Writing when you should be farming is not easy. Last night, when I tried to compose, I looked outside for inspiration. It was a spectacular evening: enormous billowing clouds, backed... more
Now come the shortest days, and we offset the long nights with lights and little candles everywhere. In a show of determination and defiance, decor is how we get through the darkest days merrily. I do not rationalize the need to decorate, and I do not fight the urge. Instead, I consider what is durable and plentiful. If I hang it from a bespoke wire hook, will people grasp the symmetry and austere beauty? Will they flock to my booth at the craft market? We had a bumper garlic crop. And sales were slack. So, going into soup season, we’ve ...
10 Dec 2024 by Marilee Foster
The major World War II event we take notice of every December is Pearl Harbor. But this month also sees the 80th anniversary of another significant event in World War II: On December 18, 1944, Typhoon Cobra almost destroyed the 3rd Fleet in the Pacific Ocean. Remarkably, what happened thousands of miles away in the southwest Pacific has several personal and local connections. One personal connection is that Jim Clavin, my father’s older brother, was on one of those ships. I don’t recall him ever talking about it, and it was years after his death when I first learned of ...
9 Dec 2024 by Tom Clavin
Before the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Suffolk County became “the global center of the eugenics movement,” eugenics had roots in England, relates Mark A. Torres in his forthcoming book, “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.” He notes how, in 1851 in England, Herbert Spencer penned a book, “Social Statics,” that “first publicized the phrase ‘survival of the fittest.’” And “less than a decade later, Charles Darwin popularized the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in his seminal work ‘The Origin of the Species.’ Yet another Englishman, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, then authored a book, ...
by Karl Grossman
Connectivity underpins nearly every part of modern life. It provides access to public safety, innovative health care and quality education, spurs economic growth, and strengthens bonds between neighbors, friends, and family. It also increasingly supports the smart technology and home automation that a rapidly growing number of households across the state and nation rely on, enabling the remote monitoring and management of everything from doorbells and curtains to ovens, televisions, and security systems — all from a computer, tablet or even a phone. As many as 69.91 million U.S. households are actively using smart home devices this year — 10.2 percent more ...
by Mike Florio
Just in time for the holidays, some spare cash can be found in pockets. For a farmer, this pocket might be from a winter coat laid down years ago. He’d left a few twenties in the breast pocket — it felt like the lotto when he found them later. Anyway, the temperature dropped last week, and another farmer remembered another coat, seen thrown in the corner. Pretty suddenly, as if November was trying to make up for lost time, it rained, thank God, and it got colder. After a three-month dry spell, almost 2 inches of rain came down, and ...
3 Dec 2024 by Marilee Foster
“You’ll get used to it.” I was mumbling that to myself between curse words as I was wading into a 72-degree swimming pool in the basement of a hotel in Vienna. The hotel was once a bank, and its spa is in what was the bank’s vault. They had turned the vault’s door into a window overlooking the pool. People in the spa’s reception could look down at me and read my lips as I said, “Holy s-expletive, this pool is cold!” You might remember, a few columns ago, I coined the word “s-expletive,” because at this family newspaper we ...
by Tracy Grathwohl
In the northwest corner of Suffolk County is the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Its outrageous history is detailed in a forthcoming book “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.” The book, by Mark A. Torres, an attorney as well as an author, will be released by The History Press on January 21. Torres also wrote the 2021 book “Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood,” an examination of the plight of migrant farmworkers here, also published by The History Press. It’s the best work I’ve ever read on this subject. Torres is general counsel of Teamsters ...
by Karl Grossman
Staff Writer on Jul 1, 2019