My good buddy Taylor Stoehr just died and I’ve been leafing through the bulging file of his letters to me, reading passages at random and marveling at the clarity of his prose and the generosity of his spirit.
Posts published in “Essays”
Editor: My name is William Joseph Newport CDCR#K14307, aka “Bongo Bill.” This letter has been a long time coming. I was a homeless man who had a more or less meager form of existence in…
Technology rules our lives, or rather, those who develop and sell it want us to believe that. Those who are peddling all manner of genetic testing really want us to take it on faith that…
A year ago this week I wrote about a then obscure independently produced documentary called Searching for Sugar Man, about a Detroit singer/songwriter who disappeared into the dustbin of the American corporate music business in…
Marcia and I had breakfast on Wednesday morning at Ravens’, the wholly vegan restaurant at the Stanford Inn, our meal courtesy of a gift certificate Marcia received for officiating at a wedding. I especially enjoyed the coffee and orange juice and the view of Big River Beach.
Disruption was once a theory of social change that inspired the radical Left. In the 1970s scholars like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward developed a disruptive theory of social movements based in particular on…
Next to Ali, I’d be willing to bet that James Brown is the most widely known Afro-American in the world. There are probably teenage Japanese girls who know more about him than I do. And…