Columnists

Thoughts of Harvey Pekar and life among the files.

Immigrant labor has helped keep the Hamptons humming for decades, longer if you go back to the turn of the 20th century and the Irish and Italians who worked on the estates of the oceanfront rich.

It is the story of my life that, post sixth grade, I have pretty much always been on the giver end of the Valentine exchange.

Goodbye to a one-of-a-kind family pet.

As stupid as renaming the Gulf of Mexico is, it reminds me of a similar effort of my own right here in East Hampton.

You employ the words “cope,” “coping,” or “copium” when another person has expressed feelings and desires clearly but you think their actual argument is feeble.

Hard time as a captive to talk radio.

The first hat I produced after weeks of work was a bit of a disaster, looking like something a “Game of Thrones” extra would have worn before getting his head chopped off

The pashmina, with its many petal colors like varieties of April flowers, was the late-20th-century version of the Tulip Mania of the Dutch golden age.

A mild cold snap here conjures a real cold snap way up north.

Along the eastward shore of Napeague Harbor a length of rusted pipe pokes out of a dune. This pipe has an interesting history.

I don’t quite know how it came to be that my parents’ culinary habits were on the advanced side for the 1970s and its sesame-seed buns and Fresca.

How can I give up on my 17-year-old workhorse of a car with 287,000 miles on it? It’s like a member of the family, gamely limping on to its final reward.

Last week, this column described a railroad line that once connected Bridgehampton to Sag Harbor. Part of what I left out was an explanation of why the road that now is the most direct route between the two is to this day called a turnpike.

I wonder if any climate scientists today are tabulating an increase in the number of citizens slipping and falling in the snow and ice and cracking their skulls open now that we so seldom have snow and ice.

Obsessive online analysis shows just how bad Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics writing was. Jack Kirby, though, remains “the King.”

East Hampton was something of a backwater until nearly the dawn of the 20th century as compared to Sag Harbor, which the Long Island Rail Road linked to the rest of the world starting in 1870.

No one in my house likes change, and I am the Empress of Retrograde.

Notes on a new/old favorite, “Homicide: Life on the Street,” now streaming on Peacock.

One tradition that I have always been a sucker for is the tree in Town Pond, of which the best part is seeing the village crew setting it out from their tippy aluminum rowboat.

My son and I have been down for the count with influenza and quickly reached the Very Boring Stage of convalescence. Bring on Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson in “Red One,” the Christmas-themed action movie.

A divine stay at a monastery turned hotel in Pittsburgh.

Coming full circle in a job that’s as important as ever.

Boating season came to an end with a whimper, though in my imagination the year was not going to be like this.

The music room in my house is what “the parlor” was to Americans in the mid-20th century: the room that time forgot.

Thoughts on team loyalty formation after the Thanksgiving football smorgasbord.

The era of cheap goods made in China exchanged during the holiday gift season could be ending.

Christmas tree follies.

Coming to you from the D-III national championships in Terre Haute, Indiana . . .

At Thanksgiving it seems appropriate to think about eastern Long Island’s very first land flip, which began 383 years ago when the Manhanset Indians were robbed of the place we know today as Shelter Island.