Last spring Betty Burton received a call from a producer for Sesame Street. One of the most respected television programs for children had been branching out recently, from singing songs and learning how to count with fuzzy Muppet friends, to producing shows that educate kids about some of the bigger, more tragic issues kids face today. A new episode in the works was to be about poverty, specifically the issue of kids in America going hungry.

Each week for the past 10 years, Paul Karasik completes and sends about 10 cartoons to The New Yorker magazine. For those at home doing the math, that’s around 5,000 cartoons, give or take.

For more than 20 years Dr. Elliott Dacher practiced medicine. He was an internist going about his rounds of helping patients with their physical ailments. Over the years, however, he began to sense that something was missing. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he felt an inner longing, both for himself and for his patients, whom he felt were not receiving the entire package.

Last winter, Jennifer Sanford was sitting at her desk at MassMutual in Springfield where she works as a trader, when an e-mail message came across her screen. The message gave the details of an upcoming triathlon to be held later that summer on Martha’s Vineyard. Ms. Sanford had never entered a triathlon or a race really of any kind before and so it wasn’t the competition that first caught her eye. It was the date of the race: Sept. 11, 2011.

I have mixed feelings about going to the Agricultural Fair. This has nothing to do with the fair itself, which at 150-years-old has aged exceptionally well, maintaining its links to the past without a hint of mustiness. It is very much a thing of the present and this weekend I will bring my children to the fair many times.

On Wednesday, August 10, at 5 p.m. there will be a screening of the short film The Barber of Birmingham at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. The film is part of the ninth annual Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival taking place here on the Island, beginning today, August 9, and running through Saturday, August 13.