When clients of Phoenix House visit East Hampton High School, it’s usually on invitation from Jim Stewart, the school’s longtime health teacher, who wants his students to understand how substance abuse, treatment, and recovery look and feel.

“I have been told by students it’s one of the best classes of the semester,” Mr. Stewart said this week.

On these winter days, there's a lot to keep kids and teens busy.

This December 1989 photo from The East Hampton Star’s archive depicts Percy Heath, Montauker, sportfisherman, artist, and bassist who co-founded the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Two men were charged with drunken driving last week, in what was otherwise a quiet week on local roads.

A “tall white male” was asking patrons at the post office Saturday afternoon if they’d give him some money so he could “restore a broken flagpole,” and someone called in a report of peddling. By the time police arrived, the man had departed.

Marilyn Thompson of Montauk, an abstract artist whose career spanned 50 years, died on Dec. 11 while vacationing in Madeira, Portugal. She was 90.

Jim Miller, formerly of Springs, an illustrator, art director, and graphic designer behind some of theater’s most memorable shows, died of congenital heart disease on Dec. 15 at home in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 83.

Elizabeth Kaplan Fonseca of East Hampton died on Dec. 19 of long-term Alzheimer’s disease. She was 93.

Alice Byrnes Cooley, who began working as a telephone operator before she graduated from high school, and in her retirement was a familiar face at East Hampton Town’s senior citizens center, died at home in Bluffton, S.C., on Jan. 1.

Susan Sullivan Saiter, an author, freelance journalist, and educator, died of pneumonia on Dec. 27 in Winston-Salem, N.C. A part-time Water Mill resident, she was 76.

Gunther Schlessinger, a summer resident of Amagansett who had a 60-year career in finance, died on Dec. 17 of pneumonia caused by Covid-19. He was 93.

Jacqueline Ann Mitchell, a retired elementary school teacher who grew up in East Hampton, died in Newark, Ohio, on Dec. 21. She was 77 and had been ill with liver cancer.

Kathryn D. Vegessi, who had lived in Montauk for many years, died at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn on Sunday of complications from a staph infection. She was 70.

Visiting hours for Louis J. Sapienza of East Hampton will be held today from 2 to 8 p.m. at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. A graveside service is planned for tomorrow at 11 a.m. at the Jamesport Cemetery.

An uprising is growing over a plan to use 14 acres of county parkland in Hither Woods to build a sewage treatment plant in Montauk.

In her State of the State speech this week, Gov. Kathy Hochul outlined plans for creating more affordable housing. For downstate regions and Long Island, the proposals would have a goal of creating hundreds of thousands of new housing units.

For some Americans, the word “weaponization” is all they will need to hear about a freshly minted subcommittee in the House of Representatives aimed at blocking prosecutions of former President Trump and his cabal of election-denial plotters.

Rooftop solar on the early-1960s house I live in provides me with a reason to gloat: electric bills that run a steady $14 a month.

Things keep breaking. In 2023, the infant year, I’ve accidentally dropped and smashed plenty.

Notes from a Jeremy Strong fan club member.