My first home of my own after college was an apartment on Sag Harbor’s Main Street, just south of the Sag Harbor Cinema. I lived there for six years in my 20s, watching the village’s daily life unfold through the front windows. 

On Memorial Day, the Sag Harbor Community Band would begin tuning up well before 9, tucked in the semicircular alcove in front of the Art Deco cinema. In the mid-’90s, on warm summer nights, kids would loop through the village from one end to the other, showing off their jacked-up trucks and people-watching as they drove. It was a thing, then. Maybe it still is. 

When I first moved in, Sag Harbor was still rebuilding from the 1994 Easter Sunday fire that destroyed the Emporium Hardware building. Before the new building rose in its place, I remember a view of the water from the roof behind our apartment, but could that really be? 

It was the perfect place to live at that time in my life, and I shared it with a rotating collection of friends who signed on as roommates for a few months at a time or just crashed on the couch for a weekend or so. 

After reading about the fire two weeks ago that destroyed the cinema among other neighboring buildings, my friend Carl, one of the many who laid claim to the second bedroom, described the apartment as “a kind of miniature commune.” And it was, in its way. It just lent itself to a good time. We were one big, happy family and did not yet need to answer any of life’s bigger questions. We danced and made movies and played charades and cooked huge communal meals together. Friendships were made and relationships fell apart, and I was one of the people at the swirling center before so many of us drifted off in our separate directions. 

Because the cinema was so iconic and appeared in so many paintings and photographs, our apartment next door often played a supporting role. We’d notice our lamp, the silhouette of our potted plant, in, say, a painting on the cover of Dan’s Papers. It was about the theater, but among those of us who knew 90 Main Street, it was our few minutes of fame, too. 

It was a shotgun apartment that ran the full depth of the building, with a big living room in front, a spacious eat-in kitchen in the middle, and two bedrooms at the back with windows onto an unheated sunroom. What passed for the master bedroom also served as the gateway to the sunroom, the roof beyond, and the fire escape out back. From the kitchen and bedroom windows, we could see over the roof of the cinema lobby, and from the front windows we could see the nighttime glow of the cinema’s neon “Sag Harbor” sign gently illuminating the sidewalk below. 

You could ride out on the Jitney, get off at the movie theater, and walk right upstairs. Out the front door, you could get everything you needed and go barhopping, too, without ever getting in your car. And if you weren’t in the mood to talk, it was best go out through the backdoor; it was impossible not to run into a friend or acquaintance looking for a chat. 

Main Street was my front yard, and its pulse beat inside of me for those years and quite a few after that. 

Now my old apartment is just a shell of itself, sky visible through the burned-out roof, and the cinema and the building to the right of it have been torn down completely. All of us who love the village feel the hole not just in the streetscape but inside of us. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Sag Harbor without that cinema facade is like East Hampton without the Hook Mill. God forbid the mill ever burned, there is no doubt we would rebuild.

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

In putting The Star together we agree that it benefits not just from a variety of feature and news stories each week but diversity among the opinion pieces. “How about the holidays or a funny anecdote?” I’ve been asked when trying to come up with a topic of late. In recent weeks, though, it has not always been easy to supply the requisite entertainment or light humor. 

Clearly, I am not alone in looking for words of wisdom about facing what looks to become a grim epoch in this country’s history: I apologize that two out of three columns on this page are devoted to the subject of how to conduct yourself under an authoritarian regime. (And, well, at least Jack Graves has written about his sister this week — see the bottom of the page — rather than the state of the nation, which he is also often wont to do.)

Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale with a concentration  on Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Holocaust,  is the author of “Twenty Lessons From the 20th Century, Adapted to the Circumstances of Today,” an essay that is making the rounds online. He speaks 5 and reads 10 European languages, and has written six award-winning books and co-authored others. He is a prolific essayist and commentator on American politics.

“Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit­ler and Stalin” traces the circumstances that led to dictatorship in Germany and Russia. It  has won 12 awards and been translated into 33 languages.  His most recent book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” will appear in 24 foreign editions. 

What better academic to take advice from now?

“Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism,” Mr. Snyder writes in prefacing his “20 Lessons.” 

Here are a few of his maxims that seem most appropriate to follow today:

“When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. . . .  Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.”

“Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

“Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.” 

“Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.”

“Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up auto-pay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.”

“Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.”

