The plethora of free summer publications had not become stratospheric when the editorial we at The East Hampton Star decided something was missing — a guide to the restaurant scene.

The year was 2004, which makes our guide, À La Carte, almost 25 years old. Sheridan Sansegundo, our restaurant reviewer, was the guide’s guiding light (ahem) for many years. But when she took off for San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, the responsibility of seeing it to publication fell to me. 

Putting À La Carte together, even with the meticulous help of The Star’s versatile Jane Bimson in recent years, is quite a chore, and working on it makes you hungry. Coq au vin used to be the prevalent French entree on the best restaurant menus here. Who would’a thought that by the time we got to the 21st century a restaurant on the South Fork would offer such refined French dishes as “fricassée de homard du Maine, flambée au Cognac with pommes frites?” (Et cetera.)

The owners of stand-alone restaurants here are brave souls; it’s an incalculable risk to operate year round given the seasonal population and seasonal nature of almost all business. Instead, corporate restaurants, branches of big chains, have moved in, and summer residents and visitors are more likely than ever to look for clones of places they know and like in the city.

At least that is how it seems. Il Mulino, for example, which has eateries in SoHo and uptown Manhattan, as well as in Westchester, Roslyn, Las Vegas, and Puerto Rico, has taken over the big white elephant on the edge of Georgica Pond at Wainscott Stone Road, where restaurants have come and gone with regularity. I wish it luck, but doubt that it can count on success.

One of the reasons there is so much interest here in restaurants is that the South Fork is largely a resort and dining out is what you do on vacation. I am not quite sure, however, why East Hampton has for about half a century been a magnet for nationally known food writers. Perhaps it began with our extraordinarily rich farming and fishing resources. Or maybe one professional just follows another. 

The prolific writer A.J. Liebling, whose topics varied from journalism to boxing and a lot in between, was a part-time resident of Springs, and he concentrated on food in “Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris.” (I remember the time he carried a smoked pig’s haunch out on the Long Island Rail Road, but that is, as they say, another story.)

 The late Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food writer and cookbook author, lived and entertained in Springs, often working with the renowned chef Pierre Franey, who made Springs his home, while today Florence Fabricant holds a place of honor on The Times’s food pages. Did you know she got her start at The Star?

But back to À La Carte. The 2018 edition will be inserted in The Star on June 14 and then distributed widely in shops and gathering places. Pick up a copy and tell us what you think.

Welcome, once again, to the world. Thirty-two countries, 64 games, and 35 joyous days of football. It’s not called soccer anywhere else but America, and since Team U.S.A. did not qualify, there’s no reason to call it anything but football. The beautiful game is a simple one, as Gary Lineker, the English former professional footballer and current sports broadcaster, once put it, in which 22 tattooed men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans win.

Yes, but this World Cup is already proving to be different. We’re in murky Russia, after all, with Vladimir Putin — whose over-Botoxed face itself evokes the taut smoothness of a football — who appears to be able to bend every rule as skillfully as Beckham. Somehow, the host nation ended up in unquestionably the weakest group in the World Cup, alongside Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Uruguay, and viewers believe it can’t just be a coincidence. 

Nor could anyone fathom Russia’s 5-0 win over higher-ranked Saudi Arabia, prompting one clever football fan to tweet: “Revised opinion. Russia to win every game 6-0 and take the World Cup. Putin to lift the trophy in full kit.”

Putin, in response, has only smiled that contorted smile for the cameras and denied that any corruption has taken place. Well, he can be forgiven his smirk, because for him the tournament is not really about sport, it is about telling the world that Russia is back. Whichever nation lifts the trophy on July 15, one man’s victory looks secure.

In the first four days alone there were some opening-game stunners. Cristiano Ronaldo refused to allow Spain’s comeback story to overshadow his own. With a spectacular hat trick, the gimlet-eyed Portugal captain almost single-handedly denied Spain the victory it craved at the end of a torrid week that saw the dismissal of its manager. The action was nonstop and it kept coming back to Ronaldo, who produced one of the greatest performances of his international career. He is astonishing.

