That last tour with Charlie Musselwhite was pretty brutal. Sharon and I wanted to have kids, and this is where we wanted to have them,…
Posts published in “Essays”
The Republican convention of July 1952 was the first televised national convention. Although my younger brother Hugh was only four years old, he sat, transfixed,…
Say what we will about the silliness of Hillary Clinton claiming to be dead broke when she and Bill exited the White House in 2001 to make way for George “Picasso” Bush, at least her ridiculous boast brought to light the collective insanity of the obscenely wealthy.
"I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have…
City governments from San Francisco to Fort Bragg have figured out that Airbnb rentals are often subverting local business, zoning, and taxation laws and regulations.
Sacramento, my sports town, and I'm not talking about the NBA Kings. It's World Cup soccer, the USA Track and Field championships, MLS minor league…
When I was four, my parents gave me a toy drum kit, and then later in second grade I took piano lessons for awhile, then…
Ithaca, New York — Come mid-May in the Finger Lakes of central New York the landscape transforms itself as if overnight. Little more than a…
Funny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as simple…
A loud, crashing sound startles my young farm-hand Emily Danler awake in the dark of the night. She camps out in order to start picking…
This week marks the 50th anniversary of “Freedom Summer” and the murder by Mississippi Ku Kluxers of three young civil rights volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew…