Essential Reads — Start Here
Our most complete guides on food, health, Long Island living, and more. Bookmark these.
Food & Health
Eating Well on Long Island — The Complete Guide to Keto, Organic & High-Protein Dining
Read the Guide Our KitchenHeritage Diner’s Kitchen — Our Philosophy, Recipes & How We Cook
Read the Guide Long Island DiningThe Complete Guide to Dining on Long Island’s North Shore
Read the Guide Long Island HistoryLong Island History: 20 Moments That Shaped the Island
Read the Guide A.I. & ScienceAI, Science & the Future — A Diner Owner’s Guide to Technology Reshaping Our World
Read the Guide Marcellino NYEnglish Bridle Leather Briefcases — The Complete Guide & How Marcellino NY Builds Them
Read the GuidePeter’s Personal Library of Book Reviews
El Greco’s View of Toledo — A City Painted from the Inside Out
Every landscape carries a mood. Most painters work to suppress it — to render the terrain accurately, neutrally, as a...
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Black Button Distilling — 1344 University Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607
Grain before glass. That is not merely a tagline at Black Button Distilling — it is a covenant, one that...
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Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys: Political Philosophy in Three-Minute Bursts
Punk didn't ask your permission. That was the whole point. It arrived like a fist through drywall — ugly, immediate,...
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley — What a Storm-Locked Villa and a Ghost Story Contest Produced
Some books earn their reputation one decade at a time. Frankenstein has been earning it for two centuries and shows...
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God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens — What the Man Left Behind When He Left
Hitchens died in December 2011. Esophageal cancer. He knew it was coming and he said so, publicly, in the same...
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Eating Well on Long Island: The Complete Guide to Keto, Organic, and High-Protein Dining from Farm to Fork
The industrial food system spent seventy years building a machine designed to make you sick and keep you fed. It...
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Peter’s Reading List: 50 Books That Built a Diner Owner, a Craftsman, and a Philosopher
Every library is an autobiography. Not the polished kind — the real kind, with the receipts. The books you kept,...
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Heritage Diner’s Kitchen: Our Philosophy, Our Recipes, and How We Cook on Long Island’s North Shore
Twenty-five years is a long time to stand behind a line. Long enough to know what works and what doesn't....
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AI, Science, and the Future: A Long Island Diner Owner’s Guide to Understanding the Technology Reshaping Our World
Nobody told you that understanding AI would be this complicated. Or this important. Or that ignoring it would cost you...
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Long Island History: 20 Moments That Shaped the Island — From the Culper Spy Ring to Lindbergh’s Takeoff
Long Island does not advertise its history. That's part of the problem. You drive Route 25A past strip malls and...
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English Bridle Leather Briefcases: The Complete Guide to What They Are, Why They Last, and How Marcellino NY Builds Them
Most briefcases sold today are theater. The frame is pressed cardboard. The "leather" is a polyurethane film stretched over bonded...
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The Complete Guide to Dining on Long Island’s North Shore — From Diners to Fine Dining
Long Island is 118 miles long and feeds more people than most states could dream about. That fact gets lost...
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Tenmile Distillery — 78 Sinpatch Road, Wassaic, NY 12592
Patience is the rarest ingredient in American food and drink culture. We live in a nation of instant gratification —...
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The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche: God Is Dead, and Heavy Metal Has Known It Longest
Friedrich Nietzsche published Die fröhliche Wissenschaft — The Gay Science — in 1882, and then expanded it in 1887 with...
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Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer — A Portrait of the Mind in Conflict
There is a reproduction of this painting mounted on wood in my living room — a canvas print I made...
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What Never Hits Zillow: The Hidden Inventory Problem on Long Island’s North Shore
Every few weeks, someone walks into the diner and says some version of the same thing: I've been watching the...
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Brooklyn Skinhead by Lou Morales — Boots, Brotherhood, and the God He Found After
Sunset Park in the late 1980s did not produce philosophers. It produced survivors. The blocks between Third and Fifth Avenue...
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A Kierkegaard Anthology, Edited by Robert Bretall: The Thinker Who Refused to Let Me Go
Reading Kierkegaard as someone who arrived through Nietzsche is, to put it plainly, disorienting. It is something like walking into...
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Ride the Lightning: Metallica, Fade Away
Metallica · Ride the Lightning · Megaforce Records / Elektra Records · Released July 27, 1984 Every kid growing up...
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An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method by Morris R. Cohen & Ernest Nagel — A Review
An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method — Morris R. Cohen & Ernest Nagel | First published 1934 | Harcourt,...
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