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Posts published in “Essays”

Society of Spectacle

The televised spectacle of the January 6th hearings will not restore democracy or halt the rise of the far right. The hearings are a desperate ploy by a doomed political class. The Select Committee to…

A ‘Perfy’ For The Claremont

For planting this item in the East Bay Express, the Claremont Hotel in Oakland deserves a Perfy (the PR industry’s coveted Perfumes-of-Arabia award for best cleansing of a company’s image): “Some cities have wine trails.…

And The Beat Goes On

They’re driving on South Dora, arrive at the stop sign at Observatory Avenue and watch a man tug at his belt buckle, drop his trousers and squat a few inches above the sidewalk. The driver,…

Eros Bound

When I walked into the day room of the Bay Area board and care facility where my friend Sally lives, a pall of gloom had descended on the place as bored-looking residents sat in front…

The Well-Tempered Clavier at 300

Accessibility of knowledge was crucial to the Enlightenment. That ethos was embodied in the celebrated Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, the first of its seventeen volumes appearing in 1751, the year after Johann Sebastian Bach’s…

Crimes Against Peace

I was in Nuremberg during the war crimes trials which followed WWII. My father, Brig. General Telford Taylor, was Chief Prosecutor during the second, American phase. The French, Russian and British staffs had gone home…

Sad, Serendipitous: Book Review

‘The Third Life of Grange Copeland.’ by Alice Walker, 1970 ‘Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker’ Edited By Valerie Boyd, 2022 ‘The Candy House’ By Jennifer Egan, 2022 * * * Many…

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