As host of the third panel on timely, serious issues under the umbrella of Guild Hall’s Hamptons Institute on Monday, Alec Baldwin wore a number of his many hats comfortably. The topic, “The New Normal in News: Ideology vs. Fact,” was explored by Mr. Baldwin and a prestigious panel: Nicholas Lehmann, former dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a frequent essayist for The New Yorker, Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!,” the long­time muckraking radio program, and Bob Garfield, the author of five books and a podcast on journalism and advertising and a co-host of the radio and online program “On the Media.”

Mr. Baldwin said he has been a news junky since he was 10, something we know here at The Star from the letters to the editor he has submitted over the years. As president of Guild Hall’s board of trustees, he helped plan the panels and took this one to heart, asking tough questions and eliciting generally jaundiced views of the corporate media and TV pundits from the panelists. He even found an occasion to bring down the house with his comical and by now familiar Donald Trump impersonation.

Acknowledging that the panelists could all be considered liberals, he said Guild Hall had tried but failed to get an avowed conservatives like Tucker Carlson to take part. And he drew out an apparent lofty consensus: Despite apocalyptic change in how and where people get news, and the many questionable sources, intellectual honesty continues to be the reporter’s credo.

As someone who has dedicated more than the last 50 years to newspapering, it was an evening well spent. The conversation was informative, sometimes provocative, and helped put “fake news” in perspective. Besides, Nicholas Lehmann had quite a few things to say about today’s Columbia School of Journalism, where the late Everett Rattray, who edited this paper from 1958 to 1980, and I met and sealed our fates.

The panelists bemoaned the lack of press coverage of local and state government across the country, saying it resulted in the loss of an informed citizenry, and Mr. Baldwin cited the Los Angeles Times as a major newspaper that managed to do it all. I couldn’t help think he could have applauded The East Hampton Star for being a community forum, where issues are brought to light and opinions of all stripes are published week after week in our expansive (and sometimes exhaustive) letters pages. Turn this page and take a look. There are 40 letters this week.

To the dismay of many, Labor Day weekend has arrived, and for Hamptoners it officially marks the end of summer. White, beachy apparel, nautical stripes, and floral bohemian dresses will be stored away for next-summer use, or likely for the holiday season when St. Barth’s, the Bahamas, and Palm Beach seem better suited for weekend tans and holiday getaways than the windy, white winters on the East End. 

For locals, on the other hand, Labor Day weekend marks the finale of a long-awaited three months of pop-up shops, celebrity sightings, summer concerts at the Surf Lodge, hours of traffic, and the inability to get a reservation at just about any and every restaurant.  

While locals will revel in the tranquillity, and travelers will anxiously wait for next year’s Memorial Day weekend to mark a new beginning to summer, ambivalence is undeniable when you’re in not one, but both of these groups. 

Having left home at 15 years old for boarding school, I grew up yearning for summers in the Hamptons, and so did all of the friends I made. Maybe they’d heard about it from their parents, listened to librettos from a multitude of music artists, watched “White Chicks,” or wanted to experience a real-life “Gossip Girl” episode (all of these have ways of infiltrating conversation when you say you’re from Southampton).

Though I suppose the South Fork can be all of those things, the reality of hectic summer months — no beach parking spots, bustling Main Streets, lack of dining availability, and heavy traffic — while far from the glamour “the Hamptons” exudes, had an air of excitement . . . maybe because I, to a degree, was a vacationer . . . a faux local. 

Memorial Day marked my arrival and Labor Day my sendoff to Sheffield, Mass., and eventually Winston-Salem, N.C., but now my days in academia are over. This year I will outlive the expiration date on my summer beach parking sticker and end the seven-year streak of spending September elsewhere, and while it’s a bit unsettling, I’m equally thrilled. The weather (insert emoji with heart eyes)!

For the record, all those episodes and songs . . . they’re misleading. Sure, summer is great, but oh, the fall. . . . The air is crisp, the fields are voluminous, the ocean is warm, the leaves transform into every shade from fiery red to canary yellow, the roads are open, light beams glisten and bounce off everything in their direct line, and the sunsets. . . . Civility takes the wheel and ruckus patiently sits in the passenger seat for a ride through the fall, winter, and spring seasons. 

Maybe it’s the frenzied summers that make falls on the East End so glorious. Maybe it’s just as beautiful, only now we have time to digest it. 

Jackie Pape is a reporter for The Star, and about to spend her first fall on the South Fork.

“You’re good to go,” my dentist, Perry Silver, said after cleaning my teeth.

