Having spent most of the past two weeks in bed with what appeared to be the flu, Twitter and I have gotten to know each other well. Not that I tweet, or post, much; instead I have spent hours upon hours following various threads on which the authors express outrage about the election. Twitter is as good a place as any to drive you to despair. But it is also a place where one can get a deeper understanding of what is going on.

There are plenty of straight-up maniacs, but there are also good, thoughtful people on Twitter. I have been reading closely, for example, posts from Norm Eisen, who was a top White House ethics lawyer in the Obama administration. Mr. Eisen co-founded a group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and with Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush White House from 2005 to 2007, wrote a compelling op-ed in The Washington Post before the election laying out what they saw as the ethical challenges of a Trump presidency. 

The piece was persuasive — and here is where Twitter shines, in my opinion. Readers like me who wanted more have been able to follow Mr. Eisen’s thoughts in the ensuing weeks. Twitter is good for that. Used well, it is a way to understand the world as seen through many of its most qualified observers. 

On the other hand, it can be a bludgeon. See Donald Trump’s attacks on a union boss who crossed him at that Indiana Carrier plant ­or the president-elect’s tweet about the cost of a new Air Force One that tanked Boeing’s stock. There is some talk that Mr. Trump’s staff will wrest away his cellphone once he is in the White House to preserve the dignity of the presidency and avoid the possibility of a war based on late-night rant.

Whether or not Mr. Trump remains on Twitter, it is now an essential part of the contemporary political scene. Those interested in knowing what is really going on would do well to follow along.

The late boys basketball coach Roger Golden, when I asked what it was he loved about basketball, said, “The gyms are warm.”

And indeed it’s so, especially in Bridgehampton’s, that tiny black-and-gold bandbox that has a precious quality that you don’t find in the more modern, ill-lit, cavernous ones. 

True, Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees, winners of nine state championships, with perhaps yet another on the way, deserve (have deserved for years) a regulation-size gym, one sanctioned for playoff games that the team would otherwise have to contest on the road. But it will be sad to see this jewel go. 

Well, it won’t go — it will remain an auditorium, with its curtained stage, the momentary resting place sometimes of the backsides of players intent on making layups, at one end, and, at the other, two wide doorways through which the ball can be inbounded more easily than when pressed up against the padded “Killer Bees” wall in between.

The gym is interesting, too, for the fact that, while it provides a warm and intimate setting for the lucky fans often jammed into it, it can at the same time be frightening for teams not used to playing in such close quarters. You’ve got to be good, really good, to win there because there’s no room to breathe. Hold on to the ball and you’re done. There’s no time, no space. Pass, pass, shoot. 

The games have a prizefight aura without the crushing blows that attend boxing rings, though crashing into the wall, however much padded, is not a fate you’d wish upon anyone. It happened in last night’s game with Port Jefferson to J.P. Harding, and it was nice to see him get up and make both free throws. 

Afterward, everybody comes out onto the floor and it’s a wonderful feeling, like a warm embrace.

A feeling that I doubt you’ll find many places in this world. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Leo the pig. Regular readers know all about Leo, a supposed teacup pig that now, at age 4, has grown to what I estimate to be 130 pounds.  

My oldest child had found a Texas trailer park breeder on the internet who promised that the cute pink piglet would never exceed 10 pounds — money back guaranteed.  As I have written before, I said it was impossible that he would remain small, and, anyway, we did not need a pig as a pet. I was overruled, even if these four years later I am proven right.

The question now is what to do with him. I did not want Leo in the first place, but the way things turned out, he has mostly become my responsibility. Most mornings, well before my alarm goes off, Leo is up from his comfortable bed near the fireplace, looking to be fed. 

He makes his desires known first with a round of loud grunts. Next, if that does not get me out of bed, he increases the pressure by knocking over whatever he can, be it kitchen chairs, the metal bathroom garbage basket, or his self-filling water fountain on the porch. He is smart that way; I get up and fill his bowl as the dogs stand by wondering for all the world why they did not think of that themselves.