While flashy Brazil was held to a draw by Switzerland, the great Lionel Messi’s Argentina was stunned by an unlovely 1-1 draw against Iceland. Yes, Iceland, the country with a population the size of Tampa, Fla., and with absolutely no history of tournament football. No matter what happens next, Iceland has already established itself as the greatest story of the tournament. It was a true feather in the Viking helmet to be able to face Argentina in their World Cup debut and not blink. What heroes they were: brave, organized, superb.

The biggest hero was Hannes Thor Halldorsson, the 34-year-old goalkeeper, who, like every member of this Iceland squad, is only a part-time footballer. Halldorsson is a distinguished filmmaker. The team’s manager is a dentist.

Argentina certainly had the personnel to save itself, and Messi will regret his lackluster penalty as painfully as anybody. The stadium had just heard its first coordinated “Viking clap‚“ Iceland’s gift to football acoustics, when Argentina’s fans responded with song. They had the bigger numbers, the louder voice, and the arena had its first real taste of how a World Cup should sound. It was certainly an unforgettable day for Icelanders. All 300,000 of them.

Germany, always expected to be nothing less than super-efficient, faced utter humiliation losing to Mexico on Sunday. It was a horror show for the defending World Cup champions, who suffered a nightmare start after being defeated by a goal by Mexico’s Hirving Lozano, nicknamed Chucky after the character in the slasher movie “Child’s Play.” 

Even so, Mexico is no one’s favorite, as its fans directed a homophobic slur at Germany’s goalkeeper during the game. The International Federation of Football Association has repeatedly fined the Mexican football federation over this particular chant, and it was clearly audible at the stadium when the goalie prepared to take a kick.

And, ah yes, England. My home team. It hasn’t won an opening game since 2006, and on Monday, football’s most quietly tortured nation entered a World Cup arena with the burden of expectation close to zero. But through a plague of mosquitoes, a series of missed scoring opportunities, and a huge turnout by Tunisia’s supporters, the youthful England XI, with only 248 international wins and 25 goals in international competition among them, beat an obstinate, organized Tunisia. 

It was brilliant at times, it was brutal at times, but when England needed a matchwinner, up stepped Captain Kane. Two goals for Harry, three points for England. 

So, in less than a week, we have bowed at the feet of Cristiano Ronaldo, groaned with Lionel Messi, cheered Iceland’s pluck, witnessed the humbling of mighty Germany, and bubbled with optimism over England. The World Cup ruling bodies might be compromised by greed and corruption, but the beautiful game proves that it can still provide something unexpected — a connection to some enduringly distant corners of the world. And, so far in Russia, more kick than a shot of Stolichnaya.

Judy D’Mello is The Star’s education reporter.

President Reagan was said to have called ketchup a vegetable. And Nixon was said to have put ketchup on his cottage cheese. (I tried it, and shouldn’t have.) Reagan loved mac and cheese and favored a particular method of its preparation. And his fondness for jellybeans was known to the world. 

According to a website called The Daily Meal, President Obama’s personal chef said he snacked on exactly seven almonds every evening. “Michelle and I would always joke: not six, not eight,” the chef quoted Mr. Obama as telling The New York Times. But the president demurred, saying he had only been kidding, although he did admit to keeping a stash of healthy nuts around. 

The question is why any of us should be interested in what presidents eat and, in particular, President Trump’s preference for fast foods — a hamburger, a side of “deep-fried” macaroni and cheese, and a Diet Coke, for example. His is a true-blue big man’s diet, I suppose, so we shouldn’t begrudge his choices, although I have never seen nor heard of deep-frying mac and cheese.

President Trump is also said to favor only one flavor of ice cream, cherry vanilla, and to ask for two scoops when it is served at banquets while others at his table get only one. He also apparently likes his ice cream served alongside chocolate cream pie, but I couldn’t find out whether anyone else at the table gets some pie. As for President Obama’s almonds, Mr. Trump is reported to have replaced them with Lay’s potato chips. 

Many people, especially those who are faulted for being so-called elites, were shocked when Mr. Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Perhaps they wouldn’t have been if they had been paying more attention to what he was eating, which apparently was what middle-class white Americans usually have in their daily diets. The foods Mr. Trump enjoys might have presented an accurate clue to how the election was going to turn out.

