Some of you, I’m sure, will assume that by the Great Satan of Energy I must mean nuclear power, but I don’t. The Great Satan of energy is coal. Whether nuclear power is a lesser demon or a good angel is beyond the scope of this article. It’s just not the Great Satan. I want to convince you that even if nuclear power is every bit as bad as its severest critics maintain, coal is far, far worse.

My argument is based solely on the contribution of coal to global warming. Of course, coal has other environmental impacts, none of them good. Soot. Sulfur. Smog. Toxic waste. And did I mention that coal ash is radioactive? It emits radon gas that had been trapped in the coal seams before the coal was mined. But set that all aside. Let’s just look at the impact of coal on the global climate.

To estimate how bad coal is, one needs a little context. The world’s population is about 7 billion, or 7,000 million. Each year, 130 million babies are born and 60 million people die. The main causes of death are heart disease and stroke (18 million), infectious diseases and parasites (15 million), and cancer (8 million).

Among specific causes of death, according to the World Health Organization, H.I.V./AIDS kills 1.5 million people each year, while smoking kills 6 million annually.

Where will climate change fall in relation to this spectrum of deaths? Right now, respectable estimates of the yearly death toll from climate change are in the hundreds of thousands. However, the impacts of climate change are just beginning to be felt. If the world goes on burning fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate, the average toll in the coming century will certainly be much higher than this.

An optimistic estimate would be that deaths from climate change will be about as numerous as those from H.I.V./AIDS. If the impact of climate change remains at this level, they will be “lost in the noise” of the total death rate of 60 million, which in any case will climb in coming decades as the current bulge of younger people age up. To claim that the death toll from climate change will be much less than this is to claim that it is not important enough to worry about. A certain breed of climate denier makes this claim, namely that world resources should be directed toward other goals, such as fighting poverty and finding cures for the “big three” killers.

Consider, however, the multitude of ways that climate change will kill us: agricultural failures (think of the monsoon not coming to India); depletion of critical water supplies (think of those vanishing glaciers in the Himalayas and the drought in the American West); rising sea levels (think of catastrophic floods in Bangladesh); spread of tropical diseases into the temperate zones (think of a malaria epidemic in New York), and wars fought over diminishing resources (think nuclear war as India and China claim that they need the relatively vacant and enticingly warming lands in Siberia to house and feed their starving millions, and Russia takes exception).

I am going to use 1.5 million deaths per year as a base case even though, for the above reasons, I believe this is very optimistic. Perhaps climate change will have an impact comparable to that of smoking (6 million deaths per year) or infectious diseases (15 million annually). Even the apocalyptic scenario envisioned in the film “Interstellar” cannot be ruled out. That would mean perhaps 60 million or more excess deaths annually.

How long will these impacts last? Experts say centuries. Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for about 100 years, however, I’m going to charge the coal plant for only 100 years’ worth of deaths, even though one could argue that as the instigator of longer-term effects, our fossil fuel combustion now should be charged with all of them. In other words, I’m giving coal the benefit of the doubt every step of the way, but as we will see, it still looks very bad.

How much of the climate-change impact is one coal-fired power plant responsible for? The logical answer would be to estimate its greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime and compare that to the world’s expected emissions for a century. As an approximation, I used its input energy over a 45-year plant life and compared that with an estimate of the world’s fossil energy use over 100 years.

This yielded the conclusion that a typical million-kilowatt coal plant would be responsible for one part in 20,000 (1/20,000 or .005 percent) of the total damage. That may seem like a tiny sliver, but it’s a tiny sliver of a very big number.

If you take the base case, the coal plant kills 1/20,000 times 1,500,000 deaths per year times 100 years, which works out to 7,500 excess deaths. For the more likely case in which climate change will be comparable to smoking as a cause of death, the coal plant kills 30,000 people. The two worst cases yield estimates of 75,000 and 300,000 excess deaths, respectively.

The thing to note is that these estimates do not apply to a coal-fired power plant that has a major accident, but to one that operates exactly as designed and with all available environmental controls in place. These controls do nothing about carbon dioxide. The comparison with nuclear power demands one’s attention. In contrast to what might happen in case of a terrible accident, with coal we have something comparable (or worse) happening even when there is no malfunction.

To put it another way, every coal plant is a Chernobyl. Every coal plant is a Fukushima.

John Andrews, who has a Ph.D. in physics, did research on solar energy and energy-efficient buildings for 25 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He lives in Sag Harbor.   

David Sedaris has gotten me through some pretty tough times. Whether it’s divorce, death, or disaster, I read “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and know that everything’s going to be okay. So I was thrilled to hear he would appear at the John Drew Theater, directly across from the library where I work. As luck would have it, the show was sold out and I didn’t have a ticket. Being Facebook friends with the wife of the theater’s artistic director, I figured my best tactic was blatant begging.

I had been their son’s nursery school teacher and he had adored me, Kate always telling the story that I was his first love. He’s in high school now, but she always mentions it whenever I see them, which I’m sure he really appreciates. Nevertheless, I was an important part of his life, so they owed me. Kate couldn’t come through with a ticket but kindly invited me to the autograph session before the show.

I walked into the theater lobby, and there he was. A slight young man was kneeling worshipfully before him, talking earnestly. The kneeling posture gave me pause. Kneeling or bowing is a sign of reverence or submission. For David Sedaris, this was totally deserved. But should I, must I, kneel?

Luckily, Kate was right there and distracted me from this dilemma by handing me a Post-it, instructing me to write exactly how I wanted David Sedaris to autograph my book. This was a big decision, so I discussed it with everyone else waiting in line, letting go of my natural shyness and forming an instant bond because we were all meeting David Sedaris together!

The woman behind me quickly decided to have him write, “You can’t kill the Rooster,” which was clever, because by quoting a line from his book he would know she had read it. That would impress him, but I wanted something more personal. All I had come up with was “To Lisa” when the kneeling young man suddenly stood up and it was my turn.

