Essex County News

EDISON, NJ-- April is National Poetry month, and throughout the month second grade students at The Wardlaw+Hartridge School in Edison read, studied and wrote various poems. Typically, the second graders hold a “Poetry Cafe” where they perform in front of a live audience of family members. However, due to COVID restrictions this year, the students took their performance to ...

EDISON, NJ-- Taliyah Williams of Rahway, a senior at The Wardlaw+Hartridge School in Edison, was among three local high school seniors to receive Good Citizen Awards from The Westfield Chapter of The Daughters of The American Revolution (DAR).

Each school selected one Good Citizen from their senior class based on Dependability (truthfulness, loyalty, punctuality), Service (cooperation, ...

EDISON, NJ-- Twelve seniors in the Class of 2021 at The Wardlaw+Hartridge School in Edison shared their research and findings on a variety of pertinent topics in last week’s Capstone presentations in the Center for Global Learning. This project, a requirement to graduate with the Global Scholars Program diploma, involves many components including a written paper, action research ...

EDISON, NJ-- Lower School students at The Wardlaw+Hartridge School in Edison capped a three-week read-a-thon in April with some impressive numbers. The students logged 20,438 minutes of total reading. Fourth-grader Josh Culver of Colonia led all students with 1,368 minutes, which is nearly one full day! Total donations reached $4,130 and the proceeds will go toward a fund to diversify Lower ...

EDISON,NJ-- Middle School students at The Wardlaw+Hartridge School in Edison are celebrating their own divisional Spirit Week from May 3-7. Students are having a blast embracing daily themes to begin the home stretch of this unprecedented school year in style.

The week kicked off with Match a Friend Monday on which students joined up to four friends with matching outfits. Teachers joined the ...

EDISON, NJ-- The Junior Kindergarten class at The Wardlaw+Hartridge School in Edison concluded its lifecycle unit by releasing their Painted Lady butterflies in the Lower School garden on April 28. Early Childhood students learned about the lifecycles of ladybugs, chickens, frogs and the butterfly. 

“We received our butterflies as caterpillars and watched them form chrysalis as they ...

SAYREVILLE, NJ -- Brandon Bielak, a Sayreville native who played his high school baseball at St. Joseph High School (Metuchen), took the mound for the Houston Astros against the Yankees Tuesday evening in a hostile Yankee Stadium, where fans released their anger over Houston's sign-stealing scandal became public following the 2019 ALCS.

Bielak had the thrill of ...

Like it or not, the idea that “all politics is local'' is no longer reality. Instead, local government has been poisoned by the toxic political environment once confined at the state and federal levels.

Local reporters used to be shielded from the national political discourse, in part because municipal elections typically don’t include Rs or Ds next to candidate ...

NEW PROVIDENCE, NJ - When marketing your services or products, the best place to start is right in the community you serve. Your local community is full of potential new and returning customers, and that market is essential for you to sustain and grow. 

Local marketing is trending, and now more than ever it is important for your business to be prominent in your local market.

According ...

NEW PROVIDENCE, NJ - If you own a business, you might be familiar with lots of trends in marketing that promise to increase your business: social media and email campaigns, as well as paid and organic ads. One trend that tends to get overlooked is SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is a proven and necessary tool, but you may ask yourself, “What is it?” and “How can you best ...

SAYREVILLE, NJ - Longtime TAPinto Scotch Plains-Fanwood franchisee John Mooney is taking his talents to the banks of the Raritan. After spending years growing TAPinto Scotch Plains-Fanwood into one of the networks top 5 most-visited sites, Mooney is officially launching TAPinto Raritan Bay, covering Sayreville and South Amboy, N.J.

“Since I am familiar with Sayreville-South Amboy and ...

Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker. Harper Perennial, 

2013.

I first learned about this “unsolved American mystery,” when 48 Hours did a comprehensive show on the horrific discovery of four bodies wrapped in burlap sacks in 2010. The deceased were discovered on Gilgo Beach, a desolate stretch of sand that did not host excited, Sunday sun ...

Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power by Neal Gabler. (Yale 

Univ. Press, 2016).

Stephen Spielberg: A Life in Films by Molly Haskell. (Yale Univ. Press, 2017)

My family complains each year at holiday time that I am impossible to buy gifts for. This is true because, usually, if I want something, I purchase it myself. They ask me for lists, but even ...

The Persian Always Meows Twice: A Cat Groomer Mystery by Eileen Watkins.        (available on Amazon).

        Cassie McGlone needs to start over, escape from an abusive ex-boyfriend, and establish a business of her own. An independent woman, Cassie moves to Chadwick, New Jersey (a fictional town somewhere near Morristown) ...

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press, 2021)

We can’t quibble that Kristin Hannah is one of the most respected authors on the contemporary scene. Her new book, The Four Winds, is number 1 on the New York Times Book Review. Hannah is a wonderful storyteller, who frequently uses the theme of the importance of family in our lives, which is a universal theme, ...

Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness that Ended the Sixties by Dianne Lake and Deborah Herman. (Harper Collins, 2017).

I am skeptical of the true crime genre because so much of it is poorly written and sells for its sensationalistic value rather than its literary worth. The only decent book that I have read about Charles Manson and ...