This summer will go down, in my opinion, as the one in which the affluent finally burst the South Fork’s seams — and maybe the North Fork’s, too.

    Plenty of part-time residents here, or year-round summer people (as a friend described her own tribe years ago), are down-to-earth members of the middle class who live in relatively simple houses on wooded, quarter or half-acre lots. But from all appearances the East End is being defined by those who have redefined luxury in multimillion-dollar houses, used only occasionally, and those who are ready, willing, and able to put down six figures for a short seasonal rental.

    Tickets to glitzy, big-name benefits are selling like hotcakes, I’m told, but it seems to me that many of those who are so visible here are generally uninterested in hearing the specific problems and concerns of the community: the growing need for food pantries, the effects of the recession on the town, not just the nation.

    The Hamptons are where you see people at play, intent on making the most of what their money can buy; are they really fiddling while Rome burns, or is this a misapprehension? (Maybe, on the hush-hush, the visitors you see arriving via mega-yacht or strolling about with strings of luxury-goods shopping bags draped from their wrists are, indeed, making donations to, say, Meals on Wheels or the volunteer fire departments . . . but why do I doubt it?)

    Only the first week of August, and the pace gets more frantic. The gourmet markets are more crowded than ever, even though prices are astronomical. The number of standing-room-only events at Guild Hall has surprised its tab-keepers. And, as the tabloids like to report, more young partiers are heading to Montauk, where the scene has overflowed from one really hot spot to everal others. Everywhere you look another gallery has sprung up, so I suppose artwork is selling. There’s not one pop music festival but a couple, not one glossy magazine, but, well, you count them.

    We had a family party in the backyard on Sunday. I had thought about keeping up with the Joneses, of going to our finest food shops for goodies. In the end, though, it was turkey burgers and hot dogs with a few salads for good measure, along with a birthday cake from King Kullen and cupcakes from Duncan Hines.

    One of my children, a grown man now, pointed out that there were three generations out on the lawn. He was nostalgic, he said, as he watched one of the youngest of us off by herself trying a few improvisational yoga positions. Can you remember, he asked me, when you were a kid and lolling on the grass was what summer was about?

    With the calendar flipping from July to August, changes come to the beach. Even before sunrise I can hear the difference in the wind, now coming from the north. It is a light wind, though, only a hint of what is to come as summer gives way to fall and then to winter.

    In the house, our oldest child was packed off to sleep-away camp for the very first time this week, another sign of time’s passing. Skittering hordes of sandpipers and plovers have been back for several weeks now, their numbers increasing each day as they arrive from breeding places in the far north.

    These small birds move through the seasons quickly, nesting in spring, staying only briefly in their tundra haunts before winging south, stopping along the coast in the usual places to gorge on the shrimp-like things and worms that live at the water’s edge. In the distance they seem to rise and fall like snow, flying out over the bay for a moment without apparent purpose, then returning to the same patch of sand.

    The very southernmost sweep of Gardiner’s Bay has been teeming with life of one sort or another this year. This is in stark contrast with, but perhaps related to, the savage and sweeping devastation of the late December storm that churned the beach and pushed the dune landward a dozen feet in some places. Huge schools of sand eels rise each day before dawn, drawing in predators above and below.

    Terns show up just as there is light enough to see them, hovering along the edge of the beach. It was pointed out to me by a brother-in-law who notices such things that, though their nesting sites were elsewhere, young-of-the-year terns assemble on the beach, waiting to be fed by the more able adults.

    Getting Adelia ready for camp has been reminiscent of the terns’ feeding arrangements, if somewhat more complicated. There have been bags to pack, things to buy and ship in advance. One morning this week, she will be sent on her way, in a van to New Hampshire, our own little bird, making her very first flight

    A crew from Town and Country magazine was here a couple of weeks ago, and, at the end of the day, the young reporter appeared at my door.

