Columnists

I’m beginning to get it — “it” being how Puritanism, with its disdain for freedom of speech, religious tolerance, equality, et cetera, led to the Declaration of Independence — but my essential question as to how we got from Cotton Mather to Thomas Paine remains.

You might almost feel bad for Mike Pence. You could almost see the color drain from his cheeks when he was tapped by the boss to lead the United States coronavirus response.

As choruses go, the Choral Society of the Hamptons, which forwent a spring concert this year in order to allow enough rehearsal time for its concert of the Bach B Minor Mass on June 27, has gotten better and better. Now, under the heartfelt leadership of its longtime music director, Mark Mangini, and with its ranks expanded by the members of his New York City Greenwich Village Chamber Singers, it’s ready for Bach.

‘What was the book where the bookcase fell over and killed the guy?” I asked Mary one day recently after having banged nails somewhat haphazardly into the shelves of our living room one that had become bowed out, thus rendering precarious one of our stores of knowledge, much of it having to do with cookery.

Is Michael Bloomberg is taking cues from the Trumpian style of public speaking? Departing from prepared remarks last Thursday, he briefly riffed on his negative view of the Shinnecock Reservation, which is near his Southampton vacation house, calling it a disaster and a bunch of other things better not repeated.

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.

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. . . .

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

“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.

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.

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. 

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.