“War is hell,” General William Tecumseh Sherman observed during the hellish American Civil War. It’s hellish for human soldiers and also for dog soldiers who…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
Jaipur, India — I have watched a whole family of monkeys perched on ancient stonewalls, and I have followed elephants as they’ve galumphed down the…
Agra, India — I can see the Taj Mahal from the window of my hotel in Agra, India and I can hear the near constant…
Artists are the “antennae” of the human race, someone once said. They’re the mind readers and the prophets who scope out the future. And sometimes…
Call Greg Sarris an anomaly, or maybe call him emblematic of the cultural crosscurrents of our age. Raised in a white, middle class family in…
The tellers at my branch of Citibank take my money and smile politely. “Will there be anything else, Mr. Raskin?” they ask. “No,” I say…
“The Sixties” as a state of mind has lasted far longer than the actual decade itself, much to the delight of 1960s survivors and to…
A specter is haunting Mendocino: the specter of mental illness. No one knows that story better, both personally and professionally, than Thomas D. Allman who…
Mexico never seems to age, never appears to grow old, and never goes backward or forward in time, though it’s always in flux. “Poor Mexico,…
French journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr might have been thinking of marijuana when he coined the phrase “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” which…
Hasn’t everyone noticed by now that it sucks? No, I’m not talking about the race for the Presidency, which has offered plenty of fireworks, but the second half of the 2016 Major League Baseball season. Ever since the All-Star break at the start of July, no team in the National League, except the Chicago Cubs, have put together a respectable string of wins, and as of July 28 the Cubs had not won more than three games in a row. The San Francisco Giants had lost eight of ten and yet they were still in first place in the National League West.