    I confessed right off that I had spent most of my working life, 44 years, at The Star, that I had only quit twice, and that I, now in the 2,200 range columnwise, had only been censored twice — “Points Of View” on the pursuit of happiness and on Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which the redactors feared would, in the case of the first, alienate the gay community, and, in the case of the second, alienate the Catholics. Though why only them, I don’t know. Rather than biblical figures, it had more to do with celebrity worship and my antipathy for it than anything else.

    Inevitably, I was asked, along that line, about the Beales, who I thought were traduced by overweening officials and a prurient press, of which I am, of course, an outlying member.

    “One quote I can give you,” I said. “I remember Edie Beale saying at the time, ‘Oh, Mr. Graves. East Hampton is so beautiful on the outside, but so ugly on the inside.’ Or words to that effect.”

    I’ve since thought about what she said — true certainly when applied to her and her mother’s case — in light of the many examples of community-wide efforts here over the years in which the grief of those who have been particularly battered by Fate has been, if not lessened, at least conjoined with the knowledge that East Hamptoners generally do care for one another and wish each other well.

    I said I didn’t know why the collective we were racked periodically with foaming-at-the-mouth seizures of self-righteousness, but it seemed to be so. “Maybe there’s something in the water. . . . Very soon after the Beale affair, my landlady-to-be’s nursery school was raided. She walked when the mothers testified n justice court that it was not a moneymaking concern.”

    He asked what the quotes on my windowsill said. It was the first time I’d looked at them in a long time. “One says to stay out of Iraq,” I said, looking back at him. “One says to stay out of Iran . . . and this one, by Peter DeVries, who was generally known as a humorous writer, says it all.”

    “ ‘The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life ‘means’ nothing. But that is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque ‘mean,’ or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all these, knowing himself to be no more — a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. . . . It seemed from all this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.’ ”

    “Well,” I said, with a shock of recognition and with a sense of affirmation, “that’s what I’ve done!”

    My sweet little Volvo is so lucky. It has an odometer that measures how far it has gone since it was made, like all cars. And then it has two “trip” odometers. If I press the odometer button twice, I can get two other readings: for example, how many miles we have driven since God knows when, and how many miles it is to Riverhead.

    But the great thing is, if I hold the button down on the trip odometers, the car will reset them to zero.

    Too many times I find myself on an unwanted trip in my brain. I know I’m in trouble when I start to have conversations with people not present, telling them off, loudly, in my car.

    Did you ever have a ferocious argument in the car with a person who wasn’t there, and then when you realized that the driver in the next car was staring at you, pretended you were singing along with a radio that wasn’t on? I have.

    I’ve always thought it would be just dandy to be able to tap a finger in my ear, push the trip odometer button, and reset to zero, to have that person or situation just register as a blip, a tenth of a mile, on the vast odometer of my life.

    For some reason, even though I was brought up with a lot of love and support, it didn’t resonate with me the way an unkind word could cut me down. Compliments were quickly forgotten, but one criticism could stay with me for 30 years.

    As I’ve grown older, I’ve been able to let a lot of stuff go, simply because it isn’t healthy for me. It’s like drinking the poison and waiting for someone else to die. And everyone has something good in them, the potential for enlightenment, the capacity to change at any moment. It’s better for me, much better, if I try to practice compassion rather than criticism.

    I need a lot of practice. But I’m getting better.

    When Michelangelo was in his 80s, he scribbled “ancora imparo” in the margins of one of his journals. It loosely translates to “I am still learning.”

    I think I’m starting to understand what he meant, because the older I get, the less I know. I knew everything when I was in my 20s. Now, not so much.

    I have to empty myself out every day and start over again. I have to let go of my expectations of what Other People Will Do and try to approach life with curiosity and a twinkle in my eye.

    And when I choose to fill up my core with joy, acceptance, humor, and compassion, and let go of all that comfortable negativity, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” have no hold on me.

    I feel like Wonder Woman, but with much bigger thighs.

    As long as I remember that I can reset my trip button any time I want.

—

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.