Truth is that I don’t mind feeding the pig and the dogs all that much. The bigger problem is that Leo enjoys chewing the woodwork. Some time ago he discovered the pleasure of snapping chunks off the shingles on the enclosed porch. An antique chest is increasingly distressed with teeth marks. He has chewed nearly all the way through the edges of the few stairs he can reach. Normal outdoor pigs root in the ground; Leo prefers to express his creative urges in the warm indoors.

We could move him outdoors, but with the cold months ahead that would be cruel. Plus, if we gave him a heated pad to sleep on or a shed to hide in, he would soon chew through the wires and electrocute himself or burn down the shed. The couple of animal rescue farms we got in touch with said they were full up with pigs. 

Keeping Leo seems out of the question. We are down to only a few pieces of furniture on the level of the house that he can roam in, and he smells so bad that having people over for dinner or a drink is impossible. 

My best plan, though I doubt I’ll get around to it, is to borrow a pony trailer and haul Leo back to Texas. If we are not going to get our money back, at least we might get the satisfaction of dropping him off at the breeder’s. Anyway, it would make for a hell of a story.

In putting The Star together we agree that it benefits not just from a variety of feature and news stories each week but diversity among the opinion pieces. “How about the holidays or a funny anecdote?” I’ve been asked when trying to come up with a topic of late. In recent weeks, though, it has not always been easy to supply the requisite entertainment or light humor. 

Clearly, I am not alone in looking for words of wisdom about facing what looks to become a grim epoch in this country’s history: I apologize that two out of three columns on this page are devoted to the subject of how to conduct yourself under an authoritarian regime. (And, well, at least Jack Graves has written about his sister this week — see the bottom of the page — rather than the state of the nation, which he is also often wont to do.)

Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale with a concentration  on Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Holocaust,  is the author of “Twenty Lessons From the 20th Century, Adapted to the Circumstances of Today,” an essay that is making the rounds online. He speaks 5 and reads 10 European languages, and has written six award-winning books and co-authored others. He is a prolific essayist and commentator on American politics.

“Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit­ler and Stalin” traces the circumstances that led to dictatorship in Germany and Russia. It  has won 12 awards and been translated into 33 languages.  His most recent book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” will appear in 24 foreign editions. 

What better academic to take advice from now?

“Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism,” Mr. Snyder writes in prefacing his “20 Lessons.” 

Here are a few of his maxims that seem most appropriate to follow today:

“When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. . . .  Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.”

“Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

“Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.” 

“Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.”

“Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up auto-pay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.”

“Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.”

Until the Electoral College confirmed Donald Trump as president-elect on Monday, I refused to believe he would make it to the White House. Now, I’m afraid, it is time to take advice like Professor Snyder’s to heart.

The summer’s drought ended the last of whatever miracle had been holding up the old beech tree outside my office window. Two weeks before Christmas, Kevin Savastano and his crew arrived early on a cold Friday morning, as promised, to take it away.

For years, the tree had been a seasonal curtain on my view of Main Street and the comings and goings at the library. From my desk, I look out due south toward the Town Pond Green flagpole. When the leaves were on the old beech, I could not see much, but in the winter, it was different, with a view clear to the Mulford Farm.

Kevin stopped in the office on Tuesday, looking for a check for the work, and said  the beech had been imploding and had it not been removed it almost surely would have fallen apart this winter and damaged the Star building across the narrow driveway.

Not knowing what to look for, the beech had seemed all right to me, at least in the spring. Yet by the beginning of autumn, branches had begun to fall. 

There is a bright line between life and death, I often think, but it is less obviously so for a tree. When we humans are alive, even barely and in our dying days, we are clearly alive. I think of Richard Higer, one of our most faithful letter-writers, who died on Dec. 5 of pneumonia. Mr. Higer rarely, if ever, missed a week to share his opinions with our readers. His last message, full of his left-of-center thinking, arrived at my in-box on Nov. 26,

Looking out our front-office window on a rainy Tuesday, Kevin Savastano told me that two European beech trees just up the way at Woods Lane will soon have to be taken down. I went out for a look later; even in dying, trees hold on to their majesty far longer than we do. There was nothing about their massive gray forms with rainwater slicking down their bark that said their time had come.

