There’s not a month that goes by that someone doesn’t ask me, “Why do they call you Chili Bill?” I feel the time has come to answer this question in a simple, straightforward manner to…
Posts published in “Essays”
New books on “the brain” are being published every week, it seems, with many of them purporting to explain virtually everything about human behavior, health, follies, and the future.
Following a Sheriff’s Office-escorted tour of Garberville’s transient camps and hangouts, Southern Humboldt Supervisor Estelle Fennell has reported that an effort to launch police foot patrols is underway. Fennell toured the Garberville area’s streets and…
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.
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…