Columnists

Dinner at Sam’s Bar and Restaurant with both my children followed by a brand-new Ridley Scott movie: Life probably won’t get much better than that.

At Thanksgiving it seems appropriate to think about eastern Long Island’s very first land flip, which began 383 years ago when the Manhanset Indians were robbed of the place we know today as Shelter Island.

Coming to you from the D-III national championships in Terre Haute, Indiana . . .

We are swimming upstream against the mighty current of all-consuming consumerism as Black Friday approaches.

I heard a liberal podcaster the other day lamenting the corniness of the term “the Resistance,” which brings to mind some dystopian movie.

May all your feeders be full.

Recalling then-Representative Lee Zeldin’s strange town hall in Amagansett.

It was as welcome as it was toothsome when Brian Collins, pitmaster, served up a colonial meal, history lesson on the side, at the Nathaniel Rogers House.

The movies are my lexicon.

A number of people I’ve run into in the past couple of weeks have asked about my sailboat and what the status of its motor retrofit is. Perhaps it was because of the unseasonably mild weather that some minds turned to sailing.

Casting an early ballot in the old Southampton College gym brings on the hoop dreams.

Many, many years — and many shattered illusions — ago, during the presidential election year of 2004, when I was a magazine editor in Manhattan, I volunteered during the Republican National Convention as an “election observer.”

I have a problem with genius jerks who have a great idea in a garage somewhere and then see themselves as gods.

Paging George Costanza? My college-age son has a wallet beyond his years.

I am overawed by previous generations of Rattray women who managed to file their weekly Star columns without a break over the span of four and five decades.

Deer are rapidly adapting to their new reality and doing things they never did before.

The National Warplane Museum in Geneseo triggers (in a good way) one non-pilot.

I’m a believer in the veil of distraction. It seems to me blatantly obvious that Karl Marx was correct on that score, anyway.

The phrase “fifth column” came into common use during the Spanish Civil War.

That’s funny, he doesn’t seem like a Nobel winner. (A trip to John Steinbeck’s water-encircled Sag Harbor compound.)

Is the vocabulary of the average American contracting?

Thoughts on the popularity of e-bikes.

Adventures in scrap metal.

I’ve never owned a car I truly loved.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of what looked like little tropical fish-tank fish were swimming near the surface.

A straight father of three sings the praises of Judy Garland.

Emails from colleges drift in and pile up in my daughter’s email inbox — and my own email inbox — like the falling leaves of the sugar maple and the red oak.

An office goldfish heads to the great fish pond in the sky.

Feeding the beast: On the 800-pound gorilla that is the National Football League.

My mother, Helen Selden Rattray, has the longevity genes of the Greenland shark. She will be turning 90 years old on Sunday.