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Columnists

Gristmill: Filling in the Blanks

John Steinbeck holds up.

Jun 26, 2025
The Mast-Head: Seed Bombs

Clandestine efforts to spread milkweed.

Jun 26, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: Pink Lady Slippers

We used to have a much closer relationship with flowers and other flora.

Jun 26, 2025
Gristmill: Over or Under?

Must sports fandom be subsumed by relentlessly hawked gambling?

Jun 19, 2025
The Mast-Head: Protest on a Rainy Day

My role on that historic Saturday was to observe and document.

Jun 19, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: Forever Young

Scarleth Urgiles’s memory will truly live on.

Jun 19, 2025
Gristmill: So Long to the Standard

The last five-speed Nissan manual transmission just rolled off an assembly line in Mexico. 

Jun 12, 2025
The Mast-Head: The Baby Beach

A chat with a teen who wants to be a Main Beach lifeguard reminds me of my own brief and unremarkable lifeguarding career. 

Jun 12, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: Goodbye, Mr. Rawson

The phrase “baggage train” kept popping into my head this weekend as we packed up the contents of my daughter’s dorm room in New Hampshire and stuffed it all into the crevices of the car.

Jun 12, 2025
Gristmill: Diner Bound

Once more unto a storied eatery at a Catskills crossroads.

Jun 5, 2025
The Mast-Head: Summer Babies

June is birthday month for the Rattrays. Chalk it up to the first chill nights of late summer and early fall putting people in the mood around here.

Jun 5, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: Animal House

I tend to see the creatures who live in my immediate domestic orbit through a semi-comical anthropomorphized lens.

Jun 5, 2025
Gristmill: A Real Resort

Arcades and mini golf and open-air alcohol. ’Twas ever thus.

May 29, 2025
The Mast-Head: Hole in the Hull II

Cerberus, my 1979 Cape Dory sloop, is progressing toward a July Fourth launch.

May 29, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: The Printer’s Devil

It’s been an interesting spring in family newspapering.

May 29, 2025
Gristmill: An Ending, a Beginning

If you’re worried about whether society will hold together, a SUNY college commencement just might be a cure for what ails you.

May 22, 2025
The Mast-Head: Mating in Moonlight

Scuffs where horseshoe crabs had made love during night covered the sand at Lazy Point. Their fevered trails crisscrossed the beach. Plovers and turnstones probed for eggs along the edge of the water.

May 22, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: 24 Hour Party People

One of the recurring themes of this column that I keep returning to — like a dog that annoys its master by wearing holes in the living room rug by habitually turning circles and clawing at the carpet with its paws before lying down — is the incontrovertible truth that people used to have more fun.

May 22, 2025
Gristmill: King of Pests

Ticks have never been worse. Science to the rescue?

May 15, 2025
The Mast-Head: A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat

Getting reacquainted with Cerberus, my 1979 Cape Dory sloop.

May 15, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: Come On and Zoom

I didn’t really enjoy the 1970s when I was in them. But how we miss that decade now that it’s gone.

May 15, 2025
Gristmill: Tending Sheep 

A homily for parlous times.

May 8, 2025
The Mast-Head: Paying History Back

Slavery and the debt owed to Black Americans are among the subjects the Trumpist thought police are seeking to erase from their telling of United States history.

May 8, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: Island Time

I’m glad Gardiner’s Island has remained in private hands. Is that wrong?

May 8, 2025
Gristmill: Hard and Harder Boiled

What’s yours? Ross Macdonald or John D. MacDonald? How about both . . .

May 1, 2025
The Mast-Head: One of a Kind

For Helen S. Rattray, a “testimony and witness to more than a half-century of community life.”

May 1, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: Rhumb Line

I’ve had this idea for a few years now that requires some artistic assistance. Does anyone know a mapmaker?

May 1, 2025
Gristmill: Into the Wild

Close and not-so-close encounters with bears.

Apr 24, 2025
The Mast-Head: Osprey in the Mood

The ospreys are back for the season, and I’ve spent more time than usual watching the show.

Apr 24, 2025
The Shipwreck Rose: Funeral Potatoes

We’re having a potluck lunch on Sunday at Ashawagh Hall, following the 11 a.m. memorial gathering there for my mother, Helen S. Rattray.

Apr 24, 2025