Satirist Paul Krassner made history with his raucous magazine, The Realist, the great-grandfather of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” Like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, he has had no sacred cows. I’ve known Krassner…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
It’s that time of year again: time for me to write about the baseball season now exiled to distant outfields as political and meteorological storms grab the headlines. Last July, a bit earlier in the…
If you’re tired of reading about cannabis, don’t expect relief anytime soon. Right now, we’re in the cannabis moment. The media here and around the U.S.A. can’t get enough stories about dope fiends, dabs and…
I did not know Clancy Sigal well, but I read almost all of his books, including Going Away, Weekend in Dinlock, Zone of the Interior, Hemingway Lives!, plus A Woman of Uncertain Character—which is about his mother—and Zone of the Interior, a…
At a New York museum last week I noticed two objects on exhibit, one of them a mirror, the other a camera that was focused on the mirror. The mirror and the camera, which we…
On a summer day in June it was hot and dry almost everywhere in California. Nearly eight thousand miles away, it was hot and rainy across much of Laos, the landlocked nation in Southeast Asia…
Would you darken your complexion and walk in the shoes of a black man in America today? Probably not, especially with police shootings of unarmed black men, and not if you remember John Howard Griffin’s…
Tony Linegar has a wealth of experience in two northern California counties where cannabis has long been a major cash crop: Mendocino and Sonoma. Before taking over the reigns as the Agricultural Commissioner for Sonoma in…
Brian Elliott’s small, tidy Santa Rosa office is filled with mementos of his long life in public service. Perhaps most striking is the large fire chief’s helmet that he wore for decades. Indeed, no one…