Guestwords

It was the summer my family discovered “the Black Hamptons.”

A close-up look at Abraham Lincoln’s presidency offers possibilities for our own political polarization.

For me Pig Latin is a little like Swedish. Everyone who speaks it reminds me of the characters in a Bergman film who have lost their faith in God.

This year our little church by Accabonac Creek, the Springs Community Presbyterian Church, celebrates its 140th year. I call it one of the great cathedrals of the world.

All our decades of planning were working to create the family we’d always wanted. Until, late in my pregnancy with our fourth child, a nurse called.

Vietnam was my war, even though I never served there. It framed my youth and I longed to see the country. I finally got there at age 69, in early 2020, just before Covid hit.

A family tradition of clamming and an everlasting appreciation for the chowder of Mary Emma Bunn of the Shinnecocks.

The summer of 1977, the summer of Son of Sam, brought trauma and fear, and the poison of trauma doesn’t just go away.

Again today, the world is witness to invasion, resistance, and the need to escape repression.

We are seeing a resurgence of attitudes antagonistic to correcting systemic racism. After two years of listening, there is not only fatigue around these conversations, but also significant pushback. So we must act.

Nature on Earth is in a man-made death spiral, but imagine how much faster we would be killing life as we know it if everyone on this fragile orb followed the lead of America’s most “successful.”

I satisfied my departed dad’s spirit as Rosanne Cash sang about enshrining her departed dad during a benefit concert at the State Theatre, a plaster palace in Easton, Pa.

If you’re like me, a fishing greenhorn after you’ve already gone gray, I’ve got a few tips.

Honeybees will not make a hole in your house, but they will take advantage of an existing one. So be sure to take a good look around your property and seal up all cracks and crevices.

These days, “one could do worse than yield to the power of food.” And poetry.

Lessons from the Dutch travails of World War II.

Whenever I give a lecture and someone asks me why so many Jews went like sheep to the slaughter during the Holocaust, the question sets my teeth on edge.

In praise of cards and board games, pastimes with staying power.

If we’re interested in reducing the strain on our interdependent world amid this devastating conflict, it’s worth considering a more mundane response: conservation of resources.

Poor confused Will Smith.

A Frankie Avalon show at the Suffolk Theater in Riverhead raises questions: What happened to romance? Where have the good times gone?

The sight of the shuttered Southampton movie theater brings to mind “The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 masterpiece, and further trips into a filmgoing past.

The former president famously doesn’t like emails, so many of his feelings were recorded on the back side of his McDonald’s orders from Jan. 4 and Jan. 5.

Many aspects of Russia’s war on Ukraine are eerily similar to Hitler’s invasion of Holland in May 1940. But the differences matter.

How divided is our country? Our medical community? We can’t even agree on what a fever is.

Mounting evidence suggests that nature enhances children’s development in important ways.

Japan’s tradition of designating artists and performers as Living National Treasures could be adapted here, and my first nominee would be Alan Alda.

I don’t mean to idealize our boy dog, but here is love . . .

Do you know how many rejections we have received of this potential classic of world literature? It could be something like Fyodor Tolstoy’s “Crime and Peace” or Joseph Conrad’s “Fart of Harkness.”

On a winter drive with my husband one Sunday afternoon, we started to list all the people we’ve known from the neighborhood who are no longer here — their absence struck a powerful note.