Word has reached The Star that Irene Feldt of East Hampton died of heart failure on Aug. 19. She was 89.

Spurred by an avalanche of positive Covid-19 cases over the holiday season among families, kids, and teachers, virus-related impacts have been fast and furious in coming to South Fork schools.

On behalf of his client, the driver in a hit-and-run incident in August that led to the death of Devesh Samtani, a Hong Kong teenager who was vacationing here, the lawyer Edward Burke Jr. offered sorrowful condolences Wednesday to the Samtani family outside Suffolk County Supreme Court in Riverside.

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High school sports made a stuttery recovery in the past year of Covid. The good news was that there were at the high school level two fall seasons in 2021, in which 11 mostly-playoff-caliber East Hampton High teams contended.

The first day of the new year was drizzly and drab, and, to some, depressing, though you wouldn’t have known it had you been at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach or at the Beach Lane road end in Wainscott for the New Year’s Day plunges that afternoon.

The first two and a half quarters of the Holiday Classic boys basketball game that East Hampton High played at Southampton on Dec. 28 “were the best we’ve played all year,” East Hampton’s coach, Dan White, said following the 69-60 loss to the Mariners.

Wishbone Farms, a Southampton takeout shop, offers small-batch, artisanal food and meals for home and travel. "Our general thesis, when it comes to making food, is that if it's not necessary, we won't add it," said Josh Lebowitz, a co-owner.

Reconsidering Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” as a treatise on P.T.S.D.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has announced the start of the Col. William F. Fox Memorial Saratoga Tree Nursery annual spring seedling sale, which is open to the public and runs until May 13. Each year, the nursery offers low-cost, New York-grown tree and shrub species for sale to encourage conservation plantings and foster the next generation of forests.

Liadain Warwick Smith is interested in the material, the form, and the meditative process that creates her ceramic vessels, coiling and pinching inch by inch.

Programs at Sag Harbor Cinema and The Church in Sag Harbor will celebrate New York's drag ballroom culture then and now.

An online art show from Guild Hall volunteers, the Parrish screens a Duchamp doc, the Pollock-Krasner House announces its January Zoom programs, and the White Room Gallery goes "glam."

A piano concert in Southampton by Jeremy Ajani Jordan on Sunday will feature works by Beethoven, Scriabin, Chopin, and Wagner.

In food news this week, some seasonal reopenings and closings, and Chimene Macnaughton is the new beverage director for Honest Man Hospitality Group.

An East Hampton Town man was charged with driving while intoxicated following a crash Sunday morning in which the Fire Department had to bring in heavy-rescue equipment to pull an injured woman from her car.

As winter settles in on the South Fork, kids and adults can stay busy with nature-oriented activities.

With local positivity rates of the Omicron Covid-19 variant reaching close to 25 percent, East Hampton Town has announced five additional vaccination clinic dates in February. Those previously offered in January have been booked up.

The Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center has become one of the first educational institutions here to announce a pause on in-person attendance following the holiday break, with planned closures Monday and Tuesday.