Columnists

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?

Adventures in scrap metal.

Thoughts on the popularity of e-bikes.

I’ve never owned a car I truly loved.

A straight father of three sings the praises of Judy Garland.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of what looked like little tropical fish-tank fish were swimming near the surface.

Emails from colleges drift in and pile up in my daughter’s email inbox — and my own email inbox — like the falling leaves of the sugar maple and the red oak.

Feeding the beast: On the 800-pound gorilla that is the National Football League.

An office goldfish heads to the great fish pond in the sky.

My mother, Helen Selden Rattray, has the longevity genes of the Greenland shark. She will be turning 90 years old on Sunday.

Rediscovering the pleasures of AM radio.

There is a certain kind of camaraderie that occurs at the counter of the beer store that I believe happens nowhere else.

I learned from a cheap book I read once on dream decoding, back when we read books, that if you dream of swimming or of the sea that what you are really dreaming about is your subconscious.

Someone who grew up in Bridgehampton (this columnist, for one) might think all there was to Leonard Riggio was Minden, his vast and venerable Ocean Road estate. But his passing calls up more.

As the recreational boating season hurries to a close here in the Northeast, my ideas of a summer spent at least part of the time afloat on Cerberus slip away.

One of the indignities of getting older is having hair that will no longer express your personality in a way that adequately represents who you think you are, deep down. Our hair betrays us with age.

When a county investigator instantly “gets,” and appreciates, a just-deceased family member.

We get a lot of questions from readers here. It is, after all, a local newspaper.

Good times on the jumbotron as the New York Metropolitans get the ballpark rocking on $5 Tuesday.

If she becomes president, Kamala Harris could be the last of the baby boom generation to occupy the Oval Office.

My ballet teacher was Gordon Peavy, who had his studio in the Odd Fellows Hall on Newtown Lane, above what is now the Chanel store.

Happy happy joy joy! It’s hard to shake the Games of Paris.

From where I sit with a view of Main Street, two things about this summer strike me: the numerous westbound traffic backups and the people peering in The Star’s front windows.

The addicting thing about Disney World is that it is as complex and elaborate an alternate reality as a video-game artificial universe like World of Warcraft or Legend of Zelda.

When insects attack.

And it was not even particularly good coffee.

Notes from the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night.