Opinion

Living-room spread does not quite match what could be 2020’s phrase of the year, “superspreader event,” but in defeating the Covid-19 pandemic, we are now told that our smaller social gatherings are the source of more infections.

They say that in ancient times conjunctions such as Saturn and Jupiter’s were considered ill omens — the gods, people thought, were conspiring.

We could learn something about how to handle a pandemic from 17th-century England.

I would not be surprised to learn that there is a run on puppies this December, and a shortage, as there has been a run on and shortage of Christmas trees here on Long Island.

How the Republican Party rebuilds after the president is out of office — or even if it can — has been the subject of a great deal of discussion as his term ends.

There have been more deaths in Suffolk than there have in 20 states, more than in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Nebraska, to name a few. Fourteen people died from the virus in Suffolk on Monday, the highest single-day number since May.

It is terribly disappointing, but not at all surprising, that Representative Lee Zeldin would join 125 other members of the House of Representatives in opposing the orderly transfer of the presidency from one administration to another.

I never quite got over hearing how Silicon Valley developers and programmers who worked ingeniously to hook kids on social media would turn around and send their own kids to no-tech Waldorf schools.

One of the ways that a human being can be traumatized is to have their reality doubted, and now more than 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden are being told at least once a day that what they’ve seen and done is a fiction.

We have to admit that we were more than a little puzzled at news last week that large oysters are considered too big to market. This seems like a missed opportunity for shellfish growers and restaurants alike.

Even James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was in favor of a popular vote, and here we are more than 200 years later with the albatross still about our necks.

The bad-luck schooner Alice May Davenport spent the two weeks following Thanksgiving up on the sand near Smith Point.

In the spirit of New Year’s accounting, and things we want to remember, I present you here with 10 flashbacks from lockdown — a collage of moving images, in impressionistic order.

No one wants their loved ones to die of Covid-19 in a hospital hallway. But many places in the United States are at that point right now, or near to it, as virus cases soar.

A brief snowfall triggers memories of Vermont and an uncle’s life there as a potter.

Offer me coffee and I feel special. A chance to shine, to be heard. Inevitably, all eyes turn to me when I announce, “No thanks, never had a cup in my life.”

Presumably I have returned to work now, and am thus to some extent re-engaged in East Hampton’s life, and am feeling once again at least somewhat useful.

A revealing trip through an old Dominy weather diary.

We, the Rattray family, have a tendency to get lost in time, to misplace ourselves in its flow.

The creation of a geographic entity — a village in this case — out of opposition to offshore wind power would seem the stuff of some far fringe of society. Only it isn’t.

So of all people, Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday made the obvious concession that there was no evidence of voting fraud that could change the outcome of the November election.

Fallen leaves. Is there anything in the world less satisfying to deal with?

A last-gasp effort by the Trump administration to mess with the 2020 census to undercount as many as 10.5 million people living in the United States with proper documents appears to have run into immovable opposition from the Supreme Court.

After Edmund Spenser

After eight months of social distance, I think isolation is getting to me.

Leafing back through five months’ worth of “Shipwreck Roses,” I chuckle at myself as I realize exactly how much of my brain space is filled by thoughts of handsome movie actors.

The bane of many drivers’ daily travels between East Hampton Village and Sag Harbor, the dread state Route 114, will get a makeover next fall.

Tired. So tired . . . I want to lay my head down. So heavy. 

It’s 1947, a hot, late-summer afternoon in Bethesda, Md., where I’m in first grade at Bradley Elementary (named for Omar, the World War II general). I’ve walked my bike home on the path through the woods, past the spot where we kids hunt and eat wild strawberries at recess. Too weak to pedal. I’ve made it home by holding on to the handlebars and lying across the seat. A few steps. A few more. Another.

This has been a sobering month so far for anyone who hoped that New York had seen the last of the coronavirus.

Somebody once believed that gathering in offices was a grand idea. Now, post-pandemic, we may never go back.