“That’s what I said yesterday to Mary after we had the cesspool pumped,” I said. 

I don’t know, there’s something about the way you feel after you’ve had your cesspool pumped — cleansed, ready to begin anew. 

I’ve been reading Jung lately, about the unconscious and its repressed contents that we ought to face if we really want to know ourselves, and there before me, once the cover had been pried off and we were peering down, was the unconscious metaphorically speaking. 

“Not bad,” the pumper said. I gloried in his words. “Not bad, that’s good,” I said. 

My daughter was coming, that was one thing that prompted me — an avoider as well as a voider — to take action. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened just prior to a festive dinner out there in Ohio, a root-caused massive cloacal contraction that cast us to the winds — Emily, Anderson, and the kids going to his parents’ house for the night, and Mary and I to his brother’s down the street, which was unoccupied that weekend.

Mary loved it that Todd’s house was so neat, so uncluttered. “Is he an architect? An engineer?” I asked. At any rate, its sleekness was the polar opposite of ours, whose dark living room with its raggedy books, sideboard, knife boxes (so the servants couldn’t steal the knives), velvet love seat, and dining room table that can be folded up against the wall when you’re having guests over for champagne, gavottes, and quadrilles is more 18th century than 21st.

Emily wants us to open and brighten it up, to consciously face our collective mess by ridding ourselves of the ratty oriental rug, by painting the classic burgundy window trim white (maybe Anderson will get to that when he visits next week), by replacing the three-cushion Jennifer convertible couches with one or ones more conducive to conversation, and by putting the plasma TV up over the fireplace, which we won’t do because that’s where Billy Hofmann’s beautiful painting “Louse Point,” with its moody allusion to the collective unconscious, is. We never tire of it. I’m glad I told him so once at One-Stop.

A founder of the Maidstoners softball team, the other being Dan Christensen, Billy, who could also pivot neatly in turning a double play, used to say he presumed Thoreau was my guide, and that if he wasn’t, he should be. This morning, in a review of a new biography of him by Laura Dassow Walls, I read that he once said, “Surely joy is the condition of life!”

He’s batting 1.000 in my book then.

But back to the unconscious, I dreamed the other night that my late stepfather was maniacally at the wheel of a car in which I and my mother were captive passengers. He was careening down the street toward a bank — we couldn’t stop him — and, as we feared, smashed the car right into it. A shot rang out.

I’ll admit it was puzzling, until I remembered that my basketball-playing grandchildren were on their way here and that they had great bank shots. Voila. Don’t talk to me about the unexamined life. 

Would she want to learn how to make beach plum jelly, I asked my eldest child one morning this week. We were in the truck, driving to a college prep class, and she was going on only a few hours’ sleep.

“No,” she said. “I don’t like the taste.”

“But maybe it would be good if you learned so if you wanted to make jelly some day, you would know how,” I said.

“That’s what the internet’s for,” she answered.

She had a point, but it was one that made me instantly melancholy. I had picked up jelly making in our kitchen as a child. My father, who had learned how to do it from his grandparents, if I recall, passed on a skill that connected me to them, and through them to a long line of Huntings and Edwardses and so on, back to the 17th century.

I think about the people who lived here long ago just about every time I go onto the dunes when the beach plums are ripe. I think about the Native Americans who arrived millennia before the Europeans and how they must have exalted as the days of summer drew shorter and the sweet and tangy purple fruit began to swell. 

Early European visitors observed that the native people cooked meat with the fruit that grew wild on these shores. They also saw them preparing dried sheets of the pulp to save for the cold, barren months.

I could tell from the broken pottery and fragment of fire remains that used to spill from a dune across the road from my house that native people indeed had been here at some point in the past. A new summer palace for a part-timer rises about where as a child I used to find dozens of quartz flakes, evidence that someone long ago had made stone tools there.

It is perhaps sentimental for me to feel a connection through beach plums to the European ancestors and the people whom they deliberately displaced with a thicket of legal restrictions. Early East Hampton Town records are filled with laws restricting native people’s access to guns and powder and penalizing them sharply for the most incidental transgressions. 

I think about all this each year in the beach plum patch, which no one, even the most determined 16-year-old, is going to find on the internet.

Lots of people went to Southampton over Labor Day weekend to do lots of things, but I went to cross over from “the Hamptons” into the Shinnecock Nation, which was hosting peoples of many tribes, and all kinds of visitors, for its annual powwow. 

