The original “West Side Story” was on TV Sunday night, I hadn’t watched it in decades, and as often happens, the landmark musical film triggered an ancient flashback… At Lincoln Junior High in the bucolic…
Posts published in “Essays”
When archaeologists from some other planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude that our temples were dams. Imponderably massive, constructed with exquisite care, our dams will outlast anything else…
I’ve been in North Carolina for a year and figured when I learned how to spell “Chattanooga” I’d be enough of an expert to lecture locals on how to improve things for me. Being from…
I was a delegate representing San Francisco’s Noe Valley to the 1968 founding convention of the Peace and Freedom Party. I lived with my young family at 24th and Dolores in an apartment that cost…
Life is too short to ever read a single column inch of Thomas Friedman. But the Times columnist was cited in a letter last week by a lady who liked his suggestion that Kamala Harris…
The Eurovision Song Contest has long burst the geographically borders seemingly staked out by its name. Yet the international spectacle hardly makes a blip on America’s collective consciousness or its screens. Other countries even farther…
What was so ineffably cool about the Twilight Zone was: most of the time, it was regular people moving around in the regular, recognizable world—a very 1950s world, mostly—going about their regular business, when a…
I am an inveterate tree hugger, a hugger of oak, fir, pine, eucalyptus, hickory and cedar which I first hugged as a boy growing up on the edge of a hardwood forest long gone to…
America's most enduring political figure now lives in slow motion. Hampered by bad hips, she walks at a glacial pace, usually gripping the arms of two aides who lead the way, her legs flopping around…