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Columnists

The Shipwreck Rose: Jazz Baby

When I was a teenager, the doomed trajectory of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life story caught my attention.

Nov 18, 2021
Gristmill: Teen Spirit

There’s more going on than you’d think at Sunken Meadow come state qualifier time.

Nov 11, 2021
Point of View: Glad I’m Rid of It

I quit Facebook years ago, convinced that, despite the happy patina, it was by and large a medium for meanness, for back-stabbing, name-calling, ganging-up, and worse.

Nov 11, 2021
The Mast-Head: Fighting the Rot

Doing the storms, the worst rot I found was on windows less than 20 years old made of junk wood and not intended to last.

Nov 11, 2021
The Shipwreck Rose: Bird Turd Disco

In the mid-1970s, Promised Land was like the wilderness of the Bible.

Nov 11, 2021
Gristmill: Senatorial Splendor

All legislation held hostage? There’s gotta be another way.

Nov 4, 2021
Point of View: Getting Down With Tidying Up

“What difference does it make, really, when we’re floating around in space in a hostile universe?”

Nov 4, 2021
The Mast-Head: Filling the Info Gap

We in the news business have to be sure to walk the information over to where readers are, and not expect all of them to come to us.

Nov 4, 2021
The Shipwreck Rose: A Ghost Story

I myself don’t believe in specters, but this is a true story.

Nov 4, 2021
Gristmill: A Modern Marriage

“Us,” the PBS mini-series that ran on “Masterpiece” — every married couple should see it.

Oct 28, 2021
Point of View: That’s the Cure

Yesterday, in the throes of a flushed feeling of unease, “a full-body tingling” that seems to occur monthly whose cause has yet to be determined by the cardiologists — that it doesn’t happen every night when the NewsHour’s on can be counted a blessing — I answered “not very well” when asked, casually, how I was feeling.

Oct 28, 2021
The Mast-Head: Recalling Sandy

For many of us, the windstorm that lingered from Tuesday into Wednesday brought to mind 2012 and Superstorm Sandy, which paralyzed the Northeast. Oct. 28 of that year had been still and warm enough that two of the Rattray children had gone swimming at the copper-gold end of the day.

Oct 28, 2021
The Shipwreck Rose: No One Told Me

Many times over the last 13 years, since my daughter arrived home at the age of 1, I’ve wanted to astonish everyone with my own list of all the tasks and errands I accomplish daily. I can hardly believe, myself, that I wake up by 6:30, and not infrequently by 5:45 a.m., in order to begin the varied and often esoteric chores of momming, from goldfish-feeding to trumpet-renting.

Oct 28, 2021
Point of View: The Only Way Out

We should see our history whole, not just cherry-pick the good parts.

Oct 21, 2021
The Mast-Head: Youth’s Take on History

It was a proud father moment for me watching the East Hampton Village Board meeting two weeks ago.

Oct 21, 2021
The Shipwreck Rose: Mystery of the Christmas Truck

We have entered red-pickup season.

Oct 21, 2021
Gristmill: Strike, Hollywood, Strike

How about the worker bees getting their due for a change?

Oct 14, 2021
Point of View: Well, Shut My Mouth!

When I interrupt, it isn’t because I want to stifle discussion, it’s because I want to extend it.

Oct 14, 2021
The Mast-Head: Behind the Junk

It seems to me that we Americans assume that the things we surround ourselves with are made not by actual people, but through some form of immaculate extrusion.

Oct 14, 2021
The Shipwreck Rose: Artificial Stupidity

It’s 2021 and the voices of artificial intelligence that call our landlines attempting grand larceny never sound as human as Hal 9000 did.

Oct 14, 2021
Gristmill: Cleared for Takeoff

Good times, literally and figuratively, at a massive college cross-country meet in an unlikely place — the National Warplane Museum in northwestern New York.

Oct 7, 2021
Point of View: The Way It Is Supposed to Be

Someone said that he thought it was the last day of summer, but there was too much going on to reflect then upon the waning light.

Oct 7, 2021
The Mast-Head: Out of the Box

There is a deepening frustration with the East End’s direction.

Oct 7, 2021
The Shipwreck Rose: Swimming to Oblivion

How pleasant it must have been to be an inhabitant of that now-distant Cheever America of General Electric affluence, Buicks and Panasonics, and 10,000 swimming pools.

Oct 7, 2021
Gristmill: Radio Gaga

There’s a qualitative difference in pleasure between typing names into the YouTube search box and sheer happenstance over the airwaves.

Sep 30, 2021
Point of View: There’s That Canada Train

“We’ll always have the Wyndham Greencastle Super 8.”

Sep 30, 2021
The Mast-Head: Boat Business

So far I have spent only one night aboard Cerberus, as my work on it continues.

Sep 30, 2021
The Shipwreck Rose: Think of England

Deep down, I’ve always been an Anglophile.

Sep 30, 2021
Gristmill: Birdbrains

When grackles attack.

Sep 23, 2021