One measure of the health of a community is the vitality of its main streets.

I’ve asked myself often in 40-plus years as an annual visitor to Martha’s Vineyard, what is it that gives one the sensation that a place where you don’t actually hang your hat daily or pay property taxes, viscerally feels like home?

Writing for a newspaper — having your words and name appear in print — provides a special kind of thrill not easily matched.

Clearly, I have a propensity for islands.

A team of activists for banning assault weapons and demanding gun regulation worked a miracle on July 8.

I was driving in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic on the Vineyard Haven/Edgartown Road, when my new 2023 Grand Cherokee Summit Reserve Jeep unexplainably stopped, would not restart or come out of park.

Barn House, that “tiny tribe or colony of writing and painting and thinking folk” on the South Road in Chilmark, though thriving healthily through the years in a privacy not much differentiated from freedom, celebrated an occasion on Saturday which demanded mention in the public prints.

Rebecca Makkai, whose breakout novel The Great Believers was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, returned with another novel early this year that aims to confront unreliable memories and the consequences of assumptions.

When journalist and author Andrew Meier set out to write a history of the Morgenthau family, he knew it would be no small undertaking.

Joan Biskupic’s Nine Black Robes presents a portrait of a United States Supreme Court ideologically divided and deeply affected by former President Donald Trump and his appointees.