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Connections: Word Wards

Long ago and far away, back when I was an eighth-grader at Horace Mann Elementary school in Bayonne, N.J., I was given an aptitude evaluation and tested high for “persuasion.” I don’t remember what methods they used to determine what our defining character traits were — traits that might indicate what lines of work we were best suited for. But I do remember that my own defining characteristic was this one, slightly poetic, word.

Feb 27, 2020
Point of View: Imagining

I’m living a life of quiet desperation at the moment, for nothing is hoving into view on the sportive horizon. I have, as Georgie and her peers say, reached out, though no one thus far has reached out to me. I guess I’ll go on reaching out. Surely something (or someone) will turn up. . . .

Feb 27, 2020
The Mast-Head: Global Panic

There is nothing like a good, old-fashioned global panic to get people moving on an important issue like climate change.

Feb 27, 2020
Point of View: I’ll Read On

“Without some understanding of Puritanism, and that at its source, there is no understanding of America,” Perry Miller said in the foreword to “The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry,” a little book I’ve long had around, but have, until now, never read.

Feb 20, 2020
Connections: Economic Empires

Almost everyone paying attention knows the Lehman family went from rags (in their case raw cotton) to riches and then collapsed into bankruptcy in 2008, dragging the national economy with it. 

Feb 19, 2020
Relay: For Diego

My close friend Lisa sobbed in the doorway of her apartment last Wednesday night, and the only sustenance I could offer her was a warm embrace and some of my mother-in-law’s homemade chili. Even so, it felt inadequate and I started to cry, too. The chili was hot and hearty, but we, distraught over the death of a friend, could barely taste it.

Feb 19, 2020
The Mast-Head: Hidden No Longer

For the third week, I have had an article in the paper about East Hampton’s history of slavery. This is part of a much larger project started about three years ago to identify every enslaved person who ever lived in the town.

Feb 19, 2020
Connections: Long Ago, Far Away

I was the age some of my grandchildren are today when “Cover Girl” won the 1944 Academy Award for best music scoring in a musical picture. The film was in Technicolor, which was new and exciting. Given the plethora of distinctions by which Hollywood awards are given out, I suppose it wasn’t surprising that a different film won best musical picture that year and that although the cinematography was nominated for an Academy Award it did not win that one, either. Today, aficionados consider “Cover Girl” one of the most lavish and successful Hollywood musicals ever.

Feb 13, 2020
Point of View: Playing Deaf

It’s taken a while, 70 or so years, but I’ve finally achieved a version of Nirvana when it comes to tennis, and the answer, the answer for me at any rate, is to play deaf.

Feb 13, 2020
Relay: Falling For Greta

If cultural archetypes were as unkind to men as they are to women, I would be considered a spinster. Unmarried? Check. Getting up there in age? Just turned 55. Cat owner? As of last month, yes!

Feb 13, 2020
The Mast-Head: Splitting Wood

There is something special about splitting wood. You get a likely billet somewhere, stand it on end, and bring a wedge-shaped maul down hard into the end grain. The force pushes the log fibers apart, as a crack hisses away from the impact. One or two more swings, and the log falls in two.

Feb 13, 2020
Connections: Ghosts of the Machine

I am an old enough fogey that I can remember the days when The Star was printed on an old flatbed press on the ground floor of the office building. Everyone on the staff had to physically drag the 1,700-pound rolls of newsprint out of storage in the family barn, from up the lane behind the office. How archaic those rolls seem today — positively Victorian. But I was there to see it.

Feb 6, 2020
Point of View: Katie, Katie

I’ve been asked what I would like our daughter to cook for me on the occasion of my fast-approaching birthday, and whether it’s cailles en sarcophage or mac and cheese, it will be wonderful, given the company we’ll keep.

Feb 6, 2020
The Mast-Head: Global Warming?

Ken Brown stopped by the office on Monday with an old snapshot that he thought we would like a look at. During the winter of 1966 it was so cold that the edge of the ocean froze. Ken had been going through some old things and found the photograph, taken at East Hampton Main Beach toward low tide late in the day.

Feb 6, 2020
Connections: Going West

Visiting Quogue recently with friends who had summered there from childhood was eye-opening.

Jan 30, 2020
Point of View: Stoiquotes

“I’m reading about the Puritans now,” I said to Mary, and a shadow passed across her face . . .

Jan 30, 2020
The Mast-Head: Prophetic Pile

I am of two minds about confessing my near-addiction to the give-away pile next door to the Star office at the East Hampton Library.

Jan 30, 2020
Connections: Built for Two

Because I’ve been putting my head down lately in a small house at Peconic Landing, the retirement community in Green­port, the concept of “home” has been very much on my mind. If casual acquaintances were to ask, I would still say I live in East Hampton, despite the fact that it takes two ferries across Shelter Island and about an hour to get here from there.

Jan 23, 2020
Point of View: Textbook Stuff

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.

Jan 23, 2020
The Mast-Head: Dog Town, Amagansett

One of the pleasures of a home with older dogs, aside from surprising four-figure veterinary surgery bills, is when they get you up at the oddest hours of the night.

Jan 23, 2020
Connections: A Rare Treat

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.

Jan 16, 2020
Point of View: Bernie for Me

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.

Jan 16, 2020
The Mast-Head: Takes Two to Tango

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

Jan 16, 2020
Connections: The E.R.A. Today

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.

Jan 9, 2020
Point of View: Sole-Saving

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.

Jan 9, 2020
Relay: History of Racism Shapes a Career

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.

Jan 9, 2020
The Mast-Head: In a Gull’s Eye

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.

Jan 9, 2020
Connections: Still We Abide

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.

Jan 1, 2020
Point of View: Is It Monday Yet?

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.

Jan 1, 2020
The Mast-Head: Unplugged Together

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.

Jan 1, 2020