I started off by telling him that his books have gotten me through tough times, I always recommend them to library patrons, and “Jesus Shaves” is the best story ever written. “Except for the Bible,” I said loudly, for the benefit of the minister who was next in line. I discreetly nodded in her direction so David wouldn’t think I was a religious fanatic. He seemed concerned, saying, “Why is there a minister here?” But after I whispered, “I know her and she’s cool,” he seemed to relax. He was really paying attention to me, so I decided to tell him my library school story.

I prefaced it by saying, “I’m going to tell you something, but don’t take this the wrong way.” That really got his attention. His eyes widened in alarm, as in, “Is this the deranged fan I’ve been waiting for all these years?”

I noted his reaction but bravely continued: I had gone back to graduate school in my 40s to earn a master’s degree in library science at Queens College. Always the good student, I sat at the front of the class (until my last semester when I was so burnt-out from working a full-time job while commuting to Queens that I sat in the back row with the smokers, who made snide comments and took frequent breaks). I participated in class discussions, but because of my shyness my contributions were always well-planned-out comments of a professional nature.

One night, the class was assigned to read humorous essays, one of the authors being David Sedaris. This was exciting. We were going to discuss the brilliant comedic genius of my favorite author! A bonus of the assignment was that I had already read all of his books numerous times, so it was going to be an easy week.

The following week, the class discussion began with a student complaining that she really didn’t think David Sedaris was all that funny, calling him “whiney.” Other students chimed in with agreement. I was outraged. Something rose up within me and I let them have it. “What? What is wrong with you people?” I blasted. “David Sedaris is a masterful and witty satirist . . . he is not whiney! Come on, he is so funny! What about his mom, Sharon? When she locked all five kids out of the house during a snowstorm and they tried to get the youngest sister to lie down in the road and get run over so Sharon would let them back in? That’s funny!”

The room went quiet, stunned into silence. The professor surely must have agreed with me, but she diplomatically smoothed it over and we moved on. (When telling David the story, I left out the word “whiney,” feeling that it was just too hurtful. When replaying it in my mind later, I realized he totally could’ve handled it.)

What my classmates — and other people who read one or two of his stories and then make a judgment — don’t understand is that it’s not just that we like his stories and think he’s funny. We love him. We know him and his siblings and his parents, Sharon and Lou; he’s let us into his life and laid it bare. So, sure, some of his stories might fall a little flat, especially the earlier ones where he was on crystal meth and in the throes of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But he had told us about all that and we understood and forgave him, loving him all the more for his humanness.

My fear of hurting his feelings because some crazy people/losers don’t think he is funny was assuaged when he responded to my story with a piece of advice. “What works for me when people don’t think something is funny is this: I say, ‘Why are you being so difficult?’ ” We both laughed. I was laughing with David Sedaris! I knew the people waiting in line were jealous.

Then he told me a story of his own. He once met a young aspiring writer who had told his English professor that the author he most wanted to emulate was David Sedaris. The professor advised, “Perhaps you should set your sights a bit higher.” We laughed again.

I didn’t want to leave him, we had a lot more to talk about, but the line was building and I could see others were getting anxious. So I bade him goodbye, telling him how much it meant for me to meet him and thanking him for being such an important part of my life.

I immediately went to my new friends still in line so we could all read together what he had written: To Lisa, I’m so happy you’re a librarian. David Sedaris.

Lisa Michne, a librarian at the East Hampton Library, grew up in Bridgehampton and lives in Springs.

David Sedaris will appear at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater on July 27 at 8 p.m.

This June we were appalled to read about fish kills in the Peconic Estuary, turtle kills, and harmful algal blooms in the Peconics and Shinnecock Bay. This was especially shocking to me since for many years I used these waters as clean “reference” sites for studies on effects of pollution in fish, crabs, and shrimp living in the waters of northern New Jersey.

The cause of our local problems is excess nutrients, especially nitrogen. While nitrogen is an essential nutrient (a part of all proteins and nucleic acids) and a fertilizer that is important for agricultural productivity, when too much of it gets into the water it is a pollutant.

The sources of nutrients include sewage, animal wastes, and fertilizers that are discharged or run off from agricultural areas. On land, excess nitrogen flows from agricultural fields and suburban lawns, entering freshwater and going down to estuaries via streams and rivers, altering water chemistry and ecology. Synthetic fertilizer was a benefit in terms of crop yield but is an ongoing environmental problem, primarily because of runoff into aquatic ecosystems. The increased use of commercial fertilizers has increased nitrogen inputs tenfold in many parts of the world.

Waste from septic tanks enters estuaries through seepage into groundwater, which moves slowly into estuaries. In eastern Suffolk we rely mostly on individual septic tanks rather than centralized sewage treatment plants. Most of those systems were built many years ago. Where there is more residential development and more septic tanks in the neighborhood (and where isn’t that happening?), more nitrogen seeps into groundwater and nearby water bodies.

Nutrient enrichment promotes excessive growth of algae (fertilizing the algae), mostly microscopic phytoplankton blooms. Small increases in these algae can increase productivity in food webs and sustain more fish and shellfish. However, like too much of anything, overstimulation of algal growth can degrade water quality and threaten human health and living resources. When algal blooms die off, the dead cells sink to the bottom, where they stimulate bacteria to decompose them. The decomposition process uses up dissolved oxygen from the water. If the aeration of water by mixing is less than the bacterial metabolism, the bottom waters will lose oxygen and become hypoxic (low oxygen) or anoxic (no oxygen), creating stressful or lethal conditions.

The dissolved oxygen was down to zero in the Peconic during one of the fish kills this June. Hypoxia is a major problem in many estuaries, especially in late summer and early fall, and has been increasing globally. The fact that these incidents occurred so early in the summer indicates the local problem is particularly severe.

Low oxygen reduces the abundance and diversity of adult fish and reduces the growth rate of newly settled lobsters, crabs, shellfish, and juvenile flounder. Species that cannot move or move slowly may die in low-oxygen water. Fish larvae are poor swimmers and become more vulnerable to predation. Animals generally deal with low oxygen by reducing their activity in order to consume less oxygen. This often means feeding for shorter periods and eating less food.

