FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE. By Anthony Lewis. Basic Books, New York, N.Y. 2008. 221 pages. $25 hard cover.

The Vineyard’s political season is in full swing, with town meetings and local elections happening this month. It is in a season such as this that Anthony Lewis’s most recent book, Freedom For The Thought That We Hate, is particularly compelling.

The Center for Maritime Training at Massachusetts Maritime Academy will begin its spring captain’s license course on Island Friday, April 11. Classes will be offered each Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the month of April, all held at the Edgartown School.

Now in the third year offering on-Island training, the academy gives Vineyard residents the opportunity to participate in professional training and make the most of their sea time and experience with a U.S. Coast Guard License.

It was Emily Dickinson who wrote, “a letter always seemed to me like immortality.”

After spending the past two decades uncovering boxes of handwritten diaries, letters composed on old typewriters and files of personal documents, professor and sociologist Adelaide Cromwell would have to agree.

Christmas lights illuminate the yellow upstairs room filled with squashy armchairs, each of which contains at least one sprawling teenager. Up front, two boys fool around with a microphone, testing their amplified voices, revelling in the leisurely atmosphere — that is, until the real show begins.

For Lani Carney, paintbrushes were not made for painting. Paintbrushes were made for dancing.

“I taught them how to dance with the brush,” she said, and by them, she meant her students. “Last week I said to them, ‘Today, the light blue of the sky really says spring is here! Will you dance with me and your brush and paint what spring says in your heart?’

“That fizz and the actual manner in which the color takes to that wet paper,” she continued, “It’s a delight you and I have never known!”