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A Cape Cod Notebook

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.

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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.

Cape Cod Notebook contributors from left to right: Mary Bergman, Seth Rolbein, Susan Moeller, Dennis Minsky, Tom Moroney
Cape Cod Notebook contributors from left to right: Mary Bergman, Seth Rolbein, Susan Moeller, Dennis Minsky, Tom Moroney

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.

  • I spent many years as an objective observer of this place. An academic, a historian, a researcher. On my better days, an anthropologist or some kind of gonzo documentarian, snapping pictures and recording my observations on the yellow legal pads I took everywhere, even the beach. N
  • He already was becoming the most exemplary former President maybe in history, picking up hammers to help build Habitat for Humanity homes, donning a suit and traveling the world to encourage free and fair elections.
  • Bob McKeon, a 78-year-old retired state trooper, splits his time, as many do, between his primary residence -- his is in North Attleboro -- and his place on the Cape in South Dennis. A favorite activity is going out to dinner, and when he started posting restaurant reviews on a popular Facebook page years ago, he gained more and more friends -- many of them touched by his endearing references to his singular dining companion: The Bride.
  • What is it that pulls so many of us to a Christmas Eve service, even if we are nonbelievers or haven’t stepped foot in a church since our cousin’s wedding in 2019?
  • With all the ongoing controversy about whether a machine gun range should be built on the Upper Cape, it seems fitting to go back in time and revisit some history that in retrospect seems all but impossible, but true:Cape Cod once was home to an arsenal of nuclear weapons, 56 bombs located about 600 feet from a residential subdivision, in what was then called Otis, now Joint Base Cape Cod.
  • I am a genuine birder but a somewhat old and lazy one, with limited ability and ancient binoculars. I have some idea what is out there- soaring, skulking, or flitting about- but it is woefully incomplete compared to the information possessed by the array of gifted and obsessed observers that roam the Cape on a regular basis with powerful optics and awesome cameras.
  • Cummiquid writer Susan Moeller takes a rabbit hole trip to an earlier Cape Cod.
  • The dark comes early. At first, I fought it. Disoriented, dazed. And doesn’t it feel like midnight, the moon pooling on the ocean, spilt milk reaching for the shore? At least the clock in the stove, the one I cannot figure out how to reset, is right again.