With the big beech that had been outside my window gone, I can see farther down Main Street to the pond. I can see each branching twig, bare of its leaves, as it reaches into the lungs of the sky. This is when trees seem vastly more interesting; there is no discernable structure to a tree in June. Summer’s cloak hides what is really going on. January lets us in on the secrets.

My first home of my own after college was an apartment on Sag Harbor’s Main Street, just south of the Sag Harbor Cinema. I lived there for six years in my 20s, watching the village’s daily life unfold through the front windows. 

On Memorial Day, the Sag Harbor Community Band would begin tuning up well before 9, tucked in the semicircular alcove in front of the Art Deco cinema. In the mid-’90s, on warm summer nights, kids would loop through the village from one end to the other, showing off their jacked-up trucks and people-watching as they drove. It was a thing, then. Maybe it still is. 

When I first moved in, Sag Harbor was still rebuilding from the 1994 Easter Sunday fire that destroyed the Emporium Hardware building. Before the new building rose in its place, I remember a view of the water from the roof behind our apartment, but could that really be? 

It was the perfect place to live at that time in my life, and I shared it with a rotating collection of friends who signed on as roommates for a few months at a time or just crashed on the couch for a weekend or so. 

After reading about the fire two weeks ago that destroyed the cinema among other neighboring buildings, my friend Carl, one of the many who laid claim to the second bedroom, described the apartment as “a kind of miniature commune.” And it was, in its way. It just lent itself to a good time. We were one big, happy family and did not yet need to answer any of life’s bigger questions. We danced and made movies and played charades and cooked huge communal meals together. Friendships were made and relationships fell apart, and I was one of the people at the swirling center before so many of us drifted off in our separate directions. 

Because the cinema was so iconic and appeared in so many paintings and photographs, our apartment next door often played a supporting role. We’d notice our lamp, the silhouette of our potted plant, in, say, a painting on the cover of Dan’s Papers. It was about the theater, but among those of us who knew 90 Main Street, it was our few minutes of fame, too. 

It was a shotgun apartment that ran the full depth of the building, with a big living room in front, a spacious eat-in kitchen in the middle, and two bedrooms at the back with windows onto an unheated sunroom. What passed for the master bedroom also served as the gateway to the sunroom, the roof beyond, and the fire escape out back. From the kitchen and bedroom windows, we could see over the roof of the cinema lobby, and from the front windows we could see the nighttime glow of the cinema’s neon “Sag Harbor” sign gently illuminating the sidewalk below. 

You could ride out on the Jitney, get off at the movie theater, and walk right upstairs. Out the front door, you could get everything you needed and go barhopping, too, without ever getting in your car. And if you weren’t in the mood to talk, it was best go out through the backdoor; it was impossible not to run into a friend or acquaintance looking for a chat. 

Main Street was my front yard, and its pulse beat inside of me for those years and quite a few after that. 

Now my old apartment is just a shell of itself, sky visible through the burned-out roof, and the cinema and the building to the right of it have been torn down completely. All of us who love the village feel the hole not just in the streetscape but inside of us. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Sag Harbor without that cinema facade is like East Hampton without the Hook Mill. God forbid the mill ever burned, there is no doubt we would rebuild.

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

Going to the internet to read what commentators have been saying about what the Trump administration might mean for the press, I was stunned by these words on the back of a black T-shirt worn by a man at a Trump rally: “Rope.Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.”

The president-elect has never used these hateful words, himself, and if he ever hinted that journalists should be lynched, he would have been speaking metaphorically, of course. He has, however, made it clear that he considers reporters to be sneaks, cheats, conspirators, and villains. (Sneaks, cheats, conspirators, and villains motivated by sheer dastardliness, apparently: Heaven knows reporters don’t do it for the money or the love.) Mr. Trump has called the news media “dishonest,” “lying,” “dis­gusting,” “corrupt,” and “scum,” and he has vowed to make it easier to sue newspapers for libel.