In many areas hypoxia is so severe that they are called “dead zones” because nothing (aside from bacteria) can live there. Areas with oxygen sufficient to sustain some life (below two or three milligrams per liter) have reduced bottom (benthic) communities, made up of very small animals. When the benthic community is stressed, only small, short-lived worms remain; animals like crustaceans and mollusks (shellfish) can no longer survive. Hypoxia tends to be overlooked until conspicuous fish kills occur.

The turtles in the Peconic were not killed by low dissolved oxygen, since they breathe air. They were killed by toxins from some of the phytoplankton. Some phytoplankton species produce toxins that can impair respiratory, nervous, and other functions, and even kill fish, shellfish, seabirds, and mammals.

Harmful algal blooms have been called “red tides” or “brown tides” because of water discoloration when they occur, though many do not discolor the water. Their economic impacts can be severe if shellfish harvest and fishing are closed. Reports of such blooms have been increasing worldwide and often correlate with nitrogen inputs.

This year we have been revisited by a brown tide in Great South Bay and Moriches Bay, a fairly regular recurrence on eastern Long Island since the 1980s. But this year we also had a bloom of Alexandrium, which produces the toxin saxitoxin, in Shinnecock. While brown tide can cause ecological problems, it is not a human health concern. On the other hand, saxitoxin causes paralytic shellfish poisoning when people eat shellfish that have accumulated the toxin from the plankton they feed on. Such poisoning can make people very sick because, as the name implies, it causes paralysis. If the diaphragm is paralyzed, a person can’t breathe and can die.

Reducing the nitrogen inputs into our estuaries is an urgent necessity that will not be easy. I recently heard that there is a requirement for homeowners to have their septic tanks tested — something we never knew about for the 40 years we’ve had our house. Our officials should communicate with towns on Cape Cod that are experiencing similar problems in their estuaries from similar septic tank sources. Like the East End, they derive considerable economic benefit from the attraction of their coastal areas and healthy marine environment.

There is no quick fix for this; it will require considerable effort and expense. It also will take time for improvements to be seen after we curb the nitrogen inputs.

Judith S. Weis is a professor emerita of biology at Rutgers University who lives part time in Springs. She will be giving a talk about her newest book, “Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know,” at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton at 11 a.m. on Aug. 8.

Generations of summer residents have expressed abhorrence about the changing demographics and mores of East Hampton. They revile the crowds of strangers in odd dress on Newtown Lane (this year’s crop seems to sport a return to formality, with women appearing in high heels and dresses in the middle of a summer afternoon), while forgetting that they themselves were once neophytes.

The other day, with the Vita Coco van ferrying the nouveau something or others through the center of town, the scene was reminiscent of Rome, yes, the Via Veneto of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” Imagine how the townsfolk, for whom East Hampton has comprised both home and work for generations, must feel! Of course these latter are chastened by the reminder that tourism rather than progress is East Hampton’s most important product.

One must always remember that except in the most advanced astrophysics something is generally not considered to emanate from nothing. So we have to have respect for this new class of vacationer, no matter how affluent and devoid of this or that trait that might have been displayed by earlier generations of sojourners.

So what that there are likely no budding Jackson Pollocks, Lee Krasners, Willem de Koonings, Barney Rossets, James Joneses, James Salters, or George Plimptons in the crowd! So what that the heroes for a new generation of Hamptons summer residents are hedge-fund honchos like Carl Icahn and John Paulson, whose financial machinations form the template by which a whole new generation is able to pay ever-escalating rents. So what that East Hampton is no longer an artists and writers enclave, but the watering hole for stock market tycoons, real estate moguls, film executives, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. It’s still good old East Hampton.

Remember Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land”? In that sci-fi classic a human who was born on Mars comes to Earth. But old-timers who were born and raised in East Hampton or vacationed here for decades might experience a similar effect. The windmill is still there and so is White’s Pharmacy (though in slightly spruced-up form), and institutions like Sam’s still provide the illusion of continuity. And after all there is still an Artists and Writers Softball Game and you can still find a few heavy hitters on the rosters of both teams.

Heidegger and Freud shared an interest in the concept of Unheimlichkeit, which means estrangement, literally not feeling at home. So if you’re an alumnus of the ’60s and ’70s, when East Hampton emanated a different kind of class, it’s easy to walk around town on a summer’s afternoon with the latest wave of summer vacationers and feel like you’re living out a scene from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or “Night of the Living Dead.” In those movies familiar faces become zombies.

There’s also Capgras syndrome, a neurological condition in which one suspects that the familiar face is a stranger, or its sister condition, prosopagnosia, in which the sufferer fails to recognize faces. If you’re a repeater you might experience one or all of these symptoms when strolling through town today.

But be assured, that’s how the ancien regime felt back in the ’60s when they spotted you rolling into town in your Day-Glo-painted VW bus packed with Gibson and Fender guitars, paintbrushes, and a Royal typewriter loaded in the back.

Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” His blog is TheScreamingPope.com.

When I first came to the Hamptons in the summer of 1981, Tina Fredericks, who died in May at age 93, was the pooh-bah of East End real estate agents. “Realtor to the Stars”: So she anointed herself in her business ads, and so she was. The impression, widely held and not discouraged by Tina, was that she was the Queen Bee, and the rest were drones. It was more or less true.

I had rented (not through Tina) a house in Water Mill: a grand old shingled, veranda-ed, three-story, 12-room, post-Victorian wreck looking out upon a broad greensward that sloped tenderly down to Mecox Bay. There were massive trees. There were rushes at water’s edge. There were swans gliding. There were evocations of Merchant & Ivory. The rent was $12,000 for the summer.

Midsummer, the owners came to confer with me. They were getting a divorce and were putting the house up for sale. Since I was currently in residence, it was being offered to me first. They were embarrassed to tell me the asking price. “Things are getting crazy out here,” the husband said, red-faced. The price was $325,000.

“Buy it!” Tina hissed in my ear as we stood on the veranda gazing upon all there was to gaze upon, which was plenty. “The land alone is worth twice as much.”

Of course, the land alone, in the bittersweet fullness of time, would come to be worth more like — I’m guessing here, perhaps absurdly lowballing it — 10 times as much. Even Tina could not have anticipated the full dimensions of the tulip-bulb craze that would sweep over these golden acres. But she was, in her moment, ahead of the game. She had the eye. She had the nose.