Meanwhile, the foods we eat here on the East End of Long Island tell a cultural rather than a political story. Everyone, regardless of economic status, has the good luck to be able to have foods that are “locally sourced” — whether from land or sea — as foods are now often touted to be. Those who can afford it are also likely to obtain fine foods from all over the Western world in specialty markets.

We are taught not to judge character by anyone’s appearance. So far, so good. I’m afraid, however, that I’ve been tripped up by judging people’s beliefs by the foods they eat. I just have to remind myself that President Nixon’s place in American history has nothing to do with ketchup on his cottage cheese.

As I walked out under the trees and breeze and sun with O’en last Thursday morning, I remarked to him on what a beautiful day it was not to be going to the U.S. Open. 

Soon after, we saw my brother-in-law (you could tell he was a golfer from his faded pink pants) advancing behind a troika of golden dogs, like Apollo in his chariot. He too, I learned, was happy to be alive on that fine day, and happy also not to be going to the U.S. Open. We’ll watch the final round on Sunday, from about 4 p.m. on.

Denied inside-the-ropes access yet again, I’ve been telling people that, when it comes to seeing anything, “it will be like trying to take a photo of the ‘Mona Lisa’ in the Louvre.”

The last time I was at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club for a competition round, in 2004, I had to buy a periscope made by the Mickelson Group — for $65, I think it was, and later that year wrote it of­f as an unreimbursed professional expense. It’s in my trunk as I write, and, unless Duane Bock’s guy, Kevin Kisner, is in the running on Sunday, it will probably stay there.

Snippiness aside, the U.S.G.A. treated me fraternally when I was there for the first practice rounds on Monday with my son-in-law even though, as usual, I didn’t arrive with my papers in order. The photo on the press pass was a good likeness, though the tennis racket I’d been holding had been edited out.

Tennis, not golf, is my game. I don’t have the temperament to do anything that takes that long except sleep. As a fellow tennis player said to me the other day, “You make a bad shot in tennis and it’s over and done with — in golf you’ve got five to 10 minutes to stew over it as you walk along.”

Some guys I know play both sports, and it’s always fascinated me that they do. My hat’s off to them. My center doesn’t hold, I’m excitable, I interrupt, I jump to conclusions. That used to be on my voice mail, in fact: “Hi, this is Jack Graves, the sports editor. I’m either jumping to conclusions, running off my mouth, or batting the breeze. Please leave a message.”

Anyway, that day, as I remarked to O’en this morning, was a wonderful day to be alive — a day I spent with him rather than at the U.S. Open, a day rendered all the more joyous and secure in the knowledge that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat.

Sunday found me lying on my parents' couch UpIsland, watching reruns of "Diff'rent Strokes," while noting Mr. Drummond's glaring eligibility — a fact lost on me when the later episodes originally aired in 1984. I was 6  — and how I'm now old enough to marry Mr. Drummond and become stepmother to Arnold, Willis, and Kimberly. I Googled his age at the time of filming  — 61, the same age of my ex-fiance  — when my mom walked in to ask if I was ready.

It was my dad's 80th birthday, and my brothers and I had come home to celebrate at the Red Lobster in Mineola. We don't live in Mineola but make the drive from Dix Hills for all of our birthdays, as it's the only restaurant my parents trust. "Who knows what you're gonna get at a non-chain?"

We weren't there five minutes before Mom, fishing, asked if I was dating. I listed the week's prospects: A 27-year-old landscaper called Cat Daddy whom I met at the Eleanor Whitmore Center Barn Dance at Kilmore Farm and a philanthropic senior (80?) my married friend Marianna met in physical therapy. Mom unhooked the catches — baby shark and catfish — and threw them back. "Too young and too old. You need to find someone in the middle."

I'd been loitering around the Whitmore silent auction when I met Cat Daddy along with five of his friends, one of whom was called Suds. "I wash my truck a lot. I like it to be really clean," Suds said, before inviting me for a drink at Townline BBQ, half a block away.

