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I keep getting requests for money to help eliminate the Electoral College, which, of course, I would love to see happen, for, when you think about it, its reason for being had to do with the founders’ fear of a direct popular vote that a demagogue might manipulate to his advantage.

What a thrill it was to attend a performance of Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess” last week at the Metropolitan Opera. The tickets had been purchased a long time ago as a present from my husband, Chris Cory, but he was under the weather and unable to attend. Instead, his sister, Eleanor Cory, a composer and dear friend, attended with me.

It had been a while since it happened that I was mistaken for Breadzilla Brad.

Usually around the time of his birthday, I quote Dr. Martin Luther King’s assertion that it’s abominable that poverty continues to exist in a country as rich as this, and there his words, lifted from “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” written in 1967, lie, until I exhume them again a year hence.

Given that what has been called fourth-wave feminism has swept the country, as manifested by the #MeToo movement, it comes as a surprise, at least to me, that the only right guaranteed women as well as men in the Constitution is the right to vote. Can we still be second-class citizens? Yes, men, all of whom were white, wrote the Constitution.

Driving past the Amagansett School the other morning, I noticed a half-dozen or so seagulls standing on the ridge of the old slate roof. Gulls usually are up there, three stories above the schoolyard, minding their own business. But what their business is up there puzzles me.

A flip through my high school senior yearbook, and many yearbooks before mine, confirms what history already knew but what many people didn’t really talk about back then. Very few students from minority backgrounds had attended Island Trees High School in Levittown through the end of the 20th century.

We’re going soon to hear a soothsayer, and I hope what she says concerning the new year (being 2020, it should sharpen her foresight) will be as soothing as my mood is now, a fact that can be traced certainly in part to Dr. Langone’s orthotics, which seem to have angled me ever forward onto my toes, a good thing if you’re ready to rush the net in doubles.

This time of year always reminds me of The Star’s origins: The paper hit East Hampton on the day after Christmas in 1885. The Star arrived on the doorsteps of East Hampton Village residents even before the Long Island Rail Road had an East Hampton stop. Think of that! In 2020, we will count 135 years of newspapering, and are proud to say so.

Keeping our 9-year-old away from electronic devices has been a struggle since he first figured out how to work the track pad on his mother’s Mac laptop. His is a generation saturated in all things digital that finds playing a video game while listening to something on television and keeping up with friends on social media hardly distracting.

Every day during these holiday weeks seems to me like Sunday, which, I hasten to add, isn’t a particularly good thing for someone who likes to think of himself as purposeful if not actually useful.

Lights, moves around the western world’s solar calendar because it is based on the Hebrew calendar, which is an ancient, shorter, and lunar one. The years may be briefer, but since there are now 5,780 of them, there is plenty of reason to celebrate: Make of it what you will, a feeling of pride ensues if you accept thousands of years as part of your personal heritage.