East Magazine

There’s a room on the lower level of the Suffolk County Historical Society building that holds an artifact that was once revered in local history. On display here is an object made out of cloth, stitched by hand, and preserved, tightly pressed under glass. It measures 41.5 inches by 28.5 inches and consists of 13 white six-pointed stars on a blue canton, with seven bars of red and six white. It’s constructed out of homespun, a worsted wool, with the stars made out of cotton muslin. It is known as the Hulbert flag because it was found stashed in the rafters of a Bridgehampton barn that was owned long ago by a man named John Hulbert.

When you think of vodka’s origins, it’s likely what comes to mind is some hardscrabble Polish steppe or an inhospitable Siberian plain. After all, the word vodka comes from the Russian translation of water: voda. Certainly, an unlikely association of this distilled spirit’s provenance would be the verdant and eye-wateringly expensive village of Sagaponack.

Manoucher Yektai was stubborn about his aspirations.

From an early age he believed he possessed something of significance, something the world needed. He spoke of that belief all his life. It drove him as a youthful poet and inexperienced painter from tradition-bound Iran in the 1940s, and continued to animate him and provide powerful direction as he navigated the art worlds of Paris, New York, and eastern Long Island. His whole life was an endeavor to meet his colossal self-imposed expectations, and he presented no shortage of hubris when it came to his ability to do so.

Times have changed, as has terminology. What was once called a spritzer or a mocktail is sometimes now called a “soft cocktail” by the internet blogeratti. Call it whatever makes you and your guests happy. What really matters is that there’s something for everyone.

For a Hanukkah sweet, we propose a homemade donut that touches on two traditions: beloved jelly-stuffed sufganiyot and the homespun crullers fried up in East Hampton kitchens since colonial days. Here, a recipe — and advice for fearful friers — adapted from an ORIGINAL column by Florence Fabricant published in The Star in 1975.

Last year, Robert Longo, like so many of his New York City peers, was a full-time resident in his weekend house here, improvising studio space in a basement, which he called “a storm of chaos,” while he waited to move into another house in Northwest.

In the midst of the pandemic, he was organizing “All for the Hall,” a benefit exhibition for Guild Hall, recruiting his friends to donate work and finding an eager artistic community ready to give back when it was so urgently needed.

Search #womenofweed on Instagram and an image pops up that could, at first glance, be mistaken for teatime at grandma’s. Captioned “High Tea,” the photo is an explosion of pink: floral wall paper, delicate bone china, and blooming peonies scattered about. Look closely though and you’ll see there are other buds — dried and green — on the table, as well as a feminine hand holding a spliff.

Tempers flare and face-slapping breaks out when East Enders’ conversation turns to egg sandwiches. We are committing a social crime tantamount to treason by suggesting what we’re about to suggest, but here we go.

Sorry, egg sandwich. You heard it here: the Morning Taco from Carissa's Bakery beats all.

“What a hell of a man a man could become,” John Steinbeck wrote in The Winter of Our Discontent, the novel that cemented the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award him the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read between the lines and New Baytown, the book’s fictitious setting, starts to look a lot like Sag Harbor, where he lived while writing it.

The East End is chockablock with yoga classes, some led by legends you may recognize from the cover of Yoga Journal. We all have our favorites, and out of loyalty to the many don’t often choose to throw the spotlight on just one specific teacher or class. But we’re making an exception for YOGA + SOUNDS + ART, because it is less a yoga class than a happening. Yogini Ashley McGee runs the scene every Sunday morning at 10:45, through October. 

Yoga class as a garden of delights — art and sitar, ocean air and CBD.

Unlike fiberglass, unchanging and inert, wood flexes and moves, it must be cared for, and it is temporal, decaying ever so slowly with anything less than the best of care. Trent Preszler’s exceedingly limited-edition canoes deserve that sort of care. Each is built to order in his North Fork woodshop and takes about a year to complete, give or take. 

Seaweed farming is the fastest growing aquaculture sector, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and shellfish farmers, conservationists, East Hampton Town, and New York State are taking action. Companion bills in the State Senate and Assembly would permit kelp cultivation in underwater lands at Gardiner’s and Peconic Bays, and allow Suffolk County to lease underwater lands for that purpose.