Two hundred twenty-five years ago this week Thomas Jefferson wrote to his more conservative friend, James Madison: “I hold it, that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in…
Posts published in “Essays”
I got an email from my sister a few months ago telling me she had entered me into some kind of obstacle course race. I am in school and work and have a kid but…
As he approached his 70th year, the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright endured a bout of pneumonia during a Wisconsin winter. “You could add 20 years to his life,” his doctor told Wright's wife, “if…
In the Grimm brother’s Snow White the Queen gazes into the magic mirror that never lies and vainly asks: “Magic mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land.” Later, she gets the…
Panic set in not for the obvious reasons: the blinding white stone of the Capitol dome, ramparts and columns resembling nothing so much as Albert Speer’s Hall of the People after a full-on peroxide scrub…
Here's what I've learned about doing time: you can't do years. Well, in retrospect you can, easily — that is, after you've done 'em. They're a snap. Looking back they don't seem a huge deal.…
Staying with friends was the only way I could afford to make my trip to New York in 1976 last more than a week or so, and I wanted to stay in or near Manhattan for at least three weeks. When I left for New York, I thought I had two places to stay, one in Newark, New Jersey with Dan and Janka, and one on West 83rd Street in Manhattan with Scott and Richard, but when Janka’s mother learned I was planning to stay in the area for several weeks, she invited me to use the guest room in her apartment on West 94th Street, three blocks from Central Park.
Each summer during the 70s, there were basketball camps which sprung up in the frozen windy tundra tri-state areas of Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa (the hockey states playing the Canadian league!). Their aim? Making steady…
Two items from the first week in January that barely registered faint blips on the media radar: First, Huell Howser has died. If he is unknown to you, I’m sure PBS stations throughout California will…