At the end of a scary article about freelance genetic engineering, raising the possibility that someone might one day not all that far in the future release a killer virus that would wipe out a lot of us, Lawrence O. Gostin, an adviser on pandemic influenza preparedness for the World Health Organization, said, “There are really only two things that could wipe 30 million people off of the planet: a nuclear weapon, or a biological one.”

“There’s a third,” I said as Mary was recounting what Mr. Gostin had said. “Don’t forget asteroids and comets.”

At least if Neil DeGrasse Tyson, whom I’ve been reading lately (and with no little trepidation), is to be believed. 

Yes, it might not happen for a very, very, very long time, “but when it [an asteroid] hits,” he wrote in “Death by Black Hole,” “it will take out hundreds of millions of people instantaneously and many more hundreds of millions in the wake of global climatic upheaval. . . . And here’s one for your calendar: On Friday the 13th of April, 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communications satellites.”

“All of which is to say that we’re in a very tentative situation on this planet when it comes to man-made or natural disasters,” I said. (I was, of course, preaching to the choir.) “There are a lot of big rocks out there and a lot of crazies down here, but, for the moment, we’re tilting toward the sun, all is a-bloom, your birthday looms, and even to the edge of doom I’ll plight my troth (however neurotic), and strive never no more to char the chicken.”

Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics, a form of manipulation aimed at sowing doubt in an individual or in members of a group to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. 

I know this to be true, because I read it on the internet.

Sociopaths, Wikipedia continues, transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically also are convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing.

I’ll return to this notion, but first will acknowledge a small measure of satisfaction that Alex Jones, a contemptible huckster and apparent confidant of the president of the United States who trumpets conspiracy theories to an audience of profoundly confused Americans, is the subject of three lawsuits. The Times reported last week that Mr. Jones, who has asserted that the 2012 mass shooting in which 20 first graders and six adults were murdered was a hoax, staged by the government as a pretext to confiscate firearms, has been targeted by families of those slaughtered on that December day in Newtown, Conn. 

Naturally, the self-styled courageous crusader, now that he is in the crosshairs, so to speak, equivocates. After lawsuits were filed last month, according to The Times, he claimed that he “very quickly . . . began to believe that the massacre happened,” this despite “the fact [sic] that the public doubted it.” 

The article, “Truth in a Post-Truth Era: Sandy Hook Families Sue Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theorist,” details the regular harassment and threats, including of murder, to the families of the slain children, thanks in no small part to the bloviating Mr. Jones. What a vast understatement to say that for the devastated families, he has added grievous insult to injury. 

I would remind this wearisome loudmouth that karma is the cosmic cash register, seeing to it that no debt goes unpaid. May that debit be extracted sooner rather than later, a la “Instant Karma!” by John Lennon, who was most definitely shot dead in 1980 by a profoundly confused American of an earlier era. 

Mr. Trump has certainly done his part to inject ambiguity and disorientation, appearing on Mr. Jones’s radio show during his campaign for the presidency, The Times notes. The president has called the news media the “enemy of the American people,” a phrase for which Mr. Jones claimed credit, and parroted the charlatan’s bogus assertion that millions of undocumented immigrants voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who, in the world of objective reality, won the popular vote by almost three million. 

Last week, the television journalist Lesley Stahl detailed a 2016 postelection conversation in which the president-elect told her that he continually bashes the press “to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” 

On Saturday, the president complained, via Twitter, that “The Failing @nytimes quotes ‘a senior White House official,’ who doesn’t exist. . . .” Of course, his claim that The Times was lying was easily proven to be itself a lie, just one of thousands he has told over these last 16 months. Earlier this month, apparently citing that fortress of fairness and balance — “Fox & Friends” — Mr. Trump, a man who for years peddled the lie that President Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, tweeted that “91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake).” It was, I think, his most illuminating utterance of all. 

“Now that he is president,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman wrote in The Times this week, “Mr. Trump’s baseless stories of secret plots by powerful interests appear to be having a distinct effect.” The president of the United States “is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth, and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media that mirror his own.” 

It bears repeating: Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics, a form of manipulation aimed at sowing doubt in an individual or in members of a group to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. 

I know this to be true. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer for The Failing @EHStar.

The meeting room of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, which is regularly filled by Sunday-school classes and women’s-club suppers, is not exactly where you would expect to go to a Latin jazz concert by a world-class performer. On Saturday night, however, the music, and some tango dancing, took over.