They were already doing shots by the time I walked in. "Bubbly water with cranberry," said I, before the five scrambled to tell the bartender. They passed the glass from one to the other, before the last one passed it to me, watching with the curiosity of an alien race making first contact.

"You've never read 'Harry Potter?' " Suds exclaimed. Then Suds nudged Cat Daddy and asked if I'd have dinner with him at the American Hotel. The boys looked at me mischievously, and I felt like I was in junior high again. Cat Daddy likes you! Do you like Cat Daddy?

"Why doesn't he ask me himself?"

"He's shy," said Suds.

Cat Daddy looked bashful, then gave me a piece of paper to write down my number.

"We're all going to come and sit at the next table for moral support. Unless you have some single friends you could bring?"

I shrugged. "All my friends are married or widowed."

Suds: "How old are you?"

By Tuesday I was back East, having dinner at Pierre's in Bridghampton with my best friend, the novelist Frederic Tuten, who happens to be 81, when a 50ish woman at the next table whose party had just left interrupted us: "Is that your grandfather?" Before I could answer she said she used to go to dinner with her grandfather once a week and was touched to see us. "The elderly have so much to teach us," she finished 15 minutes later, still ignoring Fred who was pretending to gum his food.

When she was gone Fred and I resumed our conversation: About the frustrations of Henri Rousseau who, unable to secure a gallery, had mounted a show of his paintings at a furniture store. "No one came because he forgot to include the address on the flier. I love Picasso because Picasso loved Rousseau when no one else did. At a dinner they both attended, Rousseau made a toast, declaring he and Picasso the greatest artists of their age, 'He in the modern style, Picasso in the Egyptian,' said Rousseau, who was 37 years Picasso's senior." We'd been reminded of Rousseau by the recent death of a mutual friend, Malcolm Morley (86), who was due to have a show at the Parrish this summer, and whose paintings we agreed shared an affinity.

The next morning, I drove Fred to the Jitney in Southampton. I was walking away from the Manhattan bound Ambassador when an ex-boyfriend, now a lawyer, strode up to wait for the following bus. We broke up 15 years ago, when I was 25 and he 26, but for three years before that we'd come out every weekend and stay at his parents' house on Ocean Avenue, and go to nightclubs like Jet East or M-80 or else get wasted on the vast lawns of his friend's parents. They'd set up a golf tee at the edge of the patio and, standing with legs apart and hands in red pants pockets, take turns launching the balls out into the dark.

A mid-island girl in a crowd of Upper East Siders who'd "prepped" and summered "out east" — when asked how we met, I'd say it was at the gas station in the Valley of Ashes a la "Gatsby," likening myself to Tom Buchanan's mistress Myrtle Wilson — I felt misfit and was always concocting excuses to stay back in my hot and loud apartment over the Midtown Tunnel where it was at least impossible for me to say the wrong thing.

When we weren't partying with his friends in those days, we partied with his parents' friends, sitting for long poolside lunches while servants buzzed around, holding platters to my right so I might serve myself with tongs. Unsure of my table manners, I did my best not to call attention to myself, failing spectacularly when I began choking on a piece of chicken because I'd been too afraid to risk "reaching" and too shy to ask for more water.

I hadn't seen him since last fall when he and his parents invited me to a Hamptons International Film Festival screening of a documentary about Itzhak Perlman, a family friend.

"Are you out?" he said, asking of my summer plans. He wouldn't be this weekend, he explained. "Spencer's getting married," he said, as if marriage were the most far-fetched thing, as if we were all still just out of college.

"I got engaged," I blurted. "Then disengaged, so I'm back to normal now."

"That's good," he said, referring to my engagement, "It makes you seem less weird. What else is new?"

I waved to Fred as the Ambassador pulled away. "I'm writing a column for The Star."

"Everyone reads The Star," I recalled his mother telling me over a bowl of cherries next to the pool 17 years ago, "crime blotter first." She read aloud from the humiliations, as I leaned back into the whicker and watched my boyfriend throw a Frisbee to his dog.

"I didn't see it when I stopped by my parents' this weekend" — he has his own place now in Noyac — "though admittedly, I only looked to see when 'DeadPool 2' was playing."

