It was Thursday evening, I think, and, eager to get away from the bear attacks of a long week, I drove to the beach at Atlantic Drive on Napeague. There was one other person there when I arrived around 6:30, and he or she was wrapped in a towel and sitting on a chair some distance away from the road end. About a mile to the west through the haze I saw two trucks parked on the state park beach, though at that distance, I could not even really be sure what they were.

When I got out of the water after my swim, the person in the chair was gone. Other than a couple of gulls strutting around looking for a late-day scrap, I was alone.

Even in the height of July, when the temperature hits 90, I am astonished how easy it is to get a bit of solitude. On Tuesday of this week, for example, I took an afternoon break, getting away from the computer for a moment to go to Indian Wells Beach. At 4 in the afternoon, not really all that many steps east of the Amagansett Beach Association area, I again was alone.

It’s often the same when I go out in the boat, toward Gardiner’s Island, ostensibly to fish but as often as not to just drift and swim and think. During the week, mine might be the only vessel at all between Fireplace and Crow Shoal. It’s quite amazing, really, when you consider how many boats are berthed in the harbors here. 

Then there are the weekends, with the roads crowded and frustrating by the time the sky is bright, but it was still a pleasant drive to check the surf in the very early morning. On Saturday, just Chris Kiembock and I traded waves for an hour at the First Jetty until about 7 a.m., when a couple of other people showed up, one of whom I count as a friend.

We do run into people we know at these off times. At Indian Wells on Tuesday, my friend Eric Firestone got up from a beach chair to say hello, and I saw Andy Stenerson with his dog in the parking lot. Relaxed and smiling, they knew, too, I think, to enjoy it all while the enjoying was good, just a few steps away from everyone else.

The Pop-Up Comic Extravaganza on Sunday transformed one little corner of East Hampton from chic to geek.

The event, which couldn’t specifically be called “Comic Con” for legal reasons, was, functionally, a comic book convention. There were artists and writers, vendors selling comic books, stickers, buttons, action figures, other nerdy stuff, and even “cosplayers,” short for “costume play,” meaning dressing up as your favorite fictional character, often in attire that is proudly homemade. Just about the only thing the Pop-Up Comic Extravaganza was missing was a celebrity geek-culture guest star charging around $60 for a signed photograph and photo-op, as is the norm at the bigger conventions. (That’s what I paid in June when I met Brent Spiner, my favorite actor from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” at an event called Eternal Con, held at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City.)

• Related: Pop-Up Comic Book Show a Rare Outlet Here for Fans and Artists

The Pop-Up Comic Extravaganza wasn’t Long Island’s first. Among the early ones was I-CON, which began as a science fiction convention in 1981 at Stony Brook University and evolved to incorporate comic books, animé, the fantasy and horror genres, gaming, and medieval re-enactment. 

I-CON was reborn as LI-CON in 2014, but has not announced a 2016 date yet. Since then, other conventions have popped up, including Eternal Con, L.I. Who (a Doctor Who-themed convention to be held for the fourth time in November), and Long Island Geek, a sci-fi and fantasy convention.

The significance of the comic book convention cannot be overlooked. Geek culture is making its way mainstream; it’s actually okay to be a nerd now. When I was in high school, in the late 1990s, I was ostracized for dressing in a “Star Trek” costume for Halloween. A couple of weekends ago, the film “Star Trek Beyond” took in $59.6 million, suggesting a bunch of cool kids also went to see it. In 2014, The New York Times wrote that “once-fringe, nerd-friendly obsessions like gad-gets, comic books, and fire-breathing dragons are increasingly everyone’s obsessions.”

And the significance of the Pop-Up Comic Extravaganza, I think, went deeper than just a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Its organizer, Nancy Silberkleit, is to be commended for her efforts. Not only did her event “fill the gaps” for comic book lovers on the South Fork, as Patrick O’Con­nor, a comic book vendor from Shinnecock Hills, put it, but she is also quite an inspiring role model. As the co-chief executive officer of the iconic Archie Comics brand, Ms. Silberkleit stepped in to help run the company after the deaths of both her husband and his business partner. A former schoolteacher, she says she is the first female top executive in the company’s 75-year history. She also started the Rise Above Foundation, which uses comic books as a tool to promote messages of kindness and deter bullying among youth.

