The Eurovision Song Contest cannot be neutral. There is just one winner. That winner is chosen by combining the popular cellphone votes of millions of viewers with the tallies of the five-member juries in each…
Posts published in “Essays”
In New York City recently at an outdoor memorial for Robert Reilly, a former apartment mate and friend who died at the age of 94 — and among other friends I had not seen for…
The late Max Crawford’s last novel was called, “Wamba.” According to the flier announcing it … “After years away, Roy Alan Richardson has come home to western Texas to grapple with the demons that haunt…
If any inattentive adult has any lingering doubt about the value of Ukiah’s library, some fog-clearing clarity is on its way. Our library, subsidized by everyone, gets additional largesse from dim-witted feel-good patsies who keep…
“Is this that political-type paper,” a tentative female voice asked when I picked up the phone. I suppose, I answered, forever not knowing what might come next. “Oh. Hi! I am Zaya. I saw an…
If one looked at a map of California and Northeastern Mendocino County a person would see a lot of National Forest; the Snow Mountain, Thatcher Creek and Yolla Bolly Wilderness Areas; the Round Valley Indian…
Is the United States becoming a failed state? The performance of our elected officials now, in the MAGA era, certainly seems to indicate that it is; while the world is filled with urgent business that…
Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness. By Robert Aquinas McNally. University of Nebraska Press; May 1, 2024 “Only to the white man was nature a…
Somewhere around mid-November the Y2K whimpering died down out of sheer exhaustion. Humboldt County [where Cockburn lived at the time of this writing] is calm. A couple of weeks ago I asked the amiable Jim,…