Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Essays”

Mendo News 100 Years Ago

One hundred years ago the Boston Red Sox scored only nine runs in a six game World Series, and won, four games to two over the even more hitless Chicago Cubs. Babe Ruth started and…

Exploiting Styron’s Ghost

Eli Lilly got FDA approval to market Prozac in December 1987. The company had a brilliant strategy for making it a blockbuster: promote not the drug so much as the disorder — "Clinical Depression," a supposedly widespread "mental illness" that, by the way, Lilly's new "Selective Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitor" could supposedly treat.

Fire & Burritos

I know what you’re all thinking: How’s ol’ Flynn doing? Oh, I know you’ve all got your own fish to fry, particularly in this parlous, combustible summer, and with the very flames licking at your…

Midtown Manhattan in the Mid–70s

I was starting my first year at Rutgers Law School in Newark, following a zigzag (should I say Zig Zag?) course that had taken me from a small hill farm in northern Vermont, to Harvard…

Caspar’s ‘Vess’ Nolan

New characters in the panoply of history come to light at the Kelley House on a regular basis, often due to generous donations of time and materials to the archives and museum. A case in…

Yorkville Highlands, 1971

Two nights after we'd established our raucous brood in Mendocino County's serene summer hills, not far from the unsuspecting hamlet of Boonville, we got our first lesson in the psycho-pathology of the pre-pube criminal, the…

Raconteur Gerd Stern Remembers

“He’s wasn’t a nice guy,” Gerd Stern said on a Saturday afternoon at the Sonoma Valley Museum in Sonoma, California, where Jack London once lived, farmed and wrote fiction and non-fiction. Stern was talking about…

-