One of his favorite supporters, Fox’s Sean Hannity, has gone so far as to say Mr. Trump should refuse to allow The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others, to have White House credentials.

Barring potential critics and ushering in those “journalists” who fall in line? Has the president-elect heard about the First Amendment? Does he care about the principles of freedom it enshrines? Has he read the Bill of Rights at all?

In an interview on CNN (a news station Mr. Trump has railed against, naturally), Floyd Abrams, a highly respected lawyer dedicated to First Amendment cases, noted that there are no federal libel laws; they differ from state to state. I hope that Mr. Trump has become aware of this fact by now — though, as I write this, I’m not sure he would care, even if he is aware of it. 

Mr. Abrams expressed the concern that Mr. Trump’s denigration of the media “could lead the public to be so anti-press” that even if it didn’t destroy the it, it could “lead the public to limit its constitutionally protected role.” 

Mr. Trump may have gone to Wharton for an undergraduate program, but his education, clearly, was lacking when it came time for classes on the rule of law.

From where I sit, it seems that our current national crisis was in at least some measure made possible by the crisis in professional journalism. Newspapers, unable to compete with no-cost pseudo-news spread via social media, have had to shut down across the country. Will Americans see the value of paying for reliable news  — from professionals dedicated to best ethical practices —  only too late?

 Whatever Mr. Trump throws at journalists in this country, however, pales in comparison with the violence journalists encounter elsewhere. A recent report from the Committee to Protect Journalists said 450 journalists around the world had been forced into exile since 2010; Syria had expelled 101, Ethiopia 57, and Iran 52. Being kicked out of the White House, if it comes to that, wouldn’t seem like such a big deal . . . if it didn’t signal the coming administration’s possible first step toward an unconstitutional and unAmerican silencing of the healthy questioning and criticism that is so necessary to good government.

Now, mind you, I am definitely not one who believes that nasty things emblazoned on T-shirts should be censored. On occasion, when The Star has been hotly criticized for publishing bigoted or hate-filled letters against individuals or groups, I have tried to remind readers that the First Amendment is intended to guarantee the expression of language and opinions that are unpopular or even offensive. That is the very crux of free speech: The majority’s accepted opinions need no protection. 

And that is precisely what the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, grasped so clearly so long ago: When, God forbid, the majority of Americans embraced ideologies or actions that were dangerously wrong and a danger to democracy, it would be the duty of dissenters to speak out in protest. Their right to do that, under the First Amendment, and the right of the press to report on 0ould stand between us and tyranny.

I’ve been reading in comparative mythology recently, about ritual regicide, virgin births, thefts of fire, trees of life and of death, resurrections . . . that kind of thing, and apparently, at least according to Joseph Campbell, it’s all one — more or less the same stories and symbols from Day One aimed at reconciling earth with the heavens. 

“Ad astrum per aspera,” I said to O’en this morning as we headed, with hope, for The Star. And no sooner had I sat down than the phone rang. A call from the West Coast, from my erstwhile doubles partner, Gary Bowen, with whom I’ve won East Hampton Indoor tournaments in successive summers. 

He hesitated at first when I answered. “Do I sound like Mary?” I asked.

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he said, I did. 

“We’re becoming one!” I said. “Like the myths — the earth goddess entwined double helix-like with the slayer of aging doubles teams.”

We talked about meeting up around February (when our ninth grandchild is to be born out there) and were commiserating about the winter and the election and about how we yearned to scrap the rurally biased Electoral College when he had to sign off to go do battle.

I shall gird my loins tomorrow, at high noon, and it is in this wise that we agile-for-our-age septuagenarians, not unmindful of our blessings, aim for the stars — engraved plaques at least. 

The Independent today quoted Einstein to the effect that to some nothing in life is miraculous and to some everything is. I would definitely put O’en, our 5-month-old white golden, in the latter camp. 