I needed a 12-room house like I needed a hernia. Anyway, it was impossible. I had neither the means nor the spirit. I was recently widowed and still a bit of a basket case, beset by ghosts that prowled the Provincetown house, a dear, decrepit behemoth smack on the harbor, that my husband and I had owned. I wanted to sell it, I didn’t want to sell it, and in the throes of that indecision had taken the advice of friends, who urged a change of scene and found me this place in Water Mill.

I called Tina. There were connections. Way back I had worked for The New York Times, where her then-husband, Rick Fredericks, the Sunday picture editor, had been my pal and colleague. Now she and I met, hit it off, and fell easily into the habit of dining together often. We had mellow dinners in the lovely Georgica Road carriage house (purchased by Tina and Rick in 1950 for $6,500) that was her home and office. We sat rocking, nursing drinks, and trading intimate war stories on my dandy veranda-by-the-bay (which she never visited without sighing, “The land alone . . .”).

Land was much on her mind that season. Land was always much on Tina’s mind, but especially that season. She and a partner were developing something new on the Hamptons landscape: an ambitious amalgam of co-op units and private homes, all spread over 150 rolling acres that had once been a dairy farm.

That summer, her vision existed mostly on paper. By the next, it was almost complete. I saw it often, traveling east along Route 27. It looked like a period etching, a pastoral dream incarnate. Horses peacefully grazing in a huge meadow that sloped upward from the road. At the top of the incline, the silver crowns of two vintage silos gleaming in the sun. Big open spaces. Clusters of co-op units discreetly hidden from one another by the lay of the land, a touch of the Japanese aesthetic, a tad of the potato barn in the way they hugged the ground.

Condos and co-ops, though common enough in the city, were still a rarity on the East End. “It’s the future!” Tina said, waving an arm as though to summon the future now. “Somebody else takes care of the pool! Somebody else takes care of the tennis court! Somebody else takes care of the grounds!”

I was still not in the market, and Tina knew it. “Oh, I wish . . . ,” I would say, and she would say, “Well, maybe someday. . . .” But by the time someday arrived, my life had taken several different turns, and I was no longer spending summers in the Hamptons.

In 2000 I was remarried, to a man who had himself been widowed. With his late wife he had owned a vacation house in Springs, which was traded for a house on the Connecticut shore, to be closer to their children, which was traded for no house at all because, he said, the hell with it. Enough of the groundskeeping and the deck repairing and the tennis-court maintaining. No more houses.

And sitting there in our co-op on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I heard a bell. Ping. Or maybe a voice. A remembrance of a voice long past, coming softly, seductively, through the ether: “Somebody else takes care of the pool! Somebody else takes care of the tennis court! Somebody else. . . .”

Et cetera. Also, eureka.

“Uh. How about a co-op?” I said.

So we came and we saw and he liked and we bought, and I have never since had any cause to beware the 30-year-old wish that came true.

Tina was long retired by then, and ailing. So she never knew, which I regret. And now she is gone and sometimes, particularly in those hours when we are sitting idle-handed on our little patio and watching somebody else cut the grass, I find myself thinking of her. Salut, Tina, I think, lifting a glass. You had the nose.

Martha Weinman Lear’s most recent book is “Echoes of Heartsounds,” published last year.

­While it is arguably the best time to be on the East End, with the sun still shining brightly and the local farms bursting with their harvest, our attention begins to refocus away from the joys of a glorious summer. The traffic has given way to yellow school buses as our children return to their classrooms. This is the perfect reminder to parents about the need to plan for the costs of higher education.

Starting early may ease the burden, as parents can take advantage of opportunities and programs specifically designed for saving for college. Parents and others who are thinking about funding education expenses should try to be as informed as possible and carefully consider their options, their own financial situation, and future objectives when deciding on appropriate levels to set aside.

According to a recent study conducted by the United States Department of Education, the average tuition cost of one year at a public university is north of $15,000, and a private institution is approximately $33,000. Consider also that these costs have grown over the last decade at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent, far outpacing both inflation and wage growth. This means that for my twin boys entering kindergarten this year, when they reach college age it is likely that one year of public tuition will cost more than $44,000. One year of tuition at a private university may reach close to $130,000. These are daunting figures.

The costs associated with obtaining a college degree might seem discouraging, but they are important to know and understand. Knowing what costs to expect drives parents to consider various planning strategies. Regardless of one’s financial condition, the best results are often achieved when a plan is initiated at the earliest possible stage. With that said, it is never too late to start.

For parents of young children, 529 plans have become popular tools to save for education. These state-sponsored plans offer tax advantages and are even transferable among family members. Education Saving Accounts also offer certain tax benefits, but differ from 529 plans in their contribution limits.

Student loans, too, are an important tool, but come with a cost. The burden of carrying debt for young adults entering the work force handicaps their path toward financial independence, a goal every parent has for their children. Merit and performance-based scholarships and financial aid packages may also play a role in covering some of the costs of college, but cannot be guaranteed and should not be fully relied upon. Other strategies to set aside money for education exist and vary in their complexity and have benefits and limitations all their own.

Watching my kids paddle out to the lineup at Ditch Plain with the warmth of summer still lingering in the air, it is fun to dream about one of them getting a full ride to college on a surfing scholarship, if there even is such a thing. I think instead I will add a little money to their 529 plans on Monday and make sure they do their homework.

Andrew Stern is a financial adviser with Lebenthal Wealth Advisors in Bridgehampton.

Stella Goldschlag was a German Jew from the Berlin provinces who worked with the Gestapo during World War II, identifying Jews stuck in Berlin who were masquerading as Aryans. Those German Jews who performed this betrayal service for the Nazis were called “catchers.” There were many in her profession, more than one would like to think, their Aryan good looks protecting them.

They could pass, at least for a while, unless a catcher turned them in.

The Jews in hiding — also protected by a non-Jewish mien — were referred to as U-boats, after German submarines, taking refuge underwater, false identities, so to speak, coming up for air in busy public avenues that they thought were the safest.

