The trails are mapped today, but when two former college classmates began their horseback rides on them decades ago, without maps or smartphones to guide them, the goal was to find a path that stretched through the woods and reached the edge of the ocean. With an expanded group of women, they are still exploring the trails today.

What appeared at first to be a quirky but heartwarming story about a friendly mute swan that had taken to roaming the streets of Sag Harbor, often stopping traffic and interacting with people, ended tragically just a few weeks after the bird had become a summertime character on the north end of Main Street.

A disciplinary hearing ongoing since July 10, conducted by the New York State Education Department, seeks to answer the question of whether the Amagansett School principal took a red envelope containing a holiday gift card meant for another school employee.

“This has been a longtime problem on the South Fork,” Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. said in reference to a universal truth about Long Island: that gas prices generally get higher the farther east you go. The change in gas prices between UpIsland and the South Fork can be startling, and the change from just Southampton to Montauk even more so.