Opinion

A shovel brigade was summoned to East Hampton High last Saturday to clear snow from the track, the turf field, and from the baseball field and tennis courts, too, for the new sports season.

The America we live in today did not begin in 1776; it grew out of Anglo-European colonization in which the exclusion of the land’s indigenous people was from the start routine.

Five hundred people, from a population of at least 22,000, have been vaccinated locally in East Hampton Town for Covid-19. This is far from enough, and allegations are that other parts of the region are faring better.

Covid-19 test diagnoses have fallen to nearly none in East Hampton Town in the last week. Where two or more positive cases were found in each hamlet or village a day, now the figure might be zero for days at a time. I am closely aware of the figures, preparing the semi-daily reports The Star sends out by email.

In the last week, the shiny halo that many New Yorkers had thought hovered above Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s head may have dulled a little as it became clear that he had withheld data about Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes and then refused to answer questions about it. More than 15,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the state’s nursing homes and long-term care facilities. At one point last August, when the Legislature and state attorney general asked for information, Mr. Cuomo decided to keep the toll secret.

What to do with a troubled dog? Or should that be trouble-ing? A family pet who isn’t much of a pet or all that family-friendly?

News that the Shinnecock Indian Nation had renewed plans for a casino development on its land may have come as a bit of a shock to some this week, but it was a long time in coming. The small community has a minimal tax base, which leaves it chronically lacking the kind of amenities enjoyed by residents of the nearby towns and villages. These include some basics, like roads and other infrastructure and social services. Income from a casino — and the tribe’s two giant illuminated billboards alongside Sunrise Highway — could fill that gap.

Though alone since my husband passed away this year, I don’t feel lonely inside this lovely snow globe.

My children do not speak like native eastern Long Islanders, or even like citizens of the old New York. Their pronunciation is the same as that of my Amagansett nieces and nephews: that is, generic mass-entertainment pronunciation. I don’t know if the received Netflix pronunciation is a Californian inflection or a Midwest thing, but they will persist in pronouncing orange (which to me is are-inge) as ore-inge; and avenue (aven-nyew to me) as aven-noo; pure (pyure) as pyer, and coupon (kyew-pon) as coop-on.

Last spring, after the Black Lives Matter protests had begun, the New York Legislature voted to change a portion of civil rights law that had blocked police disciplinary records from public disclosure. The section of the law, known as 50-a, had made the records confidential, meaning that even the most serious repeat offenders might be shielded from scrutiny.

In an ordinary year on the day of my birthday, I told Mary, who brought me coffee and the crossword in bed this morning, she would have already claimed two palapas for us on Las Brisas’s half-moon Pacific beach in Mexico.

My introduction to the art of Prudence Punderson came in 1976 in Connecticut, when I took up embroidery and checked out a book on the subject that contained an example of her work. But an East Hampton connection? That came as a surprise.