An accidental newspaper life
Newspapers by nature are carried along daily in the bouillabaisse of human events: births, deaths, tragedies, triumphs, fire, flood, politics, arguments, crabbiness, euphoria. We are exposed to it all. It’s the job, and thanks to you — readers, customers, newsmakers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, critics — it has been a terrific job to have.
The windy 10-year war
If you have been marveling at the other marathon, that is, the marathon, unanesthetized colonoscopy now being performed on the Stop & Shop project, history suggests that this is nothing new. When we fight,...
Discrimination permitted here
What is the paramount requirement for navigating the information age in which we live today? What is the irreducible minimum skill that our children must learn and that we and they must practice all...
Irresistible April
Our habit of centuries and of generations is to venerate the town meeting as the pure, raw essence of democratic self-government. But, we’ve been duped. It’s just eyewash. After all, town government, measured by...
The justice system too often fails us
Don’t miss the account this morning of the career of 31-year-old Matthew P. Tucci, who was arrested last week. Again. This time for dealing heroin.
It's a story of hard and successful work by police...
Medical marijuana trending now
Statewide, voters, including especially eager Islanders, have embraced so-called medicinal marijuana sales. Voters nationally lean toward marijuana, whether gilded with a pseudo-health care attribute or not. The harmful effects of pot use on cognition,...
Well, this was a change of tune for online comments
We have a winner. Commenters have declared without reservations, that the Pacheco family’s Reliable Market, on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs is the best Island grocery store. Of course, it’s an informal survey with...
Bowling alley is not MVC business
Elsewhere on these Editorial and OpEd Pages this morning, the chairman of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC), under the pretext of defending his beleaguered regulatory and planning overlord agency, takes his constituents — that...
Leaving home
Friday afternoon, some significant segment of the Vineyard population, the majority of them teachers, parents, and children, all of whose desperation was palpable, left home. There were a few unconnected to the grueling routines...
On quilters and weather weenies
And that's that
Roger Wey, the former Oak Bluffs selectman whose management of the financial affairs of the Oak Bluffs Council on Aging is under a cloud, gets an endorsement this week from Glenna Barkan,...
Towns should claw back their depreciated prerogatives
In the mid-1970s, when the ground rules for implementing the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s enabling legislation were being written, a general goal was to identify and devise protective protocols for fragile landscapes, for delicate and...
Willing suspension of disbelief
Updated at 6:30 pm, February 6, 2014
Perhaps the window has closed for so-called medicinal marijuana for Martha's Vineyard. News this week that pot shops, fronted as medical dispensaries, have been approved for many counties...
The simple sense of it
The politicians who drafted the Martha's Vineyard Commission's enabling legislation in 1974 tried to strike a delicate balance. They wanted to empower the commission to push out the town-by-town boundaries of limited zoning and...
We meet on the stairs
Now, we contemplate the struggle together and observe the security precautions the same way.
A long and puzzling trip
The mirthless irony is that between 1998 and 2007, in good times and lean ones for the real estate industry, there were few years which tallied more sales at high dollar figures than has been the case in the worst of the six years since post-Great Recession.
Sports and poetry
You won't have forgotten his few words, and his curse, standing alone in the infield at Fenway Park, right after the Marathon bombing, telling the evil-minded among us that Boston and its people were "Boston Strong.
Answer the Water Street question
The real imaginative opportunity is to find a way to flush the Bernier poison pill and allow the lot to be sold by IHT for commercial purposes (parking perhaps) — but not to Stop & Shop, if Mr.