by Steve Heilig
One foggy afternoon long ago, I was taking a solo hike on the Marin ocean cliffs. The fog was so thick one could only see a few feet ahead. Sound was muffled too, yet I kept thinking that a voice was wafting thru the air. And it was a voice I thought I recognized. After [...]
by Tom Cornell
Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City, by Anthony Flint. Random House, New York, New York 2009. This fast-moving and gripping story, summed up in the subtitle, recalls an epic battle waged by a woman without credentials and no college degree, against a very powerful [...]
by Steve Heilig
“Don’t take the brown acid” was the famous warning issued about a bad batch of LSD from the stage at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. But meanwhile, some shadowy but influential West Coasters were counseling everyone to try a pill of another color. Orange Sunshine was a “brand” of LSD made and marketed by a [...]
More of our young soldiers are now killing them selves than are being killed in our wars in the Middle East. The following poem by a 24-year-old former Marine, who slashed his wrists twice after four years of duty and two tours of combat, tells it all.
Three years ago an unusual volume was issued by Crown Books. It was signed by Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines, and titled “Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life).” Presented as a chronicle of how one woman broke through the glass ceiling to attain eminence in her career, [...]
Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County is part of the so-called South Bay, south of Santa Monica. It was mostly populated by middle-class white people when I grew up there in the 1950s, and was a good place in many ways. I played volleyball on the beach, and once a year we had surfing, paddleboard [...]
by Steve Heilig
The legendary American abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed in the 1800s that “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.” And thus the long legacy of conflict whenever the status quo is challenged in arenas of what widely come to be seen – although too often not until after the battle has [...]
