by Joseph Hanna
What are we? No! Really! What are we? The question needs to be answered because, depending on how the answer goes, you stand the chance of being made extremely unhappy, really miserable and dead before your time. It is fashionable among the swells, and they are among us in numbers too great to [...]

by Jim Marquardt
A quiet summer morning, already hot. I’m crouched in the meager shade of the lifeguard stand trying to get over too many beers from the night before. I glance occasionally at a small group of nuns dunking in the modest waves. They’re from the parish school up the street and always come to [...]

By Harvey Jacobs

In July of 1969, Neil Armstrong took a walk on the moon. President Kennedy had announced a program to land a man—an American—on the moon’s surface nine years earlier. It was an outrageous goal, an attempt to win major points in the “race for space” between the USA and what was then the [...]

by Jim Marquardt
Sag Harbor’s 7-Eleven Store better keep its doors closed tightly. Across the Atlantic a nervy seagull, christened “Sam” by the locals, plagues R.S. McCall’s News Agency in Aberdeen, Scotland. It lurks outside the shop’s open door until the proprietor and customers are distracted, then darts in and grabs a bag of Cheese Doritos [...]

by Peter Hamilton Travis
Due to a ferociously strident yet physically benign misunderstanding last Friday with an extraordinarily busy (portions of Rt. 114 lack cellular signal support because…?) motorist (moments from rescheduling a highly anticipated doubles match, responding to a vitally important text regarding the delivery of a carbon fiber kayak, and completing another grueling three [...]

by Joseph Hanna
A young man approached Socrates with lips trembling from the effort of holding back a juicy sluice of gossip. “I have something … you are not going to believe this …”
Socrates was not one of the fathers of Philosophy (they didn’t have DNA tests then) for nothing. “Let me ask you three questions,” [...]

by Richard Gambino
There is so much good music performed here on the East End in summers. (How I wish it were also so during our winters.) Funny how the most abstract of all the arts, music, goes deepest in our souls. Pop music can nourish our need for fun, our romantic sense, our whistling-down-the-street joy [...]

by Jim Marquardt
Unlike today, when the public seems barely affected by overseas conflicts, World War II involved everyone in America. Over 70,000 women volunteered in the Army and Navy Nurse Corps. A few of them in our community look back at the war that ended 65 years ago. Hardly out of their teens, they served [...]

By Julie Penny
About a year and a half ago I started noticing that the tides lapping Long Beach, both on its bay side and on its cove side, seemed to be getting higher. Was it my imagination? Perhaps you had noticed this too, or the similar rise in some other tidal body of water near [...]

By Peter Hamilton Travis
This column is a continuum of my previous Our Town contribution, Requiem for Credibility — 1st Movement.
For the handful of inattentive myopes who remain unfamiliar with the precursor — as they say in the oil biz: “Sorry. Sort of.” I’ve no intention of taxing the loyal Effervescents — who regularly find time [...]