Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders gave one of two keynote talks at the International Cannabis Business Conference in San Francisco last weekend. Dr. Elders had been fired by Bill Clinton after acknowledging to the American…
Posts published in “Essays”
"I hope you're writing some of this down," she said, gathering her books and hopefully her wits before I swept her off to class. On the way to campus we stopped in a long column…
I've been having some trouble sleeping lately. The pattern goes as follows: I fall easily and deeply asleep at about 10:30 and then pop fully awake at about 2:45 — the dark one — thence…
“Wanna meet some pretty ladies today, mister?” I turn to see a brown-skinned woman with a leathery Zoltec face. She should be singing ancient lullabies to dozing grandchildren about to be sacrificed to the Sun, around a slow crackling fire. Instead she’s outside Planet Hollywood Hotel & Casino touting two-for-one drink coupons for a strip club/money laundering scheme called Twin Peeks.
February marks the passing of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but it also is the anniversary of two other notable moments in the history of courts and the service of justice. In the first…
At 7:30 this morning I went out the door of #518 on my way to work. I usually come and go via the stairs, but today, my hands full, and thinking the wood I was carrying might prove awkward in the stairwells, I came down by elevator instead.
I first met the celebrated American composer Steven Stucky not in Ithaca, where we have both lived for the past twenty years, but in Los Angeles on February 26, 1995. I arrived in Ithaca later that year; Steve had taken up what proved to be a more than three-decade-long post as professor of music at Cornell back in 1980 after doing his doctorate in composition at the university in the 1970s.