I received my official 2024 vote by mail application today from the Mass. Elections Division, and it reminded me of the systems, checks, and balances that make sure our elections […]

We started this newspaper with plans focused on the future — one where small-town newspapers thrived again. But some of the things we hoped for were old-fashioned. We wanted people […]

It’s hard for me to understand those people who believe there is a “deep state” of corrupt government officials determined to take away our rights. The fabrications and fantasies of […]

There are certain words that pop up frequently in news stories and set off alarms in an editor’s brain. Several of them appeared in our report last week about an […]

Sometimes it feels as if being a journalist consists mostly of waiting for return phone calls from people who are never going to call you back. The other day I […]

When I heard that Provincetown was hosting an “active shooter attack prevention and preparedness” training session, my initial reaction was skepticism. The town’s press release said, “This crucial training event […]

I taught writing to college freshmen back in the 1980s, when the internet was young. As a tool for doing research, the new technology seemed almost magically powerful and seductive. […]

There is so much to fear. Hard-won progress in civil rights, reproductive rights, and gender equality has rapidly eroded; we are beyond the overture of a climate catastrophe; war and […]

We started this newspaper in 2019 because we saw journalism dying here. The Provincetown Banner and the Cape Codder, once robust, were struggling. Word was readers and advertisers didn’t care […]

Jack Styler is a young writer who will be joining our newsroom as a staff reporter next month. He’s a Midwesterner; he graduated from the University of Wisconsin two years […]

In a front-page story in last week’s Independent, Paul Benson took a look at some of the supposed facts that have surfaced in talk about affordable housing on the Outer […]

Is writing a dying art? Sometimes I wonder. Years ago, I taught expository writing to freshmen at a college where many of the students were intensely ambitious. The ones who […]

Last week the Boston Globe reported “a rare bit of good news on the housing front — at least for vacationers” on Cape Cod: “renting at a reasonable rate might […]

Two weeks ago, page 3 of the Independent was our annual April Fool’s fake front page. We’ve done this for five years, and you might think that readers would have […]