Columnists

The Ukrainian president cuts through the nonsense.

There is little question that soccer here, the games that have been played by adults since the early 1970s and since 2009 by our high schoolers, has been East Hampton’s pre-eminent sport.

Buying socks was a problem here — until I noticed a bin in the menswear section at the Ladies Village Improvement Society Bargain Box.

Best concert ever: Bob (“Schoolhouse Rock”) Dorough on keys and Richard Sudhalter on cornet at a North Fork vineyard, spring 2002.

As with so many things in life as the years tick-tick-tick by, it takes rather more priming of the pump than it used to to achieve the right holiday atmosphere.

A simple question for the sellers on those social media marketplaces hereabouts . . .

The only person I know who says they don’t gossip and holds true to that word is a friend who is autistic.

Yes, Virginia, even 82-year-olds can freak out.

Laid up with a stomach bug for the past several days, I have had a lot of time to watch what is going on outside.

One of the most stirring moments of my youth was the April evening in 1985 when, as part of a marching mass of college-student protesters, I danced up Amsterdam Avenue to the joyful rhythm of the song “Free Nelson Mandela” by the Specials.

“I don’t want to let him go,” our eldest daughter said of her elder son, who in the not-too-distant future is to go to college, a normal progression you’ll agree, but she can’t bear the thought of him leaving.

Early December would usually be when we got the iceboats ready. A letter writer this week recalled a time, not really all that long ago, when Mecox Bay froze solid enough to race on. Not anymore.

Pot? Hey, kids, maybe not before your brain has fully developed.

Like many men, Ron, a pack-a-day smoker, had gone years without visiting a doctor.

Subconsciously, as has long been the case with Christmas, I may want Thanksgiving to just go away.

A daughter’s streaming of Netflix’s “Wednesday” calls to mind the 1960s reruns of a columnist’s youth.

Evidently, there is “a more brotherly mood” abroad in the nation than I had thought.

I have a visual memory of the recipe for oysters Rattray in my mother’s handwriting on a piece of paper tucked into a cookbook.

A failed home repair has a columnist fondly recalling life without running water.

And now you will be treated, reader, to the boring column in which I describe the circumstances in which I finally caught Covid-19.

It was one all-stater and a strong finish for the Pierson girls cross-country team at the New York State championship meet in Vernon.

Notes from a five-night film festival at sea, sponsored by the Turner Classic Movies channel.

People, it seems, have been voting against their best interests for years, since Reagan proselytized on behalf of trickle-down economics, which turned out not to raise all boats, just yachts.

Cerberus came out of the water last week, formally ending my sailing season.

One of my great pleasures is perusing old cookbooks to see how people ate and entertained in other eras.

They say it’s “the beautiful game,” and yet some teams that play soccer in a less beautiful, even ugly fashion, can win as often as not — as Half Hollow Hills West did here on Halloween — through untrammeled will.

Out of seemingly nowhere, on Monday my 12-year-old told me in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to vote for anyone who was not “a minority.”

A charming upstate downtown can get a guy thinking.

A friend called a single flower that emerged from a thin cosmos plant on my office window this week the “miracle on Main Street.”

This would be a good Hallowe’en to be visited by ghouls and ghosts because the Mohs surgery I’ve had lately has prompted Mary to sing “My Funny Frankenstein” from time to time.