At the Pop-Up Comic Extravaganza, I envied a handful of high school students dressed as characters like Negan from “The Walking Dead,” Harley Quinn from “Suicide Squad,” and Daenerys Targaryen from “Game of Thrones.” They kind of made me wish I could do high school all over again and this time let my geek flag fly proudly, so I could be seen as being ahead of my time.

But until time travel is invented — can someone get on that, please? — comic conventions will have to do for me.

Christine Sampson covers education for The Star.

Dear Amanda Hubbard, 

I am tired of receiving your calls on my cellphone number. Practically once a day, sometimes twice, I get calls for you, mainly from solicitors offering a mortgage or some kind of green energy solution for the house you may or may not have. It’s getting old.

Those who know me know that I spend so much time talking for work that I have actually grown weary, in my old age, of talking on the phone at all. Send a text and we’ll meet up in person. Taking calls that aren’t even for me is a whole new level of annoyance.

At first, I thought it was a scam of some sort. Then I wondered if you were scamming me. I keep a close eye on my credit report and all has been well. Thankfully, no identity theft. Perhaps I have your old number? I’ve had this cellphone number for half a dozen years, so that doesn’t seem plausible.  

Sometimes, after I inform the caller I am not Amanda Hubbard, nor does an Amanda Hubbard live with me, and that I don’t even know a woman by that name, the caller proceeds to ask me questions. “Don’t you want to save money on your energy costs?” No, no I don’t. Goodbye! Fewer calls might help me cut down on my phone bill, though. 

During one call I fielded recently — I can’t recall from which company — I told the man on the other line that I had asked the company to stop calling. He said, “But you gave us your number to call you.” Of course, I am not you, Amanda Hubbard, but it begs the question are you actually providing my digits as your own? Are you mistaken? Are our numbers so similar that it’s an honest mix-up? Or are you purposely providing the wrong combination as you might give a guy you had no interest in. 

I’m sure I could find some solution, through blocking or putting my phone number on a do-not-call list, but I always hurry off the phone and then stew about it later. Plus, now I’m curious. Who are you? Did you ever buy that house? How are the energy costs? My husband is a home energy rater, by the way, in case that’s something you need. 

Well, Ms. Hubbard, whoever you are, hope this finds you well. Give me a shout. You know the number. But better yet, send a text. 

Your friend, 

Taylor

Taylor K. Vecsey is The Star’s digital media editor. 

Not only is the body politic askew as we head toward the presidential election in November, so, too, do the tenets of ethical journalism seem to have gone haywire. 

The code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, which was updated about two years ago, has four straightforward principles: Seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. I recommend the society’s website if you are interested in the reasoning behind each.

A few weeks ago, Liz Spayd, the new public editor of The New York Times, whose role is to reflect on readers’ reactions, addressed what she said was a popular perception that The Times is biased.

 Why do “conservatives, and even many moderates, see in The Times a blue-state worldview?” she asked. She suggested that to dispel that view more attention was needed to where stories, editorials, and advertisements were placed; guilt by association was inevitable. She also referred to “the ranks of the newsroom’s urban progressives” and suggested “a better mix of values” might be in order.

We all recognize that Rupert Murdoch’s empire is a conservative stronghold. One would certainly argue that The Wall Street Journal is at least as biased (although in the other direction) as The New York Times and that Fox News and the New York Post actually glory in slanting the news.

  I am a PBS “NewsHour” devotee, and its political coverage may or may not be as fair and unbiased as it claims. During the national conventions, however, I took some long looks at Fox News. (Besides, Bill O’Reilly has a house in Montauk, which makes him of interest as a local of sorts.) What I saw was indeed biased, but it was smart enough to almost seem straight. 

