Opinion

A last-gasp effort by the Trump administration to mess with the 2020 census to undercount as many as 10.5 million people living in the United States with proper documents appears to have run into immovable opposition from the Supreme Court.

Fallen leaves. Is there anything in the world less satisfying to deal with?

The bane of many drivers’ daily travels between East Hampton Village and Sag Harbor, the dread state Route 114, will get a makeover next fall.

Tired. So tired . . . I want to lay my head down. So heavy. 

It’s 1947, a hot, late-summer afternoon in Bethesda, Md., where I’m in first grade at Bradley Elementary (named for Omar, the World War II general). I’ve walked my bike home on the path through the woods, past the spot where we kids hunt and eat wild strawberries at recess. Too weak to pedal. I’ve made it home by holding on to the handlebars and lying across the seat. A few steps. A few more. Another.

Somebody once believed that gathering in offices was a grand idea. Now, post-pandemic, we may never go back.

For a second-home seasonal resort economy such as ours, the winter months can be one of scarcity in terms of putting food on the table.

Every year about this time, I would go through the same litany of worries. That gosh-darned turkey gave me no end of heartburn. But this year is something else entirely.

The unknown previous owner of my secondhand copy of “How to Marry a Multimillionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating” (2005) left penciled-in checkmarks next to the self-help points she found most salient and helpful.

The Biden administration is already shaping up to be something different.

We’ve made cardboard cutouts of family members so that Mary and I can be infused with the familial glow that has been so much a part of this holiday over the years.

Southampton's Dr. George Schenck returned to his practice Thanksgiving week in 1918 after being ill with influenza for nearly a month. A 25-year-old whose parents lived in North Sea died at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. 

This has been a sobering month so far for anyone who hoped that New York had seen the last of the coronavirus.

Efforts to improve water quality in Montauk are moving ahead with the centerpiece: a $129,000 study for a sewage treatment plant to serve the downtown area with possible tie-ins to other neighborhoods.

There has always been in this country somewhat of a disconnect between its ideals and reality.

Construction and landscaping have been a backdrop here for a long time, but over the past few years it has become ceaseless and everywhere.

My favorite state park might be the only one in existence with more parking lots than greenways.

Troubling locally is that new Covid-19 cases seem to be popping up all over, even in parts of the East End that had been stable more or less from the beginning of the pandemic.

My father was pretty good-looking, with sharp blue eyes and a wash of curly hair that held high on his head throughout his life. What my father wasn’t was a sharp dresser.

“Anne of Green Gables” is the book that influenced me most in my life — not Tolstoy or Nabokov or Bruce Chatwin.

It might be time for Democrats to revisit the candidate selection process in the First Congressional District.

For months, the number of Covid-19 cases among East End residents held steady. Then, as the season turned and more people remained indoors, trouble began.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first big job was filling his cabinet, and this year’s large Democratic field of candidates offers Joe Biden a chance to emulate him.

Peak 2020 was reached at 3 p.m. last Thursday with a phone call from a young woman in the office at the John M. Marshall Elementary School informing me that my son, Teddy, had been determined to be a true contact of a positive Covid-19 case in the fifth grade.

What if Americans were not as divided as we believe them to be? Indulge us for a moment to lay this out.

I thought Joe Biden’s victory speech was just right, reminding us to listen to our better angels.

With reports from Peconic Bay poor, there was a sense that the scallop crop in town waters would be bad as well.

Every week I hike a Pennsylvania nature trail named for my late friend Jere Knight. It’s my thank-you to her for trusting me to write the first biography of her late husband Eric Knight, the English-American author of the novel “Lassie Come-Home.”

The schools have done a good job dealing with virus cases and preventing wider outbreaks by strictly managing their internal practices. But once outside of the school buildings, the risk of uncontrolled transmission increases.

Suffolk voters may be divided when it comes to which political party’s candidates they align with, but they nearly spoke with a single voice on Tuesday in rejecting a ballot proposal to change the length of county legislators’ terms.

Good for a hundred years, why in the world were New York’s old voting machines ever put out to pasture?