Seen from within its courtyard off busy Euston Road in London, the British Library is meant to look like a stately ocean liner pulling out to sea against the gables, turrets, and clock tower of…
Posts published in “Essays”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to read Facing the Wind, knowing that it concerned the impact “imperfect” children can have on families into which they’re born, and more specifically, a man who slaughtered his disabled…
Virginia Woolf didn’t realize when she began to publish her own work more than 100-years ago that she would birth a cottage industry that would put all her writing – letters and diaries as well…
We’re in the middle of a brief stretch in a long year when we pause to count blessings, give thanks and acknowledge our good luck. We are finished with 2025, and look where we are:…
Anyone who has been in the Anderson Valley for any length of time is familiar with the Floodgate Store on Highway 128 in Philo. Over the years many businesses established there have had some prepared…
Do we get softer, more sentimental, less intelligent and less able to think clearly as we age? (Asking for a friend.) Actually I’m asking for, or about, my wife. She was once hard-headed, tough-minded and…
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre on London’s Southbank, might seem to make for oddly out-of-season fare. Yet the play itself conjures calendric confusion and climate catastrophe. In the midst…
There are many things I don’t understand. Some are common, like the mystery of airplanes able to heave their loaded bulk high above the clouds, coming down a million miles away with (almost) never a…
The Golden State Warriors invited the seven surviving players from the team that won the NBA championship in 1975 — Charles Dudley, Jamaal Wilkes, Clifford Ray, Rick Barry, George Johnson, Butch Beard and Jeff Mullins…