I am an inveterate tree hugger, a hugger of oak, fir, pine, eucalyptus, hickory and cedar which I first hugged as a boy growing up on the edge of a hardwood forest long gone to…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
Charles Albert is not the last white man in San Francisco. Not by a long shot. 43% of the population identifies as white. 49% are female. Hordes of white men live and work in The…
This is not a San Francisco gloom and doom story. There have been too many of them lately. San Franciscans feel sorry for themselves and wallow in despair. You might call this a health and…
Watching Steve Talbot’s new documentary, The Movement and the "Madman," reminded me of my own opposition to war, and also that over the past 75-years, US soldiers have gone into battle and died on distant…
Daniel Ellsberg, who recently announced that he has prostate cancer and doesn’t have much longer to live, sent out an email in which he wrote, “It is long past time--but not too late!--for the world's…
“Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight,” Roy Orbison sang on his hit single that has never gone out of style. In the greater San Francisco Bay Area, as in many other parts…
In a city that honors the new and newness, islands of the past disappear almost every day. In spanking new neighborhoods like Dogpatch, where glass and steel buildings tower over the streets, the past hardly…
To write her most recent novel, (2022; 549 pages; $32.50; Harper Collins) her tenth in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens whom she calls her “genius friend.” In the…
Looking at Richard Avedon’s black-and-white photos of the Chicago Seven which peered out at me in a recent issue of The New Yorker felt like seeing the dead. That’s not surprising. With the exception of…