Having put out calls for help, Redwood Community Radio has received an influx of donations and overdue pledge payments have augmented other funding to bridge KMUD’s operation to the end of September. Nella White, a…
Posts published in “Essays”
David and I scattered a small vial of Susan Keegan’s ashes on Sunday, in the northern part of Manhattan’s Central Park. Some of them came to rest on a hillside overlooking Turtle Pond, others mingled…
Over the years, I've spotlighted America's telephone system as the single best example of the diminishing returns of technology in everyday life. This sort of negative “blowback” occurs when you apply technological innovation to make…
It was way over 100°F up in Southern Humboldt. Too hot for most any reasonable human, let alone a furry black dog, so we soaked in the Eel River all we could and contemplated heading…
In the 1920s the Albion Lumber Company hired one of the first college educated foresters. On his initial day on the job he rode the train east several miles and strode up a steep hill…
I just cashed in 30 pounds of beer bottles, three pounds of aluminum — mostly beer cans — and about three pounds of plastic, nearly all individual-serving water bottles. Nothing unusual about it, except the…
Why am I writing about Helen Gurley Brown, famed editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and a champion of sexual freedom or a promoter of sexual enslavement, depending on your particular socio-political orientation? Well, because Helen Gurley Brown just died at the age of ninety, and though many people consider her a traitor to feminism, and many others see her as a pioneering feminist and social revolutionary, Helen was one of the very few magazine editors in America in the 1970’s and 80’s who would publish my short stories about the challenges facing men and women in the chaos of sexual and social change that arrived with the birth control pill and the dawn of the feminist epoch; thus I have no doubt about where I stand regarding Ms. Brown’s place in the history of psycho-sexual discourse.