Columnists

It was distressing to read that the traffic snarl exacerbated by the U.S. Open had eased during the weekend, which means, I guess, that they really are going to have it again, in 2026.

Driving past an osprey feeding on a utility pole on my way to Lazy Point the other morning, I noticed something that had not caught my eye before. Grasped in a talon was a flatfish of some sort, which the bird was tearing apart with its beak.

The landscape here is lovelier than ever this spring . . . even as our nation wallows in the muck.

As I walked out under the trees and breeze and sun with O’en last Thursday morning, I remarked to him on what a beautiful day it was not to be going to the U.S. Open.

Welcome, once again, to the world. Thirty-two countries, 64 games, and 35 joyous days of football. It’s not called soccer anywhere else but America, and since Team U.S.A. did not qualify, there’s no reason to call it anything but football.

Since the East Hampton Library placed a dandy touch-screen coffee machine on its circulation desk last month, some of the Star staff have spent a lot more time next door. That might not be the case with the enigma that is Russell Bennett, who takes regular breaks to sit in one of the comfortable leather chairs and flip through a book. For several of the rest of us, the lure of made-to-order coffee, for $1 if we take our own mug, is irresistible.

President Reagan was said to have called ketchup a vegetable. And Nixon was said to have put ketchup on his cottage cheese. (I tried it, and shouldn’t have.) Reagan loved mac and cheese and favored a particular method of its preparation. And his fondness for jellybeans was known to the world.

I’ve always thought that East Hampton would serve as a good model for what this country should be, a place in which people, despite their differences, cared for one another when you came down to it and cared for the naturally blessed place in which they lived, to wit, that here people could indeed live for a cause bigger than themselves, as the late Ben and Bonnie Krupinski did.

We called Eric Firestone the porgy whisperer when he got back on dry land. And with good reason. Last year, he landed the biggest porgy ever taken on my boat. This year, he brought aboard the largest porgy I had ever seen anywhere.

Sunday found me lying on my parents' couch UpIsland, watching reruns of "Diff'rent Strokes," while noting Mr. Drummond's glaring eligibility — a fact lost on me when the later episodes originally aired in 1984. I was 6 — and how I'm now old enough to marry Mr. Drummond and become stepmother to Arnold, Willis, and Kimberly.

The plethora of free summer publications had not become stratospheric when the editorial we at The East Hampton Star decided something was missing — a guide to the restaurant scene.

My analogy may be a little off, but I think the way into the Art Barge on the Napeague stretch resembles a pound trap, a long track through wetlands leading to the cod end, from which there is no escape.

Amagansett has gotten a lot more hip. A friend from away and I spent Sunday afternoon driving around in a clapped-out Volvo drinking coffee and noticed this was the case.

The meeting room of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, which is regularly filled by Sunday-school classes and women’s-club suppers, is not exactly where you would expect to go to a Latin jazz concert by a world-class performer. On Saturday night, however, the music, and some tango dancing, took over.

I applauded James Clapper, the former C.I.A. director, the other night when I heard him say he thought Russia had won the election.

Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics, a form of manipulation aimed at sowing doubt in an individual or in members of a group to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.

Going into Memorial Day weekend, I had an intention to write down all of the amusing things I overheard while out and about, and make a column out of the best of them. Either I wasn’t paying attention or simply went to the wrong places, as by the end of the day on Monday, I had very little material. Well, no, that’s not quite right; I had exactly one quote.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the country, where no one was afraid of bugs. When I say country, I mean a part of the world with more fields and farms and cows and chickens than summer residents, rather than “country” with quotations around the word, the way the East End is often misidentified. A quilted barn jacket and pair of Wellington boots don’t make you a farmer.

At the end of a scary article about freelance genetic engineering, raising the possibility that someone might one day not all that far in the future release a killer virus that would wipe out a lot of us, Lawrence O. Gostin, an adviser on pandemic influenza preparedness for the World Health Organization, said, “There are really only two things that could wipe 30 million people off of the planet: a nuclear weapon, or a biological one.”

My plan was to watch the royal wedding from an ironic distance. I got out of bed at 4 a.m., I left my cowlick-afflicted hair uncombed to create the illusion that I had donned a sort of cut-rate fascinator, I adjusted my Twitter feed to receive the snark aimed at the event, and then I turned on the television.

First, Second, and Third House in Montauk were so named, one would think, to commemorate the order in which they were built. This is not so. Nor is Gin Beach called that in connection with Prohibition, as is often assumed. In fact, their origins go back to the early 18th century and have everything to do with cattle and sheep, and nothing to do with construction sequences or illicit liquor.

For as long as email has been an everyday occupation, I have been in the habit of trying to rid myself of unwanted electronic communications by labeling incoming junk as “junk,” and vaguely sort of expecting and hoping that my laptop email program would eventually catch my drift and start recognizing and blocking the senders.

‘If I ever get arrested,” I said to Tom McMorrow, who was about to leave us for The Independent, “please say, ‘A 78-year-old man from Springs. . . .’ ”

In 1867, something called the Department of Education was formed in the United States, establishing the notion that providing children with an education is a universally good idea. But in the century and a half since then, it seems we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most fun, carefree, inquisitive, and experimental and turn them into a period filled with stress and a neurotic sense of failure.

Suddenly, this became dandelion spring. Their pale yellow heads rose one day in numbers like I had never noticed before.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a psychological need to set the household to rights before doing much of anything else in the morning. First I potter around the bedroom, putting a book left willy-nilly on the bedside table back in its place or picking up socks I tossed about at bedtime.

This would be the time of year I’d rub neat’s-foot oil into my mitt, inhale the heady smell, and put in a ball and fasten it with a stiff rubber band.

Now that I’m back traveling the South Fork daily, I’ve come to one very simple realization: The cellphone service out here is really not so great.

After a persistently cold winter, the shadbush has at last bloomed. Cloudlike sprays of white flowers are rising briefly here and there on Napeague like fireworks and fading away as quickly, as their gentle petals drop and green leaves unfurl where the sparks had just been.

For the better part of the school year, when I was in seventh grade, I went to my Great Aunt Elizabeth’s house for lunch. Uncle Chiel, a formidable presence, had lunch at the same time, and I would watch with shock and awe as he devoured an assortment of strange meats and offals like calves brains. I always was served scrambled eggs and white-bread toast with grape jelly.