A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.
It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.
A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:
Mary Bergman, originally from Provincetown, now lives on Nantucket. She is a writer and historian, working in historic preservation and writing a novel.
Seth Rolbein began his journalistic career on Cape Cod in the 1970s, then joined WGBH-TV as a writer, reporter and documentary filmmaker. He has written for many regional and national publications. His magazine and book-length fiction and non-fiction has spanned continents, and documentaries on National Public Television have won multiple national awards. Throughout, the Cape has been his home. He became editor-in-chief of the region’s weekly newspaper chain before starting The Cape Cod Voice; a weekly emailed column of the same name continues that effort.
Susan Moeller is a freelance writer and editor who was a reporter and editor with the Boston Herald and Cape Cod Times. She’s lived on the Cape for 45 years and when not working, swims, plays handbells, pretends to garden, and walks her dog, Dug. She lives in Cummaquid.
Tom Moroney is a veteran journalist and radio host whose love affair with Cape Cod began when he was a child. Before retiring in 2023, he was managing editor overseeing radio and television in Boston for Bloomberg, the global financial news company. He co-hosted Baystate Business, a daily radio program focused on the region’s economy. He also served as Bloomberg's Boston bureau chief. Moroney has been a print reporter with stints at The Boston Globe and People magazine. In the 1980s and ‘90s he wrote an award-winning column for the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham and was a correspondent for Greater Boston, the public affairs program on WGBH-TV.
Dennis Minsky's career as a field biologist began in 1974, at Cape Cod National Seashore, protecting nesting terns and plovers. A Provincetown resident since 1968, he returned full time in 2005. He is involved in many local conservation projects, works as a naturalist on the Dolphin Fleet Whale Watch, and tries to write.
Robert Finch, in memoriam, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing. He has lived on and written about Cape Cod for forty years. He is the author of six collections of essays, including "The Iambics of Newfoundland" (Counterpoint Press), and co-editor of "The Norton Book of Nature Writing." His new book, "The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk Along Cape Cod’s Atlantic Shore." Bob passed away on September 30, 2024. Read more about him and hear some of his work here.
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New fishing restrictions on Nantucket extend protections for great white sharks that began on Cape Cod Bay and the Outer Cape. Tom Moroney connects those rules to the lasting damage Jaws did to the species' reputation, and to his own past coverage of a now-defunct shark tournament on the Vineyard.
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A tiny, weathered gravestone in Sandwich's Old Burial Ground may be the oldest on Cape Cod, but its inscription was deliberately chiseled away centuries ago. Gravestone historian Steve Broker explains the competing theories, from anti-Quaker sentiment to Puritan objections over sacred imagery.
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On Nantucket, the height of summer means being outnumbered by tourists two to one. A meditation on Augustitus, the exhaustion and thrill of a place at its busiest, borrowed from a phrase coined nearly a century ago.
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A pizza order gone slightly sideways sends Tom Moroney down a rabbit hole of restaurant surcharges, tip-shaming, and the economics behind why your cheeseburger costs what it costs.
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Painting a boathouse turns out to have a lot in common with yoga: stretching, balance, and the patience of proper prep work. A meditation on ladders, primer, and the quiet satisfaction of a job done right.
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Turns out empty nest syndrome doesn't require actual children. Susan Moeller follows a gray catbird family that set up shop in the viburnum by the kitchen window, from sloppy first nest to turquoise eggs to a six hour screaming fit from an anxious dad. Then, silence. And a lot of feelings about it.
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Nantucket wakes most summer mornings wrapped in fog, yet the island is deep in drought. With a sole-source aquifer and no neighboring town to lean on, water restrictions have divided the island between lawns left to go golden and lawns kept impossibly green by private wells. A meditation on scarcity, privilege, and the strange beauty of a place learning to live with less water.
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From "Happy as a Clam" to "Squeezed Inn," a Cape Cod cottage-naming saga full of bad puns, a 92-year-old sign-maker's wisdom, and the realization that some things resist a name.
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This week Robert Finch tells us why there is nothing more soothing than the sound of rain.
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A surprising etymology of "tourist," from ancient pilgrims to the invention of the "tourist trap," and a case for seeing visitors as individuals rather than a crowd.