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Columnists

The Mast Head: Interspecies at Dinner

Dinnertime for black-backed gulls more or less coincides with people dinner around here, or so it seems to me. 

Jun 25, 2020
Gristmill: Back to The Bridge

The Bridgehampton racetrack was brought back to life Saturday for a simulated racing competition watchable on YouTube.

Jun 18, 2020
Point of View: Stirrings

“It gets easier,” someone said recently in referring to long marriages and looking my way for confirmation.

Jun 18, 2020
Relay: Ever Present Past

How can I ever thank you? You have been there from the beginning, in the soaring chorus of “Good Day Sunshine” through the car’s tinny radio so many summers ago, and even now you are here, the infectious — in the best way — “Home Tonight.”

Jun 18, 2020
The Mast Head: Sound Advice

As such things go, early on during the pandemic I passed on a piece of good advice I had heard — about learning a new skill during the lockdown — then did not really heed that thought myself.

Jun 18, 2020
Gristmill: Life Without Cable

I pulled the plug on cable television at precisely the wrong time — as two national crises descended upon us.

Jun 11, 2020
Point of View: We’re Here!

A real estate broker once told us that we didn’t want to live in “The Corridor,” but now, with all the beautifying work going on at practically every house in the neighborhood save ours, I feel blessed to be living within it.

Jun 11, 2020
The Mast Head: Black Cowboys

In the 19th century, as many as a quarter of cowboys were black.

Jun 11, 2020
Gristmill: From a Minneapolis Rooftop

A report by Facebook from the George Floyd war zone.

Jun 4, 2020
Point of View: On Viruses

All about us there’s suffering, and yet this neighborhood in which we live in Springs is beautiful, in full bloom and serene. It doesn’t get any better than this — here, that is.

Jun 4, 2020
The Mast Head: Like 1968 Only Worse

The obvious enthusiasm of some American police officers for violence amid peaceful protests may be among the most indelible images to come out of the nationwide demonstrations that have followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Jun 4, 2020
Point of View: Do I Wake?

Before the coronavirus became a round-the-clock night­mare, mine were confined to night­time.

May 28, 2020
The Mast-Head: Pandemic Pastime

Who would have thought when a pandemic hit the United States that instead of stocking up on guns, Americans went grocery shopping?

May 28, 2020
Connections: A Blaze of Words

Memorial Day seems an appropriate time to bid farewell to a longtime pursuit — in this case, this: my weekly column, “Connections,” which has appeared in The East Hampton Star, come rain or come shine, come hell or come high water, since 1977.

May 21, 2020
Point of View: Get Me to the Courts on Time

I’m playing tennis in the morning,
Ding, dong, the balls all will be signed,
Pull out the hopper, let’s do it
proper,
But get me to the courts on time.

May 21, 2020
The Mast-Head: Openings in Lockdown

Learn something new. Of all the thoughts I have heard or read on enduring the pandemic lockdown, this has been the best advice.

May 21, 2020
Connections: Unpopular Causes

I am proud of The Star's literary standards when it comes to language, proud of our effort to represent the lives and interests of not just the wealthy and the grand but of the working people who make up the fabric of our community.

May 14, 2020
Point of View: Intertwining

We talked with a potential financial adviser by phone one recent morning, he in Charlotte and we here, and were told that the resultant plan was positing a life span of 100, which I thought was a little on the rosy side given what’s been going on.

May 14, 2020
The Mast-Head: Summer Is a Coming In

It hit me yesterday, when one of the kids pointed out that she was going to be done with school in two weeks, what the heck are we doing to do with them this summer with camps not opening and movement still restricted?

May 14, 2020
Connections: Wild Game Plan

It’s not just fear of Covid-19, but how the pandemic has affected the grocery-store supply chain that commands my attention these days.

May 7, 2020
Point of View: At Last

Golfers can golf, and have been able to for most of the past two agonizing months, but tennis players, unless they have private courts, have been waiting around wondering if they’ll ever be able to play again.

May 7, 2020
Relay: All Good Things

Don’t we want this to be a happy place? A friendly place? And isn’t how we feel often self-created? Friendliness is intentional, driven partly by the idea that our own friendliness might brighten the community around us.

May 7, 2020
The Mast-Head: Refugees, Avian and Human

When the coronavirus refugees began arriving about the middle of March, I wondered what the ospreys would think.

May 7, 2020
Connections: July, 1967

Given my insistence that time has come to sign off on “Connections” — at least as a weekly obligation — various family members have started sending suggestions for special, quirky, or interesting columns.

Apr 30, 2020
Point of View: Saved

I would like to say a word about my former landlady, Barbara Johnson, without whom I would not have been able to stay in East Hampton.

Apr 30, 2020
Relay: Guilt, Escapism, and the N.F.L. Draft

Talk of a return of baseball this summer, sans fans, sends our faithful correspondent tripping down memory lane and stumbling into the N.F.L. draft, quarantine-style.

Apr 30, 2020
The Mast-Head: The Spanish Flu

Leafing through old issues of The Star from the time of the so-called Spanish influenza, its effects here could be told from the number of dead and ill.

Apr 30, 2020
Connections: Springtime, 1977

Despite the fact that I had been a resident of East Hampton for nearly two decades at that point, my first column definitely reads today like the words of a young woman “from away.”

Apr 23, 2020
Point of View: Love Doesn’t Fade

Love means never letting her wonder if you’ve left a margarita for her in the pitcher you’ve put in the refrigerator, even if she doesn’t want one.

Apr 23, 2020
The Mast-Head: Empathy in Isolation

The isolation is balanced. Phone calls seem a little longer. Even routine conversations with someone in the outside world leave time for a few empathetic words.

Apr 23, 2020