My dad grows the best tomatoes. He drops them off for me in fruit boxes with padding in the bottom.

In addition to local meat and produce, last Saturday’s farmers’ market in West Tisbury featured some healthy local competition between two well-known Vineyard chefs. In the third annual Seafood Throwdown sponsored by the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance and the Dukes County Fishermen’s Association, chefs Jo Maxwell of Chesca’s in Edgartown and Teddy Diggs of Home Port in Menemsha met stove-to-stove in a stormy cook-off.

Whether or not she’s a true blood-relation, Auntie Anne Beiler is every pretzel fanatic’s favorite aunt. That’s because Auntie Ann is the founder, with husband Jonas, of Auntie Anne’s pretzel company.

Tonight, August 17, beginning at 7:30 p.m., Auntie Anne will visit the Federated Church in Edgartown to talk about her journey, from humble beginnings to worldwide snack attack guru.

Summer on the Vineyard conjures images of sand and surf, beaches and breaking waves, water and . . . wagging tails?

When most guests sit down to a dinner at Beetlebung Farm in Chilmark, they usually glance at the menu and then set it down again, absentmindedly imprinting it with grease and wine stains. But the more discerning will notice that the seemingly disposable item is actually a work of art — the design is innovative, the words have been selected for sound and form, and the ink has been elegantly fused with the paper.

p> Summer Is. By M. Lesnikowski, 21 pages, Southern Lion Books, $20. Vineyard-born artist Molly Lesnikowski, who has written two earlier children's books, has turned her pen and paintbrush to the Island, at last.

Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. is passionate about roots. The Harvard professor, writer and genealogist first started on a family tree as a nine-year-old, after his grandfather’s burial, wanting to know about his connection to his father and grandfather. He’s followed his passion in his professional life, through scholarship and his popular television shows tracing people’s genealogy, and in the personal realm: still working on the family tree, he is trying to find the identity of his great-great-grandfather.

Always under the skin of America. White guilt defines my life relentlessly. Never a Nazi, just a German. Marry white to dilute brown. Glad love doesn’t come in colors.

Six words to define how you feel about race may seem far too short for such a complex topic, but this is the philosophy behind the Race Card Project, an online forum meant to restart a conversation that some say has been left by the wayside in America. Project founder and longtime summer visitor Michele Norris said her six words change all the time.

Daily newspapers shuttered. Radio and TV networks swimming in red ink. Reporters and editors enduring widespread buyouts and layoffs.

This was the landscape of the news business that Boston University professor Christopher B. Daly confronted as he began researching the history of American journalism about eight years ago. It occurred to him that he just might end up having to write the obituary of American journalism.

David Driskell

David Driskell is a painter, collector of art and one of the leading authorities on African American art. He is an emeritus professor of art at the University of Maryland where in 2001 the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora was created to celebrate his legacy.