Until the Electoral College confirmed Donald Trump as president-elect on Monday, I refused to believe he would make it to the White House. Now, I’m afraid, it is time to take advice like Professor Snyder’s to heart.

Mobutu Sese Seko was by the time I arrived in Africa as a college student in 1985 renowned as one of the globe’s most corrupt leaders. Zaire, as the Congo was then called, had withered under his rule. The story was that you could have driven a Cadillac from the Rift Valley in the east all the way to the Atlantic without hitting a single pothole when he assumed power in 1965. Twenty years later, only traces of the road remained, most of it sucked up into the jungle.

Traveling around Africa as a young man, I was struck, as many were, at what was perceived as the continent’s preference for strongman, authoritarian dictators. Uganda’s Idi Amin, deposed in 1979, was reviled as brutal. Even in Kenya, which was thought to be a model for African democracy, elected officials were amassing wealth improperly, restricting students’ right to protest, and fomenting clashes among ethnic groups.

Why the masses put up with it in so many countries seemed a mystery. This week, after the Electoral College voted to formalize Donald Trump’s victory, the preference for an autocratic government is much less foreign.

It was in Zaire, toward the end of my stay in Africa, that I really began to sense the dangerous undercurrents. Arriving at the border from Burundi, I was swept up by armed men, who took me in the back of an open Toyota pickup truck to some office or other before letting me go on my way. I never figured out if they were police or something else, and I never lost the sense that I was being watched or that every man between 20 and 50 seemed a little like he was with the secret police.

Whether from love or fear, many of the people I saw on the streets of Zaire wore small pins showing Mobutu Sese Seko sporting his signature heavy-rimmed glasses and leopard-hide cap. I had to have one and eventually found my way to a neighborhood political party office, where for a couple of Zaires, as the currency, which also bore the presi12dent’s likeness, was called, I obtained several. But the transaction was not without an air of menace. 

Leaving the country a few weeks later, the customs agents at the grass-strip airport refused to let me leave with the pins. “These are for the Zairouis. They are not for the outside world,” one said.

I was still in a fit of pique about that when we landed in Tanzania a couple of hours later, and I stuffed most of my shopping bag full of nearly worthless Zaires down a latrine by way of protest. 

It is only today, following the election of Mr. Trump, that I think I finally, so many years later, have a degree of understanding about how countries could go so wrong, how voters could welcome with broad grins a thug-like, divisive leader. I did not get it then, but I do now.

My sister, who has agreed that she was “a basket case” not so long ago, has made a complete turnaround, thanks to an Egyptian-born psychiatrist who utterly revamped her medications with what I would call miraculous results, “and, ultimately, God.”

Or He and Allah.

I wrote a while ago that I, for my part, had faith in her — though that faith was shaken during a period in which everything (soul, body, mind) seemed to go south, and during which she told me she was no longer talking to God. 

It seemed as if she were throwing in the towel, and we didn’t know what to say other than to persist in urging persistence and in cheerleading, in trying to make her laugh, which had worked for me and Mary — an even better cheerleader than I — in the past. But there did come a time when it seemed there was nothing more we could say. 

During my last visit to her, recently — the one in which I found her vastly improved, much more lucid and calm, lighthearted even — she said she had had suicidal thoughts in the previous months and had thought more than once of jumping out of a window. “Thank God you were living in a first-floor apartment,” I said.

And the interesting thing was that on that weekend trip, she, who had been saved by Dr. Ayyash and by God, saved me from getting us hopelessly lost while exploring Mars in my rental car. Yes, Mars, for that is where she is living now, Mars, Pa., having moved there from Moon. I’m not kidding. And, of course, I am the Star of the East . . . Hampton.

Well, I shouldn’t go that far, but she was happy to see me, and I’m glad that, homebody though I may be, I made the trip — through the airport where there’s a statue of Franco Harris making the Immaculate Reception.

Actually, her recovery is like that! I remember running from our car — we’d been Christmas shopping — into a hair salon in Sewickley to find out what had happened, and everybody was going crazy: The Steelers, they said, had just beaten the dastardly Oakland Raiders in the last seconds of the A.F.C. divisional playoff game! It had been a miracle.

As has been my sister’s recovery. 

It’s fourth-and-10, the ball is on the Steelers’ 40-yardline, there are 22 seconds left. . . . Bradshaw, under pressure, is scrambling to his right. . . . He lets it go. . . .

The rest you know.

