Columnists

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.”

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.

Joe Theismann’s leg: a retelling.

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.

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

No trips downtown in August.

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.

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.

Mad magazine’s Dave Berg, now more than ever.

Paying attention can be draining.

In the context of the way so many of us live our lives, not taking a break for something pleasurable is just business as usual.

It is a cliché that middle-aged Americans like me should indulge in nostalgia for the lost years of banana-seat bicycles and 10 speeds, but they did carry us far and they did provide us with a bliss of freedom completely unknown to my children’s generation.

Sag Harbor’s Jordan’s Run is always worth it. Just don’t miss the ceremonies.

Pretty much everything that makes life worth living has been axed in the Wainscott School District as the result of two budget turndowns.

It is my opinion that so long as they are fed, their tank is relatively clean, and they are around some kind of action for entertainment, goldfish become part of the family.

So much of our time, especially in the summer, is taken up with running into proof positive that strangers are total idiots.