Speaking of locals, when Dan Rattiner started his weekly Dan’s Papers decades ago, his basic principles veered away from the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. Because truth is illusive, he told me at the time, his intention was to tell it like he saw it. By hindsight, he may have been ahead of his time.

Dan and I, however, came of age journalistically when print media ruled. Digital media apparently have made an adherence to the goal of objectivity in news reporting seem positively outmoded. 

Online news media like Slate and Pro- Publica do serious investigative work, but they obviously have agendas. And today thousands upon thousands rely on social media for news, although I am not even sure it is fair to call what they read or see news.

 According to a report early this year from the Pew Research Center, 66 percent of Facebook users and 59 percent of Twitter users get their news on those sites. We know Donald Trump has a tweeting habit; do his 140-character takes on everything and everyone make him a winner among the millions of that platform’s users? To be sure, strong voices, like Senator Elizabeth Warren’s, offer counter-tweets, but are any of their Twitter followers actually enlightened by this back-and-forth, or are they just further entrenched in their preconceived beliefs? 

News consumers seem to relish taking sides, and to resist exposing themselves to differing opinions or dissents. Re-enforcing your own biases and stoking the intensity of your emotions around them is a lot easier than thinking about “on-the-one-hand . . . on-the-other-hand” journalism.

I have lived by the beach in Amagansett long enough to be able to tell summer’s changes from the sound of the birds. Now that it is August, spring’s crazy pre-dawn ringing of songbirds in the brush is replaced by the feeding calls of terns hunting baitfish in the shallows. The wind from the north has kicked up small waves, providing an impossible-to-describe background as a few gulls make their lazy yawps.

I woke up one morning this week feeling a little under the weather, a head cold, perhaps. On Sunday, I took two naps, and on Tuesday I slept on the sofa in the living room overlooking the bay right through the sunset. I had fallen asleep while reading The Times, and, when I awoke an hour later, it was almost night.

In Sag Harbor, the carnival has arrived, and conversations among parents have begun to run to plans for fall, when their kids leave early for school. The leaves haven’t begun to turn, and yet the sense that the more serious business of the year is approaching fast seems to be in the air.

As a friend points out, August is when summer vacation begins for many people. Fields and farms are just starting their most productive weeks; think of the zucchinis, I tell myself, growing fast and fat like some sort of alien pods in a B movie. 

There are fish to be caught. My tough little russet apple tree is bowing with fruit. I spot beachplums on the bushes along the road. Houseguests are arriving. The water is warm, the days still long enough for doing something outdoors after work. There are more invitations to more gatherings than I can ever hope to attend.

But, still, I wonder if the beginning of August will ever not make me melancholy. I like the fall, sure, but the child in me seems to never stop wishing that summer will go on forever.

I gave my daughter some mezcal to taste the other night, and one sip, she said, ought to quash, at least for a good while, any desire for alcohol that a young person might ever harbor — in much the same way smoking a big cigar down to the nub has allayed, sometimes forever, that activity.

We agreed that mezcal tasted pretty much as if it were a pairing of leather and gasoline. Why, then, you ask, do I drink it, and I will tell you that it is because it is there. I bought a bottle at a duty-free shop on the way back from Mexico last winter, demurring when the salesman said I ought to buy two. 

It’s from Oaxaca. If it is used in esoteric native rites, I oughtn’t to dismiss it so quickly. I have not seen God yet, though maybe I’ve not been in the right frame of mind. I will give it another shot, though I don’t think Emily will join me.

Speaking of God, Joseph Campbell says — or rather says some sages say — that we don’t need to look all that far. There is far more than is dreamt of in our philosophy, and, surprise, it’s all here — at least that could be our sense of it when we are still. Which is hard, of course, if you live in the Hamptons.

