In 1861 -- only 10 years after Yosemite Valley had been "discovered" -- Carleton E. Watkins, perhaps the most famous early Western photographer, wandered this extraordinary natural wonder with heavy camera equipment strapped to mules and snapped images that inspired Abraham Lincoln to secure the world's first national park, in perpetuity, "for public use, resort, and recreation."

Today, many of our national parks -- Yosemite and Grand Canyon especially -- are perilously overcrowded, a reminder of what happens when a public patch of land becomes #instafamous.

African elephants are in trouble. According to the Save the Elephant organization, their numbers have fallen from as many as 10 million a hundred years ago to as few as 400,000 today, and they could be nearly extinct by the end of the next decade.

Amagansett firefighters extricated a man from a silver Toyota sport utility vehicle that had been struck by a delivery truck in front of Cirillo’s I.G.A. on Montauk Highway Thursday afternoon. 

In the history of written correspondence, the usefulness of postcards, in my opinion, falls somewhere between “telegram” and “tweet.” The sender has room for maybe three or four sentences — not a whole lot of space. But with a postcard it’s the picture that says the most, taking its recipient on a quick little journey to another place, maybe far away, maybe not.