Opinion

Thoughts on fandom, time-wasting, and the “refreshment factor.”

So-called spot zoning is illegal in New York State, which made a recent East Hampton Town Planning Board decision to recommend just that a head-scratcher.

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

In seventh grade at the East Hampton Middle School, our math teacher taught us how to balance a checkbook by having us each run an imaginary store.

Any and all concerned with East Hampton Airport will have an opportunity tonight at 7 to say just how they feel.

In Netflix’s “The Chair,” one of the backdrops is declining enrollment at a small liberal arts college, and an English department, if not an entire discipline, in existential crisis.

The death of Devesh Samtani, an 18-year-old summer visitor who had been struck by a car while walking on the side of the road in Amagansett at night last month, was an avoidable tragedy.

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.

A three-way conversation that I had by chance over the weekend inadvertently got to the root of something that underlies a lot of conflict here — resistance to change.

Ranking states in terms of corruption is difficult, but if it were possible New York certainly could claim a top position.

“I almost got court-martialed for wearing frayed cutoff shorts like that,” I said to Ed Hollander in the early going of the recent Artists-Writers Softball Game.

This is one of those years when nature has looked with favor on the East End, providing us with a beach plum harvest for the ages.

Perhaps the calamitous end to the endless war in Afghanistan will finally persuade us that a liberal democracy cannot be grafted through force of arms onto other societies.

One of the things that was supposed to get us through the Covid-19 lockdowns was learning something new.

The United States was never going to win in Afghanistan.

A storm’s merely glancing blow leaves a parent free to focus on a daughter’s wrenching departure for college.

In what could be the first of sweeping relaxation of zoning laws, the East Hampton Village Board last week made it easier for the owners of large properties to get more of what they apparently wanted.

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.

Do you want to know what year people stopped smiling and saying “hello” as they passed one another on the sidewalks of East Hampton? That would be the year of our Lord 1994.

One warning sign is that the present town board is not to be trusted when it comes to recreational or environmentally significant areas.

I’m writing this in a blaze of blinding sun and white concrete, poolside at the Lighthouse Inn on Cape Cod, whither the kids and I have hied ourselves for a last-minute, three-night mini-cation. The Lighthouse Inn is a family-run resort founded in 1938, a cottage colony by the sea. A band was playing “Build Me Up, Buttercup” and “Sweet Caroline” by the water’s edge as we checked in.

Certainly Covid-19 vaccines are near-miraculous, but they are no magic force field for everyone.

Mary said she was excited to hear that I was making Lidia’s roasted eggplant with ziti and ricotta tonight, testimony, I suppose, to the depths of ennui we’ve plumbed — plum tomatoes are in the recipe too — since Emily and the kids left for Ohio, leaving us to marvel on our own at the glowing light she sees caressing us here.

I had been upstairs in the main newsroom working with our August interns when we heard several loud thumps above the usual background noise from outside.

Ongoing conversations about East Hampton Airport could muddle public opinion, leaving a path for the board to avoid having to make the tough decision at all.

Mets games over the AM radio only make a trip to Citi Field itself that much sweeter. As long as the rain holds off . . .

Do we believe that East Hampton could handle another decade of similar growth?

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.

A veritable tsunami of coffee in a decades-old thriller sets a grateful reader to thinking.

Questioning the value of offshore wind based on maintenance issues with the first United States project is a stretch.