Jane Hastay, the minister of music at the church, who also happens to be a jazz pianist, drew an enthusiastic crowd for a concert that starred Gil Gutierrez, a virtuoso on nylon string guitar with an international following. He was accompanied by Ms. Hastay, at the piano, Peter Martin Weiss (her husband), on bass, and Bob Stern, on amplified violin in keeping with the guitar. 

Mr. Gutierrez is from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a place imbued by music. (The Choral Society of the Hamptons’ recent Rossini concert was conducted by John Daly Goodwin, who lived there for many years.)

Long recognized as a star, Mr. Gutierrez has been a soloist with the Minnesota and Florida symphony orchestras and performed at Carnegie Hall and in documentary films. His virtuosity encompasses various styles, including opera, jazz, flamenco, and tango. East Hampton was lucky to have him here.

On Saturday night, his sound brought shouts of joy from the audience when the tunes were spirited and deep sighing when they were quiet or melancholy. 

Over the years, I’ve been quite  tuned in to live and recorded jazz, by professionals as well as friends. But while all jazz encompasses improvised sections and Latin and African influences, what I have listened to over the years has, for the most part, been what could be described as a commonplace North American variety. Many who attended on Saturday were, unlike me, quite familiar with Latin jazz, specifically, and many concertgoers were brought out by OLA, the nonprofit organization that has been an advocate for the eastern Long Island Latino community since 2002 and to which the concert was dedicated.  The concert was a shared activity that engendered a sense of community, and the blend of music and people was heartening.

The Presbyterian Church is only a long stone’s throw from my house, and given my caution about driving at night, I walked over, hoping for a good concert. I had not imagined that I would be delighted by an outstanding concert that was not just a new experience, but a wonderful use of a community church hall that brought disparate members of the community together.

Thank you, Jane and OLA!

My analogy may be a little off, but I think the way into the Art Barge on the Napeague stretch resembles a pound trap, a long track through wetlands leading to the cod end, from which there is no escape. 

It becomes nothing less than Mephistophelian from a driver’s point of view when there is, as there was on Memorial Day eve, a large party there.

Having crept and crept and crept forward, I arrived at a small circle and went to park behind an S.U.V. with a license plate that said “Moon Unit,” but was told I could not. We often do it that way at The Star, and it was a Star party, and, as I told the security guard, I didn’t plan on staying long, but he was adamant.

So, there I was, told to go back, which I began to do, creeping and cursing the while . . . until confronted by an onrushing tank — for that is what I call Range Rovers and the like — driven by a guy who, when I motioned him backward with both hands, refused to give ground, just as I should have done in the first instance. He dismounted and told me that I was the one who should back up to the circle where we would all turn around. Soured on partying by then, I began backing, until, in trying to get around a particularly protuberant van, the driver’s side wheels rolled over a half-sunken log into a marshy ditch.

The guy, in passing by a few minutes later, said he was sorry.

Well underway by that time, the party was loud, and it was all I could do to hear the AAA voice on a borrowed cellphone in the tiny kitchen — an effort interrupted when told that someone with a four-wheel drive, someone whom I knew, would tow me. I ran out to where the car was, but there was no one in sight. Gloomy in the gloaming, I sat on the fender of the lopsided Solara a while longer before returning to the barge again, where a kind woman was to intercede for me with Mary over a landline phone. I was walking up the steps as Jane Bimson, a co-worker, was walking down them. 

“Mary told me to promise only to have one drink and, guess what, I’ve had none,” I sighed, after telling her what had happened.

“Have two,” said Jane.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the country, where no one was afraid of bugs. When I say country, I mean a part of the world with more fields and farms and cows and chickens than summer residents, rather than “country” with quotations around the word, the way the East End is often misidentified. A quilted barn jacket and pair of Wellington boots don’t make you a farmer.

We would hang around outdoors all day and certainly didn’t worry about creatures with four — or more — legs. (My mother and other female adults were frightened of bats, but that is another story.)

I think when I was a kid we would have expected only a city person to get upset by creepy-crawly things, but I’m a lot less blasé about bugs today than I was when I was 8 or 9. No, I don’t mind spiders: The grandchildren like spiders, and in any event they eat flies and mosquitos. But lately the insect invasion seems to have gotten out of hand. Here we are, in the beautiful Hamptons, and we have to be constantly mindful of the presence of ticks. Now, too, we are plagued with a newer arrival . . . oh my heavens, stink bugs! 

