Opinion

As a legal standoff between East Hampton Town and the Springs Fire District over a disputed radio and cellphone tower drags on toward a fourth year, emergency communications — as well as mobile phone service — in the populous hamlet remains poor to nonexistent.

Ketchup was a kitchen staple when I was growing up in the 1940s, as it still is in most American households. You know the saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”? I think we might better be able to chart the zeitgeist of the United States by keeping an eye not on auto production but on our national condiment.

It has often been said that if you weren’t for impeachment already, you were not paying attention, but nothing has been quite enough.

I’m getting near the end of the Old Testament now, and it surely has been a test.

North Main Street was blocked this week as a crew hired by the Long Island Rail Road worked on raising two trestles about three feet above their current grade. The project had been a long time coming. For years, trucks too tall to make it through the underpass there and at Accabonac Road have done damage to the trestle. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the L.I.R.R., had had enough.

For some time, we have observed that the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals operates in what seems to be a universe unto itself.

I had the opportunity recently to appear on the actor and Amagansett resident Alec Baldwin’s “Here’s the Thing” podcast. Ostensibly, I had been invited to reflect on the nearly 20 years I have been the editor of The Star and how the South Fork has changed over the years.

Was it so long ago that I wrote about the articulate students, survivors of the Stoneman Douglas mass shooting, who had come to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., to speak eloquently of their suffering?

The presidential game is not over, many Americans being frightfully capable of being fooled twice. That the economy is rolling along is nice, though you do wonder how much people are making and how many jobs they are working.

The logo of the Eastville Community Historical Society, a longtime nonprofit based in Sag Harbor, has three profiles, one black, one white, and one red.  When the society sponsored musical and dramatic performances at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Sunday, however, 99 percent of the people in the audience were people of color. 

I’ve been looking a little longingly lately at accounts in Newsday of playoff games, in baseball, boys and girls lacrosse, and softball, wondering if the day will come when East Hampton teams will be in them again. Baseball used to be, boys lacrosse used to be, girls lacrosse too, and softball, of course, used to be.

Hook Pond is jammed with carp. The other evening one of the kids and I pulled over near the Dunemere Lane bridge to watch groups of the nearly leg-long fish breaking the surface of the water. 

By Hamptons standards, it is a good deal. Bookings opened this week for new luxury tent accommodations at Cedar Point County Park in East Hampton, starting at $300 a night, and, from where we sit, there is every reason to think the venture will be successful.

Last year at this time we were preparing to host Thanksgiving for 37. It was our first Thanksgiving at the Mashomack Preserve and we wanted to make it a holiday to remember. Family, friends, food, and fire, all the hallmarks of, well, a Hallmark Thanksgiving.