It was 1973, the year Michael Shnayerson lived at the windmill at Quail Hill. He pretended successfully to be a tennis pro and unsuccessfully to be Kurt Vonnegut, and surprised even himself by defeating Geraldo Rivera on the court. Those long-ago memories of teenaged freedom were rekindledrecently, when he read a real-estate ad. . . .
Trump ahead on Newtown Lane
How do two artists create a happy home among the billionaire hedgerows of Bridgehampton, raise a couple of good kids, and still manage to create captivating work? Bastienne Schmidt and Philippe Cheng have found the magic keys.
I woke up in the morning speaking French and found that Pascal had came back, his left ear bent, like a furry maple leaf. I tried to straighten it but he pinched me with his needle teeth. He had been gone for over two weeks. I had plastered everywhere his photo and my number and a promise of a reward but no one ever called.
Round Swamp Farm has become a mecca, from May to December, for anyone who embraces locally sourced food and loves home cooking. And the successful business has preserved a fishing and farming way of life for a family whose roots have grown here on land and sea for three centuries.
(An exclusive excerpt from her second novel of the same title)
You are unemployed, at best very unsuccessful. Yet you go to parties. Parties where you meet people who ask, “So what do you do?”
You live with your parents. You share a one-bedroom with three roommates. You consider ramen a food group. You update your Facebook profile daily.
Your job has no title. You work within a department. You’re an unpaid intern. You’re assistant to the intern.
You stop people on the street and ask them if they like comedy, then push ticket packages to the “best comedy club in New York!” You stop them and say, “Excuse me, may I ask you a question about your hair?” You hand out free soap samples; nobody wants your soap samples.
The right whale is an apt metaphor for a good magazine in the digital era: big, slow, mesmerizingly beautiful, and . . . verging on the edge of extinction. The sense of setting off into some unknown is also appropriate.
HE HAS ONE of the last great farms in the Hamptons, 33 acres in Wainscott north of old Main Street, and he is, in fact, East Hampton's last bona fide potato farmer.