It smelled of woodsmoke and sage. Walking slowly around the grounds, the sound of anklebone jingle bells swelled and faded as dancers behind me approached and passed. The vendors sold Shinnecock clams, Wampanoan frybread, Aztec tacos, and Mexican-style corn, mixing and matching cultures.

My heart set to the drumbeats, as it always does, the moment I arrived. 

Preteen friends in powwow garb hurried through the gates into the dancers’ area behind the stage. Their footsteps, without effort, fell onto the soft ground in that circular, staccato native dance, in sync with the drums. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know just what I mean; it’s a step at once grounded and skittery, like the way some small animals move through the woods, a connection and light touch upon the earth, the push and pull of a magnet.

On stage the M.C. welcomed dancers and drummers representing different tribes, moving through their traditions, enacting stories, marking the wheel of life, honoring the Great Spirit.

A seagull flew diagonally across the field of clouds overhead as Arvel Bird, a composer and performer, stood front and center with flutes and electric violin. The wind, rising, rustled branches of the tall trees, livening the background of green. “The wind spirits are waking,” he said. Before playing a song from his “Animal Totems” CD he talked about the message a young hawk trying to fly has for us in its example of determination and fortitude.

I left before the Grand Entry lineup of all the dancers dressed in colorful ceremonial clothes, but stopped to buy an Arvel Bird CD. I was looking forward to putting it on at home whenever I need a breath of life, an elevation of spirit.

In the parking lot, the hatchback of his minivan raised open, the man who had earlier sat eating barbecue fresh from the fire was adjusting his full regalia, a spread of long dappled feathers blossoming from his back like the mouth of an anemone. 

The moon was up, almost full; enough light lingered for me to see the shine of the blue bay at the end of the lane. I turned right, toward the highway, and back into the fray.

When I got home the tree frogs and cicadas were making their own music, the steady rolling chirrupy voice of one chorus overlaid with the 1-2-3 rhythmic saw-buzz of the other. 

From across the street and through the woods came the sharp sounds of an edgy band, one of five playing at a party at the cold glass-and-iron trophy house built by the Euro-rich neighbor of a friend. 

The night before, drawn by the sounds of a party, the young people at her house went over to the neighbors’ to see what was going on. There were colored lights shining into the woods, music, fabulous guests.

One of the visitors remarked upon the neighbor’s house, and on the scene. A native Spanish speaker, the wealthy owner waved his hand. “All this,” he said, “I don’t know why.” 

Neither do I. But for it, the East End has been transformed, a heavy imprint on the quiet interconnected waterways, woods, fields, and skyways that the powwow dancing celebrates.

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

The job of editing letters to the editor landed in my lap a few years ago and has remained there ever since. I don’t know whether I was given this difficult task because the editor or managing editor decided it would be a suitable slot for an old hand like me or because they thought it would keep me out of harm’s way (or prevent me from doing harm as I “age in place,” as the saying goes).

Readers know that The Star publishes every letter it receives provided it is exclusive, neither libelous nor obscene, and the writer is identified. Of course, the letter also has to arrive before our deadline of 5 p.m. on Monday. Recently, the East Hampton Star motto “Shines for All” could well have been changed to “Letters for All”: We ended up publishing 35 letters in each of the last two editions. We are proud of this service, an open forum — one of our previous editors called the pages “Freedom Hall” — that we believe is healthy for the community and that has for many decades now been a medium through which important issues and ideas have been raised leading to important progress in government, in our local organizations, and in our school districts.

In order to keep the letters pages from becoming an incoherent hodgepodge, each missive is edited to conform to our standards of grammar and punctuation (but otherwise, in general, left as written). Because we are a newspaper of record for local municipalities, it is incumbent on us to check the accuracy of the titles of the various entities mentioned: Is it Workmen’s or Workers’ Compensation, for example? We give each letter a headline taken from words or phrases within it, and then we put them in what seems to be a common-sense order, grouping those on the same topic.

That sounds easy, right? But there’s more: the human element. We typically have to engage with the letter writers, devoting many hours to checking that names are real and not pseudonyms, checking addresses, deciphering bad handwriting, transcribing, and fielding angry phone calls from cranks and from those who don’t agree with an opinion someone has expressed in one of the letters.

In the past, if there happened to be, say, 20 or more letters in a given week, we would find the  time to engage their writers, by phone or, later, by email, in a more or less pleasant give and take about anything confusing. Even recently, with so many letters, the majority of writers make it easy. Those who write regularly are usually savvy enough to make sure they aren’t just composing the same letter each week, and they become familiar with the process.

