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Posts published in “Essays”

John Muir, The Untold Story

Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness. By Robert Aquinas McNally. University of Nebraska Press; May 1, 2024 “Only to the white man was nature a…

Goodbye To All That [December 1999]

Somewhere around mid-November the Y2K whimpering died down out of sheer exhaustion. Humboldt County [where Cockburn lived at the time of this writing] is calm. A couple of weeks ago I asked the amiable Jim,…

Big Tech Accelerates Isolationism

By producing such extremes of wealth, big tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who — after…

The Little Things That Count [1950]

San Francisco. Sentimental expatriates say, “You can leave it—but it never leaves you.” It has three approaches by land, only one of which is free. It is full of fleas that bite only tourists and…

Liberalism Without Accountability

Witnessing the hundreds of militarized police being deployed to round up student protesters, many people in the United States and across the world may be wondering what the difference is between supposedly progressive, liberal government…

Tobacco Takes Series Against Me, 2-0

In a lifetime filled with exciting adventures and thrilling escapades, only two have involved nicotine. Both these tobacco-related encounters were also thrilling and exciting, but with an added component of nauseating. And most memorably by…

Blues Rules

1. Most Blues begin, "Woke up this morning..." 2. "I got a good woman" is a bad way to begin the Blues, unless you stick something nasty in the next line like, "I got a…

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