Yes, it is hard to find that still center in the spinning world when you’re looking for a parking space on a rainy day. My retreat, if I may, is my outdoor shower — and I think there are others here who regard their outdoor showers in a similar way. I was standing in it yesterday morning (we have a bench in ours so you can draw your feet up and read) when, as Larry Penny had said would happen, a butterfly, a large yellow one, appeared, teasing me out of thought — most of them having to do with how Gary and I are going to demolish our tennis tournament opponents — as it flitted across the yard, and up, up into the trees.

I have — we are, after all, sexual beings — been thinking of slugs too. Their lovemaking is fascinating, as Mary and I learned last summer, but you’ve got to have the time. Slugs will not be rushed. Theirs is a message for us in these frenzied, partied-out days of August in which, as Bob Schaeffer used to say, there is too much muchness. Much too much muchness. There is no time not to think.

I read The Times last week, safe in my little Sunday bubble at the ocean beach, but with the Aug. 6 anniversary of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima on my mind. Just a few pages in, I was feeling the grace of my privilege — even in the face of my ever-more-common sleepless nights fearing the wolf’s breath at my door — but I was also feeling its weight. 

“I want to give them a beautiful dream . . . to change this black color at least into gray,” said Aeham Ahmad, a Syrian refugee now in Germany, in one newspaper story. From a third-generation Palestinian family exiled to Syria, he was talking about why he played piano in the rubble of his neighborhood there, bombed and cut off from basic needs by the Syrian civil war. 

In a photo on another page, a Japanese mother crouched in front of a pretty expanse, about to drop a lunchbox into the water for her daughter who disappeared in the devastating tsunami five years ago.

Also in the paper, I read the tale of the Olympic team comprising refugees, among them the Syrian girl swimmer who made it to Greece across the Aegean Sea, just barely, because she jumped overboard and, with her sister, spent three hours pulling a foundering raft full of other refugees to shore.

On a teaching trip to Japan in 1991, on a rare free day I took the bullet train from Kyoto to Hiroshima. The lace doilies on the back of the seats were clean, the bento box vendors polite and measured and the sushi well prepared. I emerged from the station and, with only an hour or two until I had to board another train to go back, made my way to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. It was a pilgrimage I felt I had to make.

The open area of the park was once Hiroshima’s downtown, before the United States during World War II dropped “Little Boy,” an atomic bomb, and blasted it into a vacancy, the first use of a nuclear weapon. More than 100,000 were immediately killed, thousands more were injured in the explosion, and radiation exposure would take its toll on many more.

Three days later, American bombers dropped another A-bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Japan surrendered to the Allied forces not long after, on Aug. 15. 

In and around the park there are dozens of memorials and monuments to peace, as well as a museum: a grassy knoll covering the ashes of some 70,000 unidentified victims of the bomb; the open shell of one of the few buildings left standing after the bomb, now called the A-Bomb Dome, which survived although all of its occupants died, and gates with “peace” in 49 languages.

What I remember most was a set of concrete steps, the only remainder of a bank that was annihilated at ground zero. There was no color there, only the clear blankness of a white outline, person-shaped, the “nuclear shadow” from the bomb’s thermal radiation — the blank remains, some believe, though the science isn’t clear, of someone vaporized by the nuclear blast. So much writ in an empty shape of a life gone absent instantaneously by that hideous new weapons technology. 

Maybe Sadako Sasaki, the little Japanese girl who lived only a year in the hospital with leukemia caused by the bomb but in that time folded more than the thousand paper cranes that a Japanese proverb holds will make wishes come true, dreaming over and over of peace and healing for the war-wounded around the world, had the same impulse as Mr. Ahmad in Syria — to substitute clear blankness, the aftermath, with color.

Now, children around the world read Sadako’s story in a work of historical fiction and send paper cranes by the thousands to Hiroshima, to be draped near a statue of her in the peace park — linked together, a cacophony of bright origami birds with the thoughts, the fears, the hopes and futures of their makers finger-pressed into their sharp folds.

Real birds chattered around the park-like plaza that bright day I was there. Japanese schoolchildren in crisp ironed uniforms, let loose from the halls of the Peace Museum, skipped a bit and talked, their voices rising and falling like chittery wingbeats around the birds of peace. 

