In late May, the pro-Kremlin political PR hack Konstantin Dolgov published a startling interview with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner private military company. Prigozhin said that the entire “denazification and demilitarisation” rationale behind…
Posts published in “Essays”
Flying Oakland to Burbank meant saving a couple hundred bucks. So headquarters could spring for a cab, instead of the Muni/BART/shuttle journey. A Georgian — not the Atlanta kind — arrived to haul me across…
by Fremont Older, Editor of the San Francisco Call Bulletin, 1931 It happened at the moment of my deepest depression that A.E. Sherwood, my stepfather's brother, suggested to me that I could preempt 160 acres…
Much of my childhood was spent in a van, especially the 1968 Chevy that my parents drove across California, Nevada and Arizona. I remember feeling trapped and bored on those trips, spending countless hours staring…
In eulogies Daniel Ellsberg is defined as a “whistleblower,” but he didn’t really break the news about “our” role in Vietnam to US Americans who had attended a teach-in or read about the war in Ramparts,…
Quit drinking the other day, but knowing me, it won’t be long before I hit the bottle again. It’s my pattern. That means I’ll soon be drinking again. Hallelujah. I started in college and have…
The hippies grew up in my backyard. I did not find them good neighbors. It was nothing personal. I thought it terrific, in the early days of the Haight-Ashbury, that love children could put a…
There is “town vomit” on the streets of Elsinore (Helsingor in Danish), a mere cobblestone’s throw from Hamlet’s castle. Depending on your temperament the stench might evoke either a medieval morosity or a renaissance joie…
Fort Bragg Chronicle, November 25, 1913 — Like a chapter from the “Old Sleuth” series of dime thrillers or a page from the history of “Doc” Standley, Mendocino County's redoubtable fighting sheriff, reads the story…