The East Hampton Historical Society will kick off its Winter Lecture Series on Friday, Jan. 31, at 7 p.m. with a talk by Robert Hefner on the story behind the Dominy Shops Museum.

The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation has two seal hikes and a nighttime owl hike on the agenda in the coming days. 

President Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency comes in for praise and skepticism in a Senate confirmation hearing.

Tommy John Schiavoni was sworn in as the new assemblyman for the First District of New York on Friday night in Sag Harbor, with his wife, acting Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Andrea Harum Schiavoni, administering the oath of office. He became only the fourth person to hold that post since 1969.

“What’s happening in California is something that can happen every day here in New York,” said Chuck Hamilton, the founder of the New York Wildfire Incident Management Academy. The East End has what he called an “urban interface” — also present in Southern California — which means that houses touch right up against forested areas ripe with fuel.

After a difficult debate that ended in compromise, the East Hampton Town Board agreed at its work session Tuesday to bring an updated formula that links house size and lot size to a public hearing in early March. The board settled on a maximum house size of 7 percent of lot area plus 1,500 square feet. Right now, the formula is set at 10 percent of lot area plus 1,600 square feet.

A painting by the late Ralph Carpentier, a well-known landscape painter here who died in 2016, is back in the hamlet where he created it and on display at the Springs Library.

At its first meeting of the year, the East Hampton Town Planning Board, under the new chairmanship of Ed Krug, chose not to pursue an Article 78 lawsuit against the town board for passing a resolution to exempt the new senior citizens center from town planning and zoning regulations.

Calvary Baptist Church and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church welcomed faith leaders and parishioners from Bridghampton to Montauk on Sunday for this year’s interfaith celebration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — his life, his teachings, his message.

In 1822 Henry Packer Dering, the Sag Harbor customs collector, issued this “acknowledgement” that Benjamin Lord, “an American seaman,” had paid “into this office six months Hospital Money.”