Thinking about President Trump and his southern border wall the other day, and realizing that it somehow seemed to ring an ancient bell, I understood that growing up here, my friends and I often talked about a barrier of our own — at the Shinnecock Canal.

It is difficult now to empathize with my teenage self, who, along with a lot of other year-rounders, fantasized constantly about keeping city folk from getting here. High tolls were one notion. Getting rid of the canal bridge altogether was another. Ours, like the president’s, was an arbitrary distinction: Our friends from the city and their parents were cool; everyone else was not cool.

Okay, so this is not to say that we were exactly like Mr. Trump. He arrived by helicopter on his one memorable visit to the neighborhood, during which he attended a beach volleyball match played by a bunch of models. Still, in the same way he demonizes Latin Americans, we blamed the summer influx of “outsiders” for all our ills. What we did not realize then was that we had met the enemy and he was us.

East Hampton has had a love-hate relationship with people from away for more than 100 years. We like the money, but resent the changes and think we can have it both ways. As kids in the 1970s, for us, it played out in whom we hung out with at Indian Wells. 

In my own adolescent group of friends, the city girls provided the opportunity for a date. Or maybe it was that, wisely, the local girls knew enough to want nothing to do with us. But, at the same time, we would whine about the city people messing everything up while the grown-ups allowed the farm fields to be carved into house lots and the woods trails to be blocked off by tennis courts. Sure, the folks from the big city might be buying, but we were the ones selling.

When we were a little older, a friend put an ad in the paper with a drawing of a Jeep with a laser mounted where the rear seats would have been. His business — entirely a fantasy, mind you — was called the McMansion Eliminator or some such foolishness. We all thought it was hilarious.

Fact is that East Hampton was and is inextricably tied to the city and suburbs to the west as Mexico and Latin America are to the United States. My friends and I eventually wised up. It is a pity that the Build the Wall! crowd never did.

The feel-good movie “Green Book” winning the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday night drew immediate protest. Most notable, perhaps, was the filmmaker Spike Lee’s comments and fast walk out of the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. But more measured, if no less passionate, responses came from all corners. 

One that I found particularly illuminating was on The New York Times’s “The Daily” podcast. On Tuesday, Michael Barbaro, the host, spoke with Wesley Morris, a Times critic at large, about the context and message of “Green Book” and its Oscar win. Most sharply, Mr. Morris pointed out that “Green Book” was almost a remake of “Driving Miss Daisy,” both of which he pegs as racial reconciliation fantasy. 

“Green Book” screened here in October as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival. “BlacKkKlansman,” Mr. Lee’s far superior film, also nominated for Best Picture, had a celebrity V.I.P. screening here in August. 

“I’m snake bit,” Mr. Lee said backstage on Sunday. “Every time somebody is driving somebody, I lose — but they changed the seating arrangement!”

If you have not seen it, “Green Book” involves a white tough guy from the Bronx hired to drive a black concert pianist on a tour of the Deep South in 1962. Through proximity and osmosis, the men forge a bond of friendship.

Set in the South, “Green Book” might feel safe for Northern audiences used to thinking that racist divides are a Southern thing, even though that is not true, especially on Long Island.

During a forum last fall on Sag Harbor’s historically black neighborhoods (which, incidentally are more or less all on the East Hampton side of the town line), I was struck by an audience member who spoke about car rides as a young woman from her family’s Brooklyn brownstone. Once getting on the road, there was no stopping until they reached Riverhead, she said, the middle of the Island being unsafe for strangers of color.

Personally, there was poignancy to the timing of the Academy Awards, “Green Book,” and Mr. Lee’s outrage. That afternoon, I had taken part in a near-sellout event at Bay Street Theater sponsored by Sylvester Manor Educational Farm on Shelter Island on the topic of East End slavery.

My own involvement has been through the Plain Sight Project, a joint venture between the East Hampton Library and The Star to identify and compile a list of every enslaved person and free person of color who lived, worked, or died in East Hampton from the 1650s to the 1830s. The core idea is that these men, women, and children have been excluded from the founding story of the United States, and of our town, and that by learning their names and encouraging other communities to do similar work, we can gradually make the American myth more accurate.

In his acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay, Mr. Lee hit the same note: “Before the world tonight, I give praise to our ancestors who have built this country into what it is today. . . .” He is correct, of course. 