With Stella’s Nazi collaboration, the U-boats’ cloak of concealment became a shroud for those German Jews she unmasked.

She was a great-looking Aryan-type German Jew who, to be fair, had suffered an arrest, torture, and imprisonment by the Gestapo. Then a release, because her captors understood the potential Stella had in their racial cleansing of Germany.

Raised in 1930s Nazi Germany, growing up with Hitler, Stella Goldschlag attended a special school, the Goldschmidt School, for Jewish children founded after the Nazis removed all non-Aryan, that is, Jewish, children from public schools.

Her family did not get away while getting away was possible, while one could go to Hamburg, take a boat to Shanghai, where no visa was required and important Jews were looked on as Europeans, as opposed to their non-Aryan brand in Europe. Her father had failed to swiftly ask his St. Louis relatives for an affidavit of support then needed for Jews to emigrate to America, to the United States, to be more precise. Basically, the U.S. was not too sympathetic to migrants.

First, to save her family on a promise from the Gestapo that, with her complicity in disclosing Jews in disguise, they would not be deported to the death camps, Stella betrayed other Berlin Jews, the U-boats who were living in public as Aryans. When the Nazis reneged on the deal and shipped her family off with the others, however, Stella continued her work for them, to save herself. She would eventually become known as the “blond poison.”

The adage “one becomes what one does” applies to this Jewish woman whose self-serving tip-offs aided the Nazis in their Jew-hunts. Stella Goldschlag was responsible for the capture and subsequent deaths of hundreds. And she continued to help the Nazis long after her family was deported.

She would sit in an outdoor cafe on the main drag, and when she recognized a Jew she would high-sign the Gestapo agents who were there as well. They would efficiently leap — no, trip over each other — to action, to pull in the prey. She stalked and hunted down German Jews — U-boats — for the Gestapo, as well.

What is one willing to do to survive? We cannot know about ourselves in similar circumstances. But clearly, to this writer, the first step is the critical one. That is, the first step can embody all the others. The logical extension of an act flows from that first decision.

In the two major Western religions, Christianity and Judaism, the first believes in mercy, forgiveness, and love, while the second subscribes to justice, that is to say, acts have consequences for which we are responsible.

In Western philosophy, Kant writes that humans are responsible only for the intent of an act or decision, because consequences are out of one’s control. For the ancient Greeks, however, like Aristotle, referred to as the Philosopher by early Christian theologians, remorse is not a virtue. Sorry just won’t hack it.

Would any of us be Stellas, be catchers in Nazi Germany to save our family’s life? To save our own? Remember, the first decision is the trap.

So, more about Stella and the catcher crews some other time. She had three trials after the war, and her one daughter moved to Israel and would have nothing to do with her.

But now we look today at the Kentucky clerk jailed for not issuing a marriage license to a gay couple. She was put in jail, pleading that a higher morality she held to would be transgressed if she did her job, that is, if she followed the law of the land, in this case.

Now let’s go to the post-World War II Nuremburg trials. Nazi judges were tried and convicted for crimes against humanity because they did follow the laws of the land at that time, Hitler-time.

Oops! Are we hypocrites? Is an act a crime if and only if we don’t sympathize with the cause for which it was done? Hmm. And what kind of decisions would you entertain in order to survive?

Survival, betrayal, immigration, marriage licenses . . . if you live long enough there’s too much to think about! Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?

Lona Rubenstein moved to East Hampton more than 50 years ago. Her books include “Itzig,” a novel set in Germany from 1900 to 1935.

You’re not the only one with a summer rental, reads the sign in the window of the J. Crew on Main Street in East Hampton. The store is currently undergoing renovation and the sign is merely meant to direct customers to J. Crew’s “rental,” a pop-up shop just across the way, but when I came upon it the other night all brightly lit, it nearly stopped me dead in my flip-flops.

We have been renting houses on the East End of Long Island for years now, more than a decade at least, and there is something at once both dispiriting and enlivening about coming here on a temporary basis. As renters we are interlopers, transients. If the pecking order begins with those whose families have been here for generations, think the Halseys, the Toppings, and all those who have ever had a street named after them, and then descends to locals and then summer people, well, we are right after them, which is to say just one notch above day-trippers.

But our status — if you could call being a summer renter a status — also has its benefits. If to be an insider is to lose all perspective, and to be an outsider is to have no access in order to gain perspective, then we as outsiders temporarily granted a degree of insider access are well positioned to observe, and keenly.

Every house that we’ve rented here has had its great points and, as if by dint of some kind of Newtonian penance, its equal and opposite not so great points. There was the house on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton that had a swanky address and was, true to its name, walking distance to the beach. But that house also had a garage door permanently lodged in its dining room ceiling, the house having been cobbled together out of the garage of an erstwhile estate plus its various outbuildings. I loved that funky house even though I understood that it most certainly didn’t want to be loved for its funkiness. The house was like the personification of a failed bid at social climbing: It so badly wanted to move up in the world and yet, for all its desire to succeed, it nonetheless couldn’t help but keep exposing its awkward pedestrian roots.

Once, in the Village of East Hampton, we had a lawyer for a landlord who asked if he could commingle our security deposit, which was legally mandated to be in an escrow account, with his own personal checking account. Trying to be accommodating we said yes, and though it all worked out well for us in the end (we got back the correct amount), we did later learn that our landlord had been disbarred from the practice of law for those very sorts of infractions.

Another year, in Wainscott, we moved into our rental only to find that the next-door neighbor’s house was suddenly, irrevocably gone. This didn’t strike fear in my heart but it sure did strike fear in my husband’s. “It’s the Hamptons,” he said. “Someone will be building a house there in no time.” Perhaps truer words have never been spoken, for the very next morning the incredibly noisy job of laying the foundation and framing the house began and continued right on through till the end of our lease. When I called up our broker to complain he not only yelled at me, but hung up on me midsentence, and then for years afterward, no matter how many times I tried to unsubscribe from his emails, he wouldn’t stop sending me listings.

