It wasn’t until I was around the age of twenty that my impressions of the cops really began to take form, with some of my earliest encounters with the men in blue being a couple…
Posts published in “Essays”
Last time we explored the details of the May 1856 beating of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The attacker was South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks who used a walking cane to repeatedly strike Sumner. Brooks was…
Terence Hallinan was always a bit mystified by Willie Brown’s animosity. Reading a headline in the Chronicle like “Brown excoriates Hallinan, other big-mouth critics,” he would shake his head in sad disbelief. When he said…
In 1835 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow hailed music as “the universal language of mankind.” Few would disbelieve him and deny themselves the comfort of the cliché that music has the power to transcend cultural, political, and…
Many of the articles about cannabis that appear in the AVA are so chock full of bad news that they would depress even Julie Andrews, who plays Maria von Trapp, an eternal optimist, in the…
Given the scary nature of pretty much everything these days (a raging pandemic amidst widespread disbelief in science; a ruling oligarchy dead set on destroying anything worth living for; Attorney General Barr’s “anarchist jurisdictions,” which…
IN THE DELUGE of unhappy news this week was another airliner crash in Indonesia. The plane was flying from Jakarta to the Borneo city of Pontianak. Pontianak! In the year of living dangerously, 1965, I…