We've interrupted our biweekly print magazine to take a quick trip out East

FOR YEARS, THIS MAGAZINE would devote an issue to exploring the Hamptons. In 1972, Gail Sheehy paid a visit to Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith “Little Edie,” Jackie O’s unhinged and downwardly mobile relations who were living in the magnificent, yet borderline unlivable, estate Grey Gardens. (The article inspired the documentary.)

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By the time we returned for our last stand-alone issue in 2000, the Hamptons had transformed. What was long the relatively buttoned-up summer retreat for descendants of gilded-age robber barons, patricians of old-line Mayflower pedigree, and the occasional Abstract Expressionist had become the destination for Wall Street’s new-money guys to build enormous mega-mansions, for Steven Spielberg & Co. to build their Georgica Pond compounds, for Sean “Diddy” Combs to throw, with his now-infamous annual White Party, the only social event that mattered, and for every yuppie to measure self-worth by the size of their summer-share house. Could these tiny towns, one wondered, ever absorb such garish displays of wealth?