Columnists

The drive-through Smith Point Light Show in Shirley is holiday entertainment, corona-style.

They say that in ancient times conjunctions such as Saturn and Jupiter’s were considered ill omens — the gods, people thought, were conspiring.

We could learn something about how to handle a pandemic from 17th-century England.

I would not be surprised to learn that there is a run on puppies this December, and a shortage, as there has been a run on and shortage of Christmas trees here on Long Island.

I never quite got over hearing how Silicon Valley developers and programmers who worked ingeniously to hook kids on social media would turn around and send their own kids to no-tech Waldorf schools.

Even James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was in favor of a popular vote, and here we are more than 200 years later with the albatross still about our necks.

The bad-luck schooner Alice May Davenport spent the two weeks following Thanksgiving up on the sand near Smith Point.

In the spirit of New Year’s accounting, and things we want to remember, I present you here with 10 flashbacks from lockdown — a collage of moving images, in impressionistic order.

A brief snowfall triggers memories of Vermont and an uncle’s life there as a potter.

Presumably I have returned to work now, and am thus to some extent re-engaged in East Hampton’s life, and am feeling once again at least somewhat useful.

A revealing trip through an old Dominy weather diary.

We, the Rattray family, have a tendency to get lost in time, to misplace ourselves in its flow.

Fallen leaves. Is there anything in the world less satisfying to deal with?

After Edmund Spenser

After eight months of social distance, I think isolation is getting to me.

Leafing back through five months’ worth of “Shipwreck Roses,” I chuckle at myself as I realize exactly how much of my brain space is filled by thoughts of handsome movie actors.

Somebody once believed that gathering in offices was a grand idea. Now, post-pandemic, we may never go back.

We’ve made cardboard cutouts of family members so that Mary and I can be infused with the familial glow that has been so much a part of this holiday over the years.

Southampton's Dr. George Schenck returned to his practice Thanksgiving week in 1918 after being ill with influenza for nearly a month. A 25-year-old whose parents lived in North Sea died at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. 

The unknown previous owner of my secondhand copy of “How to Marry a Multimillionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating” (2005) left penciled-in checkmarks next to the self-help points she found most salient and helpful.

My favorite state park might be the only one in existence with more parking lots than greenways.

There has always been in this country somewhat of a disconnect between its ideals and reality.

Construction and landscaping have been a backdrop here for a long time, but over the past few years it has become ceaseless and everywhere.

“Anne of Green Gables” is the book that influenced me most in my life — not Tolstoy or Nabokov or Bruce Chatwin.

It might be time for Democrats to revisit the candidate selection process in the First Congressional District.

I thought Joe Biden’s victory speech was just right, reminding us to listen to our better angels.

With reports from Peconic Bay poor, there was a sense that the scallop crop in town waters would be bad as well.

Peak 2020 was reached at 3 p.m. last Thursday with a phone call from a young woman in the office at the John M. Marshall Elementary School informing me that my son, Teddy, had been determined to be a true contact of a positive Covid-19 case in the fifth grade.

Good for a hundred years, why in the world were New York’s old voting machines ever put out to pasture?

The schools have done a good job dealing with virus cases and preventing wider outbreaks by strictly managing their internal practices. But once outside of the school buildings, the risk of uncontrolled transmission increases.