Ticks are hideous whether inching along in search of a host or lying about looking nastily full. And, of course, ticks carry serious diseases. It’s no joke. As far as I’m concerned, though, there is nothing good about stink bugs, either. They don’t have to do anything to be hateful. They don’t even have to crawl. 

I find stink bugs so offensive that I turned the pages of a New Yorker magazine article about them as quickly as possible after reading the headline. The New Yorker feature, in its March 12 issue, tells the story of a couple dealing with a massive stink-bug invasion: “Will we ever be able to get rid of them?” they ask, perhaps futilely.

The brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys) is an invasive species “that can upset customers and frustrate technicians,” the New Yorker article says. The number of the little stinkers in the house in question had reached 26,000 at the time the magazine went to press. 

Where did these pests come from? They were unknown hereabouts 10 or 15 years ago. Apparently, stink bugs creep inside in the fall looking for warm places to spend the winter. According to the National Pest Management Association’s fall 2017 “Bug Barometer,” they have been flourishing in the Northeast because the region has consistent rainfall and enough warmth. “Invasive species may start off making headlines, but often level off in a few years,” said Mark Sheperdigian, in a column for an interesting journal titled Pest Management Professional.

Such professional assessments don’t help very much if you find a few stink bugs at home and decide you have to squish them, however. I don’t advise that you squish them. It might release the famous bad odor, and it really won’t do anything to reduce their numbers. 

Before I disgust all my readers by writing about other unpleasant pests hereabouts, like silverfish, roaches, and termites, let’s hear it for centipedes and caterpillars. Those are sweet insects. And how about another wonderful member of the arthropod world, the cricket, who chirps so delightfully? And butterflies, and dragonflies!

I’m concerned about the numbers of these pleasant insects. Has anyone seen a grasshopper lately? Where have the grasshoppers gone? It feels like the world and the ecosystem are out of whack, when ticks and stink bugs are omnipresent, but you rarely see a monarch butterfly.

My plan was to watch the royal wedding from an ironic distance. I got out of bed at 4 a.m., I left my cowlick-afflicted hair uncombed to create the illusion that I had donned a sort of cut-rate fascinator, I adjusted my Twitter feed to receive the snark aimed at the event, and then I turned on the television. 

Since I was looking to remain unengaged intellectually, I tuned in first to the coverage from the American networks. CBS had a countdown clock to the ceremony, a CNN camera zoomed in on a dog wearing a Union Jack bandanna, and NBC had an expert weigh in on whether Prince Harry would tie the knot bearded or clean-shaven. (Note: The expert was wrong, the prince kept the scruff.)

Having tired of sitting through commercial breaks, I flipped over to the BBC News channel, which, while dedicating most of its screen to the day’s pomp, stuck to its more serious journalistic mission via a news crawl that relayed information about the North Koreans who had defected, the school shooting in Texas, and the plane crash in Cuba.

The BBC high road did offer slightly more captivating views — particularly the chats with people who worked at charities supported by the prince and his bride-to-be, Meghan Markle — but I was still in no danger of being roused from my ennui. 

That is, until a black Mercedes van pulled up in front of St. George’s Chapel and out stepped William and Harry, the brothers I had watched publicly mourn the death of their mother almost 21 years ago. 

There was something about the sweet interplay between the two — the sly smiles, the whispered asides, the gleeful camaraderie — that seemed universal to all siblings who have ever attended a family event in fancy clothes they didn’t want to be wearing. I suddenly found myself projecting a gamut of feelings onto them: grief, triumph, brotherly love, a blistering desire to change into sweatpants.

Once the cameras ventured inside the chapel, I was soon flooded with a surprising sense of patriotism. It seemed as if Ms. Markle, an American actress with a mixed racial heritage, had tossed all staid royal wedding plans aside and let loose with Yankee abandon. A rollicking sermon from Bishop Michael Curry, the first African-American to head up the Episcopal Church in the U.S., likely left many Brits in attendance feeling as if their Sunday services were hopelessly ho-hum. A rousing rendition of “Stand by Me” by a British gospel choir proved that, Pachelbel be damned, American songwriters create the best wedding anthems. The medieval chapel, which was filled with a cross-section of humanity that ranged from a yoga teacher with a pierced nose (the bride’s mom, Doria Ragland) to the Queen of England, had been transformed into a new world melting pot. 

