Columnists

My parents’ generation had a pretty good idea of how to have a good time.

It’s important to “be of good cheer,” as the old folks used to say, not just during the winter holiday weeks but all year long.

When holiday protocol is violated.

I have vowed while breath is still in me not to be such an a-hole on the tennis court, to be charitable when it comes to my partners and opponents.

Early darkness and the bell music from the Presbyterian Church make me think of my grandmother, who lived just up the driveway from the Star office.

You may have been a teenager in the 1980s if . . .

Bring the mini excavator. Throw a bone to put-upon pedestrians. Noyac Road needs a sidewalk.

I had a photo of myself smiling and holding a can of Spam at an otherwise unoccupied candlelit dining table sent to our eldest daughter’s house in Perrysburg, Ohio, where most everyone in our family had gathered for Thanksgiving.

Present-day ideas about land rights on the East End can be traced back to the English, who set out their plantations on the Island in the middle of the 17th century, and it is illuminating to see what laws came first.

Turned off by the N.F.L.’s enthusiasm for calling ever more penalties, a football fan finds solace in Patriot League collegiate games.

In praise of sortition.

The Asian longhorned tick, which apparently arrived in the United States by hitching a ride on a New Zealand sheep in 2017, has been found on Long Island. 

Read on for the variety of evening amusements that kept East Hampton entertained the week of Dec. 20, 1934, at the height of the Great Depression.

A quite noticeable fashion statement at Saturday’s N.C.A.A. Division III national cross-country championships was worn on the face. The mustache is back.

The classics teacher in “The Holdovers” says it was always thus, that it was no different in ancient times, that there’s always been the horrific and the sublime. Yet thinking about how to get beyond it seems to be the only thing that keeps us sane.

The prevailing narrative on Representative George Santos’s rise and imminent fall has bothered me from the start.

I’ve stood on a ladder pointing a hose through the window of a house ablaze in the boondocks of Nova Scotia, and you can’t take that away from me.

From the comic stage to the world stage.

Money can’t buy you love, no, nor can it buy you peace of mind, engaged as you might well be in the constant pursuit of it.

There are no understory plants any more. No saplings coming up. The Quercus alba acorns I may manage to grow into small trees could help preserve the species.

Don’t name your business Hampton-whatever. It just sounds generic.

L.A. story: eternal gratitude to that West Hollywood art house cinema for an introduction to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Dekalog.”

On the Day of the Dead, I think about them, my immediate forebears.

Only about a month remains in the village’s leaf-pickup program, and at this rate there will be nothing much to suck up.

My children definitely don’t feel the sense of excitement we felt as children at the holidays. They’re quite blasé.

The adventures, follies, and disequilibrium of running on a treadmill.

It was a homecoming win all the more memorable for the fact that its attainment was the players’ gift to their coach and a gift to themselves.

Sea water temperature is projected to rise by .05 to .5 degrees Celsius per decade, with warming expected to be amplified in shallow coastal waters like ours.

You know you are a child of the 1970s when . . .

I’d been looking forward to Cormaria’s “Sunday supper” takeout offering for weeks.