Some of the Plain Sight Project’s work can be previewed at plainsightproject.org. 

The panel at Sunday’s fifth annual Black History Month program at Bay Street Theater on the history of slavery on the East End was illuminating. Its title, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” made the thrust of the story about enslaved people here from the 1650s into the late 18th and early 19th centuries evident. Who were they? Where were they buried? And, yes, what were their names? 

Only two gravestones, for Ned and Peggy, are known in East Hampton for people who were enslaved. A single boulder on Shelter Island commemorates the burial of some 200 enslaved people. It reads: “Burying Ground of the Colored People of Sylvester Manor since 1651.”

Georgette Grier-Key, executive director and chief curator of the Eastville Historical Society, Donnamarie Barnes, curator and archivist at the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, Aileen Novick, administrator of Hempstead Houses in New London, Conn., and The Star’s own David Rattray were the panelists. (He comments on the event this week in his column, “The Mast-Head.”)

Ms. Grier-Key, who acted as M.C., is well known. A writer, curator, and full-time professor at Nassau Community College, she is an outspoken advocate for what she calls the reconstruction of African-American and Native American history. Ms. Barnes, a longtime photo editor for magazines such as People and Essence, is a Sylvester Manor scholar, leading tours of the house and grounds and educating visitors and schoolchildren about its lengthy and complex history. Ms. Novick,

who has degrees from Northeastern University and Bates College, worked at the Indiana Historical Society and began teaching about the history of slavery at Historic Locust Grove in Louisville, Ky.

At one point in the program, the word, and concept of, reparations caused a phil­osophical flurry. Ms. Grier-Key seemed to say reparations for the sins of the past would be impossible because the need for them was so vast. A woman in the audience, the Rev. Leandra Lambert of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton, argued with her, saying that reparations were crucial because indeed they would have to be vast.

The audience on Sunday was thoroughly engaged, raising questions for the panelists and criticizing history itself. They expressed dismay when the event was called to a close and obviously could have gone on for a long time.

What the panelists had to say is not to be found in school textbooks, which continue to disrespect the lives of enslaved and indigenous residents by omission. What was evident, however, was that Bay Street Theater was filled with people of good will, who no longer are satisfied to allow the full history of this place to be “Hidden in Plain Sight.”   

We were watching the red carpet effusions preceding the Oscars when “Roma,” which we liked very much, came up, Susan wondering what the fuss was about inasmuch as she had found the movie to be “boring.”

A lifetime lover of “boring” movies, I took issue. I’ve always been enthralled by quiet-spoken, reflective films concerning the sadness and joys we all have in common.

Action movies with fiery explosions, over-the-top comedies straining for laughs, maudlin love stories, movies with frills, in other words, don’t move me. Give me understatement and the sense of time passing every time. Give me truth, or, even better, truth and beauty, which the Urn in Keats’s ode equated. 

“Roma” was true and beautifully done, luminous in black and white. “Green Book” was enlightening and rang true. “If Beale Street Could Talk” was beautiful, and, shameful to say, even at this late date, true, and “BlackKkKlansman” was true and in its skewering of evil beautiful.

So, with this in mind, I went to BookHampton and asked Jesse to order a copy of Keats’s letters, which, in truth, he did. Beautiful. 

I guess Keats’s idea in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was to be all-inclusive, to look equably upon sorrow and ecstasy. Though while truth and beauty may have been conflated in the Urn’s eyes, that being all we needed to know, it’s pretty clear that all things which are true, such as war, pestilence, anguish, death — I probably could think of quite a few others — are not beautiful.

Still, what’s to keep us from plumping for beauty and righteousness, for inclusion rather than exclusion, such as the Oscars this year began to do, every step of the way. 

To our nephew, who was bemoaning polarization the other day, Mary said she’d combated it in the past election by knocking on doors, in our neighborhood and in others, even unto Montauk no less, to find, through simply listening, how much we share. She was brave, he said. I agreed. She is brave. I wasn’t a coward, I told him, until faced with danger. (Got that from Molière.)

While truth may not always be beauty, if we’re true to ourselves, to our better selves, we can, I think, make America beautiful, genuinely beautiful.

And that is all ye need to know. 

“No way. Tell them to call you when the price drops below $1 million.”

This was my texted response to a friend’s inquiry about an eroding piece of waterfront on the bay with an asking price of more than three times as much. “There’s a reason that it’s been on the market for 10 years,” I wrote.

My friend was among the rare property hunters to actually inquire. In my experience most people do far more research when thinking about buying a dishwasher or four tires than real estate. Over the years, I have been queried only a handful of times by prospective buyers, and never, to my mind, has someone phoned this office with a request to look at our files or talk to a reporter with a question about one parcel or another. They might, however, take a look at online maps predicting future sea level rise. But in fact “room for a pool and tennis” are about the only words potential buyers take in from their real estate salesperson once that I-gotta-have-it feeling takes hold.

There seems to be a law of nature that the more expensive a purchase the less most people think about it. Certainly, speaking for myself, I tend to compare the chicken thighs at the Amagansett I.G.A. for price, fussing over a 40-cent difference far longer than I would a $32 free-range entree with Balsam Farms Yukon gold potatoes, roasted garlic, and rosemary at Nick and Toni’s.  

As far as waterfront real estate goes, caveat emptor might be better replaced by “interrogare emptor,” that is, buyer inquire.

Once upon a time I was the only person who brought a dog to work, here at the Star office, but now we arrive to a daily menagerie — from the itty-bitty black and tan dachshund puppy and scraggly little terrier belonging to Isabel Carmichael to the 21/2-year-old rescue (a charming fellow with a soft, brown nose, named Marty) who was recently acquired by Paul Friese, to Archie, Jane Bimson’s bright-eyed Jack Russell, and Jack Graves’s adorable, purebred O’en, with his soft blond coat. 

The dog belonging to me and my husband is a lazy, plump, foxlike creature with a red coat and a stubborn nature. We call her Sweet Pea. I don’t know what we were thinking when we gave her that name. Dozens of other monikers were offered up by the younger members of the family, to be considered and discarded. Sweet Pea came to us from the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, where she was known as Victoria, which we all felt was too grand and ladylike for a quizzical canine who had washed up in the aftermath of one of the 2017 hurricanes. Sweet Pea definitely seemed sweet when we met her, and, like a pea, she is, yes, small. Still, I still almost laugh when I call her name: The only other Sweet Pea I can think of is Olive Oyl and Popeye’s baby, which seems such an incongruous reference.

My daughter found Sweet Pea at the ARF adoption center in late 2017; by the time my husband and I arrived to inspect her, later that day, they had bonded. To this day, Sweet Pea will run to her as fast as she can when she spies her entering a room, and will positively knock over bystanders in her rush to climb into her lap. Sweet Pea has not forgotten.

ARF told us Sweet Pea had been among the animals brought to the States following Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in late September 2017; Sweet Pea was at ARF by mid-November. She was — and I have a hard time visualizing or believing this — a skinny little thing back then. Her paperwork says she was only 19.4 pounds when we met. Now she is nearly 26, and the veterinarian has instructed us to put her on a special diet. She may look like a fox when viewed from behind, but viewed from above, she is torpedo-shaped, a chunky little sausage.

That Sweet Pea was a warm-weather pet is evident by how much she detests snow, sleet, and rain. On a recent wicked, wet day, she ran to the car when we set out, but absolutely refused to climb back out again when the time came. For a small dog, she is mighty. I went into the house to fetch her a treat, as bribery, but even then she had to be seriously coaxed and dragged from the car, as I got soaked in the downpour. Forget trying to get her to walk in the snow.

At home, Sweet Pea likes to sleep and sleep and sleep — on the master bed. We don’t have the heart to kick her out of the bedroom or put her in a crate. In order for there to be room for us to sleep, we have to bribe her down to the foot of the bed with a goodie and put a heavy pillow as a sort of barrier behind her. We always start out the night with the hope that she will stay in place, but she inevitably finds a way to creep up during the night and ensconce herself between our shoulders and heads.

