News
Island author, Pulitzer-prize winner and self-described “deep-green, feminist, tree-hugging” Geraldine Brooks recalled a thankless trudge through New Hampshire canvassing for then-Senator Barack Obama in 2007. Retreating to a diner on that frigid day Ms. Brooks ventured to canvass the dining patrons as well.
“As I approached a friendly-looking couple, I noticed that they, too, had clipboards,” Ms. Brooks said. “The cafe was filled with fellow Obama volunteers, except for one guy. He turned out to be canvassing for Edwards.”
Enter the Solarbeam
Southern New England Solar has installed the first solar parabolic concentrator on a residence in the United States, here on Martha’s Vineyard. The system is currently providing all domestic hot water, space heating and pool heating for a large residence on the Island.
The company, recently formed by West Tisbury resident Paul D. Adler, with sales executive Gary Stuber of Chilmark, has an exclusive distributorship for Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, for a new solar product called the Solarbeam.
Massachusetts architects Elizabeth Morgan and Ann W. Marshall are working as colleagues in Peru to install an exhibition of archaeological artifacts from the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu at the Casa Concha, a manor house in Cusco.
Since 1968, the black middle class in America has quadrupled, Henry Louis (Skip) Gates told a packed house at the Edgartown Whaling Church on Thursday evening.
But that was the only positive news in an otherwise bleak survey of the state of black education by a panel of experts convened by Professor Gates and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
From a podium bearing the presidential seal set up before a grove on Blue Heron Farm, President Obama spoke to the people of Libya yesterday, saying, “An ocean divides us, but we are joined in the basic human longing for freedom, for justice and for dignity.”
People stood stock still. Necks craned. Those who were unwitting enough to have their heads down stepped around, muttering about these human obstacles in their path. But it was their loss. What was so dazzling that hundreds of people attending the 150th Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Livestock Show and Fair were able to stop where they were and ignore everything around them?