Opinion

Watching people running at each other like careening trucks while safe in the comfort of one’s own home is probably something to atone for, and yet football is “as American as apple pie.”

All is not right. Dredging for bay scallops has mostly become not worth it, oyster populations can’t sustain themselves without human help, and skimmer clams have all but disappeared.

It was toward the end of the 2014 Hamptons International Film Festival, and I had been asked to be a juror in the documentary film competition.

Such is the lot of the personal essayist: Sometimes you have to lead with “I.”

Directed onto a heat-oppressed dog, a box fan does double duty as Proustian madeleine.

Falling leaves provide shelter for the insects that pollinate our flowering world. They nourish the soil, keeping it alive. Let’s rethink what we do with them.

Supporters of a controversial plan to clear brush on town-owned land along Old Montauk Highway in Montauk have cited the plight of the monarch butterfly as among the plan's justifications.

I am about to begin my 57th year at The Star. Yet I should not be borne wistfully into the past.

What is the Huntting Inn, anyway?

Having spent a lifetime looking at fabrics and trying to imagine what it felt like to live in the material world while wearing a dress of dimity or cambric or society silk, I have gotten pretty good at recognizing what era a print or pattern is from.

East Hampton Town’s regulatory apparatus is not able to keep up with the staggering pace of development.

The Villages of Sag Harbor and North Haven suffer from terrible traffic, much of it originating near Long Wharf. Adding a hundred or more people stepping off a cruise ship would make the chaos unsustainable.

When Cormac McCarthy died this summer, I didn’t go to one of his late novels, I went to “Blood Meridian.”

Closing up our summer retreat was when I first experienced what my grandmother called “the pain of a heavy heart.”

The East Hampton Library deserves a vote of confidence on Saturday.

I was taken to task recently for not giving as much space to the Travis Field memorial softball tournament as I did to the Artists and Writers Game, but both events were noteworthy.

September at summer’s end feels as if the world is in a kind of abeyance.

I am a superfan of the — terrible, awful, no-good — television franchise “The Bachelor.”

Considering what the English colonists who founded East Hampton in the mid-1600s did to the land’s original inhabitants, it is a remarkable act of grace that the Montaukett Chief Robert Pharaoh agreed to be the grand marshal for the town’s 375th anniversary parade on Sept. 23.

When a good-natured and for-a-good-cause 5K becomes an obsession and a mission.

I refuse to embrace the title of elderly. No, I am in that age range which I have labeled “twelderly”; like “tween” is to teen.

While seasonal flu, as opposed to Covid-19, has yet to make a strong showing this year, now is a good time to make a plan to get the vaccine. The updated and highly advised Covid-19 shot is available, too.

Confined to one sports page these days, whereas, formerly, I was granted three or four, I’m inclined to yearn for the old days.

On Sept. 21, 1938, the morning of the Great New England Hurricane, as it came to be named by news writers, indicated a perfect end-of-summer day. There was little warning for tropical storms in those days.

How lucky we were to be born into Cadillac America in the century of progress, optimism, 20-cent milkshakes, and rock-and-roll. Everybody in the 20th century had something to say about Cadillacs.

It looks as if the goats will be coming to Montauk. This is despite concerns from neighbors of the semipublic Benson Reserve, among others, about a 10-year land-clearing plan that the East Hampton Town Board appears to support.

Long-running college football rivalry games are down the drain.

A 2012 Columbia University study on addiction medicine found that only one in 10 drug or alcohol addicts gets medical treatment, leaving more than 20 million Americans untreated.

For art historians and preservation-minded residents and friends looking to save at least a portion of the James Brooks and Charlotte Park house and studios in Springs, there is a ray of hope.

There’s still something to be said for the value of a liberal arts education, with courses in history, literature, and languages, whose ultimate gift is to enrich our lives, to make us more knowledgeable citizens of the world.