To be honest, even though she is a near-daily presence here at the office, she isn’t particularly welcome in certain circles of the building. She likes to sit guard at my desk, eyeing my colleagues with sleepy suspicion, and has been known to bare her teeth and snap at people for no discernible reason. She is probably 6 or 7 years old, and although she was possibly a street dog in Rincon, her daily lapdog habits lead me to believe she whiled away her days sitting on some doting person’s lap, watching people pass by the window and being fed bonbons. I like to think of her fault as being simply too devoted and loyal, but I’m not sure the rest of the staff would agree. As to whether she is genuinely sweet, well . . . the best thing I can honestly say about her behavior is that it is variable. Maybe we should have named her Crosspatch.         

To get an idea about what team spirit means, all you have to do is go to the greater Boston area at Super Bowl time. I was there last week because my husband was a patient at the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, and everyone seemed to be wearing New England Patriots T-shirts emblazoned with the number 12 all weekend long. It was patriotism in two senses of the word. 

Although I was a twirler (you know, it’s something like a drum majorette) in a maroon-and-white outfit when I was in high school in Bayonne, N.J., marching onto and doing routines on football fields, I never paid much attention to the game; basketball was my sport. 

At the hospital during the Super Bowl, however, it was impossible not to recognize the spirit. Even I knew why the aides and nurses were wearing the red, white, and blue, and that 12 was the superstar Tom Brady’s number.

When I was first married and had become an East Hamptoner, we often went to Dartmouth football games, with or without children but always with great tailgate picnics. An outlier nevertheless, I once distinguished myself, if you can call it that, by jumping up and cheering loudly when a player ran down the whole field to make a touchdown. The trouble was he was on the opposing team. As far as I was concerned it felt good to cheer for a maneuver that was swift, graceful, and wily regardless of whose team he was on, and even if no one else on my side of the bleachers did. For me, it was simple appreciation; I didn’t care which team scored.

Such an attitude made me out of sync with my compatriots, but I was comfortable as an outlier, as much then as now. These days, for example, when I am among my husband’s large and talented family, I tend to stand with his brother-in-law, a man who is very much admired but whose background, like mine, is far afield.

Considering myself an outlier at The Star also has made it possible over the years for me to wear an editor’s hat. We decided it would be inappropriate for me to be a member of local organizations, even one noted for good works like the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society. 

Suppose the society decided to do something outrageous, like, for example, tearing up the perimeter of Town Pond? I wanted to preserve the right to howl. Sure, L.V.I.S. members and the general public might well express opinions of disapproval, but at least no conflict of interest would be involved in what the editorial “we” had to say. I had a bully pulpit and think that was good enough.

We all know it’s been cold, and we all know how to procrastinate. What do I avoid doing? Paying bills, sorting through the junk drawer(s), going through old papers and magazines. You know the drill. 

But one has to do something when not doing the thing that needs to be done. 

Enter the time wasters. 

There are those little nuggets of time to be found while waiting for disks to burn, a return e-mail, or files to upload. Sitting at my computer with the big screen, while waiting for electronic things, I have been known to play a kind of scrabble against a computer. I tell myself that this is strengthening my brain and vocabulary, and, thus, I am actually not wasting time. Ah, but there are other things that engage me.

Much like the Jimmy Stewart character in “Rear Window” — both of us being photographers and both of us being indoors (he for a broken leg, me hiding out from the cold) — we have found entertainment in “the window.” He watched a murder; I am watching the peaceable kingdom. He watched his neighbors, I watch Africa from my computer window. 

Africam.com, is a website I found years ago when my family had just gotten back from a photo safari to East Africa and I could not get enough of anything Africa. The site features live feeds from remote cameras in the South African wild. I found myself staying late at the office to watch the watering holes in the African daytime. 

Enter the polar vortex and Africa once again seems a really great escape from the chill. I have abandoned the faux Scrabble game and begun to watch Africa, streaming live, in my house. 

The time difference messes up your creature watching big time. When it’s 2 p.m. here, it’s 9 p.m. in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. The watering holes are lit up, but not a creature is stirring. Anyone who watches animals knows you never know what’s going to happen. At Tembe Elephant Park, as I watch, two impalas are illuminated on the screen. Turning up the volume I hear the sounds of the South African watering hole. The animals are doing what I am doing, a continent and an ocean away — we are just hanging out.