Back at my rental in Amagansett, I fielded an email from Marianna's older man: A list of contemporary book recommendations published by The New Yorker. F.Y.I., never give reviews of contemporary writers to other writers, unless they're scathing. To do otherwise is like sending a profile of one movie starlet to another, asking her to appreciate how the former's enigmatic beauty fills the screen, while in person her small pixie-like frame surprised this journalist as he quizzed her on her diet of nuts and seeds. It's true, as they say, that novelists like to play god. I'm not the first to declare, "Thou shalt have no other!"

Instead, I declared, "Thanks. What are you going to read this summer?"

Minutes later, he sent a long list of books he wasn't going to read but would like to. Wrong! Correct Answer: YOURS. Then he emailed again, asking if I'd like to meet for a one-on-one dinner prior to our foursome on Wednesday. I emailed Marianna, "We're having dinner on Wednesday?"

"They're either too young or too old," I hummed, feeling like Bette Davis in the World War II film "Thank Your Lucky Stars." (She was 35 when it shot in 1943.)

Opting to stay home, I made myself an omelette for dinner and thought about Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein. Stein's cook was always preparing omelettes, unless she didn't like Stein's guests, then she'd fry the eggs over easy. "It doesn't look like her," people said of the painting when they came to Stein's Paris salon and found her sitting beneath it. "It will," said Picasso through a mouthful of omelette, according to the "Autobiography of Alice B Toklas," which was penned by Stein but attributed to Toklas, in order that she might have someone besides herself call her a genius. (Did I mention Frederic Tuten is coming out with an autobiography?)

Brushing my teeth, I studied my own portrait in the mirror, noting how it too did not look at all like me. "It will," I spit and went to bed.

In the morning, I cruised the #waybackwednesdays on Instagram, R.S.V.P.ed to Guild Hall's Guitar Masters kickoff party at Dick Cavett's Montauk estate Tick Hall, and by noon was walking into the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton for a lecture, "Women Secret Agents" in World War II.

Close-cropped white hair decorated the room while walkers here and there flanked the 70-odd chairs, most of them filled. "How many of you have seen 'Dunkirk?' " the lecturer, Patricia Del Giorno, asked. All hands but mine went up. "I see we're all the same age here," Ms. Del Giorno went on, "so when I do this historical review, I know you'll all know to what I'm referring."

But before that, Penelope Wright, the program's curator told us a war story about her parents, members of this country's Greatest Generation, and expressed her regret at not having asked them more questions when they were alive to answer. It was the 74th anniversary of D-Day, she noted, a day too way back for #waybackwednesday to reach; on Instagram I had seen no hints. I did not know.

Other things I did not know:

Facing the Nazi threat, Churchill had formed the S.O.E., the Special Operations Executive, nicknamed "the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare," a guerilla unit so secret even Parliament did not know it existed.

Its mission: To infiltrate occupied countries, organize and support resistance, provide arms and equipment, subvert and destroy enemy operations (blow up trains, etc.) — "Set Europe ablaze!" Moreover, it was the first agency to recruit women for combat roles. Who were these brave women? Journalists, clerks, teachers, housewives, an Indian princess, a Polish countess — all believers who, no matter how great the risk, knew the Nazis must be stopped.

The risks: There was a 50-percent mortality rate among agents, a six-week life span for radio operatives, agents were given cyanide pills to swallow if caught and facing torture, and faced deportment to German camps under operation "Nacht und Nebel," a.k.a. "Night and Fog," so called for Hitler's order that those captured should disappear as if into night and fog, with no record kept, without a trace.

The S.O.E. was the subject of Ms. Del Giorno's (82) master's thesis she told me after. After retiring from a career in nursing, she took a masters degree in English literature at Stony Brook University. "The lecture was fascinating," Jola Marcario attested, having also rushed the podium following its conclusion. An East Hamptonite, Ms. Marcario regularly ventures west for the library's lectures accompanied by her two friends, Daughters of the American Revolution Harriet Edwards and Mary Ella Moeller. "It's for adults, not seniors," Jola told me pointedly. "Our generation is not satisfied with Bingo. We worked! We're interested!"