Much as I remember, and even in some ways hold dear, the ups and downs of each particular house, each particular renting experience, what after all makes up a decent chunk of my life experience, the simple fact is that it’s the memories of the people with whom I shared these houses that matter to me most.

Thanks to both an albeit shakily shot home video and the home video (perhaps also shakily shot) that is my now middle-aging mind, I remember my mother coming to visit me, my husband, and our then-toddler son 11 years ago on Job’s Lane in Bridgehampton. Things were already rather Jobian for my mother by that point as she had Stage 4 ovarian cancer, and yet what I most remember from her visit was not how stressed or depressed she was, but rather how carefree and grateful and happy she was to be there, with us, at that particular home, and how lovingly she trailed my son around everywhere he went.

The home wasn’t large but it had a huge and beautiful breezy backyard that stretched to the shores of Sam’s Creek, and I remember my mother sitting on a wooden swing on our back porch and saying to my father, “Let’s do it. Let’s go for it, Charlie. Let’s offer the owner a million bucks in cash.” She was joking, of course — my father never would have gone for it and neither would have the owner, who well knew just how valuable his land was — but in a way my mother was also very much not joking. Even though the house, which had been built by Leonard Lauder in the 1970s and not really been updated since, was a teardown, my mother loved the house just as it was. It was as if the experience of being there with us freed her chemo-addled mind to be itself again, to play, imagine, and even, for the first time in a long time, to dream about the future. So what if it would never come true?

The next summer we were back at that very same rental, all of us except my mother, who by then had her own piece of Long Island real estate, a burial plot in one of those gigantic godawful mid-Island cemeteries that are so big they practically have their own ZIP code. She was buried on July Fourth and I remember thinking, after a long hard six months of feeling devastated as I watched her essentially disintegrate, is her death going to ruin my summer? But the truth, in fact, was otherwise. Not only did her death not ruin my summer, it made it that much more poignant. Maybe we were all just renters. Maybe we were all just passing through.

This year we are once again in Wainscott, re-renting the house we rented eight years ago, and the experience is a bit odd, like going both backward and forward at once. Last time we were here we had just two children; now we have three. The first time we rented was from someone named Rob, whose nickname, for some reason I’ll never know, was Rebel. Sometime not long after our departure Rebel sold the house to an actress who happens to be a Buddhist, and though I myself am not a believer and the house is substantially the same as it was before, its aura is nonetheless completely different, more expansive, all-embracing, peaceful.

The other day my youngest child, whose very existence we hadn’t even yet wished for or imagined the last time we were here, turned 5, and so my father, now 87 years old, came by with his girlfriend for a family party. My father looked and seemed great, on point as ever, and yet in my mind I couldn’t help but compare him to the him of eight years ago. Last time he was here he walked the 1.2 miles to the beach, swam, and walked right back. This time he barely wanted to get out of his chair on the back porch. “I could just sit here forever,” he said, as the children played around him.

“You know we really should rent out here next summer,” said his girlfriend, who is one year younger than my mother would now be had she lived. But my father said nothing, just smiled, nodded. Later, when the sun went down, my father would admire the sky but then become eager to leave. He was getting cold, and like all good things, summers, rentals, and life itself, this too would have to end.

Johanna Berkman has been published in The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Harvard Review, The Observer, and Glamour. She is working on a novel called “(M)Other Life” and writes about family life on her eponymous blog.

It is the early fall of 2016. The so-called Iranian nuclear nonproliferation pact is diplomatic history, although accusations of clandestine Iranian noncompliance are rampant.

Then, on Oct. 12, 2016, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the collective fears of Israelis of once again facing mass extermination ignited. Four small nuclear weapons secreted in cars and trucks were detonated in strategic locations in Israel — one near Ashkelon, another in Neve Yaakov, and two in Tel Aviv. Two cars were stopped near Jerusalem before their cargo could be detonated, and the drivers were shot dead.

Early reports had the death count and injuries into the tens of thousands, and the likelihood that because of radiation levels vast parts of the land would be uninhabitable for generations to come.

Shortly after the attack took place, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (PM BN) initiated a call to President Obama (POTUS), a transcript of which was obtained through Israeli security channels. It is not a verbatim version of their exchange and, for purposes of brevity, leaves out certain more nuanced aspects of the dialogue.

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, before you say anything, on behalf of all Americans, I want to personally assure you that we stand with you during this horrendous time. Our nation will do everything possible to help your nation recover from this unthinkable attack.

PM BN: Mr. President, as we speak, our Air Force and Navy are preparing strikes against Iranian interests and other non-Iranian targets that assisted them in this attack.

POTUS: Are you contemplating a nuclear retaliation?

PM BN: I am not at liberty to say at this time, Mr. President.

POTUS: I must assume that you are contemplating this course of action, Bibi, and if so, I implore you to reconsider.

PM BN: Reconsider? Most respectfully, why?

POTUS: How can you be sure that these weapons were acquired through the Iranian network?

PM BN: We have been following the development of Iran’s nuclear program and we were aware that some of the smaller weapons they were working on were being passed off to terrorist networks through its Hezbollah affiliation.

POTUS: But, do you have irrefutable proof of this? What I’m saying is, why not take some time in ascertaining the exact source? We can take the lead on this for you and present the findings to the United Nations and bring the leaders to justice.

PM BN: We are not looking to have this horror wind up in some criminal court, Mr. President. Our nation is broken; it may, for all we know, be destroyed. We need to defend our people.

POTUS: But, Bibi, there is another direction you can take.

PM BN: What do you mean?

POTUS: You have already suffered a grievous loss to your people, to your land. I know the loss is unimaginable and I understand the impulse to retaliate, but think for a moment, what will be gained? It will destroy another civilization, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

PM BN: We will not perish without a fight; we will not permit our extinction without being heard.

POTUS: But, let it be heard in a world tribunal, maybe the United Nations or the World Court.

PM BN: Mr. President, most respectfully, this conversation is tending toward the absurd. Our nation is under siege, we have suffered a deep, penetrating wound, perhaps a mortal one, and you are hectoring me about some justice initiative?