We’ve heard a lot these days about fake news and know that cyberspace is crowded with misinformation — and disinformation — which often make it hard for anyone to know who and what to believe. But I never expected to find a film on a kids’ TV channel infested with advertising masquerading as a happy holiday production for the whole family. 

I fell into the fake-news trap recently when I decided to take a look at Disney’s animated film “Frozen” on the Disney Channel on a night when I was at home alone. I hadn’t accompanied any of the grandchildren to see the smash-hit musical when it came out in 2013 and was intrigued because the kids all seemed able to sing “Let It Go,” the most popular song from it. 

I had begun watching a somewhat truncated “Frozen” when suddenly a different production intruded. Red curtains parted, and real live children and adults began “rehearsing” a performance of a pseudo-“Nutcracker.” Honestly, I didn’t realize what was going on, and blithely continued watching “Froz­en” until it happened again.

I had expected that a film on the Disney Channel on ABC would be interrupted by advertisements, but I didn’t understand that the performance behind the red curtain was a commercial. Eventually I noticed that before the curtains opened, a prominent bull’s-eye appeared. What followed, interrupting “Frozen,” was an insidious stealth holiday-marketing campaign by Target.

It turns out that holiday performances have been used as TV advertising by Kmart, Macy’s, and Victoria’s Secret, although the first two are brief and make the source of what you are watching evident quickly. Viewers don’t learn it’s a Victoria’s Secret commercial unless they watch the scantily clad, gyrating dancers to the very end.

Target’s publicists had announced: “In past years, guests loved following the ongoing adventures of a variety of characters — including our beloved mascot, Bullseye — in Target’s holiday marketing campaigns, whether it was a trip to Wonderland with Alice, or a magical journey to light up a tree.”

“This year, we’re turning up the dial on our storytelling by raising the curtain on a Broadway-style production. Our top toys of the season team up with celebrity friends. . . .” Not only does John Legend appear as the Rat King, but his wife, Chrissy Teigen, a writer and television personality, is in it, too. They were on hand for the New York City premiere of “The Toycracker” (which is what Target calls its “take on the classic story”) early this month, before its TV debut on Sunday night.

I’m sorry. I love Broadway-style musicals, but the blurring of the line between kids’ programming and advertising is a sad commentary on the culture of our times.

Having spent most of the past two weeks in bed with what appeared to be the flu, Twitter and I have gotten to know each other well. Not that I tweet, or post, much; instead I have spent hours upon hours following various threads on which the authors express outrage about the election. Twitter is as good a place as any to drive you to despair. But it is also a place where one can get a deeper understanding of what is going on.

There are plenty of straight-up maniacs, but there are also good, thoughtful people on Twitter. I have been reading closely, for example, posts from Norm Eisen, who was a top White House ethics lawyer in the Obama administration. Mr. Eisen co-founded a group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and with Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush White House from 2005 to 2007, wrote a compelling op-ed in The Washington Post before the election laying out what they saw as the ethical challenges of a Trump presidency. 

The piece was persuasive — and here is where Twitter shines, in my opinion. Readers like me who wanted more have been able to follow Mr. Eisen’s thoughts in the ensuing weeks. Twitter is good for that. Used well, it is a way to understand the world as seen through many of its most qualified observers. 

On the other hand, it can be a bludgeon. See Donald Trump’s attacks on a union boss who crossed him at that Indiana Carrier plant ­or the president-elect’s tweet about the cost of a new Air Force One that tanked Boeing’s stock. There is some talk that Mr. Trump’s staff will wrest away his cellphone once he is in the White House to preserve the dignity of the presidency and avoid the possibility of a war based on late-night rant.

Whether or not Mr. Trump remains on Twitter, it is now an essential part of the contemporary political scene. Those interested in knowing what is really going on would do well to follow along.

It was Tuesday night when it occurred to me that I hadn’t — because I was flying back from having spent the weekend in Pittsburgh — seen the first half of the Steelers’ delightful 24-14 win that Sunday over the Giants.

Mary had recorded it, and so it was with a light heart that I headed down the hall, with her behind me, toward the larger TV where I presumed she’d show me — yet again, for I have never kept pace with change — how to summon it up.

“Was it the football game you were interested in?” she asked when we got there.

“Well, just the first half — I saw the second half, you’ll remember, when I got home. The Steelers were leading 14-0 at the half, so I thought it would be fun to watch.”