Yes, there was also an abundance of romance. The flowing gown, the carriage rides, and especially the sweet nothings the groom cooed to his bride at the altar: “You look amazing. I’m so lucky.” But the most memorable and touching thing about the ceremony was its aura of inclusiveness, its sense of bridging the divide.

Ultimately, I found myself agreeing with the Twitter scribe who wrote, “it seems that after shootings, plane crashes, natural disasters and threats between nations, the world needed a royal wedding more than it realized.”

Jamie Bufalino is a reporter for The Star.

I applauded James Clapper, the former C.I.A. director, the other night when I heard him say he thought Russia had won the election.

He said it with finality — I had on these pages in mid-April merely wondered if it were true — and Judy Woodruff, his interviewer, said it was a stunning conclusion if so.

As I say, you don’t know what to believe anymore. Nothing’s out of bounds. What John McCain said in “The Restless Wave” about our founding principles almost sounds elegiac. 

It’s all for one and all for one now. You wonder if ever again there will be general agreement as to a common purpose in domestic and foreign affairs aside from enriching the rich at home while sucking up to myriad capricious dictators.

I would go so far as to include in that number the National Football League, which this week took a stand on standing when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. This may well be the land of the free, though the millionaire minions whose heroics and brain-scrambling collisions delight us each Sunday in the fall apparently are not. Presumably we are not to be reminded when the national anthem is played of any divisions that may exist in this fissured country.

What were those principles the senator cited? For one, that this is “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men [and women] are created equal.” And that our great cause, the cause that binds us, lies in defending the dignity of all human beings and their right to freedom and equal justice.

I didn’t find it undignified when the N.F.L. players knelt and locked arms. It seemed right, as if it were more an act of supplication than protest. After all, it is what is done in church every Sunday, in humility and adoration.

Linking arms and kneeling is, in fact, the best way, I think, to celebrate this country’s strengths while praying at the same time that its wounds be healed — our slavishness to mammon perhaps being chief among them, an addiction that can bring many to heel.

Going into Memorial Day weekend, I had an intention to write down all of the amusing things I overheard while out and about, and make a column out of the best of them. Either I wasn’t paying attention or simply went to the wrong places, as by the end of the day on Monday, I had very little material. Well, no, that’s not quite right; I had exactly one quote.

It was therefore a good thing that I happened to take a walk in the Amagansett lanes on Friday evening. These narrow, straight streets run roughly south from Amagansett Main Street. They were where my friends and I did our Halloween trick-or-treating when our ages were still in single digits.

At the time modest ranch houses and four-squares built in the early postwar period dominated. Every place had plenty of lawn, with breathing room between it and its neighbors. Not anymore. With money to be made maxing out every available inch of a house lot, developers and people looking to build and flip are replacing the old ranches and four-squares in batches.

Standing in front of a house under construction on Miankoma Lane, I saw something I had not noticed before, which marks the new style: its side rooflines. Unlike those on earlier houses, today’s roofs appear to point directly at the property lines. That is, if you imagined a line parallel to the plane of the roof, it would hit the ground right where the privet is planted. This is no accident.

In East Hampton, building plans must conform to a so-called pyramid law and not exceed it. This is a line on paper that extends upward at an angle from the property’s margins. Builders seeking the most floor area have the houses extend side to side as far as possible, leaving headroom for decent-height ceilings and pitched roofs. 

The effect is a surprising conformity in the scale and shape of the new houses. I do not care for it, but then again, I am not directly in the business, although pretty much everyone who makes a living on the South Fork’s boat is floated in one way or another by building, real estate, and the related trades.

I walked on, thinking about that one thing I overheard, which I mentioned at the outset, a derisive “They have phones in Monaco!” from a man on a cellphone. He no doubt had come from one of those big new houses.

Tuesday morning awoke with a snarl. Two raccoons had gotten into the chicken run and were squabbling over something or other, making an indescribable clamor, kind of a blend of exercised chatter, hisses, and a predator’s growl. That roused the dogs, which roused me, and together we ran out to see what was going on.

As it was not quite 5 a.m., and there was only a hint of glow in the sky to the east, I could not observe what happened. I heard Weasel, the biggest of our dogs, making attack sounds and a raccoon screeching its answer. Then nothing.

