Opinion

The East Hampton Independence Party’s support for a slate of candidates this week is important because it instantly injects a hearty dose of democracy back into the race.

Science can’t prove or disprove God, but I nevertheless believe that its findings can contribute greatly to our quest for meaning.

Linguists and writers of a certain pompousness (ahem, me) like to debate the relative euphoniousness of words at dinner parties. Have you heard this thing about the most beautiful phrase in the English language being “cellar door”? What about "defenestration" or "lollygag," "twilight" or "jubilee"?

Early on in an effort begun by a Star intern to document the history of slavery in East Hampton, one of the project’s advisers said he could draw a direct line from omission of enslaved people of African heritage from the American founding story to police killings of Black men today.

And so, we too have acceded — inevitably, it would seem — to the fact that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires.”

The Montauk Hammerhead Building team trounced the Amagansett Fire Department in Little League action on Monday. I should know; I was among the spectators at Lions Field trying to keep warm as a chilly westerly wind blew in off the ocean. In an email to parents earlier in the day, the Amagansett coaches had told us to dress warmly. No one dressed warmly enough, especially on the visitors’ side of the field.

Once more unto the darkened theater — for escape or togetherness?

For the first time, there is a baseline on nitrogen levels from which the several mandates can be evaluated. Before now, sampling for nitrogen was inadequate, when it took place at all. This created a situation in which policy got out ahead of science.

Lessons from a tumble down a flight of stairs, a hospital stay during the height of Covid, and 90 isolating days in a less-than-desirable care center.

My rubber-band ball, made entirely from rubber bands, grew bigger every day. It was bigger than a softball, bigger than a  grapefruit. It was heavy and perfectly round. I liked to bounce it, like Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” off the wall of my first office at Vogue magazine, when I got my start in 1998. Everyone loved Steve McQueen, the 1970s tough guy with cruel lips, in the summer of 1998.

Bam. Pause. Bam.

People often ask me about what life was like at Vogue, back in the Gilded Age before the Millennium, before 9/11, before the collapse of print media.

On Long Island, Covid-19 numbers have fallen since their peak, but they remain surprisingly and stubbornly high. Deaths from the virus have also declined, but even so lives are lost that should not have been. The 3,300th person in Suffolk County died from the disease between Monday and Tuesday this week. More than 41,000 New Yorkers across the state have died from Covid-19, which is still taking the lives of more people of color and Spanish speakers, by population, than whites.

Recently, I was asked to retrieve from The Star’s attic contacts and negatives of Troy Bowe, the former Killer Bees’ point guard, in action. The request set my head to spinning like a leptoquark, for, as I told Carl Johnson, who had made the request, “It’s a black hole up there, a bottomless pit from which it has been said nothing escapes.”