It doesn’t really matter how many years have passed since your final graduation ceremony – when the air cools and the Island quiets down, it always feels like we should be headed back to school. Maybe it is the excitement of seeing friends again, comparing notes from our summers, or settling into new projects that has us daydreaming about our school days. The good news is that all those things are still available to us in the fall. See the friends who you’ve only waved to as you rushed around to every summer activity. Laugh and cry about peak season adventures. And pick up whatever is calling to you from the woodshed, the studio, the fishing docks, or the library. Fall is here again.
What We’re Listening To
With more than eight decades and twenty-four studio album releases behind her, Carly Simon isn’t done making music. Her latest album, Comes in Waves, was released in August. It’s her first collection of new songs since 2008’s This Kind of Love. The single, “Howl,” stays true to Simon’s direct, open songwriting. “‘Howl’ lives in that space between betrayal and forgiveness, where anger has to be voiced before it can be released,” she wrote in a press release. “The song begins in anger, but it moves toward forgiveness, and speaks to any situation where trust has been broken.” The album, which was co-written and produced with David Spencer, includes one of the late John Forté’s last recorded appearances. Simon’s children, Ben and Sally Taylor, also make appearances.
What We’re Watching
What does it take to achieve true greatness? Charlie Parker practiced the saxophone for up to fifteen hours a day. Isaac Newton sometimes forgot to eat or sleep while inventing calculus. And tennis star Rafael Nadal kept up a rigorous daily schedule despite excruciating foot pain caused by a genetic deformity. Nadal is the subject of Rafa, a new Netflix docuseries by Vineyard seasonal resident Zach Heinzerling.
“The pieces of his life…that might seem sad or heartbreaking were the things that people needed to see, so that you would see the sort of sacrifice that athletes make to be at the very top,” Heinzerling told the Vineyard Gazette. The docuseries looks at Nadal, his childhood, his vulnerabilities and quirks, and how he came to be known as the “King of Clay.” The series may even inspire some greatness in your own life.
What’s Up and What’s Down
Forget about the New York Stock Exchange. We’ll tell you what’s up
and what’s down on the Island, what’s rising and what’s falling. Remember: buy low, sell high.
What’s Up
The town of Oak Bluffs is considering adding security cameras in the downtown area. Oak Bluffs police chief Jonathan Searle approached the select board about the idea, citing concerns about recent “incidents,” according to reporting in the Gazette. But others were worried about the implications of increased monitoring. “When you start putting cameras on public spaces, you move from security, like our current policy, to a surveillance system,” said select board member Mark Leonard. “There’s privacy concerns.”
What’s Down:
When John Waldron, a Goldman Sachs executive, illegally chopped down about twenty trees at his Katama home, the Island took note. Now the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection is on the case too. Waldron and his wife, Amanda, have been ordered to restore them. Keep your eyes on “What’s Up” – we’ll be sure to report back when the new trees are finally planted.
What to Read
The Breakup by Kurt Andersen (Random House, August 2026)
Don’t let the title of Kurt Andersen’s most recent novel fool you into thinking you’re getting a simple story about a relationship. Although it does deal with divorce, this book is largely about the break up of a different union: the United States of America. If it isn’t too painful, imagine it’s 2045 and the country has split into the left-leaning United States and the right-leaning Free American Republic. The world’s first trillionaire has suffered a drug overdose on the way to Mars. AI rules the world. When Donald Trump dies from a stroke, his fans begin rioting in New York City. It’s against this dystopian backdrop that parents Natalie and Asher embark on a college-visit tour across both countries with their daughter, Logan. Political commentary ensues. To write the novel, Andersen, a longtime Vineyard visitor and cofounder of Spy magazine, drew from the research he’s conducted to write his many nonfiction books, including Evil Geniuses (Random House, 2020).
Runner by Ashton Lattimore (Ballantine Books, July 2026)
For Lena Jameson and her father, Earl, the ocean both gives and takes away. It’s 1923 and Earl, a fisherman turned rumrunner on Martha’s Vineyard, makes good money smuggling liquor from boats offshore to customers on the Island. But then Earl and his crew are killed in a shipwreck that some suspect wasn’t an accident. Lena had hopes of making it off the Island and isn’t ready to give up on this dream, so she assembles a crew to carry on the family business: there’s older brother Walter, boyfriend Sam, and summer girl Dee. The gang of four gets swept up into some roaring-twenties adventures:
they leave Oak Bluffs for the crime-ridden streets of Boston, then make their way to the jazz clubs of the Harlem Renaissance. They’re looking for cash, but Lena’s also looking for answers to the question of what exactly happened to her father. Lattimore said the idea for the book came from an exhibit she saw at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum about a mysterious Prohibition-era shipwreck in Vineyard Sound.
Numerology
1,740: The number of patients per primary care physician in Dukes County, which is comprised of Martha’s Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands.
970: The average number of patients per primary care physician in Massachusetts.
600: New primary care patients added to Martha’s Vineyard Medical’s roster since last June.
Well Said
“You just make it easier for people to do the right thing.”
Vineyarder Jesse Fink, who along with his wife, Betsy, runs Rethinking Food Waste Through Economics and Data, or ReFED, a national nonprofit that funds food waste solutions. The pair won this year’s James Beard Foundation Impact Award.
Who We’re Missing
The late Elizabeth Weinstock Hawes often used her full name as her byline in the pages of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, where she contributed for more than a decade. She used Elizabeth Hawes in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Friends and family called her Besty. But you don’t need to have known her name to know you were reading her work. You could feel it. The Island and the larger literary community lost a talent when she died this summer at age eighty-five.
Luckily for us, we have her work to return to, and we often will: Weinstock, a Chilmark resident, wrote stories that open themselves to you slowly and gently until you are transported to a different place, body, and soul.
Take her 2025 piece in this magazine about Tea Lane Farm in Chilmark. She starts slowly, in the “brisk and blustery month of April,” when farmer Krishana Collins was dreaming of warmer weather. After a delicious list of flower names (“lupine and nasturtium, alyssum and ageratum, bells-of-Ireland and lisianthus, cherry vanilla”), we skip lightly ahead to summer. We can relax in Weinstock’s expert hands as she carries us along, telling the story of a community, of a dream held carefully over seasons of hard work. We hear the hum of the bees, see the pride on Collins’s face. Then, at the end, we’re gently released: “The many thousands of flowers bloomed well into the fall, when the fields were cut and quietly faded into the sleep of winter,” she wrote.
Weinstock used these same skills and many others in her two books: she explored the intimacy of the reader-writer relationship in one about Albert Camus, and her adopted home became her muse in another about the New York City apartment house.
Gracious, curious, and kind, she brimmed with ideas and was genuinely delighted to see her work in these pages. We are grateful to have known her, and grateful still that her words endure, ready to transport us again.