by Julie Penny
I saw one of my doctors a couple months ago, a specialist. He’s not accepting certain insurers anymore. One of them is mine. This allows him to earn more, and to free up time he otherwise wasted on paperwork that insurers use to drown doctors in—the capricious, redundant kind of paperwork meant to [...]

By Harvey Jacobs
     The other day I heard a young student confide in his friend, “You know what? I’m just not a creative person. I know they say we need creative people but I guess some of us don’t make the cut.”
     I was left thinking about that boy’s self-image and the larger question of [...]

by Peter Travis
A teenager’s life is wrought with drama, disorientation, and heartbreak. Have you seen the new MySpace? It looks to have been slapped together by a frantic bat — struggling to free itself from the Internet’s suffocating gnarl.
In 1924, one extraordinarily tragic 18-year-old boy — having lost both his mother and father within the [...]

By Jim Marquardt
My wife and I walk every day along the beach on Little Peconic Bay and when we first moved here we always saw horseshoe crabs in the shallows, especially during spring spawning season. Now we rarely see them.
About ten years ago, returning from a sail to Chesapeake Bay, I overnighted in Cape May. [...]

By Peter Hamilton Travis

The title originally intended for this week’s column was: The Sensible Person’s Guide To Surviving Winter on The East End of Long Island: Am I The Only Freak Left Out Here Actually Enjoying The New Ice Age?
However — according to a certain local newsie working in the biz — printing an “overindulgent” [...]

by Joan Tyor Carlson
For the past seven years, at the Sag HarborFest, antique dealers from the harbor and nearby present an Antique Dockshow in which dealers appraise items of interest brought in by their hopeful owners. Since I used to publish a regional antique guide (from Moriches to Montauk), I was asked to organize and [...]

As Meryl Streep’s character, Sister Aloysius sobs in the final moments of the heartwarming holiday film classic, Doubt — I have doubts.  Though, for the record — I have no doubt Father Flynn was guilty.  Please, with those nails?
Now I doubt there is a single theater person reading this who is not thinking: “Correction!  You [...]

By Richard Gambino
Christmas and Hanukkah on the East End. I watch the eyes of young children as they gaze at the constellations of holiday lights here. Miracles all, every child.  Every mother looks at her newborn baby and counts the fingers and toes. Every first cry made by a baby just out of the womb [...]

By Mike Taibbi 
I’m a golfer, and I can’t tell you how many times in the last dozen years or so I’ve thought or said—after another Sunday display of otherworldly golfing genius by the guy in the red shirt—‘Man oh man, what I wouldn’t give to be Tiger Woods for a week…’
Well, not this week. Not [...]

It was beautiful the day we marched from Long Beach to Sag Harbor’s Marine Park to rally for Health Care Reform. We marked the sunny Saturday over the Labor Day weekend with our banner, flags and posters held aloft in a gentle breeze. Two to four abreast, a long trailing line of about 50 marched [...]