It's 1972. I'm seventeen smoking a joint on an old tractor at a farmhouse we're renting for $45 a month in Solsberry, Indiana outside Bloomington. Ice cream cones are five cents in the store down…
Posts published in “Essays”
The first musical technology I remember operating, from the age of five, was an Estey upright piano. The second was a stereo, the make of which I’ve forgotten, if I ever knew it. My father…
Son Lucas, a fraction of your age and thus able to control the internet the way you control your shower temperature, recently spent a minute showing me a new thingie on my laptop. It’s ChatGPT…
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat editorial Dec.18 expressed dismay about the state of the Cannabis industry in California. The PD exonerated the politicians and blamed the proponents and funders of Proposition 64 — the “Adult…
In the village of Petrykivka in Ukraine, Maria Yanenko worried that bombs would obliterate her home and destroy her traditional folk art practised by women in her family for decades. She gathered 40 paintings of…
Openly gay, black, 32-year-old basketball player American Brittney Griner walked away free as a bird from a Russian gulag seven hours east of Moscow in a prison swap with Russian Viktor Bout (pronounced “boot”) who,…
A hundred miles before breakfast. It was founding Rider staffer Dick Blom’s number one road rule in the old days back in the Seventies before many of you were born. His number two rule was…
On November 28th the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian, Le Monde and El Pais sent an Open Letter to the world, stating that “ the “US government should end its prosecution of Julian…
Miss Primwood spent more than 40 years in Ukiah schools teaching English to students ranging from the indifferent to the absent. Hers was a no-nonsense approach, a stickler heavy on grammar and composition and with…