It may not be surprising, however, that there also are a few letter writers who try our patience. Some have an urge to submit a flow of letters that are very long and/or technically obscure and therefore difficult to proofread. Some refuse to understand that we cannot print letters that have been sent, en masse, to a score of other publications. Last week, one writer wanted to know why he couldn’t have two published in the same week, and then, when we agreed, kept changing his mind about which of the two should be published first. We let him know our decision was to use the first first, but he wasn’t satisfied. Now imagine engaging in this way with 35 writers. It adds to my gray hair each week, and holds up the whole process of going to press.

Not that I’m complaining. I believe The Star’s role in publishing letters, which began as a promise to readers, has become a civic institution; it is a responsibility that none of the other local publications can match. Week after week, the letters provide readers with information and opinions on issues of myriad concern and offer reflections on ideas both simple and profound (and sometimes silly). To be sure, it is sometimes a heavy duty task, but the letters to the editor can also be a laugh. I hope you agree.

I read about “terminal lucidity” the other day, and breathed a sigh of relief inasmuch as I’m still wondering what it’s all about.

“At the end of life, it seems,” I said to Mary, “people who’ve been in comas and the like come to and ask how their grandchildren’s Little League season has been going.”

Actually, I don’t have to ask how the Little League season has been going: It went very well, thank you. It was Tyler Hansen, a 9-year-old, who caught my eye as I arrived one evening for the games at Pantigo. Strike, strike, strike. He was throwing nothing but strikes, and with zip too. I turned to a woman at my side — his mother, I was to learn — and said, “Wow, this kid is impressive!”

I don’t want to give him a swelled head, but his grit and his mechanics were so evident that it’s stuck in my mind, and I’ve seen many Little League games in my time, including those played by the 1991 team that won the district and county championships, the team that Brendan Fennell seemed always to bail out with grand-slam home runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and with East Hampton trailing by three.

That may not be utterly lucid, but it’s the way I remember it. Just as I remember Andy Tuthill repeatedly hitting a 4-year-old’s equivalent to a 500-foot (well, make that a 400-foot) homer with his father and me looking on, and Ross Gload’s three home runs into St. Joseph’s College’s parking lot, each farther than the last, in the small school county championship game of 1994.

Funny what you remember. Roberto Clemente’s rifled throws from right field that caught by surprise runners who’d made a wide turn in rounding first base is another. And how sad Muffin and I were when we heard he had died.

So perhaps baseball in East Hampton will come around again. If it does, we’ll have people like Vinny Alversa, Henry Meyer, Tim Garneau, and Kevin Brophy to thank for it, not to mention the players themselves.

It really is a matter of the spirit — not just mind and body — as I suppose is the case with all exceptional teams.

The spirit grows and flourishes and moves on.

The East Hampton Town Comprehensive Plan is an amazing 114-page document including tables, charts, and maps. It was adopted in May 2005 after about a year and a half of study by professional planners and of public debate. For the most part, we hear of it these days only when an official or activist points to something in it that is relevant to a current project.

The plan was largely based on data dating to 2000. Is there any wonder that many of its recommendations seem out of date? The town’s recent hamlet studies, which had been recommended in the plan, concentrated on commercial centers, without particular attention to other issues effecting the quality of life or even broader aspects of the economy (I’m thinking of the boom in home-based businesses, the “trade parade” and traffic in general, and the regrettable impact of the luxury-business takeover of our main streets). The forums held surrounding the hamlet studies helped gauge public opinion, yes, but they hardly provided fresh ideas about the current effects of zoning and growth.

Most East Hamptoners surely agree with many of the goals in the comprehensive plan. For example, to “maintain, and restore where necessary, East Hampton’s rural and semi-rural character and the unique qualities of each of East Hampton’s historic communities” is one such laudable goal, and to “take forceful measures to protect and restore the environment, particularly ground water” is another. Another goal that remains pertinent is to “reduce reliance on the automobile [and] encourage investment in alternative transportation — including sidewalks, bikeways, rail, buses, shuttles, and ‘shared’ cars.”

Where opinion might begin to veer away from apparent consensus is on how to reduce the impacts of human habitation, how to “provide housing opportunities to help meet the needs of current year-round residents, their family members and senior citizens, seasonal employees, employees, emergency services volunteers, and other local workers,” and how to “encourage local businesses to serve the needs of the year-round population and reduce the environmental impacts of commercial and industrial uses.” That these goals pretty much refer only to the year-round population might be enough reason to think a revised comprehensive plan is overdue.

