming back to that image.
Because it's the most honest thing about the state. Connecticut doesn't do memorials. It does repurposing. The old textile mills are now artist lofts and breweries. The armories are event spaces. The asylum is a farm. The state just keeps building over itself, and the new thing always carries some trace of the old thing. The kale grows in soil that remembers the institution.
Does the kale taste institutional?
It tastes like a land-grant university's agricultural extension program. Which is its own kind of institutional flavor.
Daniel's an Irishman looking at this from the outside. Ireland has its own palimpsest — castles, abbeys, famine roads. Does that give him a lens, or does the American version work differently?
I think it's different in one important way. Ireland's layers are marked. You can visit a ruined abbey and there's a sign telling you when it was sacked and by whom. Connecticut's layers are unmarked. The training school grounds don't announce themselves. The liquor store doesn't explain its Puritan origins. The submarine yard has a museum, but it tells the story of the submarines, not the story of why a quiet state with blue laws became the submarine capital of America. You have to know what you're looking at, or you'll miss it entirely.
That's the guide, then. Walk the green, buy some bourbon, stand in a kale field, and know what you're standing on.
And if you have time, get ice cream at the Dairy Bar. It really is excellent.
Let me ask you something more personal. You grew up in this. You were a teenager sneaking onto abandoned asylum grounds. Did you understand, at the time, that you were living inside this layered history? Or did it just feel like a boring small town?
It felt like a boring small town. Completely. I couldn't wait to leave. I wanted to go somewhere that felt like it mattered. It was only later, after I'd been away for years, that I started to understand what I'd been standing in. The training school wasn't history to me — it was just the creepy abandoned place where kids dared each other to spend the night. I didn't know about the Fundamental Orders or the blue laws or the institutional logic. I just knew that the state sold the liquor and the university ran the town and there were a lot of trees.
And now?
Now I think Storrs is one of the most interesting places in America, precisely because it doesn't announce itself. It doesn't perform its history. It just keeps going, building the next thing over the last thing, and if you're not paying attention you'll drive through and see nothing but grass and a few university buildings. But if you know what to look for, the whole history of the American experiment is right there, compressed into a few square miles. Puritan theocracy, industrial ingenuity, progressive institutional reform, institutional failure, repurposing and renewal. All of it, under the grass.
Daniel's question about liberal versus puritan — you've essentially said that's the wrong question.
It's the wrong question because it assumes a place has to be one thing. Connecticut is both, and neither, and the tension between them is what makes it productive. The Puritans built a society organized around restraint. Their descendants built a society organized around problem-solving. The restraint didn't disappear — it just got channeled into new forms. The state still controls the liquor. The university still controls the town. But inside those containers, extraordinary things happen. Research, therapy, submarines, ice cream. The container constrains, and the constraint generates energy, and the energy produces innovation. That's the double helix.
Is that replicable? Or is this just a weird historical accident that happened to produce one peculiar small state?
I think every place has its own version of this. Daniel could do the same exercise for Ireland — the pub culture, the Catholic legacy, the tech boom in Dublin, the famine memory. Every place is a palimpsest. The question is whether you can read the layers. Connecticut happens to be unusually legible once you know the key, because it's small and the layers are close to the surface. You can drive from the Fundamental Orders to the submarine yard in an hour.
And the verdant quietness Daniel noticed — that's not a backdrop. It's part of the mechanism.
It's essential. The green isn't decorative. It's the space between the institutions. It's what lets the ideas breathe. Connecticut is dense with ideas but physically spread out, and that combination — intensity without crowding — is rare. Boston and New York are intense and crowded. Vermont is spread out and not particularly intense. Connecticut sits in the sweet spot. You can think there.
Hilbert, you've been quiet. You have a connection to this place, don't you?
Hilbert: I worked there. The training school. Nineteen eighty-seven to eighty-nine.
You worked at Mansfield?
Hilbert: Night orderly. Third shift, eleven to seven. I'd taken a job selling clocks for a company out of Bristol and that didn't take. The training school was hiring.
What was it like?
Hilbert: Smelled like ammonia and boiled vegetables. The wards were long rooms with beds lined up, maybe forty beds to a room. Most of the residents had been there decades. Some of them had been dropped off as children in the nineteen forties and never left. The state was their whole life.
By the late eighties it was already under investigation, wasn't it?
Hilbert: The lawsuits had started. We knew it was closing, just a question of when. The staff was half people who'd been there thirty years and half people like me who needed a paycheck. The old-timers had a kind of loyalty to the place that didn't make sense from the outside. They'd tell you how it used to be — the farm program, the workshops, the dances. By the time I got there, most of that was gone. Just the wards and the television.
What did you actually do, on a night shift?
Hilbert: Walked the halls. Checked the rooms. Made sure nobody had fallen out of bed. There was a lot of sitting. I read paperbacks in the nurses' station. Raymond Chandler mostly.
You said the grounds are a research farm now.
Hilbert: Part of them. The main buildings came down in the late nineties. UConn took the land. I drove past a few years ago and there were rows of something green where the old administration building used to be. Couldn't tell you what they were growing.
Does that feel right to you? The farm over the asylum?
Hilbert: It doesn't feel wrong. The place wasn't working. It hadn't worked for a long time. The people who lived there deserved better than they got. Tearing it down and planting something else — that's what you do with land that's seen too much. You can't turn it into a memorial. Nobody would visit.
I used to walk those grounds when the buildings were still standing but empty. This would have been the early nineties, right around when it closed. The silence was the thing. You'd expect an abandoned institution to be noisy somehow — creaking, wind, animals. But it was just completely still. Like the buildings were holding their breath.
Hilbert: They were never quiet when I worked there. Always somebody coughing, a television left on, the floor buffer at three in the morning. The quiet came after.
The quiet came after. There's something in that.
Hilbert: The kale doesn't make noise either.
That image — the research farm over the asylum — stays with me. Let's sit with that.
I keep thinking about the soil. The training school had its own farm program for decades — the residents worked the land, grew vegetables, raised livestock. It was supposed to be therapeutic. So the ground had already been farmed by the institution before UConn ever put research crops there. The same dirt, the same purpose, just a different set of hands.
That's the palimpsest again. The farm under the farm. The institution under the institution.
And the question Daniel's prompt leaves hanging — is this a warning or a model? Does the tension between restraint and innovation actually produce progress, or does it just produce institutions that fail the people they're meant to serve? The training school was progressive once. It was the innovation. And then it became the thing that had to be torn down and planted over.
I don't think we can answer that. I'm not sure anyone can. Every institution eventually fails someone. The question is whether the next thing built on top is better.
The kale is probably better than the asylum. But the asylum was supposed to be better than the poorhouses and the attics where families hid their disabled relatives before nineteen seventeen. And it was, for a while. Then it wasn't.
The helix keeps turning.
It does. And Storrs keeps being quiet and green, and the university keeps growing, and the research farm keeps producing whatever experimental crop they're working on this year. I don't know if that's progress or just motion. But it's Connecticut.
One thing from the research that didn't quite fit anywhere — the Mansfield Training School had its own cemetery. About a hundred and fifty residents are buried there, many in unmarked graves. The graves are still there, on what's now UConn land, near the research fields. The state put up a memorial stone in the early two thousands. That's the one place where Connecticut did stop and mark the layer instead of just building over it.
I didn't know about the memorial stone. I'm glad it's there.
What does it mean for a place to be defined by its contradictions? Daniel's prompt asked for a guide to the DNA of Connecticut, and I think we've given him one — the green, the liquor store, the kale field, the unmarked graves under the research farm. But the open question is whether that DNA is something to emulate or something to study from a distance. Do you want your institutions to carry that much tension?
I don't think you get to choose. The tension is there whether you want it or not. The only choice is whether you learn to read it.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, who apparently spent two years walking the night wards of the Mansfield Training School and never mentioned it until now.
I have so many follow-up questions.
Hilbert: It was a job.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you have a place you want us to unpack the way we just unpacked Connecticut, send it to show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
