Whenever I drive through Ukiah and see youngish homeless men trudging along the side of the road with their backpacks, my first thought is always the same: Somewhere these men have mothers. That Pavlovian response…
Posts published in “Essays”
Pandemic Halloween has been gifted a soundtrack: Republican rocker Ted Nugent’s ghoulish and deafening version of the Star-Spangled Banner. There is nothing—not Carl Maria von Weber’s Wolf Glen, not Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata in D…
This account of the Hopland Stock Farm will be a testament to this historian’s self control in that I will try and NOT go into too many details about the fascinating story of A.W. Foster…
When I was growing up in the Silicon Valley during the 1960s, a mindset everyone there seemed to share was that California was not only the best place in America to be, it was the…
As I write this we’re five days out from E-Day. Most polls show Joe Biden ahead of President Trump, but as a political scientist and more importantly a labor guy, the only poll I ever…
I had two main problems in life: I was fifty pounds overweight and my next-door neighbor beat me at Scrabble every time. Actually over the years I did beat her once, by one, and we…
Jack London’s big, bold 1909 novel, Martin Eden, which some consider autobiographical, is on the screen again, this time in an Italian production that’s set in Italy and that arrived in 2019. Pietro Marcello directed. He…
Can you think of a job you can apply for, accept, then not perform the required tasks and get neither fired nor blamed? I can. I know a line of employment in which applicants can…
A couple weeks back I shared a “why I am voting” opinion from a man I coached and taught when he was a teen in the 1980s. As something of a counterpoint, let's take a…