Fifty-Five Horses
Jack Styler is a young writer who will be joining our newsroom as a staff reporter next month. He’s a Midwesterner; he graduated from the University of Wisconsin two years ago with a degree in history...
View ArticleGhost Newsroom Busters
We started this newspaper in 2019 because we saw journalism dying here. The Provincetown Banner and the Cape Codder, once robust, were struggling. Word was readers and advertisers didn’t care about...
View ArticleSmall Towns, Big Ideas
There is so much to fear. Hard-won progress in civil rights, reproductive rights, and gender equality has rapidly eroded; we are beyond the overture of a climate catastrophe; war and atrocities go on...
View ArticleA Litany of Errors
I taught writing to college freshmen back in the 1980s, when the internet was young. As a tool for doing research, the new technology seemed almost magically powerful and seductive. Some of my...
View ArticlePride and Fear
When I heard that Provincetown was hosting an “active shooter attack prevention and preparedness” training session, my initial reaction was skepticism. The town’s press release said, “This crucial...
View ArticleSomething From Nothing
Sometimes it feels as if being a journalist consists mostly of waiting for return phone calls from people who are never going to call you back. The other day I called Kathleen Weiner, the chief of...
View ArticleLighthouses and Windmills
When my friend Elizabeth came to visit me in Wellfleet for a weekend, one of the things she wanted to see was a “real” Cape Cod lighthouse. We drove over to Eastham and admired Nauset Light as the sun...
View ArticleObfuscation Events
There are certain words that pop up frequently in news stories and set off alarms in an editor’s brain. Several of them appeared in our report last week about an actual alarm that was set off by a...
View ArticleA Crime Compounded
It’s hard for me to understand those people who believe there is a “deep state” of corrupt government officials determined to take away our rights. The fabrications and fantasies of conspiracy...
View ArticleWriters’ Block
We started this newspaper with plans focused on the future — one where small-town newspapers thrived again. But some of the things we hoped for were old-fashioned. We wanted people to write letters to...
View ArticleElections Under Threat
I received my official 2024 vote by mail application today from the Mass. Elections Division, and it reminded me of the systems, checks, and balances that make sure our elections are free and fair. The...
View ArticleAsleep at the Tweet
When Twitter launched in social media’s early days (it was 2006 when Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet) most journalists scoffed at the idea of living by 140-character soundbites. But it quickly...
View ArticlePrivate Equity Doesn’t Care
Last week’s article by Jack Styler on the substandard care at the nursing home at Seashore Point in Provincetown, now formally called AdviniaCare at Provincetown, was one of the more disturbing stories...
View ArticleYoung Writers Needed
Last week was Family Week in Provincetown, and Commercial Street was packed with people pushing strollers and hundreds of kids of every age and disposition. It’s an unusual and welcome sight in a town...
View ArticleTrafficking in the Unexpected
After writing about artists here for two years, I was relieved to find myself hustling through the mist that hung over Commercial Street to PAAM a couple of weeks ago for the Forum 24 panel that would...
View ArticleSecrecy and Censorship
In her July rulings that the Wellfleet Select Board had violated the Open Meeting Law, Assistant Attorney General Carrie Benedon wrote that the discussion at the board’s June 27, 2023 executive session...
View ArticlePicking a Funny Bone
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s suddenly ubiquitous word for the Republican ticket — “weird” — “is solidly Nebraskan and from the school of Carson,” writes Ian Frazier in the New York Review of Books. He’s...
View ArticleAn Endangered Landscape
I hope that readers have been noticing the collection of 34 essays by columnist Kai Potter that we published last month. His book is called Noticing, something that Kai does extraordinarily well. He...
View ArticleDiagraming for Democracy
The statements coming from the Republican candidate for president are setting many people’s nerves on edge. Our correspondent Mike Rice gives one example this week of an absurd accusation, repeated...
View ArticleHonor at the End
A couple of weeks ago a reader wrote to say that he was “uplifted” by an obituary we had published. He said he would like to read more about the life of the man who had died and who he wished he had...
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