There is a widely held view that Los Angeles simply went out to the Owens Valley and stole its water. In a technical sense, that isn’t quite true. Everything the city did was legal (though…
Posts published in “Essays”
“What're you doing down here on Skid Row, Willie! Did your old man finally kick you out?” “No, I'm still living at home. I've got a job down here in a winery. It's just a…
If you have the time, and the cavalry has all the time in the world, there's no better way to learn how to ride a horse than the cavalry way. Horses are big, and they…
Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sighs and pleads in counterpoint with the airport announcements. The melody is barely audible but still unmistakable above the thunderous whisper of a thousand four-wheeled suitcases rolling across granite floors, the centripetal…
The sixties was the decade when the frightened cry of “Timber!” was everywhere in the unclean air of publishing. The flow of competitive daily newspapers dried up, and magazines great and small fell like the…
There are people who have lived all their lives in Mendocino County who don’t know where Island Mountain is and have never been to Covelo. This County is a big place with secrets and mysteries…
Way back at the start of senior year at our coastal Southern California high school, one of my very best friends Tom said to me “My big brother is living at a small commune up…
Vietnam, G.I. was a first-rate newspaper founded and edited by SP/5 Jeff Sharlet in January 1968. It was an almost-monthly tabloid. This piece is from the September 1968 issue. The last issue came out in…
It was the winter of 1956. The Vice President of the United States, Richard Nixon, was trying to convince voters that he would be a wise choice in the upcoming Presidential primaries. His advisers had…