The tabloid he founded in the 1950s, The Realist, violated every taboo. If you discovered Mad in your early teens, at 17 you were mad for The Realist. Krassner was a leader of the Yippie…
Posts published by “Fred Gardner”
Dennis Peron is the Rosa Parks of the medical marijuana movement, the one who would not move to the back of the bus. Dennis refused to accept that anybody — any cop or DA or…
Although it's entitled "How Legalization Changed Humboldt County Marijuana," Emily Witt's article in the current New Yorker is not about new plant varieties but about new social realities. She opens with an assertion sure to please her…
David Fechheimer, San Francisco's premier private investigator, died April 2 after open-heart surgery. We'd been friends for 44 years, minus two. David is Stephen Best in this piece the AVA ran in January, 1990. The…
It won’t be a political tragedy, no matter who wins, but I can’t help seeing the district attorney’s race as the sad, final act
The Times' CIA correspondent David Sanger reported Oct. 7 that Gen. William Westmoreland had requested "tactical" nuclear weapons to be shipped to Vietnam in February, 1968 for use in the event that US troops were…
A sesh is a pop-up pot club. The oldest is said to be the Dream Sesh in Los Angeles, founded 2013. Sesh organizers have venues of their own or rent an event space. People get…
Eli Lilly got FDA approval to market Prozac in December 1987. The company had a brilliant strategy for making it a blockbuster: promote not the drug so much as the disorder — "Clinical Depression," a supposedly widespread "mental illness" that, by the way, Lilly's new "Selective Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitor" could supposedly treat.
The headline on Robert O'Connell's New York Times piece March 27, "Baseball's Unappreciated Power Duo," referred to Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard. The piece begins: "Baseball’s great power partnerships range from the foundational (Babe Ruth and Lou…