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Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”

Covering Corona

These days, citizen journalists are almost everywhere reporting on the ebb and flow of the virus, from Seattle and San Francisco to Chicago and New York

Book Review of “Home Baked”

Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, And The Stoning Of San Francisco by Alia Volz Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 435 pages; April 20, 2020; $27 Poet George Sterling called San Francisco “the cool grey city of love.”…

Upton Sinclair

Last January, before all hell broke loose, Seven Stories Press republished Upton Sinclair’s 891-page anthology, The Cry for Justice, subtitled An Anthology of Social Protest with the original introduction by Jack London and a new introduction by Chris…

This Too Shall Pass

Would the AVA's resident expert on the media, Flynn Washburne, regard this story as newsworthy? Probably not! After all, it’s not about his backyard and not about anyone he knows. Chances are, you don’t know…

Stay Home & Make News of Your Own

The doctor wasn’t in his office and wasn’t seeing patients either, but he was talking with them by phone, and trying to be supportive. After all, psychotherapy had to go on, with or without the…

My Life in the Plague

I spend most of my days and nights in a relatively small room, about 20 feet by 20 feet with about 8 feet headroom. I refer to it as my “cell” and like to say…

The Call of the Mild

The problem with Jack London has always been that while he was a compelling storyteller with a vivid imagination, he was also a racist, or at least a writer who embraced racial ideas about the…

The Destruction Of California?

They don’t come to northern California for the bubbly, the marijuana or the luxury hotels and they don’t enjoy picnic lunches along the Russian River. There are more than 150,000 of them in the whole…

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