East Magazine

A few quirky facts and figures about holiday pines from the archives of The East Hampton Star.

Wild for watercress? Crazy for scones? Hie yourself to the Baker House 1650 for two special tea dates this winter.

You know you want some! Winter's winningest soup is a classic from L&W Market.

Fancy dinner by fireside? East brings you a roundup of the coziest restaurants, where logs crackle and the flames are kept alive.

Just beat it! With a blender and a few minutes' patience, you can turn ordinary cream into something extraordinary: your own homemade butter.

Deck the halls with these homemade ornaments using a traditional salt-dough method, tested by the very same hands that edit East magazine.

The art of tarot reading can inform your plans and inspire your dreams as you set your resolutions for 2026. These South Fork readers are on deck to help.

Sure, it's the thought that counts, but let's be honest: We've all felt the womp-womp disappointment of receiving a lame, generic present, and we'd all rather receive something wonderful. Here's a give-this, not-that guide to gifting greatly (with South Fork flair).

The cold and dark of winter can be hard on runners and others who love sports. But hibernation isn't the only option. From tennis to bowling to batting cages, there are plenty of warm places to play inside.

Government spraying of insecticide on Long Island has a checkered history. Mosquito eradication efforts, driven by fears of the spread of malaria, were paused in the 1960s after studies revealed the dangers posed by the insecticide D.D.T. to birds and humans. Twice a month — during the new and full moon tides — an East Hampton Town trustee and his team of volunteers walk miles of boggy marshland looking for mosquito larvae. The data, collected with the help of a plastic dipper cup affixed to a stick, is sent through a digital G.P.S.-enabled app to the county authorities who then tell their helicopter pilots precisely where to unload their cargo of larvicide.

We’re navigating weird days, are we not, friends? In this context of topsy-turvy, we thought it might help to provide East readers with an early glossary of 2026’s hard-working words and phrases, so, if nothing else, you can join the conversation and talk about it all.

Hometown memories echo and reverberate in new music of four emerging singer-songwriters from the East End.

Long Island’s East End shares a cherished coastal-winter pastime, iceboating, with its neighbors across the sound in Connecticut — which is where this month’s East magazine cover artist, John Ford Clymer, lived while producing an unequivocally American collection of artwork that today sings nostalgia in every brushstroke.

The South Fork has been a magnet for fashion people for a long time. See: Ralph Lauren, and his love affair with the old houses of East Hampton (and his charitable support of its historical society); Halston hanging out at Eothen, Andy Warhol’s place in Montauk, or Cheryl Tiegs shacked up with Peter Beard on a high bluff nearby. There’s Tom Ford, who bought Lasata, the childhood home of Jacqueline Kennedy on Further Lane. Helmut Lang on Tyson Lane. And Calvin Klein, who has owned sprawling estates both on Georgica Pond and Meadow Way in Southampton.

During the Second World War, East Hampton boys in the services communicated with one another across the far-flung fields of battle using a method that is astonishing today and yet worked remarkably well: They wrote letters home to the editor of The Star; the Star collated and printed snippets of their news in a column titled “Army, Navy, and Marines” that ran each week on Page Four, and then the service members read all about one another’s escapades and heroics a couple weeks later when their copy of the newspaper reached them.

“Almost everyone has had a run-in with the ghost at LTV,” one staffer told a curious visitor to East Hampton Town’s public-access television provider.

Social media has proven a fair-weather friend to leftist political resistance over the past few decades. The 2010s saw pro-democratic uprisings in the Arab world coordinated over Facebook and Twitter on pages like “We Are All Khaled Said.” But the “Facebook Revolutions” couldn’t sustain momentum and the Arab Spring stalled. The Black Lives Matter movement dominated Instagram during the summer of 2020, spreading awareness about the pervasiveness of racism and even encouraging incremental wealth distribution.

A few fun (and perhaps frightening) facts and figures about democracy — politics, patriotism, and civic participation — on the South Fork.

Across America, community is built around the simple act of getting a fade or flat top — and stories among men are shared as freely as the clippings of hair that fall after the snip, snip of the scissors. On the South Fork, the professionals who cut hair have tales of their own to tell.

Sagaponack Farm Distillery's Gin and juice — their own American gin with a splash of tart rhubarb and sweet currant — is the perfect midsummer cocktail.

Red Horse Market, on the highway at the fringe of East Hampton Village, has seen various incarnations and owners since the 1990s. Now, it's thriving like never before and even expanding to Southampton — driven by one Latino family's resilience, vision, and hard work.

We're spoiled for choice when it comes to ice cream shops. Thoroughly sampling each option can feel like wading through a sea of crumbled-up Heath bars, so we're here to do the hard work of creating a guide for you.

Bruce Collins was a pilot and co-captain on a bunker steamer and shrimp trawlers in the 1950s. He took a camera. The images he created of a lost working-man's life along the eastern and southern coastline are not just invaluable as social history, but stunning in their artistic merit.

When Julie Reyes Taubman and her husband, Bobby Taubman, purchased a five-acre parcel of land facing the Atlantic Ocean at the end of Two Mile Hollow Road in East Hampton in 2005, they knew only one thing about the house that they would build there: They wanted it to look nothing like the traditionally-styled gabled houses covered in shingles which for the last couple of decades had been popping up all over the Hamptons.

The cooler is stocked with Topo Chico and watermelon slices. The umbrella is staked deep into the sand, and you've settled into your sling chair. Now all you need's a good read. Here's our suggestion of a dozen set right here on the South Fork.

From fishing equipment to cassette-tape converters — karaoke machines to clown-shaped cake pans — East End libraries are lending more than just books.

A uniquely American art form fills the air this month and into September, as Hamptons JazzFest returns. But what casual listeners may not know is just how rich the jazz legacy is here.

We hold the following truths to be self-evident and the following rights, for the residents of the South Fork, to be inalienable.

The Wainwrights’ roots run deep on the East End of Long Island. “On my father’s side,” the Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright says, “my family has been in East Hampton for 100 years or something. I have many second and third cousins who live out here.”

The photorealistic swimmer serenely swanning on our red, white, and blue cover is by Elise Remender, an artist who shows her sunshine-soaked paintings — with an old-school-Hollywood Technicolor filter — at the White Room Gallery in East Hampton.