    By the end of 1940, in America or New York or Manhattan or maybe just in Washington Heights — an Upper Manhattan or maybe just in Washington Heights — an Upper Manhattan neighborhood running approximately east to west from the Harlem River to the Hudson River and north to south from 190th street to 160th Street — someone decided the children of Washington Heights needed a Brotherhood Week celebration.

    The national poll at the time that revealed a sizable number of Americans believed that the Jews in Hitler’s Germany must have done something wrong to be treated the way they were being treated — did those findings trigger the event? Who knows? But a Brotherhood Week celebration was announced in the schools, both religious and public, and in the polyglot collection of houses of worship in Washington Heights. Houses of worship! Was that euphemism for churches that embraced synagogues as well, I wondered, made up as an inclusive concession to togetherness?

    The event was set for a Saturday morning — the Jewish Sabbath and day of rest. Observant Jews couldn’t travel or hold money on the Sabbath. Even though I was 7 years old, I was a precocious only child, a third grader, and I knew that choice of day was problematic. Something that made you feel even more like an outsider. I was uncomfortable with this brotherhood concept.

    Washington Heights was a map of Europe, and its multitude of churches reflected it. Within a five-block radius of my home near the George Washington Bridge there was a Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch church, an Episcopal church, a Greek Orthodox church, and an Armenian Orthodox church. The Catholic church, the Church of the Incarnation, was a little farther away, servicing mostly “shanty Irish, as opposed to lace curtain,” that national group’s own distinction, and Spaniards, not Latinos. (No Baptist churches, no African-Americans in Washington Heights.)

    As to houses of worship, synagogues, that is, there was the Y.M. & Y.W.H.A. across from the George Washington Bridge, mainly a Conservative form of Judaism, and there was Congregation Mount Sinai Anshe Emes, which my grandmother attended, two blocks east of the Y. It was primarily Orthodox (men and women were separated for praying, for example).

    Washington Heights had its own “south of the highway.” West of Broadway, closer to the Hudson, was better than east of Broadway, closer to the Harlem River, with Riverside Drive and Amsterdam Avenue representing the best and the worst, respectively, the outer limits of both. There were two subway systems, trolleys to the Bronx across the East River, and Fifth Avenue buses that took you downtown, all the way to Greenwich Village. Some on the west side of Broadway were double-deckers. Some of those had open tops on the second tier. That was a helluva 30-cent round-trip ride.

    Jews essentially lived west of Broadway. How high a street number was was directly related to an economic ladder, with the more affluent (garment center Jews) living above 181st Street. Irish and Spanish Catholics lived east of Broadway, mostly on or near the boundaries before one hit the East River.

    Protestants, sprinkled west of Broadway and mostly above 178th Street, were near their Reformed and Episcopal churches. They were in a kind of shock, surrounded as they were by their churches, with dwindling populations and all of these foreigners. Their children — with names like Robert Ames, Martha Martin, Harry Harvey — still wore shirts and ties and plaid skirts with cardigans to school.

    There were a few Chinese families in the neighborhood — the Gwons, the Chins — with brothers who soon would be quietly killed fighting for America in World War II. They lived near their Chinese laundries.

    Only my Orthodox grandmother would daily sit on her wooden grocery crate with the Chinese grandmothers on their wooden grocery crates in front of the six-story apartment building. They didn’t speak English. She didn’t speak Chinese. And there they sat together, shunned by other old ladies. After all, they were clearly of a different race.

    All of this didn’t escape the precocious 7-year-old third grader that I was. So when the planned Brotherhood Week celebration was announced at my Hebrew school at the Y, I admit I wasn’t thrilled.

    Except for Hebrew school and my cousins, I had little contact with Jewish children. My friends on the block, the block that was across the street from the Dutch Reformed church, were all Protestant. The boy from the one Catholic family on the block was always mistaken for Jewish. He was short and fat, and the Irish gangs that would occasionally wander west of Broadway would always verbally abuse him.

    He said to them once when they called him a dirty Jew, “I’m not Jewish. I’m Spanish.”

