Nantucket Today

Nantucket Blues

When I close my eyes and picture fishing on Nantucket, it involves multiple people, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the surf, casting into a big school of bluefish, as the sun sets on the horizon.

There...

Standing Together

It’s been two and a half years since Charity Grace Mofsen woke up to see the words “N----r Leave” spray-painted on the front doors of the African Meeting House, where she had been the manager. The culprit...

The Old New Tap Room

The Tap Room was the kind of place you could feel comfortable disappearing for an afternoon, back when one of the purposes of a local watering hole was to hide patrons from the stresses of the world...

Oyster Men: Bender & Son

We are sitting in Steve Bender’s kitchen, eating oysters. That is to say, I am eating oysters. He is talking about the specific natural elements that have lent his oysters a sense that they know where they...

75 years of The Boys & Girls Club

Dick Glidden remembers walking into the Nantucket Boys Club for the first time in 1956 as a 7-year-old. The club was on Francis Street back then. There was a small gymnasium, which seemed giant to him as a...

THE QUESTIONS: Neil Paterson

As a young man, Neil Paterson wanted nothing more than to get off the farm in northern Scotland where he grew up. There was no work. It was 1979 and Paterson was 20. He moved to Nantucket in search of a...

The Last Country Doctor

Eccentric? Sure. He once took payment for a hernia operation in a batch of oatmeal cookies. He has been paid in lobsters. He once showed up at my barn on short notice to stitch up a horse named Dr. Who,...

Drink: Kerry O’Brien

When I sat down with Kerry O’Brien, she had on a t-shirt that read, “Cold beer, Colder Women,” a credo that would probably please her mentor, Boston restaurateur Barbara Lynch. O’Brien grew up helping out...

The Questions: Chris Iller

Chris Iller’s office is the vast expanse of moors, heathlands, sandplain grasslands, marshes, woods and swamps that make up the Nantucket Conservation Foundation’s 9,000 acres of protected open space.

History Just for Kids

Past the sperm-whale skeleton, beyond the whaleboat and through the candle factory is the Nantucket Whaling Museum’s new Children’s Discovery Center. Two years ago, the room was the Nantucket Historical...