In the museum they had filed dutifully past the glass cases that honored their lost forebears, on what I surmised was an annual field trip. 

There was not much to show, only whatever was left over and somehow collected after the atomic blast.

Among the schooling throng of kids ebbing and flowing from room to room, I read each of the exhibit labels, their slightly-off English translations not stilted or convoluted but all the more poignant. 

So many years later, my memory of the exact text might be off, but its tone has stuck with me now for decades: “This is the lunchbox her mother sent with her to school that day. It was all that was found.” And then the next item, with a similar explanation. And the next.

I was the only gaijin, the only sore-thumb American in the crowd, wanting just to utter, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” But that would be ignoring the context of war, horrors committed by all.

“Death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” President Obama said in a speech while laying a wreath at the Hiroshima memorial in May. “A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.” The growth in nuclear weapons and other technologies, he said, “requires a moral revolution as well.”

Part of a carefully worded inscription in Japanese at the park invoking victims to rest in peace can be read as either “we” or “they shall not repeat the error.” 

There was nothing to be done during my visit but take it all in. There is nothing to be said. Whether circumstances seem to call for this or that atrocity in order to derail another, the consequences of decisions of war are inscribed irrevocably on one side or the other and on all their ensuing generations.

Until that day, as an American, I had never known in my bones of that kind of toll, which is dealt out so consistently and is so widespread around the world. 

I still don’t know it, even after meeting refugees last year who fled the Taliban or Assad in Syria, not even after seeing hundreds of travelers like Yusra Mardini, the newly minted Olympic swimmer, arriving on shore after harrowing trips.

To those Japanese students, too young perhaps to take in much more than the elegiac feel of the peace park, or Sadako’s story — though that’s enough — it’s a long-borne piece of their culture, as is, perhaps, the countenance of their grannies or their aunts, now sickly, dying out, deformed by radiation sickness. 

To the Syrians, to people the world over, it’s their set of circumstances, too.

They rise in the face of adversity, play music, swim. They prepare food so lovingly and set it in the sea adrift. They hold on to the lunchbox last held by a little girl gone, just gone, and go on.

The power of these things isn’t incendiary, but cumulative, like the pile of ever-renewed fragile paper cranes locking wings in a wash of soul-lifting color and strength. They lift us. They lift the world.

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star. 

“The View From Lazy Point,” one of Carl Safina’s eight books, had been on my bedside table, unopened, for several years. What prompted me to pick it up last week was the appearance of his essay in the first edition of The Star’s new magazine, East.

Coincidentally, just last week we drove around Lazy Point with two friends who wanted to find out why they had been told the area was a world away from “the Hamptons.” I lived just up the road from Lazy Point for many years, but it had been a long time since I had actually been there, or had a good look at Napeague Harbor, which borders it on the east. I’ve always thought the small houses there were perfect summer haunts: What could be better than living simply between the bay on one side and a broad marsh on the other — at least in good weather? There are 49 modest houses on land leased from the East Hampton Town Trustees at Lazy Point and others on private property.

 For Dr. Safina, a naturalist with a deep commitment to what he says is the compassion for living things required to save the planet, Lazy Point is a place where he can expand his already encyclopedic knowledge of birds and animals . . . and go fishing. He is at once an extraordinary scholar and an elegant writer. 

The book is easy to enjoy because it is really two books in one. Chapters alternate between those based on observations of each month of the year at Lazy Point and accounts of his forays into the wild — in the Arctic Circle, the Antarctic, Bonaire in the Caribbean, Papua, New Guinea, and Alaska. You can read it straight through or pick and choose. Every where, however, is his message: The world is changing, and not for the better, because we have ignored the relationship between ourselves and all living things, failing to connect the dots between the declines in one species after another, failing to recognize a warming planet. 

