Opinion

Honeysuckle, lilac, Coppertone, and secondhand smoke: These are a few of my favorite things. I sidle up to strangers at parties when they strike a match, just for nostalgic proximity. days of youth when I smell tobacco wafting on the breeze.

About half of the East Hampton Town shoreline is eroding. Sea level rise will increase the affected area to all of the town’s waterfront over time. These are the key points in a draft policy document released last week intended to guide officials as they contemplate how to prepare.

At the 2019 Comic Con in New York, before Covid cramped its style, I walked right by a booth set up by a legend among comic-book artists, Neal Adams.

Lessons from the Dutch travails of World War II.

Emily Dickinson said you’ll know it’s poetry if it knocks your socks off, or words to that effect, and that was how Mary and I felt as we were watching the documentary “Viva Maestro” at the Sag Harbor Cinema the other day.

A January survey conducted by CNN found that 69 percent of Americans were opposed to overturning the landmark case of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 opinion limiting the right to an abortion but preserving the fundamental freedom to choose to terminate a pregnancy.

I drove by the Pantigo fields as a group was getting set for a groundbreaking ceremony for a new Southampton Hospital adjunct. It made me sad, and then angry.

In the spring of 2001, I watched the clean-living-Americans-go-to-outer-space movie “The Right Stuff” and decided what I needed was to learn how to pilot a plane.

John Steinbeck and Cannery Row East.

Whenever I give a lecture and someone asks me why so many Jews went like sheep to the slaughter during the Holocaust, the question sets my teeth on edge.

A bill sponsored in the State Legislature by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. may represent the beginning of a big step forward on easing the region’s attainable housing crisis.

In just one day last week I was inspected and boosted, and soon I’ll be implanted as well.

Important decisions are being made behind closed doors and without the full village board’s knowledge.

The East Hampton Town Trustees eventually had to take on the question of a scholarship named for William J. Rysam, an enslaver of other human beings.

I never liked the happy-clappy bright yellow of spring’s early buds.

What exactly is the far right trying to “save” New York from?

An aptly described monster is rising over Ditch Plain.

Despite a late start in coming up with new rules for East Hampton Airport, the town appears to be making progress.

This year the fun was bled right out of TurboTax.

In praise of cards and board games, pastimes with staying power.

Thomas Piketty thinks we’re heading toward more equality should the wealth be spread around a bit more.

I had a realization, of sorts, swimming in the warm water off Puerto Rico last week.

Even when I was a punk-rock teenager of 15 and 16, I kept a carefully curated vanity table, my bottles of drugstore body lotion and mail-order pins and badges displayed like a still life, like a Joseph Cornell assemblage.

For a few weeks now, we have been thinking about what ails some of our beloved local institutions.

With few exceptions, eastern Long Island’s school boards do not accurately reflect the demographic makeup of their districts.

Notes on life in a small plane.

If we’re interested in reducing the strain on our interdependent world amid this devastating conflict, it’s worth considering a more mundane response: conservation of resources.

It is depressing to think that war, nuclear weaponry, and oceans clogged with plastic will be our legacy to coming generations.

I’m glad my daughter is finally getting into thrifting.

A researcher seeking the East Hampton Town Trustees’ blessing for a pollutants study in Accabonac Harbor said that there was little scientific basis for many of town, county, and state initiatives.