When I was a boy of 10, I got into a fight with a French kid on a playground in Paris. It started over a line dispute at a playground installation. See, France, at least…
Posts published in “Essays”
The creativity and craft of George Martin, the celebrated Beatles producer who died this week at the age of 90, is to be heard nowhere more radically and radiantly than on the band’s 1967 single,…
Early sunny morning, probably a school day; we are about 15 years old. You walk a few doors down and knock on my bedroom window, wearing just swim trunks, t-shirt, flip-flops, carrying swim fins. "C'mon, there's a good south swell and nobody's around and we can go get some waves." Well why not, I say, and join you with exact same attire and my fins. We walk a few blocks down towards the beach, me figuring we're just going to hit the nearby Coves, our semi-private paradise, but at the coast highway you stick out your thumb, heading south.
My hometown, Portland, Oregon, has a homelessness problem. Portland is often called the City of Bridges—more than a dozen cross the Willamette and Columbia Rivers—and beneath almost all, at one time or another, one sees…
After twenty-four years at the helm of the institution that he has radically transformed, Sonoma State University President, Ruben Armiñana, will retire on July 1, 2016. But first he has to run a kind of…
What I really wanted was a spicy bloody Mary. I don't know what it is about the bloody Mary, as it really doesn't matter how it's made, but where it's made. The bloody Mary is…
In April 1933, soon after they had come to power, the Nazis passed laws regulating the slaughter of animals. Later that year Herman Goering announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal…