Tag Archives: Ruth S. Barrett

Roundup: Westport Mom’s Fun Festival, Ruth Barrett’s Lawsuit, Oliver Vynerib’s Deconstruction …

Posted on October 1, 2025 | 3 comments

Over 1,000 Westporters will flock to Greens Farms Elementary School this Sunday.

Westport Moms’ 5th annual Family Fun Fall Festival (October 5, 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.) is one of the highlights of the year for kids (and parents).

Activities include a ninja wall, pottery making, pumpkin decorating, face painting, a bounce house, games, basketball clinics, chess matches, hair tinsel, and more.

Oh, yeah: a DJ, Mad Science show, character photo ops, and pizza and tacos food trucks too.

Click here for tickets, and more information. Overflow parking is on the street, and the Big Y shopping center.

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Here’s an update in the saga of Ruth S. Barrett.

In 2020, the Westport resident wrote a buzzy article for The Atlantic about the extreme measures taken by parents in their quest to mold their children into recruitable niche-sport athletes.

The lengthy piece appeared to be well-researched. A New York Times columnist called it “excellent,” and insightful in its depiction of high-end athletic recruiting as an accelerant of inequality in college admissions.

But 2 weeks later The Atlantic retracted the article. A scathing Editor’s Note accused Barrett of serious journalistic crimes, adding it could not “attest to the veracity” of her portrayal.

The Atlantic revoked Barrett’s rights to her own work, dissolved her contract, and blocked a Hollywood agency from acquiring the right to produce a spinoff TV series based on her article (entitled “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League-Obsessed Parents).”

Barrett responded by filing a lawsuit. She claimed her article was accurate, and that Atlantic editors had breached her contract and slandered her with provably false accusations.

In September of 2024, federal judge Loren Alikhan appeared to side with Barrett. In a 38-page ruling, she rejected The Atlantic’s motion to dismiss Barrett’s case, and ruled that the majority of her defamation claims would stand.”

The judge also ruled that Barrett was a private figure — meaning she would not have to prove at trial that The Atlantic harbored “actual malice” against her, but merely that it published defamatory falsehoods that torched her reputation.

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that The Atlantic had “quietly settled” with Barrett. The paper said that the magazine agreed to pay her over $1 million — and issued a series of corrections and “clarifications” to its online Editor’s Note.

Ruth S. Barrett

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Staples High School senior Oliver Vynerib — who recently received a Westport Green Building Award for exemplifying sustainable practices by supporting deconstruction on Westport properties at 5 Sycamore Drive and 159 Easton Road — will give a presentation about “deconstruction” to builders and residents looking to learn more.

The event is October 8 (4 p.m., 180 Saugatuck Avenue). Click here to RSVP, or for more information. 

Oliver founded HomeCycle CT in 2023. Its mission is to connect residents and builders with nonprofits to deconstruct homes — that is, dismantle buildings otherwise scheduled for demolition, then donating the building components to reduce landfill waste.

HomeCycle is a bridge between builders, donors and nonprofits, and provides guidance on donations and the tax deduction process. Salvageable items from home remodels are also eligible for donation. To learn more, email olivervynerib@gmail.com or call 203-919-0202.

Oliver Vynerib receives his Green Building Award from 1st Selectwoman Jen Tooker. Town officials look on. 

To learn more about what you can do to make your home more sustainable, click here.  To learn more about the Green Building Award, click here. or email cvornkahl@westportct.gov.

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Speaking about homes, but in a different vein: The Blight Prevention Board meets October 9 (7 p.m.; Zoom).

The agenda includes these properties under old business:

  • 1 Charcoal Hill Road
  • 6 Clifford Lane
  • 38 Old Hill Road

and these under new business:

  • 20 Center Street
  • 7 Bedford Drive
  • 36 Hiawatha Lane.

20 Center Street (Google Street View, 2023)

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Melissa Newman — a longtime Westporter, and favorite of Jazz at the Post as long as it’s been around — returns tomorrow (Thursday, October 2), to the weekly VFW show.

The vocalist is joined by Tony Lombardozzi (guitar), Phil Bowler (bass) and Bobby Leonard (drums).

Shows are 7:30 and 8:45 p.m., with dinner service at 7. Click here for tickets and more information.

Melissa Newman

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A race? A chat? Or just a “Westport … Naturally” photo waiting for a clever caption from “06880” readers?

You be the judge.

(Photo/Nikki Gorman)

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And finally …. today is the International Day of Older Persons. Enjoy!

(If Willie Nelson can still perform at 92, you can click this link to make a tax-deductible contribution to “06880.” It’s a lot easier than what Willie does — though he’s more impressive. Thank you!)

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Posted in Children, Entertainment, Environment, Media, Real estate, Sports

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Westport Writer Stirs “Niche Sports” Hornet’s Nest

Posted on October 20, 2020 | 33 comments
A mother whose daughters are fencers — and who compete in cutthroat tournaments nationally — has an epiphany:

It’s the Fourth of July. (My husband is) in Ohio; I’m in California. What are we doing to our family? We’re torturing our kids ridiculously. They’re not succeeding. We’re using all our resources and emotional bandwidth for a fool’s folly.

Yet she

didn’t know how to make the folly stop. The practices, clinics, and private lessons continued to pile up, pushing everything else off the calendar (except for homework; the woman knew her girls had to be outstanding athletes and outstanding students to get into the right school).

“’We just got caught up in it,” she says. “We thought this is what good parents do. They fight for opportunities for their kids.’”

That’s the opening anecdote in a long, harrowing Atlantic story about youth sports.

Titled “The Mad Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League Obsessed Parents,” it focuses on fencers, rowers, and squash, water polo and lacrosse players — “niche athletes” — in Fairfield County.

None of the examples specifically mentions Westport. But the writer — Ruth S. Barrett — lives here. Her stories are not far from home.

The Atlantic illustrated Ruth Barrett’s story with this time-lapse photo by Pelle Cass.

There’s the Darien parent who says, “There’s no more church. No more friends. We gave it all up for squash.”

Barrett writes about the “excessively ornate … circular logic” college sports ecosystem that rewards athletes in once-less-popular sports whose families can pay their own way at private colleges.

The pool of those athletes has grown. But the number of spots on teams has not.

As Barrett notes bitingly:

Alpha sports parents followed the rules — at least those of the meritocracy — only to discover that they’d built the 80th- or 90th-best lacrosse midfielder in the country. Which, it turns out, barely qualifies you for a spot at the bottom of the roster at Bates.

When COVID hit college athletics hard, the rat race seemed over. Inside Lacrosse CEO Terry Foy told Barrett:

The kid who would have gone to Yale now goes to Georgetown. The kid who would have gone to Georgetown now goes to Loyola. On and on. And then eventually you get down to Wentworth. And then you just don’t play college sports.

But it was only a temporary pause. Parents are as determined as ever to have their children — in whom they have invested untold amounts of money, and incalculable hours of driving, cross-country travel and competition-watching — find a spot on a college team.

And — it goes without saying — an elite one.

“What parent wants to have a child who’s going to be playing for a bottom-tier school with bottom-tier academics in the armpit of the United States?” the mother of a water polo player in Stamford asks. “I want to be polite. But there’s no way in hell.”

Barrett is unsparing. She writes:

Amid the shifting norms, there’s a growing sense of unease among suburban parents in niche-sport hubs—a dread that they went too far, failed to read the room. And they’re not wrong.

“It’s easy to stereotype the Fairfield County player,” says Lars Tiffany, the men’s varsity-lacrosse coach at the University of Virginia. “The Fairfield County player is the rich kid who still has his umbilical cord connected: the kid who doesn’t really have to take ownership of his mistakes or actions.”

Tiffany insists he doesn’t buy in to such broad-brush stereotypes. “We try not to care where they’re from,” he says. And yet, “if they’re from a hotbed, there’s an expectation level.”

He elaborates: “Do I hold the Fairfield County lacrosse player to a higher standard? Of course. You just know he’s been coached up. So flash-forward to me watching a [high school] junior on the lacrosse field. The thought is going through my brain that I like his skill set but there’s room for growth.

“But then I think, Wait. He’s already had a lot of people working on these things. He’s a little tapped out. Maybe I’ll take a player from Northern California or Texas. Someone who hasn’t been exposed to such elite coaching. Someone whose best lacrosse could be ahead of him. You try to tell yourself not to overanalyze, but you do.”

There’s much more in Barrett’s Atlantic piece, including a harrowing scene with 2 squash players at Stamford’s Chelsea Piers.

“The vibe was primal and strange,” Barrett writes.

“I was half-expecting Grace to chop off Emma’s ponytail and hold it aloft. This was the junior-squash world at its pre-pandemic apogee—the Hunger Games for the ruling class.”

There’s the example too of squash parents who “install pros off tour in their guest homes or in-law suites, to be available for private instruction on demand.”

How do young athletes cope? Some burn out. Barrett cites an NCAA survey that mentions “off-the-charts” binge drinking and drug use by lacrosse players.

Remember that fencing family in the opening anecdote? Barrett goes back to them. During the pandemic, the mother says:

The girls were lying on the trampoline, finding shapes in the maple trees. I realized that I’d never seen them doing that — just lying down on the trampoline together, giggling about different things. I think they’re going to look back on this period as one of the happiest times of their youth. It feels so good to get off that hamster wheel.

But that did not last. The next month, she took her daughters to a “secret bunker court” no one else knew about.

Barrett writes:

It’s a haunting vision: the ponytailed girls in hidden glass boxes training harder and harder, hitting straight rails along the line, faster and faster, even as the college spots melt away and the cultural sands shift beneath their feet.

(To read Ruth S. Barrett’s full Atlantic story, click here. Hat tip: Fred Cantor)

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Posted in Media, Sports, Teenagers

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