The three handed me fliers for upcoming events. "On Sunday we have a concert series. You should come to that."

The library circular is broken into two parts: programs for kids and programs for adults. With Facebook and Smart TV tutorials scheduled at noon, the adult programming is clearly aimed at the distinguished set. There are no library programs for those in their prime, for they're busy doing shots at Townline or teeing up golf balls and aiming for the abyss. The true marker of youth is not how well you invest it, but how carelessly you piss it away. Rich with time, the young can afford to lose a lot of it, to waste and get wasted. I do not begrudge them. We were all aristocrats once.

"So you have five adult children and a Porsche," said Marianna, reviewing what the older man had so far told us about himself. Marianna's husband, Harper, looked out at the yachts, secreting so many rich men's mistresses, we speculated, that flanked Le Bilboquet on Sag Harbor's Long Wharf. I was the last to unfold my napkin ("Whoever unfolds their napkin last loses!" my ex had instructed me 17 years ago.), as the older man invited the younger waitress (25?) to taste his wine. I took a deep breath and relaxed in my chair, as he asked her all the usual first date questions.

"Today is the 74th anniversary of D-Day," he said when she left. "I've just been to Normandy; the beaches are fantastic."

An alert on my phone. "Excuse me." Someone had commented on my Instragram photo of the World War II lecture: "Born at the wrong time?"

Over desert, the conversation turned toward reading and how it's a shame no one reads anymore (though more and more people write). "My daughter wrote a preteen book blog for BookHampton some years back and wants to do something for The Star," said Marianna, before the older man asked our waiter where the waitress had gone — "The one with the red lipstick" — and Harper and I debated the merits of authors neither of us had read.

"I haven't read it but people whose opinion I trust said its great."

"I haven't read it either, but people whose opinion I distrust said it's great."

The older man walked me to my car. I reciprocated by giving him a lift back to his BMW — "My other BMW's in the shop." — at the other end of the dock. Climbing into my parents' Hyundai he said, "What's this?" and picked up a roll of toilet paper my parents had left in the car to use as tissue. Embarrassed, I scrambled for an acceptable excuse. "In case I go to the bathroom by the side of the road. I'm not an animal."

When I got home I opened my email. The older man: "Thanks for coming to dinner," along with a link to an obituary of a writer he'd not read. There is no wrong or right time, there is only now.

I put on my pajamas and got into bed with a book, "The Age of Innocence," then opened my computer to watch "Dynasty" reruns on Amazon instead, pausing now and then to Google the actors' ages at the time of filming. I am the same age as Crystle, 40, when she married Blake Carrington, 65, after her affair with Mathew Blaisdel, 39, whose widow Claudia, 30, is now married to Blake's son Steven, 23. "Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?"

I’ve always thought that East Hampton would serve as a good model for what this country should be, a place in which people, despite their differences, cared for one another when you came down to it and cared for the naturally blessed place in which they lived, to wit, that here people could indeed live for a cause bigger than themselves, as the late Ben and Bonnie Krupinski did.

East Hampton will forever be in their debt, and its people, as I think they will, ought to honor the couple’s memory by not forgetting their example, however unmatchable when it comes to the scope of their good works it might be.

I didn’t know them really, though I’ve known Ben’s brother, Frank Ackley, a long time, and have always been drawn to his candid manner, which I imagine he shared with his brother, and have always admired his feisty can-do spirit.

So, I’m thinking I was wrong ever to have thought of Ben as merely an aggrandizer when, in fact, in him were mixed, in perhaps equal measure, the pride that attends self-made success and a concern for others. In that, he and Bonnie embodied what to my mind sets this place apart, what has made it such a great example for the country, which, I think, with the deaths of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., lost its way.

Call it participatory democracy or a cooperative republic, what you will, it is the spirit of this place, and I couldn’t help but think, in reading all the tributes today, that the Krupinskis, who died in a plane crash heading home on June 2 with their pilot, Jon Dollard, and with their 22-year-old grandson, Will Maerov, are its avatars. 