“Uh-oh,” she said. “I thought you’d watched the whole game — I deleted it.”

“You . . . deleted it. . . ?”

“Yes, forgive me, forgive me,” she said, pitiably. “Maybe I can retrieve it. . . .”

“That’s a venal . . . no, no, that’s a mortal sin, you know. Now, I’ll have to read about Emily Dickinson!”

Well, it serves me right for persisting in ignorance. I will have to learn how to record things myself. And anyway, she didn’t do it with full knowledge of the sin, the one, you know, having to do with the erasure of vitally important shows. 

“You’re forgiven — you’re not guilty!” I called out reassuringly toward the living room, where she was watching a Sam Shepard play, knowing that that would resonate particularly with her, who’s never forgotten the sign on the Pittsburgh bridge, the one painted 20 or so years ago, in big white letters, that said, “She’s Guilty.”

Why is it that women, the chief reason that there’s any joy in life, or any life for that matter, have received such short shrift by and large down the centuries, except for the few societies, like Crete, that were matriarchies?

She’s guilty? The church, and often society, would seem to have it so. 

Why that is I haven’t the remotest idea. 

And let it so be recorded.

If, when you get behind the wheel of a car, your thoughts turn toward auto accidents, or if, when you board a plane, you worry that it will crash, you are apt to face your digital life with trepidation, too. 

When you learned that Russian rogue operators (or were they put up to it by the Politbureau?) had hacked into the computers of members of the Democratic National Committee, for example, did you say to yourself, “Yikes! I better watch out”? Or did you feel perfectly secure in being a small potato, like I did?

This week my antennas went up, however, when I received two suspicious emails in a row that weren’t connected with anything I recognized. The first came from “support” — with a lower case “s” — and no further identifiers. It asked me to reset my password. My password for what? That wasn’t indicated. I read the email but did not follow its directions. That was not a hard decision, but then the second came, from someone purporting to be Howard Yang of No. 200, Changjiang West Road, Hefei, China. 

His message was that Tankp Capital Limited had applied to register easthamptonstar as “their brand name” and that I should let him know if that company was authorized by my company “as soon as possible in order that we can deal with this problem timely.” 

I’m a pretty curious person, and I am a pretty good proofreader. The grammar was a little off. I am also someone who tries to be polite when I call a “help desk” about a problem with some device or system and reach someone whose English is heavily accented; just because the email might not come from someone with impeccable English didn’t mean it was a scam. In the case of Howard Yang, however, curiosity got the better of me.

Going to Google, I searched to find out if Mr. Yang’s address could be a legitimate one. Was there such a street and such a street number? Someone did seem to be running a trading company — selling groceries and dry goods — from that address. On Tripadvisor, I learned that accommodations were available at the 7 Days Inn or the Jinjiang Inn High Tech Zone in Hefei, China, otherwise known as Anhui. I then decided to see if Tankp Capital Limited could be found at any address. After a bit of a diversion during which the algorithms thought I might be trying to buy Chinese tank tops, I wasted a bit of time looking at a corporation named NKP, rather than Tankp, based in Dubai. After a while of perusing the mission of NKP, I looked at hotels in Dubai, too, trying to remember the one I stayed in once while en route to Ethiopia in 2011. Finally, looking for gentlemen by the name of Howard Yang in the city of Heifei, I at last came across a website called domainnamescam. wordpress.com — and, hey, presto! There he was. Good old Howard.

Concerns about how much time adults as well as children spend in front of screens have been in the news recently. American children from 5 to 16 apparently spend more than six hours a day starring at screens, while, according to the Nielsen Company, adults devote about 10 hours and 39 minutes each day to consuming media, including tablets, smartphones, personal computers, video games, radios, DVDs, DVRs, and TVs. Perhaps that’s the reason Donald Trump won the election.

David Brooks wrote recently about the lack of trust in our society, and how corrosive walling oneself off can be when it comes to the intermingling a thriving democracy requires.

Still, when Sinead FitzGibbon recently said concerning a golf lesson I planned to take that it was “a social game,” I replied — by way of explaining why I hadn’t played it — that I had no friends. (Other than Mary, of course.) But that I did exult in having a great number of acquaintances.

“I do a lot of my socializing at the dump,” I told her.

“Like we used to do at Mass,” she said.

“Yes, I get a lot of story ideas there — I should set up a desk and put up a sign saying, ‘The Quote Doctor Is In.’ ”

“The dump,” she concluded with a smile, “is the new Mass!”