Yes, there is much to be learned, factually, from Dr. Safina, but he is a spiritual person and excellent storyteller. He reports on his experiences are compelling, whether an encounter at Lazy Point with baymen harvesting horseshoe crabs for bait or a dangerous adventure across a “ragged, broken, crenellated, corrugated” glacier with the thermometer reading 5 degrees Fahrenheit with two scientists searching for rare Chinstrap penguins. 

Dr. Safina, a MacArthur fellow, is not afraid to speak of loftier matters. He quotes from some of the world’s revered scientists and philosophers, Einstein and Socrates, for example, to bring home his points. But he is speaking of himself when he writes, “Life is a fully networked community; that because expanding knowledge suggests remaining ignorance, we ought to act with humility, reverence, and caution; and that the story we write with our lives affects those living near and far and not just now but in the near and distant futures.”

I found my encounter with “The View from Lazy Point” fascinating and think you will, too.

My body was well ahead of my mind and its left hand was spraying shots everywhere, into the back fence, the net, and then Gary served and I began, began to realign, and once we’d tied the score at two games apiece, things, as they say, started to come together. 

When, at last, the connection was made, we won 10 straight games after losing, owing to my volatility, the first two.

“I don’t know,” I said to our eldest daughter later, “it takes me a while to get in sync. I told Gary that, like the brain patient written about in the Sunday magazine, I was arguing with myself. And that, worse, I was losing the argument.”

Later in the match, when things had been going swimmingly for a while, I turned to him and said, “I’m still arguing, but I’m winning the argument now.”

It all, I suppose, is traceable to trying to exert one’s will, rather than trying to be at one with things. At times, I think I’d rather spin confounding serves into the far corners of that good night than go gently. 

There was a time, a delightful time, when I played paddle on grass, and really didn’t care whether anything I hit was in or out, and, of course, wonderful to tell, most everything I hit was in. I called High Times the next day to offer my services as its sportswriter. 

Since then, I — my body and mind, with the inner eye looking on, in bemusement, I trust — have been arguing with myself. And, periodically, I have to check myself in for a realignment.

Mary is helpful in that regard — she, I would say, is my best mechanic. It is to her that I bring all my petty complaints and excuses and it is before her that I shamelessly preen, peacock-like.

“Be Zen,” she says. “Play Zennis.” 

She is right. It’s all one: the mind, the body, the spirit. . . . What’s outside, what’s inside. It’s really a beautiful game when you think of it.

When you think of it.

Listening to coverage of the presidential race, I have been struck by a repeatedly heard observation that Hillary Clinton is remote, frosty, not someone you would want to have a beer with. Maybe that is true; presidential candidates sometimes come off far differently than they really are in person. Someone I used to work with years ago who knew Bob Dole said he was a hoot — warm, funny, and a joy to be around. The presidential race press corps, back then, too, decided he was a stiff.

The frequent view expressed by journalists and pundits seems at odds with the little that I know firsthand about Mrs. Clinton, whom I heard speak at Tom Twomey’s funeral last year.

Hillary and Bill Clinton were friends of Tom Twomey’s, but it still was a surprise when she and the former president appeared through a side door at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton Village and took seats near the front. Though I took no notes at the time, what she said did not matter as much as how she said it.

 She spoke extemporaneously and with deep feeling, linking Tom’s role as a local leader, fund-raiser, and activist to a kind of American tradition of people who knew how to make things happen in their communities. I was impressed by how natural it seemed to her. Bill Clinton was supposed to be the smooth, gregarious one, but, it seemed that she had a gift as well.

Richard Ben Cramer, the author of “What It Takes,” about the 1988 primaries, said that a vote for president was the least rational vote Americans ever made, given the scale of the job. This year, when fear seems the central theme, this is more true than ever.

My take is that the fear cuts both ways. Donald Trump fans the worst imaginings of certain segments of the population in his bizarre bid for the White House — and on the Clinton side, fear seems as powerful a motivating force, if not greater, except that the anxiety is that a maniac might take over the White House in January. If anything is going to get out the vote, this might be it.