The argument over cellphones as either distractions or useful educational tools for students has divided some at the Bridgehampton School.

Sensory Friendly

Christmas festivities will abound in East Hampton Village on Saturday.

Item of the Week From the East Hampton Library Long Island Collection

Someone reported an erratic driver, possibly intoxicated, on Thanksgiving Day. The caller reported seeing two young women with a small child get into a gray Honda Pilot and speed off up Main Street to Newtown Lane at about 6:30 p.m.

Michael Thomas Hinkemeyer of East Hampton, an author of suspense, mystery, and historical romance novels, died of cardiopulmonary arrest last Thursday at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. He was 79 and had been in declining health for more than a year.

Beverly Shilhan Deichert, a member of the Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton for many years, died of cardiac arrest at home in Bronxville, N.Y., on Nov. 19. She was less than a week shy of her 81st birthday.

Bernard Stoll, a former advertising executive who in 1968 built one of the first houses in the dunes on Marine Boulevard, died on Nov. 7 in New York City. He was 98.

Visiting hours for John A. de Sousa Sr. of Montauk will be tomorrow from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. Mr. de Sousa, who was 85, died on Tuesday.

A ban on bump stocks and other rapid-fire modifications to guns is now in effect in New York State. On Nov. 26, the ban on the possession, manufacture, transport, shipment and sale of such items became law, closing a statutory loophole.

As the House Judiciary Committee takes over the process of impeachment looming over the Trump presidency, one central figure with strong East End ties will almost surely not appear at any hearing, though his actions are close to the core of the allegations. This is a person whom many on the South Fork social scene have sat next to at a benefit or lifted a glass with at an informal dinner. Unlike Paul Manafort, who has family here and had owned a Water Mill house that helped him launder millions in illegal foreign payments, Rudolph Giuliani, a part-time Bridgehampton resident, could be considered a regular on the circuit. How he went from an apparently mild-mannered former New York City mayor and Hamptons summer hobnobber to someone making a mockery of both the legal profession and democracy itself is a matter of speculation.

East Hampton Town's citizens advisory committees seem to have forgotten that their roles are as advisers, not decision makers.

An early snow remained yesterday morning, thinly painting the Mulford Farmhouse roof and Village Green in white. Highway Department workers have been wiring the temporary firs on Main Street and Newtown Lane. The guy with the holiday light show in the back of his pickup truck has been out once again, new and improved with blinking LEDs making patterns as he rolls through town at dusk.

Remembering William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the E.P.A., a principled government official whose life was dedicated to environmental leadership.

There was a time when I frequently traveled from East Hampton to New London, Conn., to visit my husband-to-be, who lived and worked then at Connecticut College. My companion in those days was Mookie, a huge, black, shaggy dog — adopted by my daughter from the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons — who not only had a charming personality but impeccable manners. As regular travelers on the Cross Sound Ferry, to and from New London, Mookie and I were befriended by the crew.

Plenty of sources tell you about the risk of falls for the elderly. What they don’t tell you about are the dangers of the middle years — when the body isn’t what it used to be but the mind thinks everything is still A-Okay. Consider reading glasses.

They were in Southampton and, frankly, the news was so good that I leaped from my bed, where I’d been napping, and rushed to the sink to trim my nose hairs. Ear hairs too, inasmuch as I am able.

The East Hampton Chamber of Commerce will hold a holiday party and charity drive from 5 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday at the Baker House 1650 in the village.

The slowdown in the real estate market has continued to hurt revenues for the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund, which Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. announced on Friday totaled $63.35 million in the first 10 months of the year, compared to nearly $81.27 million in the same period of 2018.

The prices listed here have been calculated from the county transfer tax. Unless otherwise noted, the parcels contain structures.