Skip to main content

Columnists

The Shipwreck Rose: Puppies and Kittens

I would not be surprised to learn that there is a run on puppies this December, and a shortage, as there has been a run on and shortage of Christmas trees here on Long Island.

Dec 23, 2020
Gristmill: Engines of Manipulation

I never quite got over hearing how Silicon Valley developers and programmers who worked ingeniously to hook kids on social media would turn around and send their own kids to no-tech Waldorf schools.

Dec 17, 2020
Point of View: An Albatross

Even James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was in favor of a popular vote, and here we are more than 200 years later with the albatross still about our necks.

Dec 17, 2020
The Mast-Head: Shipping News

The bad-luck schooner Alice May Davenport spent the two weeks following Thanksgiving up on the sand near Smith Point.

Dec 17, 2020
The Shipwreck Rose: The Year in Pictures

In the spirit of New Year’s accounting, and things we want to remember, I present you here with 10 flashbacks from lockdown — a collage of moving images, in impressionistic order.

Dec 17, 2020
Gristmill: The Heat of the Kiln

A brief snowfall triggers memories of Vermont and an uncle’s life there as a potter.

Dec 10, 2020
Point of View: Re-Engaged in East Hampton

Presumably I have returned to work now, and am thus to some extent re-engaged in East Hampton’s life, and am feeling once again at least somewhat useful.

Dec 10, 2020
The Mast-Head: Winter Snapshot

A revealing trip through an old Dominy weather diary.

Dec 10, 2020
The Shipwreck Rose: Retronaut

We, the Rattray family, have a tendency to get lost in time, to misplace ourselves in its flow.

Dec 10, 2020
Gristmill: Chore Life

Fallen leaves. Is there anything in the world less satisfying to deal with?

Dec 3, 2020
Point of View: The Dragon Slayne

After Edmund Spenser

Dec 3, 2020
The Mast-Head: Reflecting on Mirror Neurons

After eight months of social distance, I think isolation is getting to me.

Dec 3, 2020
The Shipwreck Rose: Celluloid Dreams

Leafing back through five months’ worth of “Shipwreck Roses,” I chuckle at myself as I realize exactly how much of my brain space is filled by thoughts of handsome movie actors.

Dec 3, 2020
Gristmill: The Death of the Office

Somebody once believed that gathering in offices was a grand idea. Now, post-pandemic, we may never go back.

Nov 25, 2020
Point of View: Angstgiving

We’ve made cardboard cutouts of family members so that Mary and I can be infused with the familial glow that has been so much a part of this holiday over the years.

Nov 25, 2020
The Mast-Head: The Worst of Times

Southampton's Dr. George Schenck returned to his practice Thanksgiving week in 1918 after being ill with influenza for nearly a month. A 25-year-old whose parents lived in North Sea died at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. 

Nov 25, 2020
The Shipwreck Rose: Talk to Me, Harry Winston

The unknown previous owner of my secondhand copy of “How to Marry a Multimillionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating” (2005) left penciled-in checkmarks next to the self-help points she found most salient and helpful.

Nov 25, 2020
Gristmill: Sunken Again

My favorite state park might be the only one in existence with more parking lots than greenways.

Nov 19, 2020
Point of View: Breaking Chains

There has always been in this country somewhat of a disconnect between its ideals and reality.

Nov 19, 2020
The Mast-Head: Constant Construction

Construction and landscaping have been a backdrop here for a long time, but over the past few years it has become ceaseless and everywhere.

Nov 19, 2020
The Shipwreck Rose: Greener Pastures

“Anne of Green Gables” is the book that influenced me most in my life — not Tolstoy or Nabokov or Bruce Chatwin.

Nov 19, 2020
Gristmill: Calling Kathleen Rice

It might be time for Democrats to revisit the candidate selection process in the First Congressional District.

Nov 12, 2020
Point of View: Buoyed in Bonac

I thought Joe Biden’s victory speech was just right, reminding us to listen to our better angels.

Nov 12, 2020
The Mast Head: Season Opener

With reports from Peconic Bay poor, there was a sense that the scallop crop in town waters would be bad as well.

Nov 12, 2020
The Shipwreck Rose: Quarantine Diary

Peak 2020 was reached at 3 p.m. last Thursday with a phone call from a young woman in the office at the John M. Marshall Elementary School informing me that my son, Teddy, had been determined to be a true contact of a positive Covid-19 case in the fifth grade.

Nov 12, 2020
Gristmill: Bring Back Lever Voting

Good for a hundred years, why in the world were New York’s old voting machines ever put out to pasture?

Nov 5, 2020
The Mast Head: Expect More

The schools have done a good job dealing with virus cases and preventing wider outbreaks by strictly managing their internal practices. But once outside of the school buildings, the risk of uncontrolled transmission increases.

Nov 5, 2020
The Shipwreck Rose: Bring Me Your Dreams

Insomnia is how I personally discovered the philosophical truth that “I think therefore I am,” a  couple of years before I heard the name Descartes and “Cogito, ergo sum” at boarding school.

Nov 5, 2020
Gristmill: In the Auto Graveyard

We interrupt the leadup to the Election for the Ages to bring you an update on one man’s vehicular travails.

Oct 29, 2020
The Mast Head: Much in a Name

During last Thursday’s editorial meeting, one of the editors, Irene Silverman, asked why it was that I had named my sailboat after a three-headed dog.

Oct 29, 2020