Columnists

Watching people running at each other like careening trucks while safe in the comfort of one’s own home is probably something to atone for, and yet football is “as American as apple pie.”

It was toward the end of the 2014 Hamptons International Film Festival, and I had been asked to be a juror in the documentary film competition.

Having spent a lifetime looking at fabrics and trying to imagine what it felt like to live in the material world while wearing a dress of dimity or cambric or society silk, I have gotten pretty good at recognizing what era a print or pattern is from.

I am about to begin my 57th year at The Star. Yet I should not be borne wistfully into the past.

What is the Huntting Inn, anyway?

Directed onto a heat-oppressed dog, a box fan does double duty as Proustian madeleine.

I was taken to task recently for not giving as much space to the Travis Field memorial softball tournament as I did to the Artists and Writers Game, but both events were noteworthy.

September at summer’s end feels as if the world is in a kind of abeyance.

When Cormac McCarthy died this summer, I didn’t go to one of his late novels, I went to “Blood Meridian.”

I am a superfan of the — terrible, awful, no-good — television franchise “The Bachelor.”

When a good-natured and for-a-good-cause 5K becomes an obsession and a mission.

How lucky we were to be born into Cadillac America in the century of progress, optimism, 20-cent milkshakes, and rock-and-roll. Everybody in the 20th century had something to say about Cadillacs.

Confined to one sports page these days, whereas, formerly, I was granted three or four, I’m inclined to yearn for the old days.

On Sept. 21, 1938, the morning of the Great New England Hurricane, as it came to be named by news writers, indicated a perfect end-of-summer day. There was little warning for tropical storms in those days.

The best thing about reality bathing is that, in addition to intensifying the quotidian pleasures of simply being alive in the mundane, it slows time.

There’s still something to be said for the value of a liberal arts education, with courses in history, literature, and languages, whose ultimate gift is to enrich our lives, to make us more knowledgeable citizens of the world.

Our language roots go back to the early British colonists, not the Dutch, whose influence can be heard UpIsland, that is, west of the Wainscott Post Office.

Long-running college football rivalry games are down the drain.

Cerberus, my 28-foot-long Cape Dory sloop, is heavy enough to have its own gravitational pull, at least into the bilge. A stubborn black goo has settled there and if the floorboard is lifted it smells like the bathroom in the Mos Eisley Cantina in the first “Star Wars.”

A college drop-off and a first glimpse of the empty nest.

Beach plum jelly, made from the juice of the fruit, is far and away the most popular thing to cook from beach plums, but there are other things, less obvious things, you can do with your harvest.

The Hampton Classic must know me by now. I’ve only been covering the show since 1979.

It’s cringey to swoon over someone else’s home island and say you heard its siren song and “fell in love.” But . . .

To think that a newspaper — The Marion County Record in Kansas, in this case — was virtually shut down by a police raid at the heart of which may have been a marital dispute is mind-boggling.

These are the weeks that gardens are supposed to be in finest form, high summer.

Joe Theismann’s leg: a retelling.

Tyrants don’t speak aspirationally, they do not speak hopefully, they don’t say “wouldn’t it be wonderful if.” They bark orders, and woe to him or her who doesn’t carry them out.

It is a sad state of affairs that all anyone is talking about this summer is traffic.

No trips downtown in August.

We were in Massachusetts this week so my daughter could try out for a lacrosse club team based within striking distance of her boarding school.