The spotted hyenas soaked themselves in one of the many waterholes surrounding the vast, searing white pan of Etosha National Park in northern Namibia of southwestern Africa. The two scavengers were multitasking. While cooling off in the shallow pool of water, they were also strategizing on how to drive off a healthy-looking lioness and her […]

Society News is bringing you insider tips of the New York City arts and culture scene firsthand after spending five days there! A city brimming with things to do, here are some top go-to’s: Connoisseurs of jazz will find A-listers playing at the Blue Note on West 3rd Street in the Village and the historic […]

Globetrotting accountant Frank McGinity has published the fourth and last updated edition of Get Off Your Street, a personal travelogue recounting his travels from all seven continents. “It covers my travels over the last 25 years,” says Frank, who lives a tiara’s toss or two from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in Riven Rock. “Most […]

The 500-pound male mountain gorilla (also known as a silverback) was hungry, not hangry, just hungry in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda in Central Africa. As shafts of morning light penetrated the rainforest, he casually lumbered over to a dense stock of bamboo, the biggest shafts as round as a baseball bat. He looked upward […]

What’s black and white and bright all over? The freshly open (but still in the process of being built out) super-duper redo of The Inn at Mattei’s Tavern – thanks to interior designer/design team AvroKO, par excellence, who has not missed a detail from the bootjacks outside guest room doors to leather tabs on the […]

After the deluge, I took a quick, much-needed weekend jaunt up the coast. Our Central Coast hills, highways, and byways were verdant after the rains, making it hard to believe it’s still winter. Well, California winter. Tourism was evident (but not too crazy) and staffing issues are still difficult in the hospitality trade. Los Alamos […]

I was on an early morning beach run in Carpinteria, pink and orange hues melding across the eastern horizon. While weaving my way in soft sand past wintering killdeer and western snowy plovers, those hardy shorebirds thoroughly enjoyed the wrack lines of tattered giant bladder kelp left behind by the previous high tide. Later that […]

We hugged the crumbly west cliff face of Cuyler Harbor on San Miguel Island with no expectations from the seat of our kayaks. From afar, we couldn’t see any wildlife, but we could clearly hear first-year northern elephant seals snorting and bellowing on distant pocket beaches concealed along the rocky shoreline. I was paddling with […]

There was no denying the six-foot-tall dorsal fin cutting through the open ocean above the Soquel Canyon State Marine Conservation Area within the teeming waters of Monterey Bay, along the Central California Coast. Black and steeple-shaped, the dorsal fin belonging to a mature, male orca glistened in the morning sun. This apex predator is known […]

Descending San Miguel Hill at a feverish pace, I’d just left a freshly soddened Green Mountain to the west in my rearview mirror. San Miguel Island always delivering a diverse mix of unpredictable weather patterns. Green Mountain was cloaked in dewy fog and swept in 20 mph northwest winds. It felt like sideways rain as […]