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, you have already suffered grievous loss. But what is to be gained by killing 10 times or more of the casualties that you have suffered today? Wouldn’t that be an act of pure retribution and vengeance?

PM BN: Our people will not stand for us to sit quietly by, as we have in the past. We also have to make sure that another attack doesn’t come.

POTUS: I give you my word; there will be no further attacks. We assure you of that. We will convene an emergency session at the United Nations so that your nation can be convinced of its continued safety.

PM BN: How can you say that, sir? Is this another red line of yours? You gave us your word that you had our back — that you would prevent Iran from developing nuclear capability. And so we let up on our guard because we thought that your words and assurances would be backed up.

POTUS: Listen, I don’t need to be lectured by you. Our foreign policy is and never will be based on anything other than our national interests — not the interests of any other country.

PM BN: Most respectfully, Mr. President, was your alignment with Iran really in the interests of your country? You know, Mr. President, before this conversation veered off, I was going to inform you that our security network has been reporting picking up sustained chatter about extending the attack to your country involving some small nuclear weapons being secreted on cargo ships headed toward your West Coast, or perhaps already there.

POTUS: I appreciate your heads up, Mr. Prime Minister, but we have carefully monitored our ports of entry and have turned up nothing. We are confident that a threat inside our borders is remote at this time.

PM BN: As you say, Mr. President, I was just trying to pass on some useful information that you might not already have.

POTUS: Look, thanks, but let’s try to get beyond these personal differences. Recrimination won’t help us now either. You must look ahead and see things through a different prism — that of starting over. And, we can help you.

PM BN: What in the world are you getting at, sir?

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, there are large, unoccupied swaths of land in the world for which resettlement arrangements could be facilitated. I can assure you that something like this could be fashioned with the cooperation of world leaders.

PM BN: Mr. President, that is utterly out of the question. Our existence is inextricably tied to our historic land. It is the land of our forefathers and of the prophets. We cannot have an identity in what you call a “swath of land” located somewhere on earth. In any event, Mr. President, I don’t want to take up any more of your valuable time. I just wanted to make sure that you understood our predicament and resolve and that our military was preparing a counterattack. And, as I indicated, I also wanted to make you aware of our latest intelligence for your benefit.

POTUS: Bibi, please reconsider; you can call this off.

PM BN: We will not, Mr. President. You should know that they will find ways to infiltrate your nation as well, I warn you.

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, as I just told you, our intelligence has been working around the clock and have found no such initiative here. You are trying to not only change the focus of our conversation but to frighten us as well. It won’t work. We would prefer that you not implement the course of action you are alluding to; it is in our national interest that nuclear proliferation not expand. Your intended strikes threaten those interests.

PM BN: Mr. President, I’m not sure I understand you. Are you threatening us? We are not asking for your help. I called you as a courtesy to provide you notice of our impending counterattack and to also provide you with a warning about a possible impending tragedy in your country.

POTUS: I cannot let you start the world down the path to a worldwide nuclear holocaust. You must stand down for the good of humanity.

PM BN: Mr. President, with all due respect, this sounds pathological. There is no peace. We didn’t start anyone on this path. We are victims.

POTUS: But, Bibi, as I told you, you have already suffered this crushing assault. Nothing further can happen to you. Your country is in ruin. Your attack now is one of pure retribution. Let us help you recover.

PM BN: With all due respect, Mr. President, we cannot agree with your position. We are not asking for your support or help. We can only depend on ourselves. Remember what is written in the Ethics of the Fathers, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” That is all I have to say. Good night, Mr. President.

POTUS: Bibi, please. Listen. Don’t underestimate our resolve to keep the world from descending into an abyss. Don’t test me.

PM BN: You mean to say that you finally may start a military option and we are your target?

POTUS: You heard what I said, don’t test me.

PM BN: Test you? Test you? This is not personal to you, Mr. President. This is about Israel, about Jewish people everywhere. We were unable to protect Jews in Europe from the scourge of the Holocaust. We can protect ourselves now.

POTUS: Don’t do this, Mr. Prime Minister. Don’t go there. Uh, wait a minute — hold on. I’m being alerted to an emergency call that I must take. I have to go.

Click.

David B. Saxe divides his time between New York City and North Haven.

I became a gay reader early, at age 9 or 10, when a well-meaning librarian introduced me to the Hardy Boys books. I was mesmerized by the scenes of the brothers, Frank and Joe, and their friends stripping down to swim across one body of water or another or to dry their rain-soaked clothing. These images provided a seductive screen onto which I could project my first unarticulated homosexual longings.

Later, in high school, I sought out the novels of James Baldwin, Andre Gide, and D.H. Lawrence. Hungry for signs of homosexual life, I ignored the fact that desires were mostly unfulfilled and the relationships often self-destructive. In the limited literary landscape of gay life, these descriptions offered me an opportunity to imagine them otherwise.

Eventually I too became a writer with a decided bent for incorporating scenes from my own gay life, whether in journalistic essays, many of which have appeared in these pages, or in scholarly articles and books. My writing, like my reading, focused on the politics of representation: Who tells our stories and why? How are we depicted and with what ends in view?

It is perhaps for this reason that amid the avalanche of journalism following the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage I was drawn to The New York Times Op-Ed columnist Frank Bruni’s “Our Weddings, Our Worth.” I admired the honesty of Bruni’s autobiographical reflections that led up to his celebration of the SCOTUS ruling. At the same time I wished that he had recognized the many pioneers who had made possible his successful personal journey as a gay man.

For me the essay’s punctum, its most compelling image, is Bruni’s description of himself at age 16 (the year was 1980) slipping away from his friends at the local mall into a bookshop where he came across Seymour Kleinberg’s “Alienated Affections: Being Gay in America.” I empathize with the way that Bruni was put off by the descriptions of gay types with whom he could not identify and even the archness of Kleinberg’s style.

I had a very similar experience 20 years earlier while trolling my own neighborhood bookstore — they were everywhere in 1960 New York — and finding a copy of Edmund Bergler’s pseudoscientific “Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?” I couldn’t summon the courage to bring the book to the cash register. I was determined enough, however, to stand in a back corner of the shop and read page after page.

