Columnists

Perhaps the calamitous end to the endless war in Afghanistan will finally persuade us that a liberal democracy cannot be grafted through force of arms onto other societies.

One of the things that was supposed to get us through the Covid-19 lockdowns was learning something new.

Do you want to know what year people stopped smiling and saying “hello” as they passed one another on the sidewalks of East Hampton? That would be the year of our Lord 1994.

Mets games over the AM radio only make a trip to Citi Field itself that much sweeter. As long as the rain holds off . . .

Mary said she was excited to hear that I was making Lidia’s roasted eggplant with ziti and ricotta tonight, testimony, I suppose, to the depths of ennui we’ve plumbed — plum tomatoes are in the recipe too — since Emily and the kids left for Ohio, leaving us to marvel on our own at the glowing light she sees caressing us here.

I had been upstairs in the main newsroom working with our August interns when we heard several loud thumps above the usual background noise from outside.

I’m writing this in a blaze of blinding sun and white concrete, poolside at the Lighthouse Inn on Cape Cod, whither the kids and I have hied ourselves for a last-minute, three-night mini-cation. The Lighthouse Inn is a family-run resort founded in 1938, a cottage colony by the sea. A band was playing “Build Me Up, Buttercup” and “Sweet Caroline” by the water’s edge as we checked in.

A veritable tsunami of coffee in a decades-old thriller sets a grateful reader to thinking.

I was thinking the other day, walking in our neighborhood, that we were blessed by God; later, our daughter Emily, who lives in Ohio, told us why.

Signs of the coming change of season come too soon for my taste.

Either you love carnivals and fairs or you loathe them.

My current obsession with the Tokyo Olympics prompts memories of a low-budget trip to Montreal for the ’76 Games.

The traffic is godawful, but maybe as a result of the snail's pace everyone's driving too slowly to inflict much damage.

I have been spending a lot of time aboard Cerberus this summer, though not as much of it sailing as I would have liked.

Among the brilliant things I never did was an art project I conceived of in my late teens, in which I was going to take Polaroid photographs of my feet clad in favorite pairs of shoes. An autobiography in footwear.

A Monday afternoon in the D.M.V. road test queue in Patchogue.

As I was leaving Wittendale’s the other day holding a tall milkweed plant on the way to check out, a monarch butterfly flitted about me — a good sign.

There is a rhythm emerging in the struggle between me and the deer over who rules the garden.

Does it astonish you that there is a ferry in service today on the Long Island Sound that landed in France on D-Day?

What began as a simple college website search sends a dad into a tech tailspin.

Research does not support the idea that marijuana is performance-diminishing.

Sharks have arrived here, and not just the sort able to think that parking among the dead is okay.

If I think about it, I’m at my happiest around a bonfire, on the beach.

Here in Noyac, for some reason I’ve been overlooking nearby Long Beach, and was surprised it took me till the second weekend in July to appreciate it in a way I haven’t since the days of the Oasis.

If I were sermonizing, I’d write one on the folly of self-abasement, self-doubt, self-mortification, self-flagellation, and self-loathing.

Shortly after Lyman Beecher’s wife, Roxana, bore their first child, Drusilla Crook was brought to the household to take care of the baby — she was 5 years old, “a colored girl,” Beecher wrote in his autobiography.

I believe nothing is more depressing than the “festival” of “fun” that goes on at Hershey’s Chocolatetown in Pennsylvania.

Never mind the backups, jam-ups, and clogged (traffic) arteries, the quality of driving itself has taken a nosedive.

The goose that lays the golden egg is on life support.

Decades ago, a movement to build a bypass skirting the hamlets and villages on Montauk Highway was beaten back. I wonder what the naysayers would think if they could see 2021.