Ending two years of concerted effort, the Southampton Town Board voted on Tuesday to approve the use of community preservation fund money to buy the development rights for the John Steinbeck house on Bluff Lane in Sag Harbor Village, to turn it into a writers retreat.

East Hampton Town lawmakers are taking steps to address a longstanding problem relating to the protection of trees located on town-owned property that are either near or directly on construction sites.

Following a destructive “Black Cat” ransomware attack on Suffolk County computer systems beginning in September, the Town of East Hampton set out to fast-track its own cybersecurity in December, and on Tuesday approved a $360,000 expenditure to VirtuIT Systems of Nanuet, N.Y.

East Hampton Town’s training for future lifeguards and for summertime participants in its Junior Lifeguard ocean readiness program will begin on March 5 in the pool at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter.

The East Hampton School District is planning to put a proposition on the May 16 budget ballot enabling it to withdraw $3,925,000 from its capital reserve account for several big-ticket projects, with one important asterisk.

The Goat on a Boat Puppet Truck will pull into Project Most’s temporary headquarters at the Most Holy Trinity school building in East Hampton on Saturday at 11 a.m. to perform its take on “The Three Little Pigs.”

A Feb. 5 crash involving three cars led to the arrest of an East Hampton man on drunken-driving charges.

East Hampton Town police last week charged two men with second-degree criminal contempt, a misdemeanor, alleging they violated court-imposed orders of protection.

In East Hampton Town Justice Court, two drunken-driving cases, one of them dating back to December of 2019, were recently resolved.

A 50-year-old woman went to East Hampton Village police headquarters on Feb. 8 around 6 p.m. to report that she accidentally left her license plates on the Aston Martin that she had just traded in at a dealership. She was unable to recover the plates and was given Department of Motor Vehicles paperwork to fill out.

The closest George Washington got to East Hampton was probably Roe Tavern, seen here, in Setauket during his 1790 tour of Long Island. Its proprietor was part of the Culper Spy Ring.

From 1923, a report of the tragic death by suicide of a gray squirrel, and how his home in a Main Street elm was swiftly taken over by a doppelganger in black fur.

Meredith Spolarich, a senior at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor, can do it all when it comes to sports — and when it comes to her studies as well.

Playing seven games in three days this past week, the Peconic Hockey Association’s 10-and-under Wildcats, coached by Jason Craig, improved to 20-3-1, and thus clinched a playoff spot in the Long Island Amateur Hockey League’s 10-U Tier III division.

East Hampton High’s boys swimming team, which recently placed fourth in the league meet, placed eighth, among 24 schools, in the county meet held Saturday at Stony Brook University.

The Arts Center at Duck Creek, the Long Island Collection, and Town Historian Hugh King come in for some high praise.

Southampton College may have been doomed from the start.

A 74,000-person study last year published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that shifting food habits absolutely helps us live longer.

All is not death and doom in the new forest clearings. Here and there, new plant communities are taking hold.

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