Opinion

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.