    “Okay, you’re a dirty spic,” they shot back. And then they moved on, safety in numbers.

    So I guess Brotherhood Week, celebrated for a few hours on the morning of the Jewish Sabbath at the majestic Loews 175th Street, the grandest and fanciest second-run movie house in the neighborhood, was thought by those who organized it to be a step in the right direction. I didn’t like the idea but had to go. There was something wrong with the concept, the remedy itself. How could a few hours in the dark make everyone love one another?

    We met in front of the Y and marched the four blocks to the Loews, two by two and hand in hand, with Miss Reiner and Mr. Marcus, our Hebrew teachers, keeping order with Hebrew commands. Sheket! Sheket bevakasha! they would shout at us. All it meant to me was stop whatever you were doing. Be quiet!

    When we were inside the dimly lit theater, there were matronly matrons dressed in white, faded blond-gray hair drawn back in buns. They had large flashlights and stern, unfriendly faces.

    We were led to roped-off rows of segregated seats near the front of the theater labeled the “Jewish section.” Other areas had similar religious signs. I don’t know, was it some movie I had seen? “The North Star”? “Watch on the Rhine”? (Had they been released yet?) I was waiting for the German shepherd guard dogs to be brought out, teeth bared, struggling on their leashes to get at us huddled together in the Jewish section.

    I looked at the stage, the maroon velvet drapes pulled back. There were five or six chairs, a microphone, and a lectern. The chairs were for the members of the clergy. I saw our Rabbi Bogner, his round black yarmulke perched on his bald spot, short and round, a really nice guy who made you feel good even when you were bad. (Naturally the rabbi from the Orthodox synagogue did not attend — it would have been a violation of his Sabbath.) Seeing Rabbi Bogner chatting with the Christians made me feel better.

    The program started. Each clergyman had his clique that cheered when he got up to speak while others clapped politely.

    Rabbi Bogner was the third to speak. When he stepped up to the lectern and was introduced there was a loud and raucous round of boos and hisses from every part of the audience — the acoustics were marvelous at the Loews 175th Street — from every part of the theater targeted at the Jewish section. Only the priest from the Church of the Incarnation was able finally to stop it. He got up, grabbed the microphone, and intervened.

    I felt so sorry for my Rabbi Bogner.

    And, if nothing else, I had an experience to go by, to imagine how people felt, as that terrible war with its unthinkable events went on. That was the Brotherhood Week celebration in Washington Heights in Manhattan, in New York, in America in 1940.

    Lona Rubenstein is the author of “From Away,” a novel, and “Getting Back in the Game: Finding the Fountain of Youth in Cyberspace,” a memoir. With her latest novel, “Itzig,” set in Germany from 1900 to 1935, she will take part in Authors Night at the East Hampton Library on Aug. 13. She lives in East Hampton.

    Having grown up in the metropolitan area and spent childhood vacations in the Catskill Mountains, it comes as a surprise to me that I have enjoyed being on the water sailing more than other summertime pleasures here.

    As a kid, my friends and I hiked and ferried across the Kill Van Kull in good weather from home, in Bayonne, N.J., to Staten Island, where we followed an unsanctioned path along a brook through residential backyards to a large city park. In later life, explaining my new love of sailing, I would say that I had been afraid of rowboats in one of the lakes in Clove Lakes Park. I never learned to row very well.

    Sailing became a pure local pleasure. Even before I married into the Rattray family, whose forebears included inshore and offshore watermen as well as farmers, my husband-to-be introduced me to a classic breed of boat — an antique catboat made by the Crosbys of Osterville, Mass.

    For 20 years, sailing and cruising in the waters of Long Island Sound were prime. Catboats, with beams about as wide as the boats are long, are stable enough for kids, and for a while we also owned a boat with freeboard high enough to keep them doubly safe. We did frostbite racing for a number of years, too, in small, devilish boats of the Penguin class, but I never got to do more than hike out, playing second fiddle to the helmsman.

