I’ll get to Botox and Iraq in a bit. Let’s start with the Naked Empire. Naked in the sense that those who decide on American policy and those whose job it is to sell that…
Posts published in “Essays”
It's Saturday morning Labor Day Weekend and I wake up early thinking about where to ride. Hmmmm. Crater Lake? That blue caldera, impossibly blue, and that beautiful 35-mile ride high around its rim? Last night…
I watched a fair amount of the mainstream media coverage of the first anniversary of the 9-11 tragedy, and was deeply troubled by much of what I heard and saw. I had hoped that there…
Whatever it is these days, it’s connected with immigration. The West Nile virus is suspected of imperiling the future of any number of birds and mammals; milfoil, an immigrant grass from distant shores, is threatening…
While the country celebrates (if that's not too inappropriate a word) the anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing, one of the television stations heads its broadcast “America On Alert” and the whole country holds…
This summer’s extraordinary rescue of nine trapped Pennsylvania coal-miners verged on miraculous. Scarcely noted was the hellish nature of everyday conditions below. Those who work down there seldom live long, or well. Like many horrific…
I’ll admit I was down-and-out. I was borderline Fun Bunch. But these things are subjective. One man’s pith is another’s drivel. I was in the Humboldt Squeeze: watching my job dry up quicker than the…