Opinion

When a campus visit becomes an urban tasting tour that smacks the complacency out of your mouth.

As we’re now safely into the fall, we can dig in to the Hamptons’ favorite pastime: kvetching about restaurants.

It says “Forever” on our stamps, and we say we live in the UNITED States, but I wonder. East Hamptoners, though, give me hope.

The Star last week called it Sammy’s Beach, on Three Mile Harbor, when, in fact, the correct name is Sammis, as in the local family that lived there.

There has been all too much clinging going on in this family.

There is a sense that a new initiative to reset the scale of building in East Hampton Town is on the right track.

Netflix’s documentary series “Wrestlers” gets at the real America — you know, the oddball, likable one.

I’ve always seen the South Fork as a giant outdoor Cinerama. But how movies have portrayed the area has been hit or (more often) miss.

Amid celebratory statements in East Hampton Town Hall about a plan to put sand on the downtown Montauk beach, a stark reality remained: Nothing other than talk has been done to actually address coastal retreat.

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.”

All is not right. Dredging for bay scallops has mostly become not worth it, oyster populations can’t sustain themselves without human help, and skimmer clams have all but disappeared.

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.

Such is the lot of the personal essayist: Sometimes you have to lead with “I.”

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

Falling leaves provide shelter for the insects that pollinate our flowering world. They nourish the soil, keeping it alive. Let’s rethink what we do with them.

Supporters of a controversial plan to clear brush on town-owned land along Old Montauk Highway in Montauk have cited the plight of the monarch butterfly as among the plan's justifications.

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?

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.

East Hampton Town’s regulatory apparatus is not able to keep up with the staggering pace of development.

The Villages of Sag Harbor and North Haven suffer from terrible traffic, much of it originating near Long Wharf. Adding a hundred or more people stepping off a cruise ship would make the chaos unsustainable.

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

Closing up our summer retreat was when I first experienced what my grandmother called “the pain of a heavy heart.”

The East Hampton Library deserves a vote of confidence on Saturday.

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.

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

Considering what the English colonists who founded East Hampton in the mid-1600s did to the land’s original inhabitants, it is a remarkable act of grace that the Montaukett Chief Robert Pharaoh agreed to be the grand marshal for the town’s 375th anniversary parade on Sept. 23.

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

I refuse to embrace the title of elderly. No, I am in that age range which I have labeled “twelderly”; like “tween” is to teen.