    I’d have to think hard to remember how many old wooden boats we owned over the years, but the last was a less traditional catboat made in Yugoslavia, which I sold for a song after my husband’s death. I had no idea that the buyer, Sanford I. Weill, had his photo on the cover of The New York Times Magazine after he sold his company, Shearson Loeb Rhodes, to American Express at just about the time I offered the boat for sale. (I’ve paid closer attention to Mr. Weill’s business acumen and philanthropic activities since.)

    It took about 10 years before I found myself on sailboats again, and I have my second husband, Chris Cory, to thank for it. Together, we eventually indulged ourselves in a 32-foot Pearson sloop and in summer cruising to what, for me, were such faraway places as Martha’s Vineyard. I reconciled myself to our owning a boat made of “plastic” because it got us where we wanted to go and had such amenities as hot water for showers. I also discovered the joy of being at the helm on a broad reach in a respectable wind with the sails full.

    Sailing was on my mind this week after the hot weather disappeared and fresh, sweet breezes came in. We don’t own a boat anymore, but I’ve promised myself that we’ll go sailing again before long.

    Sometimes I feel like a short-order cook in my own house. According to my wife, Lisa, it’s my own fault, and she is probably right. We are in one of those stereotypical situations with a household of young and fussy eaters, each of whom has strong likes and dislikes.

    Ellis, who is 11/2, is by a mile the easiest to feed, if the messiest. Half of anything he’s given will end up in his mouth eventually, though sometimes via a trip to the floor or a hand-art session followed by his snuffling it off his tray like a pig onto truffles.    

    The girls, now 7 and 10, make things tricky, especially at the breakfast-time scramble. Evvy likes her pancakes with chocolate chips; Adelia does not. To one, a grilled cheese seems a fine way to start the day; to the other that idea elicits howls.

    Eggs? Well, we have chickens and get five or six eggs a day, and I am afraid the girls are burnt out on them. Cereal? Generally, they won’t touch it unless it’s one of the sugar-laden varieties, which we do not buy. Crepes are okay with everybody, but a pain in the neck when I am racing the clock to get them to school or camp. I usually have a certain anxiety as getting-up time approaches about what they will deign to eat this day.

    In our household, I do the cooking. Lisa does not really care to cook, though she can whip up a few good things in a pinch. She is a fan of my cooking when I have time or inclination to make something interesting, but she is equally happy with a couple of yogurts and some fruit or oatmeal, even for dinner. The other factor is that I get up early most days and have time to coffee up before it’s time to fire up the stove.

    One hopeful thing that comes from my catering to the girls’ whims is that they are learning how to follow a recipe and basic kitchen techniques, more or less on their own. Adelia, the older one, went through a period in which she was making cupcakes, including fancy marbled ones from a Martha Stewart cookbook. Evvy surprised us on a recent night by making her own sushi rolls with Chinese takeout brown rice and some old nori sheets I had tucked up in the cupboard.

    I can foresee a day when they make breakfast for me. I hope.

    I bought two books at the recent Amagansett Library book fair — a nice clean copy of Bartlett’s for my office, which I will proceed to mark up, and “Rapid Italian for Students and Tourists,” which better provide pretty rapid results indeed, for my wife and I are talking about going to Italy in September, even though the dollar’s worth about 70 cents over there.

    “Maybe Little Italy would be better,” I said the other night, “or Sam’s.”

    Everybody’s always making a connection between the national deficit and household budgets. To make the comparison exact, I’m going to mint my own specie then and issue bonds and notes — so that we can vacation in Italy — backed, of course, by the full faith and credit of the Graveses.

    “I got the Bartlett’s,” I said to Mary, “because it will help me with my column.”

    The next day I dipped into it and went immediately to Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said that an essay was “a loose sally of the mind, an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.”

    Well, the hell with him. It says in my book on Montaigne that “the English were happy to let a writer go on about himself, so long as he did it agreeably,” and “very few English essays after the early 17th century were philosophically rigorous stabs of thought on important topics; almost all were delightful rambles about nothing in particular.”

