Columnists

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.

Dinner at Sam’s Bar and Restaurant with both my children followed by a brand-new Ridley Scott movie: Life probably won’t get much better than that.

May all your feeders be full.

I heard a liberal podcaster the other day lamenting the corniness of the term “the Resistance,” which brings to mind some dystopian movie.

We are swimming upstream against the mighty current of all-consuming consumerism as Black Friday approaches.

It was as welcome as it was toothsome when Brian Collins, pitmaster, served up a colonial meal, history lesson on the side, at the Nathaniel Rogers House.

Recalling then-Representative Lee Zeldin’s strange town hall in Amagansett.

The movies are my lexicon.

Casting an early ballot in the old Southampton College gym brings on the hoop dreams.

A number of people I’ve run into in the past couple of weeks have asked about my sailboat and what the status of its motor retrofit is. Perhaps it was because of the unseasonably mild weather that some minds turned to sailing.

Many, many years — and many shattered illusions — ago, during the presidential election year of 2004, when I was a magazine editor in Manhattan, I volunteered during the Republican National Convention as an “election observer.”

Paging George Costanza? My college-age son has a wallet beyond his years.

I have a problem with genius jerks who have a great idea in a garage somewhere and then see themselves as gods.

I am overawed by previous generations of Rattray women who managed to file their weekly Star columns without a break over the span of four and five decades.

The National Warplane Museum in Geneseo triggers (in a good way) one non-pilot.

Deer are rapidly adapting to their new reality and doing things they never did before.

I’m a believer in the veil of distraction. It seems to me blatantly obvious that Karl Marx was correct on that score, anyway.

That’s funny, he doesn’t seem like a Nobel winner. (A trip to John Steinbeck’s water-encircled Sag Harbor compound.)

The phrase “fifth column” came into common use during the Spanish Civil War.

Is the vocabulary of the average American contracting?