Columnists

In pursuit of wintertime self-improvement, through enhanced coffee intake and otherwise.

Isn’t it nice that in this country we can think that life here for many, young or old, offers possibility.

People talk about mindfulness a lot these days.

The older I get, the clearer it becomes that hanging on to relics of the past can be a burden.

Some people are rattled by a change in hours at the town dump. (Or one person is, anyway.)

Asked in a recent Science Times happiness questionnaire when was the last time I’d initiated a social plan with someone, I laughed.

Searching through old East Hampton Stars this week, I discovered that our first mention of Hither Woods came in 1892.

Although I’m much more obsessive about keeping flowers around the house than the average American mom, I’m not so rhapsodic about it, and I’ve become less judgmental about what constitutes a decent flower.

A 2023 Bridgehampton High basketball game conjures memories of the winning teams of the 1980s.

Let’s hear it for knowledge, knowledge that can be applied to ameliorate the world’s ills.

Sometimes the do-it-yourself bug strikes because of a great interest in a particular craft; other times, it’s just the money. I am susceptible to both urges, as in a newfound passion for making crackers.

I was a wide-eyed greenhorn assigned to a night squad of world-weary veterans when I first joined the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association about five years ago.

Notes from a Jeremy Strong fan club member.

The potential for explosive, cathartic moments is what leads us to play sports and to watch them, and it seems that with a number of them the possibility of serious injury, or even death, is ever present.

Rooftop solar on the early-1960s house I live in provides me with a reason to gloat: electric bills that run a steady $14 a month.

Things keep breaking. In 2023, the infant year, I’ve accidentally dropped and smashed plenty.

Adventures at the Whitney, on the High Line, and in a lost New York.

I had no Covid symptoms, but that apparently, according to what I read, wasn’t necessarily a cause for celebration.

I am now on my second plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, at a combined gas and electric of 100 or more miles per gallon the way I drive it.

The Ukrainian president cuts through the nonsense.

I read in a recent New York Press Association publication an article suggesting that journalists be more broad-minded when writing about the elderly. Six “tips” were proffered. Here are mine.

My brother, Dan, used to say that one could survive perfectly well eating nothing other than brown rice and clams.

On Boxing Day . . .

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

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.

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 . . .

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.