We called Eric Firestone the porgy whisperer when he got back on dry land. And with good reason. Last year, he landed the biggest porgy ever taken on my boat. This year, he brought aboard the largest porgy I had ever seen anywhere.

Porgies, another friend said the other day, are the misunderstood fish. People who are used to boneless fillets don’t know what to do with one in the round. And that name, porgy, somehow just does not make one think of fine dining. Oh, but some have tried; one restaurant tried marketing them as Montauk sea bream. 

We are not deterred. A little knife work produces pieces suitable for breading and frying. Scaled and gutted, they are spectacular cooked over a good wood-coal fire. There are other preparations underway in my secret test kitchen as well, but they are not ready for sharing, or maybe the world is not ready. Eric and I are ready, however, and are devotees.

Saturday morning was wonderfully still as we left the dock at Three Mile Harbor. At what seemed to me a late hour — 8 a.m. — there were scarcely any other boats on the water. Frankly, there very rarely are. Such is the paradox of boat ownership: Most stay tied up most of the time. For what owning a boat costs, even a small outboard one like mine, it seems imperative to get out as often as possible, ideally twice a week, either fishing or just cruising around with family or friends.

As far as Eric (Fishhooks) Firestone, the Porgy Whisperer, is concerned though, it’s all about dropping a line. Out far in the bay, we set up a drift along a 17-foot contour line, according to the depth finder. The bite on our clam and squid offerings was active enough that I set to jabbering, as I tend to do with porgy on the line. (Oddly enough, this is the only fish that inspires such vocalized reveries. Get a bluefish or bass on the line, and I only grunt, if I say anything at all.)

Eric’s monster came toward the end of the morning. When he pulled it up, he said it felt heavy — big, even. After we got back and went our ways, Eric did a little research online. The record for porgy was 4 pounds, 6 ounces, he texted me from work. 

Some hours later, I put a battery in my fish scale. Eric’s beast weighed in at 2 pounds, 11 ounces, and tasted mighty fine that evening for dinner.

Since the East Hampton Library placed a dandy touch-screen coffee machine on its circulation desk last month, some of the Star staff have spent a lot more time next door. That might not be the case with the enigma that is Russell Bennett, who takes regular breaks to sit in one of the comfortable leather chairs and flip through a book. For several of the rest of us, the lure of made-to-order coffee, for $1 if we take our own mug, is irresistible. 

On both Monday and Tuesday this week, I was able to hold out until about 3 p.m. Then, a ceramic cup in hand, I went next door to the library with my dollar bills. Conversation around the Starbucks-brand machine is light and, for me, a nice diversion from the day’s typing. Upon return, coming up with new ways to vex elected officials or write a mouth-watering description of a Saturday church barbecue is a whole lot easier — even after a half-caf, one of the coffee beast’s many options.

Mugs are never a problem around this office, or the library’s break room, as I found out. While there may never be a teaspoon in the upstairs kitchen silverware drawer, mugs we’ve got. We have so many, in fact, that earlier this year when I made a fine Manhattan clam chowder for a friend’s potluck birthday, I boxed up about two-dozen random ceramic mugs in which to serve it. I have not yet dropped by to pick up the box; its absence has made scarcely a dent in our office stash.

Dennis Fabiszak, who runs the library, told me that he applied to Starbucks for the machine after numerous requests from patrons. It dispenses chai, three roasts of coffee, and hot water for tea. Other than in the Long Island Collection area, where irreplaceable hoary town records of great value are kept, we can drink our drinks of choice anywhere in the library.

My East Hampton grandmother, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, for whom one wing of the library is named, used to spend long hours there researching her history books. The story goes that my father would sometimes be sent down from the house, which is just up the lane, to tap at the window and remind his mother of mealtimes. One wonders what heights of greatness she might have attained had she had access to a powerful brew as well.

I applauded James Clapper, the former C.I.A. director, the other night when I heard him say he thought Russia had won the election.

He said it with finality — I had on these pages in mid-April merely wondered if it were true — and Judy Woodruff, his interviewer, said it was a stunning conclusion if so.