    So there. If it’s nothing in particular you’re craving you’ve come to the right place.

    Which reminds me when the ice cream truck came by the other night, making a joyful sound that even I could hear, I rushed out, stepping back 60 or so years in time to order a Creamsicle.

    “I liked Toasted Almond too,” said Mary.

    “Wait, wait!” I said, running back out onto the lawn. But he was gone.

    “Life admits not of delays,” said Dr. Johnson. “When pleasure can be had, it is fit to catch it. . . .”

    I would stop here except I think I owe you a bit more, even considering the continuing repressed state of the economy, which has forced all of us here to trim our sails, as it were. When first hired, I was told, when I asked how long this column should be, that a page and a half would be about right. And I’ve written a page and a half ever since. Periodically, I’ve done it blindfolded, as a test, and have seen on removing the veil, and hitting “wcb,” that I usually come in at around 450 words. This by way of apologizing for the 317-word count of two weeks past, which I made up for by writing a 618-word one the week following.

    We’re at 466 now, so I must hurry and finish with Dr. Johnson’s story of an old tutor who told his students that when they reread their compositions (as I often do) and came across a passage that they thought was particularly fine (as I often do) to strike it out.

    Now that New York has given the legal go-ahead to same-sex marriages, I should be busy this fall. As a Universal Life Church minister and authorized marriage officiant in the state, I’ll be officiating at weddings of gay and lesbian friends eager to tie the knot.

    My ordination wasn’t planned. Nor does it reflect any religious belief on my part. Last year, Philip and Miriam, two young friends, asked me to preside at their wedding. Unfortunately, my authority as an administrative law judge was limited to city and state tribunals. New York’s Domestic Relations Law specifies a laundry list of magistrates, judges, and clergy who can perform weddings. For some reason, it bans ship captains but allows federal administrative judges to officiate at ceremonies. Nevertheless, although I conduct legal hearings and render decisions on a daily basis, the law does not authorize me to solemnize a marriage.

    Technology provided a solution. I went online and with a few clicks I gained a new title, courtesy of the Universal Life Church. The U.L.C. proclaims a belief that all faiths are best served by freedom and choice and removes barriers to performing wedding ceremonies by ordaining all comers, from mainstream Christians and Jews to atheists and pagans. Even better, it was free. For a few extra dollars, I obtained an ordination certificate and a wallet-size ID card. The Web site boasts 20 million ordained ministers worldwide, and a quick glance at the Sunday wedding announcements in The Times will disclose a few of my fellow ministers.

    So last summer, with the East River and the spires of Manhattan behind me, and in front of a crowd that included Episcopalians, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Buddhists, Jews, and atheists, I put my minister’s standing to good use and conducted my first wedding. As a newbie, I had done my research. I discussed the origin of the epithalamium — the Greek wedding song — and the significance of the huppah under which the couple stood. I quoted from the Song of Songs and Supreme Court decisions. I recited passages from Sappho, William Carlos Williams, and Pete Seeger. Philip and Miriam recited their vows, I signed the license, and they were wed.

    I thought my performance would be a one-shot affair, but the recent legislation forced me to re-examine my role. The law requires only a single officiant and two witnesses. As I said when I stood in front of Philip and Miriam, a marriage ceremony is about more than the law. It’s about a community of people who witness and celebrate a couple’s union, offering welcome and support to the newly betrothed pair, and by their participation signal a stake in the marriage that continues beyond the rice and reception.

    While clergy and magistrates remain the norm, other states allow a wider pool of qualified persons from which a couple can select. Occasionally an out-of-state wedding reported in The Times will note the designation of the bride’s grandfather or the bridegroom’s college roommate to conduct the wedding. In Florida and South Carolina, a notary public can perform a wedding ceremony, while in California and Massachusetts, a friend or family member can be designated for the event. Colorado and Pennsylvania go a step further, offering couples a self-uniting program whereby they can solemnize their own marriages.

