Columnists

Honeysuckle, lilac, Coppertone, and secondhand smoke: These are a few of my favorite things. I sidle up to strangers at parties when they strike a match, just for nostalgic proximity. days of youth when I smell tobacco wafting on the breeze.

At the 2019 Comic Con in New York, before Covid cramped its style, I walked right by a booth set up by a legend among comic-book artists, Neal Adams.

Emily Dickinson said you’ll know it’s poetry if it knocks your socks off, or words to that effect, and that was how Mary and I felt as we were watching the documentary “Viva Maestro” at the Sag Harbor Cinema the other day.

I drove by the Pantigo fields as a group was getting set for a groundbreaking ceremony for a new Southampton Hospital adjunct. It made me sad, and then angry.

In the spring of 2001, I watched the clean-living-Americans-go-to-outer-space movie “The Right Stuff” and decided what I needed was to learn how to pilot a plane.

John Steinbeck and Cannery Row East.

In just one day last week I was inspected and boosted, and soon I’ll be implanted as well.

The East Hampton Town Trustees eventually had to take on the question of a scholarship named for William J. Rysam, an enslaver of other human beings.

I never liked the happy-clappy bright yellow of spring’s early buds.

This year the fun was bled right out of TurboTax.

Thomas Piketty thinks we’re heading toward more equality should the wealth be spread around a bit more.

I had a realization, of sorts, swimming in the warm water off Puerto Rico last week.

Even when I was a punk-rock teenager of 15 and 16, I kept a carefully curated vanity table, my bottles of drugstore body lotion and mail-order pins and badges displayed like a still life, like a Joseph Cornell assemblage.

Notes on life in a small plane.

It is depressing to think that war, nuclear weaponry, and oceans clogged with plastic will be our legacy to coming generations.

I’m glad my daughter is finally getting into thrifting.

A cable TV search for something to watch. Something other than ads.

Sag Harbor Village is the big city for me. 

Of late, I have gotten interested in a psychological aspect of cleaning.

It was at Theater 80 that I received my education in Barbara Stanwyck and Greer Garson.

Word from sunny Florida raises hopes for a revived piano circuit.

I was delighted to tell Mary the other day what I’d learned, to wit, that the Gaelic word saoirse “means freedom . . . the freedom to be and to express yourself.”

The osprey’s success story.

Recollections of an ancestor's relief work in Mariupol, Ukraine, a century ago.

When expressions of thanks are unfailingly met with more thanks . . .

Asked by an interviewer recently if I could describe the two Covid years in one word, I replied, “Constraint.”

It was one of those little moments when something someone casually says can change your trajectory for good.

The world of 1970s snackitude was fully encompassing, a total sensory experience of taste, texture, aroma, sound, and vision.

Sag Harbor’s mayor alludes to a stigma on wheels.

We went to the Sag Harbor Cinema recently, and in leaving I said to Mary that we’d never again have to go to New York City.