“One does feel a bit righteous while recycling there, sorting out the wheat from the corn.” 

I recalled that her father, who is 86, once said he’d take up golf when he was old. 

“He still hasn’t,” she said.

And her mother, who, she said, was my age, which is to say 76, had “just signed up for a 100K bike ride.”

“And when will you take up tennis?” I said.

“When I’m old,” she said.

If old has to do with feeling weaker, then I am not — at least not at this moment in time. I have Rob Balnis at East End Physical Therapy to thank for that, or perhaps he and the life force left over from the Antareans’ visit 10,000 years ago. The residuum may be in the fern boles that O’en likes to dig up in our backyard. I won’t know for sure until I jump into the Y’s pool. 

Anima Sana in Corpore Sano. That’s the motto of the ASICS tennis sneakers I wear, though, while my corpore’s sano (for the moment, I say), my anima ain’t so sana. Aside from the question of trusting my fellows, I’m having difficulty trusting myself. Mary has said they ought to have a lost and found container at East Hampton Indoor Tennis just for me. I would say she’s as forgetful as I am, but that observation is skewed by the fact that she has many more things to forget than I do — a cellphone, its charger, rings, airline tickets, checkbooks, passports, other vitally important documents, crucial internet passwords, and the like. So, let’s just say she’s much less forgetful, but loses more things. 

I would say that that’s good news for me, for should I find whatever it is she’s missing, I can add indulgences, as it were, to the pile against the day when — through no fault of my own, of course — I may fall out of grace and be consigned to do all my socializing at the dump.

The distance between my house and the Star office building is less than a hundred yards, and some of the nicest moments of otherwise ordinary days are spent walking between the two. It’s a quick moment of stolen solitude, to listen to the wind in the high trees and, quite often, the roar of the ocean, about a mile away. I am supposed to walk a lot, at least according to the medical profession. But hurriedness often intervenes, preventing me from scheduling longer, proper hikes, and this gives my many short back-and-forth trips between house and office more significance than they might otherwise merit.

Among the last people to leave the office after dark about two weeks ago, I was headed toward home when a vehicle followed me slowly with its headlights on, lighting my path up the dark lane. I had walked past the lamppost that marks the boundary between The Star’s driveway and the East Hampton Library parking lot next door and continued my slow perambulation toward my house without looking back to find out who was lighting my way.

The truth is, I cherish these walks despite the fact that a doctor told me not so long ago that my feet were “kaput.” Time was, way back when, that I spent several summers as a counselor at a phenomenal summer camp for inner-city children on a 1,000-acre tract of untouched woodland in the northwest corner of New Jersey, where it meets New York and Pennsylvania. Everything we did there was intended to be in harmony with nature, and I still try to reconnect with that feeling. Simple campsites were spread out through the woods, and it was a point of pride if you were a counselor moving alone at night not to use a flashlight; a flashlight would be almost a sin, out there between the trees and under the canopy of a star-dusted sky. Now, all these years later, as silly as it sounds —and despite my night vision no longer being the best — I still balk at carrying a flashlight, especially on familiar ground.

To be certain, I’m not exactly the surefooted person I once was, even on sidewalks. So even though I didn’t like the idea that someone in a vehicle following me home the other night apparently thought I needed help finding my way, I accepted it as a kind gesture. 

The vehicle and its headlights kept up with me and eventually turned around the circular driveway adjacent to my house as I was about to reach the front door. Seeing the vehicle for the first time — I hadn’t looked back to see who was following me because I wanted to prove I didn’t need any help — I saw a white pickup truck. Assuming my son, who owns one, was at the wheel, I offered a somewhat perfunctory wave of thanks. It wasn’t until the next day that I learned he had nothing to do with it. Who was at the wheel? I still don’t know.

There are many perks that come with growing older: Children who are now adults, if you are lucky enough to have some, will remind you of certain realities you ought not ignore. (For example, in my case, I am frequently instructed not to drive at night. And at Thanksgiving, one of my kids not only shared the preparations but just about took them over, and I was greatly relieved.) But, still, I naturally cringe when I watch or hear others tell their parents what to do and when to do it. They ought not to forget that it’s empowering to be left to your own devices for as long as possible. So, whoever the mysterious Good Samaritan was, with the headlights behind me: Thank you so much . . . but no thanks.