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Posts published in “Essays”

We’re In It

Those thousands of articles about the coming consequences of global warming, over-population, and environmental pollution? Those consequences are here. Yes, things are going to get worse, but unprecedented climatic events are not coming sooner or later, they are here.

Twist in the Tunnels Plan

When Gov. Jerry Brown announced two weeks ago at an Oakland press conference that he would radically downsize a 100,000-acre wetland restoration job, environmentalists and…

Roadtripping With Nabokov

Driving to Boston from Ithaca to give a concert at the venerable early music festival there last week, I decided to listen to a book…

California’s Cap-and-Trade Program

California has arguably taken stronger legislative steps to address climate change than any state in the union. Assembly Bill 32 mandates that the state reduce…

The Stony Lonesome: Suicide

There’s nothing funny about suicide, unfortunately; one cannot employ humor to mitigate the horror, not and remain within the bounds of humanity and good taste.…

Almond Acreage Booms 

The drought has reduced California’s water supply to an all-time low, prompting officials to mandate strict cutbacks in urban communities. Farmers, who went unaffected by…

Trust

Trust is a tricky thing. Long ago, I held writing workshops for groups of eight people meeting for two hours once a week in my living room, each course lasting eight weeks. At the outset, I would reiterate what I had explained to prospective participants when they called to sign up for the process: we would be doing my original writing exercises and there would be no lecturing or criticism or analysis of anything we wrote, by me or anyone in the group, and no one had to read aloud anything he or she wrote unless he or she wanted to.

The National Pasttime

June 24th brings us to one of the littlest known stories about major league baseball. It began in Ipswich, County Suffolk, England in 1854, on…

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