When Julie Reyes Taubman and her husband, Bobby Taubman, purchased a five-acre parcel of land facing the Atlantic Ocean at the end of Two Mile Hollow Road in East Hampton in 2005, they knew only one thing about the house that they would build there: They wanted it to look nothing like the traditionally-styled gabled houses covered in shingles which for the last couple of decades had been popping up all over the Hamptons.

Simmering discontent with the effort by East Hampton Village officials to publicize code amendments passed over the winter that require service workers to register with the village and curtail noise by tightening the hours during which such work can be done came to a boil at the village board’s July 2 meeting, with an attorney and the director of a Latino advocacy organization forcefully criticizing what they deemed insufficient outreach.

To Cate Carbonaro, executive director of the East Hampton advocacy organization the Retreat, who has worked extensively with victims of sex and labor trafficking as a public defender, the split verdict in the federal criminal trial of Sean (Diddy) Combs presents a “stark reminder of how far we still have to go” to educate both the courts and the public about what the “often misunderstood” charge of sex trafficking really means.

Across America, community is built around the simple act of getting a fade or flat top — and stories among men are shared as freely as the clippings of hair that fall after the snip, snip of the scissors. On the South Fork, the professionals who cut hair have tales of their own to tell.