Painter Margot Datz's show Party Animals opens for its annual one-night reception on August 4 at the Grange Hall from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Elin Hilderbrand may be the queen of summer fiction year after year, but hold lists provided by Island librarians showing their top requested books this summer span a cornucopia of genres, settings and subject matter.

One hundred fifty years ago this year, by an act of the Massachusetts legislature, the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association was incorporated to manage what had become one of the largest camp meetings in New England.

Each year the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association holds a Gingerbread Cottage Tour, taking guests inside the privately owned cottages to get a look past the porches. This year’s tour is Wednesday, August 8 and includes six cottages. The tour runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., beginning at the Tabernacle. The cost is $30, which includes the tour and admission to the Cottage Museum and refreshments.

A couple of us were complaining about the hot, humid weather in Vineyard Grocers. Mark, the manager told us that Oman on the Arabian peninsula just set the all-time highest low temperature – 109!

Aquinnah selectmen met briefly in executive session with their police chief Randhi Belain Wednesday morning as a personnel matter.

This is the fastest moving summer ever. Even with some of our downpours, the plants are begging for water. And I am happily entertaining a flock of turkeys – from eight to 15 daily.

Vineyarder and former high school basketball star Erin Hill will join the Yale women’s basketball team next year, one of only four standout first-years.

From a rowboat to the barges that have had more than one iteration through the years, the Chappaquiddick ferry is an Island institution all its own.

Beachcomber and paleoecologist Heinz Lowenstam needed something he could really sink his teeth into. He found it in a discovery about a small mollusk called a chiton.