Opinion

For a nation that venerates the throwing off of tyranny the way the United States does at the Fourth of July, the end of a far greater repression of human life and dignity goes largely uncelebrated.

How can I ever thank you? You have been there from the beginning, in the soaring chorus of “Good Day Sunshine” through the car’s tinny radio so many summers ago, and even now you are here, the infectious — in the best way — “Home Tonight.”

In the three months since we started home schooling our children, the global pandemic has made me feel like a 1950s housewife, sequestered at home with her colicky newborn, while also being a failing schoolteacher and homesteader.

New Yorkers have already been voting in 2020 primaries for a range of local and statewide races. Early in-person polling places, which opened on Saturday, will remain open until Sunday afternoon and then reopen on Tuesday, the actual day of the primary.

The Bridgehampton racetrack was brought back to life Saturday for a simulated racing competition watchable on YouTube.

As such things go, early on during the pandemic I passed on a piece of good advice I had heard — about learning a new skill during the lockdown — then did not really heed that thought myself.

“It gets easier,” someone said recently in referring to long marriages and looking my way for confirmation.

No sooner were New York restaurants granted a reprieve from the Covid-19 lockdown did patrons come back in swarms for outdoor dining. But for many on the East End who had become used to hunkering down and ordering takeout, if at all, the return of crowds was an unsettling shock.

East Hampton Village is a lot quieter now that limits are in place for leaf blowers and other gas and diesel-powered landscape equipment.

What holds a nest (a nation?) together? Strands of material chosen with intelligence and heart. Our species has practiced — for centuries — with the tools to build “a community of care.”

In the 19th century, as many as a quarter of cowboys were black.

The outside of the envelopes from the Internal Revenue Service say “Penalty for private use $300.” It looks for all the world as if the recipient is about to be audited. The stomach drops. But what is inside these letters, which reach 90 million Americans, seems a strange contrast with that message.