Opinion

Ranking states in terms of corruption is difficult, but if it were possible New York certainly could claim a top position.

In Netflix’s “The Chair,” one of the backdrops is declining enrollment at a small liberal arts college, and an English department, if not an entire discipline, in existential crisis.

After a decade of renewed participation in Jewish life, I see the new year celebration not as a misplaced jolt of spirituality but as an integral part of the religious calendar, a culminating event and a fresh beginning.

“I almost got court-martialed for wearing frayed cutoff shorts like that,” I said to Ed Hollander in the early going of the recent Artists-Writers Softball Game.

This is one of those years when nature has looked with favor on the East End, providing us with a beach plum harvest for the ages.

A three-way conversation that I had by chance over the weekend inadvertently got to the root of something that underlies a lot of conflict here — resistance to change.

The United States was never going to win in Afghanistan.

A storm’s merely glancing blow leaves a parent free to focus on a daughter’s wrenching departure for college.

I remember vividly the first Moby-Dick Marathon reading at my bookshop in Sag Harbor. Some 38 years ago — June 16, 1983, to be exact.

Perhaps the calamitous end to the endless war in Afghanistan will finally persuade us that a liberal democracy cannot be grafted through force of arms onto other societies.

One warning sign is that the present town board is not to be trusted when it comes to recreational or environmentally significant areas.

One of the things that was supposed to get us through the Covid-19 lockdowns was learning something new.

Do you want to know what year people stopped smiling and saying “hello” as they passed one another on the sidewalks of East Hampton? That would be the year of our Lord 1994.

In what could be the first of sweeping relaxation of zoning laws, the East Hampton Village Board last week made it easier for the owners of large properties to get more of what they apparently wanted.

Do we believe that East Hampton could handle another decade of similar growth?

Ongoing conversations about East Hampton Airport could muddle public opinion, leaving a path for the board to avoid having to make the tough decision at all.

Certainly Covid-19 vaccines are near-miraculous, but they are no magic force field for everyone.

Mets games over the AM radio only make a trip to Citi Field itself that much sweeter. As long as the rain holds off . . .

Time is the priceless container of all we have, and, after all, it will get used up eventually. For those of us who are not young, it feels like a cheat — a blank in what is left of our time.

Mary said she was excited to hear that I was making Lidia’s roasted eggplant with ziti and ricotta tonight, testimony, I suppose, to the depths of ennui we’ve plumbed — plum tomatoes are in the recipe too — since Emily and the kids left for Ohio, leaving us to marvel on our own at the glowing light she sees caressing us here.

I had been upstairs in the main newsroom working with our August interns when we heard several loud thumps above the usual background noise from outside.

I’m writing this in a blaze of blinding sun and white concrete, poolside at the Lighthouse Inn on Cape Cod, whither the kids and I have hied ourselves for a last-minute, three-night mini-cation. The Lighthouse Inn is a family-run resort founded in 1938, a cottage colony by the sea. A band was playing “Build Me Up, Buttercup” and “Sweet Caroline” by the water’s edge as we checked in.

Questioning the value of offshore wind based on maintenance issues with the first United States project is a stretch.

A veritable tsunami of coffee in a decades-old thriller sets a grateful reader to thinking.

Ah, the competition and camaraderie of hoops.

I was thinking the other day, walking in our neighborhood, that we were blessed by God; later, our daughter Emily, who lives in Ohio, told us why.

Signs of the coming change of season come too soon for my taste.

Either you love carnivals and fairs or you loathe them.

Governor Cuomo should have been ousted from the Executive Mansion a year ago.

If there was any doubt before that Andrew M. Cuomo should no longer be governor of New York, a scathing report this week from the state attorney general’s independent investigation into his pattern of serial sexual harassment of women should have erased it entirely.