I notice that their eyes glow at night, when the transmission looks black-and-white, little spots of glowing impala eyes. The remote camera sometimes zooms in for a close-up, zooms out and then gives a wide angle, and then scans the viewing area. The crickets and other things buzz, and the impalas never seem to blink. They must have spectacular wide-angle eyesight. Their eyes glow when seen from the front, the side, and even when facing away. Like goats, they sit down front legs first. When they get up, they get up fast.

As a kid I looked at animal books all the time and visited the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History and saw all the Disney movies. I figured I knew my animals, but when you visit a game park on real safari or “window” safari, you realize there are animals you have never heard of: topi, for example, and nyala. Nyala, which visit this watering hole, and are yellow-legged antelope with a long-haired strip down their spines and they have stripes. Their babies are really cute. I learned this yesterday. Educational time waster. 

I can identify the Egyptian geese by their call, and I can tell a young nyala (vertically striped) from a young impala, and I bet you didn’t know a waterbuck has a bull’s-eye on his/her backside.

I can’t control when the camera moves and scans, and it’s a bit frustrating when you hear a splash and wonder what happened and you can’t see it. There are five cameras to check on the Africam site. My favorite location is Tembe Elephant Park in Maputaland, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (I found it on Google Earth). See, I’m also learning geography. This is not a time waster; this is interesting. 

In the past week I have seen a genet being startled by some elephants coming in for a drink. A bunch of impalas carefully avoided what appeared to be either a dead thing or a big bone by the edge of the watering hole. They each stopped, took a look, and gave it a wide swath as they passed by. I felt like I was watching an open casket funeral. Two days later they paid no attention to it at all. I watched a thunder and lightning storm and the animals didn’t care at all, but it was loud in my room and my cats did not enjoy it.

For the truly addicted, the site has an animal alert app for personal devices that lets you pick the animals you want to follow. And for the truly lazy, you can check in to see what was photographed and video-ed by the remote staff while you were otherwise engaged. One of the latest videos showed a small herd of elephants wallowing.

When does a time waster become a hobby? 

Last night I left the site on, with the sound low so the crickets and the crows and such wouldn’t bother me. This morning when I headed to check my email before getting ready for the day, there on my screen were two giraffes mock fighting! They swing their necks and kind of hip/shoulder bump each other — standing hip to shoulder, each facing a different direction — with the goal of moving the opponent sideways. This was going on right outside my “window.”

How cool is it that on my way to the shower I can observe animal behavior, learn a few things, and be totally transported before brushing my teeth. There is even a photo feature, so I can have my own “ safari” memories to share.

Some may say I’m wasting my time, but isn’t real life better than a video game?

While writing this, I have the site open to live feed for all of the watering holes. It’s now 4 our time, 11 in South Africa. The impala have yet to blink, as far as I can tell. There is a loud kind of splashing and I have been trying to reach the camera remote guy to scan the view at Tembe to see what’s making that wet noise, but to no avail. Maybe a goose landed and belly-flopped, but no. The sound gets louder. As I stop typing and go to full-screen mode, an elephant comes in from below the camera. First the head, then shoulders, then the rest of it showed up. The sound I was hearing was chewing and slurping. The impala got up, hind legs first, and got out of the way and the elephant went to a puddle, not the watering hole, and slurped like a kid with an ice cream soda. He slurped up the puddle with his trunk, swung it up and gave himself a drink — in perfect profile to the camera and to me. I took a picture.

I have not yet paid my bills but I did write this.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer to The Star.

I thought what made America great was its product supply chain. The distribution system never lets up, the trucks keep rolling, and the shelves are always stocked. 

So why did I have to wait weeks to get a simple washing machine part, a little piece of metal with flanges and threaded plastic connectors, the source of a small but persistent leak puddling the floor, staining the baseboard, making a sponge of the carpet? After all, it’s not like it was coming by slow boat from South Korea.

Because of over-engineering, that’s why. Less is more, we were told by Mies van der Rohe, the architect who gave us the, uh, Barcelona chair. But not unlike the latest version of Microsoft Word, with its clutter and unnecessary extra steps and regular seizures, or your new car that shuts off at every stoplight, leaving you in the lurch, among other quiet thefts of your autonomy, my fancy front-loading washer looks good, with its spaceship array of lights, and sounds cute, with its singsong chirping that signals a completed cycle, and in theory I appreciate the reduced water use and increased efficiency, whatever that means, but does anyone really need a “Pre-Wash / Child Lock” setting or a “Fresh Care” button? 