Admittedly, I didn’t comprehend the virulently homophobic nature of Bergler’s work, but, nonetheless, like Bruni holding Kleinberg’s tome, I knew that as much as I searched, I couldn’t find myself in Bergler’s pages. Or, more precisely, I found parts of myself, but the complete case studies seemed incompatible with my life till then, or even the one I imagined I might lead.

Now I can see that at 16 the root of my confusion in reading Bergler’s stories of unhappy homosexual men was located in the word “homosexual” itself. My growing attraction to other boys and men had already led to a rich interior life that I could not and did not want to deny.

I paused over and over again when Bergler depicted the electric excitement experienced by homosexual men who furtively found each other in the years after World War II. I was far less certain, however, that I was indeed a homosexual. Yes, I was quickly coming to terms with the adjectival meanings of “homosexual,” accepting a word that identified the desires that so often coursed through my body. No, I couldn’t relate to the word when it functioned as a noun, and the all-encompassing nature of a purported homosexual personhood.

As challenging as it was, I understood myself as a person with homosexual desires, but that was different from identifying myself as a homosexual human being and especially those troubled people portrayed in the scientific literature. I was caught between my life as lived and the 19th-century medical label that I knew others wanted to affix to me.

Doubtless I would have been reassured to know that 20 years previously, in an apartment just around the corner from where I was standing on East 89th Street, three unashamedly gay men successful in the trans-Atlantic world of the arts had set up domestic life together — the photographer George Platt Lynes, the novelist Glenway Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler, director of exhibitions and publications at the Museum of Modern Art. Lynes would spend the summer of 1945 here in East Hampton, after the breakup of that arrangement, and while in the midst of a tempestuous relationship with a much younger lover.

Although I was sustained during the 1960s by a proto-gay identity, it took till the end of the decade for others who were more politically sophisticated to reclaim the word “gay” from its complicated history. The shift in terminology from “homosexual” to “gay” was emblematic of the larger social forces that separated my own experience from Frank Bruni’s. In 1984, only four years after finding “Alienated Affections,” Bruni was able to come out to his parents and friends. This, even as a growing number of young people were identifying as “queer,” a moniker signaling more fluid ideas about sexuality than afforded by a simple gay-straight distinction.

The intensity, sometimes desperation, with which young people search for images that help them reflect on who they are and where they might be going is something that Frank Bruni and I have in common with many others. But Bruni and I also have a very particular bond because I might well have been one of the very people he read about as he stood flipping through the pages of “Alienated Affections.”

Several months after the book’s publication, my partner at the time, Robert Giard, and I were contacted by its author, Seymour Kleinberg. He was working on a new project about the promises and pitfalls of gay relationships. Would we be willing to sit for a series of interviews? We knew Seymour’s work because it appeared regularly in Christopher Street, the magazine that had been tracking the flowering of the new gay culture in the late 1970s. As early and loyal subscribers, how could we not accept Seymour’s invitation?

More fundamentally, as avid readers we understood that books had been an essential way for us to make some sense of our experience. I was just becoming a writer but eager in any way possible to help fill the representational void that other gay readers faced. I wanted both gay and straight readers to have access to real and complex representations of our lives.

In the mid-1980s, after a decade of focusing his photographic attention on the landscape of the East End, Bob would begin to make his elegant, often austere, portraits of gay and lesbian writers who lived nearby — Edward Albee, Dolores Klaich, Joe Pintauro, Lanford Wilson. The project, eventually including 600 authors, reflected his commitment to picturing the diversity of gay life. Bob was to write in an introductory essay for his book “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers,” “It is my wish that tomorrow, when a viewer looks into the eyes of the subjects of these pictures, he or she will say in a spirit of wonder, ‘These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed.’ So too will the portraits and the words which accompany them respond, ‘We were here; we existed. This is how we were.’ ”

Riffling through my files to find the January 1981 issue of Christopher Street in which we were the lead story, I am struck by the stylized cover drawing of two gay men embracing. I don’t think we saw ourselves in quite this idealized way, and Seymour’s text made clear that although we both placed a high value on intimacy and domesticity, we struggled mightily with questions of monogamy and fidelity, independence and mutual reliance.

I am reminded too that any anticipatory anxiety we may have had prior to the appearance of the issue was short-circuited by a phone call from a friend and Springs resident, Chuck Hitchcock, congratulating us on the story. Working at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in New York City, he had been privy to an early copy and, despite Kleinberg’s attempt to disguise our identities, recognized us immediately.

Fast forward 34 years.

I am driving home from a swim at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter on the morning of June 26, 2015, and find myself overcome listening to President Obama’s hastily called press conference about the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision.

I am more than a little surprised by my reaction, because tears are not my way and because gay marriage has never been my political issue of choice. Yes, I married my partner, David, eight years ago in Toronto, and we now enjoy many benefits that would otherwise have been unavailable to us. But for those of us who made a commitment to gay liberation in the late 1960s and hoped for more fundamental social change, marriage hardly seems like the victory that many believe it to be.

And of course the president himself has waffled dreadfully on the subject of gay marriage, holding every conceivable position, from an early defense of the right to marry, to a limited civil unions position, to a 2008 declaration that marriage always and only involves a man and a woman. Only in 2012 did he announce that his “evolving” thinking had led him to support same-sex marriage. I had reason to be suspicious.

But Obama’s words about the slow, small, incremental journey to equality spoke directly to me: “Sometimes two steps forward, one step back. . . . And then sometimes there are days like this, when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

In the end, most of my life has been lived before the thunderbolt of this summer’s SCOTUS decision. I’ve experienced firsthand the frustration of two steps forward and one step back while negotiating work life as an out gay early childhood educator, professor, and AIDS advocate and caregiver. As an activist, I’ve appreciated the slow, steady effort of the many that makes possible the thunderbolt even when the names of just a few are attached to it.

Those of us who contributed to the new gay research in the 1970s and 1980s and who wrote about our lives in the following decades are now part of that long journey to equality, a journey that I hope we will not be blinded to by the SCOTUS thunderbolt.

Jonathan Silin lives in Amagansett and Toronto. He is a fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.