Columnists

Aside from world peace, what else am I wishing in vain for in the new year, immortality apparently being out of the question? I’m just hoping to stay connected.

My grandmother was born in the house that makes up the core of town offices on Pantigo Road. With a new supervisor taking the corner office there, it seemed a good time to offer up a bit of its history.

I tend to refer to cocktails of various kinds, but that’s not so much because I’m a drinker, as that I like the idea of a well-stocked bar cart of shiny bottles.

Another lame-ass winter brings thoughts of cabin life up north. Way up north.

Vermont’s aging population is pleading for help up there, and people who want to work in this country are being beaten back at the Rio Grande. Go figure.

American men start to pick up books on Rome or dial in the History Channel for its endless depictions of gladiators and battle strategy almost the minute they turn 50.

I’m not a Christian, exactly, but I do believe in the winter solstice celebration of lights. The older I get, the closer I feel to ancestral rituals involving trees and bonfires.

Who says it’s passé? Good news and fine times in a YouTube music search.

If Greece and Turkey could reach a rapprochement it would not be too far-fetched to imagine that other ancient antipathies could be similarly dealt with. One can hope.

My parents’ generation had a pretty good idea of how to have a good time.

It’s important to “be of good cheer,” as the old folks used to say, not just during the winter holiday weeks but all year long.

When holiday protocol is violated.

I have vowed while breath is still in me not to be such an a-hole on the tennis court, to be charitable when it comes to my partners and opponents.

Early darkness and the bell music from the Presbyterian Church make me think of my grandmother, who lived just up the driveway from the Star office.

You may have been a teenager in the 1980s if . . .

Bring the mini excavator. Throw a bone to put-upon pedestrians. Noyac Road needs a sidewalk.

I had a photo of myself smiling and holding a can of Spam at an otherwise unoccupied candlelit dining table sent to our eldest daughter’s house in Perrysburg, Ohio, where most everyone in our family had gathered for Thanksgiving.

Present-day ideas about land rights on the East End can be traced back to the English, who set out their plantations on the Island in the middle of the 17th century, and it is illuminating to see what laws came first.

Turned off by the N.F.L.’s enthusiasm for calling ever more penalties, a football fan finds solace in Patriot League collegiate games.

In praise of sortition.

The Asian longhorned tick, which apparently arrived in the United States by hitching a ride on a New Zealand sheep in 2017, has been found on Long Island. 

Read on for the variety of evening amusements that kept East Hampton entertained the week of Dec. 20, 1934, at the height of the Great Depression.

A quite noticeable fashion statement at Saturday’s N.C.A.A. Division III national cross-country championships was worn on the face. The mustache is back.

The classics teacher in “The Holdovers” says it was always thus, that it was no different in ancient times, that there’s always been the horrific and the sublime. Yet thinking about how to get beyond it seems to be the only thing that keeps us sane.

The prevailing narrative on Representative George Santos’s rise and imminent fall has bothered me from the start.

I’ve stood on a ladder pointing a hose through the window of a house ablaze in the boondocks of Nova Scotia, and you can’t take that away from me.

From the comic stage to the world stage.

Money can’t buy you love, no, nor can it buy you peace of mind, engaged as you might well be in the constant pursuit of it.

There are no understory plants any more. No saplings coming up. The Quercus alba acorns I may manage to grow into small trees could help preserve the species.

Don’t name your business Hampton-whatever. It just sounds generic.