Hot, warm, cold. Small or large load. That should about cover it.

The thing’s only four years old and this is the second repair to this one crucial juncture where water meets tube. No, for prolonged use and even abuse, you need an old top-loading job, with the rotating spike of an agitator like some medieval torture device and just as effective. 

That or a visit to the Sag Harbor Launderette. 

Putting aside the usual laundry list of complaints (pun unintentional, but I’ll leave it be), for us regular folks and year-rounders the Harbor is just not what it used to be. But in the face of gentrification, bad taste, whatever you want to call it, at least we still have this urban touch on the old main drag, with its long rows of stainless-steel shine — industrial-strength Dexter Laundry machines straight out of the Corn Belt. (You know, Iowa? Where they once made those reliable Maytags?)

The speed of laundry generation by a family of five is daunting, and the piles of clothes at home were taking on the permanence of burial mounds, so the Launderette was a godsend on a recent weekend, even with its corridor of a space filled like the 7 train after a Mets game.

I’d call it sobering, the contrast between the, shall we say, brusqueness of the summer crowds here and the courtesy among the other than rich in that rumbling, thrumming place redolent of fabric softener and sharp with static cling — a helpful tip about a dryer lacking heat here, a heads-up that another was open over there, and nowhere in evidence the petulant practice of removing someone else’s clothes and dumping them because they left them in the machine too long. It was like a Friedrich Engels fantasy in an Ayn Rand world.

Or maybe people just wanted clean socks. 

The appeal of the Launderette is the appeal of being alone in a crowded place. Like riding public transportation. Or lingering over a cup of coffee at a greasy spoon. Features of city life, to be sure, but here as the clothes tumbled and the patrons folded, the limited choices of what to do with myself was a relief — read a book (“The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume One”), stare out the window, watch the Premier League on a flat-screen. 

And then the part arrived. It had been more than a month. I figure I’ve got a couple of years until it gives out again and I’m back at the Launderette. If not, there’s always that tune by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, on spin cycle in my head since high school: 

“There go the whites, mmm, getting whiter. / There go the colors, getting brighter. / There go the delicates, through the final rinse. / There goes my Saturday night, I go without a fight. / Watching the clothes go round, watching the clothes go round.”

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

Lots of books and other things arrive unannounced at The Star, as they do at newspapers and media outlets. Some are worthwhile. Some are not. Others lead into unexpected territory.

An item I found on a center table in the newsroom this week, a book by a James Carter of Enumclaw, Wash., managed to get my attention, if only for its memorable title, “Why Einstein Was an Ignorant Fool.”

To be sure, I have tried but have not been able to crack the wall between elemental physics and my own understanding to point out the error of the author’s ways. Nor do I want to single him out. However, “Einstein was wrong!” holds a high place among crank ideas in my estimation; one of my great-uncles, Morris Redman Spivack, was known to crackpots in his day.

According to WorldCat, six copies of Uncle Morris’s “G=Mmxc/r2; a New Road to Relativity,” are held in libraries in the United States. Morris was multitalented. He spent seven years in Iceland where he drew and collected 5,000 portraits. Among his greatest skills was getting his stuff into archives around the world. Family legend is that he thought Einstein was a nice enough person, though wrong.

I gave Mr. Carter’s book a shot. I really did, but he lost me when he argued that gravity actually went up, that is, away from the Earth’s core. I don’t think Uncle Morris ever went that far. 

Crackpots are attracted to the big ideas, like how the universe came to be. One of their marks is certainty that everyone else is wrong and that they alone, or at most the people who agree with them, have the answers. These proponents might be masters of word salad, but are generally ignorant about basic physics, math, and experimental methods.

I once worked with a guy who said he believed that mayonnaise would someday power space travel. Earlier in his life, he had been a cook in the United States Coast Guard, so it kind of made sense. Uncle Morris had his moments, though; his no-till agriculture, which he promoted decades ago, now has mainstream applications.

Anti-crankism, if it can be called that, has its own adherents. The web is as full of jabs at crackpot science and armchair theorists as it is of cures for the common cold or promises of bulletproof paint. I side with the anti-cranks. At least these are the people who get jet aircraft into the air and make modern medicine work.