Opinion

Oh well, forget about getting vaccinated. I called my doctor’s office the first day I was eligible, at 9 a.m. sharp, and they knew nothing. Then I called Southampton Hospital, and they too knew nothing.

There are perhaps as many ways to look at the rampage at the Capitol as there were participants, but one thing is indisputable: It was a planned attempt for one branch of federal government to take over another.

By persisting in the stolen-election lie, Lee Zeldin took the side of the pro-Trump armed attackers and betrayed United States democracy.

Like many Americans, I have struggled to come to any kind of understanding of the violence and destruction taken to Washington just over a week ago. But one thing is clear to me as a late-coming student of slavery in the Colonial and early Republic North: Mob violence is no aberration in our history.

Nettie and I took a flying drive to Delaware this week to inspect the campus of a boarding school. Pandemic ennui makes even the shortest jaunt seem like a grand holiday.

The riot at the Capitol may have overshadowed the Georgia special election that elevated Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate, but it’s too bad it did, because that unlikely turn of events nudged the federal government closer to the ability to actually do something.

As Trump’s thugs vandalized the Capitol, hacking their way through windows and doors, and flooding in, it occurred to me that we ought to watch “Lincoln” that night, that night of all nights.

A market-based strategy to mitigate climate change is embodied in a bill now before Congress called the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. The expiring Congress did not pass it, but it will be reintroduced in the new one, where it may have better prospects.

With a vote on Wainscott village incorporation a possibility, the moment has come for the East Hampton Town Trustees to play hardball. 

Before now, few American voters would have known that the sixth day of January following a presidential election year was important.

Talk at a recent East Hampton Town Board meeting about the potential use of the former Child Development Center of the Hamptons building on Stephen Hand’s Path as a Covid-19 testing and vaccination site suggests that local officials are at last beginning to realize that they must do more.

There probably were better moments than this for me to take up knitting. Yet here I am.