    Is there any reason for New York to persist in limiting its officiant list to public officials and religious leaders? Online ordination may not be an acceptable approach for everyone, but neither should couples be forced to hire strangers to perform this most personal and profound of ceremonies.

    Why not spread the joy of the recent legislation wide to accommodate the thousands of couples who seek to formalize their union standing before family and friends? Certainly the state that has authorized same-sex marriage should allow its own administrative judges to do what their federal counterparts can. And why not a friend or relative designated by the couple for just that purpose? Let others be allowed to “officiate,” to stand with a community of family and friends as a couple, straight or gay, express their commitment and love and are ushered into wedlock.

    In the words of Sappho, our first poet to celebrate marriage, “Raise high the roof beam! High up, carpenters! Sing the wedding song!”

    Nancy M. Lederman, who has a house in Springs, is a lawyer, judge, and author. She has presided over more than 2,000 hearings and one wedding.

     Because one of my friends wants to lose a lot of weight and recently asked whether I had any recommendations about how he should go about it, I’ve been thinking about diets.  We had discussed counting calories and the Weight Watchers system of food points, but I had seen a new documentary called “Page One: Inside The New York Times” and knew that Brian Stelter, a reporter, had lost 90 pounds in a relatively short time. The question was, how had he done it? The answer was easy to find.

    Mr. Stelter, a former TV blogger, was hired as The Times’s new media reporter in 2007, shortly after graduating from college. “For me,” he subsequently wrote, “Twitter is an early warning system for breaking news, a tool for interacting with readers, and a great way to promote and improve our work.” It comes as no surprise, then, that he lost weight the digital way.

    If Twitter posts helped spur the Arab Spring, using it to lose weight should be a breeze.

    In March 2010, Mr. Stelter let it be known on Twitter that he was going on a diet. His first goal was to lose 25 pounds by his 25th birthday. Five months later, in an article in The Times, he explained his thinking, and the results.

    Rather than blog about dieting, join Weight Watchers, or keep a diary, Mr. Stelter chose to Tweet what he ate, and sometimes what he drank, along with his weight. It took him a while to make it known publicly that his weight as he started was 270 pounds, but he lost 25 pounds in two months and, by August 2010, he had lost 75 pounds and was proud of it.

    On Twitter, he accumulated a big audience. Strangers across the country Tweeted him. He had wanted the “help of a cheering section,” he said later, and he found one. “You’re ruining pastries for me with this Twitter feed, Bri,” a friend said.

    Mr. Stelter acknowledged that he wasn’t the first person to divulge his weight on the Internet. (Drew Magary, a writer for Deadspin, a Web site that puts an irreverent spin on sports news, for example, had blogged about his “Public Humiliation Diet.”)  Mr. Stelter, however, also decided to give the world images of himself as he lost weight, using a short-form-blog platform — which I didn’t know anything about until now — called Tumblr. Anyone who wants to see a collage of his photos can do so there

    The biggest hurdle, he said, was admitting the truth after a long evening of drinking or a late-night pizza binge. With the aid of the “Page One” film, he is now a media celebrity. It has been widely reported that he is dating a CNBC anchor, Nicole Lapin. Gawker, the online gossip site and newsmagazine — which usually has particularly sarcastic things to say about the media and publishing world, and can be just short of nasty — took aim at him about a month ago.

    “So there you have it,” Gawker said. “Brian Stelter lost a bunch of weight and is starring in a movie, and now he has a famous girlfriend. He also seems to be wearing decent clothes. How long before he quits journalism entirely? You don’t belong here, Brian.”

    The screening of “Page One” at Guild Hall tomorrow night — with the film’s director, Andrew Rossi, The Times’s outgoing executive editor, Bill Keller, and the columnist David Carr taking part in a question-and-answer session afterward — is sold out. Brian Stelter is not expected to attend, but I’m sure he’d be looking fabulous if he did.