I grabbed a flashlight. In its beam, there were two sets of eyes, coming from inside the wire mesh of the chicken run. Getting closer, I watched as a raccoon, with the shape of a slightly deflated balloon, rushed back and forth on the chicken coop roof before finding a hole in the mesh and squeezing to freedom. Its compatriot, with whom it had been wrangling just moments earlier, clung to a post about six feet off ground, not eager to descend. 

Thinking I might dislodge it somehow and shoo it through an open gate, I went inside to poke at it with an old clam rake that had been hanging around nearby. Mr. Raccoon was having none of it. I poked him a few times with the handle end of the rake; it snapped and carried on and refused to get down. After a bit more of this, it climbed on the mesh, upside down, and found a spot on the coop roof from which to glare at me.

I made sure that the chickens were securely locked inside the coop and left, keeping the gate open in case the raccoon eventually wised up and lit out for the woods and its now-gone rival. By that point Weasel, the dog, had gone to our house and was eager, I could tell from the way she was scratching at the porch door, to get inside and forget the entire thing.

Raccoons have been on my mind lately. I wage a never-ending battle with them over possession of the household garbage. But ever since a report that dog or dog-related waste was to blame in periodic bacteria spikes at Georgica Pond, I have wondered if raccoons might be to blame. A friend who grows grapes outside his bedroom window swears that there are more raccoons than people here, at least around harvest time, when they lodge on his arbor to gorge.

At Georgica, suspicion has been directed hypothetically toward people walking their dogs in a roadside pull-off just east of Wainscott Stone Road. No one I have talked to has said they have ever seen dogs doing their business in there. The bacteria could come from the prodigious droppings of raccoons instead, but that would not explain why the bacteria are so much higher in the pond than in other locations sampled by Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Surfrider Blue Water Task Force, given that raccoons are everywhere there is something to feed on.

The bright side of Tuesday morning’s excitement is that I now know where to close up the wire mesh. The bad news is that the raccoons will sooner or later find another way in. They always do.

“I dreamt I’d won a Peace prize. . . .” “No, no, that was my Peace prize,” corrected Mary, who recently had spent hours straightening out one of my bill-paying gaffes with State Farm, had painstakingly laid the groundwork for a tax grievance, and had raked leaves and edged until she was a physical wreck.

“Ah, mind and body,” I said. “Actually, you were the one who gave it to me, though you’re right, I should have been the one to give it to you. Dreamlife’s unfair. It was a photograph of my mother with me as an infant . . . blissful.”

“I would like to have a dream like that. . . .”

“And then I dreamt I was flying the night before. On my back, borne up by a breeze, dipping and soaring above everyone. The sun was shining. I’d been with a group of people. I began doing jumping jacks, and then I began to fly, out into the outdoors.”

“I love dreams of flying. . . . You were joyful.”

“Yes, joyful. . . . Maybe some of it has to do with the fact that there are things to write about now, now that it’s ostensibly spring. It’s a relief, I no longer have to dream things up as I did all winter, just hang on for the ride.”

“Or maybe it was about ducking out on hours of phone calls to State Farm to get the insurance snafu ironed out, or checking the internet for comps. . . .”

“Yes, it could have been about escape. . . . I mean, there are so many reasons now not to neaten up so much around the house. We want to win our tax grievance, don’t we? Shouldn’t we cultivate more of a down-in-the-mouth look? Where’s that old baby puke-green Ford Falcon when I need it? The night it died I pushed it back onto the front lawn, where it stood for years by the mailbox. . . .”

“When we had that town party everyone covered it with graffiti. Georgie and Johnna used to wait for the school bus in it. You began calling it ‘a home for wayward dolls.’ There were four or five of them propped up against the rear window.”

“Then a neighbor left that note: ‘Usually, after the viewing the dead are interred, Mr. Graves.’ The Reids towed it away. Geoff Gehman thinks I was inspired by the Beales’ Buick that I saw that wintry day in the bracken as I was biking down West End Road long ago. Perhaps I was, subconsciously. There’s not so much living down the Joneses anymore. The houses are obese, the lawns just so. Bonac yards — folk art really — are rarities now. I saw one the other day and was smitten. I thought of writing it up and photographing it, but then reined myself in. ‘In your dreams,’ I said. ‘It won’t fly.’ ”