A friend was telling me about a complicated land dispute he was in the middle of and I said, “Well, we all create our own realities.” He looked at me like he wasn't buying it…
Posts published in “Essays”
I’ve been skeptical of population estimates for a long time because it just seems there are far fewer people roaming around Planet Earth than statistics suggest. Who hasn’t run into a friend from Ukiah at…
After the first installment of my planned two-part tribute to Harry Belafonte, who died a month ago at the age of 96, two weeks of nonsense intervened. First came the coronation of Charles III—the pomp…
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…
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…