Guestwords

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.

The surprising connection between home design and phobias.

Brent Newsom, in memoriam.

In the last few weeks of 2021, my body put a stop to overtasking and sent me to the corner to think about what I’d done.

I had just hit some second-rate jackpot and felt a combination of instant relief and long-haul anxiety. Yippee, we could take a test. Uh-oh, what if my wife and/or I tested positive?

Just how did modern civilization make the transition from spirit, light entering the world, to matter — to the materialism that marks Christmas Day?

Bottom line? We want our house loved and enjoyed the way we loved and enjoyed it.

A public education debate has been raging between cursive and printing enthusiasts for several decades now.

Walking the dog was fine. Tennis was fine. Life was fine. Until Labor Day, when my knee blew up like a balloon. So what do you recommend, doc?

On Nov. 25 and every day before and after, I will thank God, Destiny, Fate, Chance, and the prejudice of white descendants of European immigrants for my good fortune. But is that something I should celebrate?

Thanksgiving last year was just weird. Now I’m once again looking to escape P.T.S.D. (Post Turkey Stress Disorder).

So what did Joseph DiSunno do about having no oil in his truck as the Germans closed in?

Over the course of 15 years running a registered charter fishing boat and taking people out to Montauk Point, I have issued five official mayday distress calls and sunk two boats — with customers on them.

What is it about Sag Harbor that brings out the spirits?

Because I can physically see the work getting done as I rake, I view things with a beneficence I can’t summon in life’s more static moments.

Recollections of a day in Missouri when everyone was a Cardinal.

On Columbus Day weekend, revisiting Philip Roth’s breakthrough collection with an eye on identity politics.

The more people learn about roosters, the more they will appreciate them and want them to have full lives. They will even develop positive attitudes toward their crowing.

The problem these days is not just the quantity of the traffic, it’s the quality.

Mike Gordon was a dear friend I had met on the softball field in Bridgehampton. The melding of machismo and kindness in one man was irresistible.