Guestwords

Brent Newsom, in memoriam.

In the last few weeks of 2021, my body put a stop to overtasking and sent me to the corner to think about what I’d done.

I had just hit some second-rate jackpot and felt a combination of instant relief and long-haul anxiety. Yippee, we could take a test. Uh-oh, what if my wife and/or I tested positive?

Just how did modern civilization make the transition from spirit, light entering the world, to matter — to the materialism that marks Christmas Day?

Bottom line? We want our house loved and enjoyed the way we loved and enjoyed it.

A public education debate has been raging between cursive and printing enthusiasts for several decades now.

Walking the dog was fine. Tennis was fine. Life was fine. Until Labor Day, when my knee blew up like a balloon. So what do you recommend, doc?

On Nov. 25 and every day before and after, I will thank God, Destiny, Fate, Chance, and the prejudice of white descendants of European immigrants for my good fortune. But is that something I should celebrate?

Thanksgiving last year was just weird. Now I’m once again looking to escape P.T.S.D. (Post Turkey Stress Disorder).

So what did Joseph DiSunno do about having no oil in his truck as the Germans closed in?

Over the course of 15 years running a registered charter fishing boat and taking people out to Montauk Point, I have issued five official mayday distress calls and sunk two boats — with customers on them.

What is it about Sag Harbor that brings out the spirits?

Because I can physically see the work getting done as I rake, I view things with a beneficence I can’t summon in life’s more static moments.

Recollections of a day in Missouri when everyone was a Cardinal.

On Columbus Day weekend, revisiting Philip Roth’s breakthrough collection with an eye on identity politics.

The more people learn about roosters, the more they will appreciate them and want them to have full lives. They will even develop positive attitudes toward their crowing.

The problem these days is not just the quantity of the traffic, it’s the quality.

Mike Gordon was a dear friend I had met on the softball field in Bridgehampton. The melding of machismo and kindness in one man was irresistible.

This Sunday marks a new, overdue, and outright joyous event in Hamptons history: the launch of its first organization devoted exclusively to Pride.

After a decade of renewed participation in Jewish life, I see the new year celebration not as a misplaced jolt of spirituality but as an integral part of the religious calendar, a culminating event and a fresh beginning.

I remember vividly the first Moby-Dick Marathon reading at my bookshop in Sag Harbor. Some 38 years ago — June 16, 1983, to be exact.

Time is the priceless container of all we have, and, after all, it will get used up eventually. For those of us who are not young, it feels like a cheat — a blank in what is left of our time.

Ah, the competition and camaraderie of hoops.

I am 74 and diagnosed with end-stage heart and kidney disease. The doctors said there was not much more they could do. Go live life.

Memories of funky, beautiful, artistic Springs in the summer of ’64.

The release of the Netflix mini-series “Halston” coincided with my discovery of a letter I’d written to a friend in Europe in early 1978 and never sent, containing my firsthand account of a busy Friday night when the designer played a starring role.

Thoughts on “The Potato Book,” a droll, tongue-in-cheek time capsule of a book with a 1970s warning in Truman Capote’s foreword.

Throughout this past year, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I have returned again and again to the lyrical prose of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Tree Where Man Was Born.”

July Fourth is a celebration of independence, and these are the reflections of an alumnus of the ’60s, the era of freedom.

Every March fills me with a false hope that spring is right around the corner. The inevitable rebirth of the new season is always painfully incremental. Glacial. The coldest winter I ever spent was a spring in Springs.