RIGHT AT HOME

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

FROM QUANSOO ROAD

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

I was relieved to read that the Quansoo Beach Association membership took action to reconfigure its leadership. I am proud to have been in a leadership position on that same board a number of years ago. I found the various news reports of the Quansoo access conflict quite distressing during last winter’s months. It is the Vineyard after all and that kind of contentiousness is more often seen in the local political arena.

PROFILE IN COURAGE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

President Obama can add another chapter to John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage; a man willing to risk his political future by upholding his own principles.

David H. Frantz

Vineyard Haven

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WELCOME, MR. PRESIDENT

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

The following letter is addressed to President Obama and his family.

Benjamin Kaplan, one of the commonwealth’s foremost jurists and a Vineyard seasonal resident, died last week at 99. Justice Kaplan was an eloquent man who brought his soaring intellect and sparking wit to the classroom as a professor at Harvard Law School, and to the bench as a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and after his retirement from that court, as a senior justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. I had the good fortune to appear before him on several occasions.

Waiting for the ATF

Trading Blackberry for Blackberries

Last week, the New York Times reported on five neuroscientists who had spent a week in May in remote Utah, rafting and camping and hiking in the wilderness. The object of their trip was to see how — and if — being both out of doors and out of reach of modern technological equipment might affect the brain. Does tranquility, they wanted to know, help attention, memory and learning? Does constant heavy multi-tasking with cell phones and computers and Blackberries fatigue the brain?