“We think nothing of walking around the block, but can you imagine what it’s like to walk around the block for him?!” I asked Mary. A garden of delights — the effluvia ever new all the time. Transcendence in the temporal. Beset by fear and desire we cling — that’s our “leash.” He is not so constrained — he just is.

We agreed that we should follow his lead. And in fact that is, when we are out on our walks, what we usually do

It was Tuesday night when it occurred to me that I hadn’t — because I was flying back from having spent the weekend in Pittsburgh — seen the first half of the Steelers’ delightful 24-14 win that Sunday over the Giants.

Mary had recorded it, and so it was with a light heart that I headed down the hall, with her behind me, toward the larger TV where I presumed she’d show me — yet again, for I have never kept pace with change — how to summon it up.

“Was it the football game you were interested in?” she asked when we got there.

“Well, just the first half — I saw the second half, you’ll remember, when I got home. The Steelers were leading 14-0 at the half, so I thought it would be fun to watch.”

“Uh-oh,” she said. “I thought you’d watched the whole game — I deleted it.”

“You . . . deleted it. . . ?”

“Yes, forgive me, forgive me,” she said, pitiably. “Maybe I can retrieve it. . . .”

“That’s a venal . . . no, no, that’s a mortal sin, you know. Now, I’ll have to read about Emily Dickinson!”

Well, it serves me right for persisting in ignorance. I will have to learn how to record things myself. And anyway, she didn’t do it with full knowledge of the sin, the one, you know, having to do with the erasure of vitally important shows. 

“You’re forgiven — you’re not guilty!” I called out reassuringly toward the living room, where she was watching a Sam Shepard play, knowing that that would resonate particularly with her, who’s never forgotten the sign on the Pittsburgh bridge, the one painted 20 or so years ago, in big white letters, that said, “She’s Guilty.”

Why is it that women, the chief reason that there’s any joy in life, or any life for that matter, have received such short shrift by and large down the centuries, except for the few societies, like Crete, that were matriarchies?

She’s guilty? The church, and often society, would seem to have it so. 

Why that is I haven’t the remotest idea. 

And let it so be recorded.

A week or two ago, with nothing much in the refrigerator, I decided to go down to the beach in front of the house to catch something for dinner. After the girls had been fed the requisite chicken nuggets, I took a look in my tackle box and had a rude surprise.

Like a lot of other things that go by the wayside for the parents of young children, my fishing supplies were in a sorry state. The hooks on the only popping plugs likely to get a rise out of a September bluefish in the bay were rusty and dull. Other lures were tangled madly in nylon leader or missing barbs that I had intended to replace but never got to. The box was a metaphor for my life.

Not that I am complaining. No, I wiggled a small bucktail free from the hell at the bottom of the box and went down to the beach. I did not catch much, only a small, tapered tan fish that reminded me vaguely of a snake. I had put another one of these, caught in a minnow seine, into our saltwater aquarium, where it hid for a few days in the sand, then took a suicide mission over the glass. I found it on the floor.

If you can imagine a meaner, toothy-looking blenny, then you have a picture of what this fish looked like. Neither my treasured "Fishes of the Gulf of Maine" nor an Internet search produced any suspects, so for now, the species will go unknown by me.

I suppose I am ambivalent about fishing anyway. Just where are all the porgies and blowfish of my youth, I wonder, the ones we used to catch from a dinghy just offshore? Now, even using ground-bunker chum, nothing comes to my line except spider crabs, and there are plenty of those. Maybe I am just lazy, but I get bored after a few casts if nothing is coming up.

There are fish around still, I am told. The bay is filled with porgies, although fluke are apparently in decline, and there were so few winter flounder around that a contest or two has been canceled.

Nature, particularly under the sea, does follow its own, nearly unfathomable patterns. A friend told me of one harbor here that was loaded with fat bunker. He said he even saw a commercial purse seiner chasing them in Gardiner's Bay, something that hadn't been seen around here for more than 30 years. It's hard to say what to make of it all.