Because the political climate in East Hampton is, like the nation, more inherently divided than it was a dozen years ago, it undoubtedly would be a much tougher challenge to revise the plan than it was to create it. It might take almost twice as long to complete, which is likely to bring us to 2020 before a revised plan could be adopted. That would be a good 15 years after the existing plan was approved, and much too long a hiatus, given the pressures of continued population growth and the escalating needs of seasonal residents and summer revelers.

As we get closer to November, it would help voters — perhaps even be definitive  —  if those seeking election to the East Hampton Town Board showed the public they know what is in the comprehensive plan and told us where they think it is on target or falls short. Their ideas about what it would take, in time and money, to bring it up to date, would also be interesting.

Henry Thoreau said, “Joy is the condition of life,” and I believe him. Certainly O’en, our white golden, does, especially now that he has as a houseguest a goldendoodle from Ohio named Fozzie.

They are inseparable. Well, that’s putting it mildly. They’re the most vigorous, courteous love-makers I’ve ever seen, neither one lording it over the other unless that’s the scene they’re playing. Roles switch in a second, sort of like an ever-whirling yin-yang. Sometimes they just lie there, a foot apart, mouths agape, looking fondly at each other, exhausted.

The other night, Mary said she heard whimpers and thought they came from Emily’s bedroom upstairs where Fozzie sleeps in a crate. But no, it was O’en who was being plaintive. I could almost imagine him, eyes upcast, 12-string guitar in hand, singing softly, “Ay, ay, ay, here at your window. . . .”

When Fozzie descends the stairs in the morning, it’s as if they haven’t seen each other in ages. O’en leaps at the gate that has sequestered him in the kitchen, forepaws upraised and extended in utter delight, pouring forth his soul abroad in such an ecstasy!

I do worry what will happen when Fozzie has to go. Undoubtedly, O’en will be depressed, but he’s too much a part of us now to idly part with him. There was a time when we worried that maybe we’d bitten off more than we could chew, but we’re pretty much in sync now. He, the beautiful boy, dines on braised organic free-range chicken thighs, a recipe of Thomas Keller’s, and fluffy organic brown rice with which occasionally we mix in some bits of Cabot’s extra-sharp cheese to firm up the stool. Taking care not to intrude, we ask periodically, rubbing our hands together, if everything is to his satisfaction.

“This is the Hamptons, you know,” I say to Emily. “What do the dogs in Perrysburg eat? Kibble?”

She shoots me a look. “With children and Fozzie it’s L.C.D., Dad, as in least common denominator. We keep the bar low. Your children have grown, it’s just the two of you, I can see that. But tea sandwiches with the crusts cut off?”

“Only on special occasions.”

“Well, he is a wonderful-looking dog.”

“He is. We don’t walk, we take the air. And so it ever will be. Though I know that whenever he’s in our embrace hereafter he’ll be thinking of Fozzie.”

Jordan’s Run, in memory of a young hero, wasn’t of course just a race, but a time to reflect. 

The memory that our government’s incursion 14 years ago into the cradle of civilization was impulsive, with profoundly tragic consequences, only serves to compound the suffering it has spawned and to widen the circle of compassion that attends it, even unto the small towns where the death of a soldier — a Marine in this case — comes, as Joi Jackson Perle said the other day, as a shock. 

And so it was that when Steve Xiarhos, a police officer from West Barnstable, Mass., with whom I’d been talking near the finish line, took off from his wrist the bracelet commemorating his son, Nicholas, who, like Sag Harbor’s Jordan Haerter, had also given his life in the Mideast, I said, truly, that I was not worthy.

He gave it to me still, saying, “I think you are, I think you have a good heart.”

“Maybe it will make me stronger,” I said, putting on the band, which said, “Cpl. Nicholas G. Xiarhos, USMC, 7/23/2009 * Garmsir, Afghanistan.”

“Maybe I can help others more. . . .”

I was deeply touched, deeply affected. I asked, “How old was your son?”

Twenty-one, he said. “How old was Jordan?”

“Nineteen.”

Nick, who was to die in combat 15 months later, had been one of those saved by Jordan, who stood his ground and fired when a truck packed with explosives was speeding toward the Marine barracks in Ramadi, Iraq, in the early morning of April 22, 2008. That act of heroism, of self-sacrifice, earned him, posthumously, the Navy Cross.

The rightness or wrongness of our representatives’ decision years ago is beside the point, which is that Jordan and Nick were honorable, and that they have united us in suffering and in compassion and, yes, in the joy that was so evident at the foot of Pierson’s hill that day, July 30, which would have been Jordan Haerter’s 29th birthday.