As I say, you don’t know what to believe anymore. Nothing’s out of bounds. What John McCain said in “The Restless Wave” about our founding principles almost sounds elegiac. 

It’s all for one and all for one now. You wonder if ever again there will be general agreement as to a common purpose in domestic and foreign affairs aside from enriching the rich at home while sucking up to myriad capricious dictators.

I would go so far as to include in that number the National Football League, which this week took a stand on standing when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. This may well be the land of the free, though the millionaire minions whose heroics and brain-scrambling collisions delight us each Sunday in the fall apparently are not. Presumably we are not to be reminded when the national anthem is played of any divisions that may exist in this fissured country.

What were those principles the senator cited? For one, that this is “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men [and women] are created equal.” And that our great cause, the cause that binds us, lies in defending the dignity of all human beings and their right to freedom and equal justice.

I didn’t find it undignified when the N.F.L. players knelt and locked arms. It seemed right, as if it were more an act of supplication than protest. After all, it is what is done in church every Sunday, in humility and adoration.

Linking arms and kneeling is, in fact, the best way, I think, to celebrate this country’s strengths while praying at the same time that its wounds be healed — our slavishness to mammon perhaps being chief among them, an addiction that can bring many to heel.

Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics, a form of manipulation aimed at sowing doubt in an individual or in members of a group to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. 

I know this to be true, because I read it on the internet.

Sociopaths, Wikipedia continues, transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically also are convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing.

I’ll return to this notion, but first will acknowledge a small measure of satisfaction that Alex Jones, a contemptible huckster and apparent confidant of the president of the United States who trumpets conspiracy theories to an audience of profoundly confused Americans, is the subject of three lawsuits. The Times reported last week that Mr. Jones, who has asserted that the 2012 mass shooting in which 20 first graders and six adults were murdered was a hoax, staged by the government as a pretext to confiscate firearms, has been targeted by families of those slaughtered on that December day in Newtown, Conn. 

Naturally, the self-styled courageous crusader, now that he is in the crosshairs, so to speak, equivocates. After lawsuits were filed last month, according to The Times, he claimed that he “very quickly . . . began to believe that the massacre happened,” this despite “the fact [sic] that the public doubted it.” 

The article, “Truth in a Post-Truth Era: Sandy Hook Families Sue Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theorist,” details the regular harassment and threats, including of murder, to the families of the slain children, thanks in no small part to the bloviating Mr. Jones. What a vast understatement to say that for the devastated families, he has added grievous insult to injury. 

I would remind this wearisome loudmouth that karma is the cosmic cash register, seeing to it that no debt goes unpaid. May that debit be extracted sooner rather than later, a la “Instant Karma!” by John Lennon, who was most definitely shot dead in 1980 by a profoundly confused American of an earlier era. 

Mr. Trump has certainly done his part to inject ambiguity and disorientation, appearing on Mr. Jones’s radio show during his campaign for the presidency, The Times notes. The president has called the news media the “enemy of the American people,” a phrase for which Mr. Jones claimed credit, and parroted the charlatan’s bogus assertion that millions of undocumented immigrants voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who, in the world of objective reality, won the popular vote by almost three million. 

Last week, the television journalist Lesley Stahl detailed a 2016 postelection conversation in which the president-elect told her that he continually bashes the press “to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” 

On Saturday, the president complained, via Twitter, that “The Failing @nytimes quotes ‘a senior White House official,’ who doesn’t exist. . . .” Of course, his claim that The Times was lying was easily proven to be itself a lie, just one of thousands he has told over these last 16 months. Earlier this month, apparently citing that fortress of fairness and balance — “Fox & Friends” — Mr. Trump, a man who for years peddled the lie that President Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, tweeted that “91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake).” It was, I think, his most illuminating utterance of all. 

“Now that he is president,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman wrote in The Times this week, “Mr. Trump’s baseless stories of secret plots by powerful interests appear to be having a distinct effect.” The president of the United States “is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth, and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media that mirror his own.” 

It bears repeating: Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics, a form of manipulation aimed at sowing doubt in an individual or in members of a group to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. 

I know this to be true. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer for The Failing @EHStar.