Even before the dawning of Corona Time, the present age was marked by its inward-looking obsessions—selfie, blog, podcast, Facebook, Twitter. The desire to eat the carefully prepared supper must wait until the urge to Instagram…
Posts published in “Essays”
In 1967, the year Terence "Kayo" Hallinan was sworn in as a lawyer, thousands of young people would come to San Francisco for the "Summer of Love" and many thousands more would go to Vietnam,…
Twenty-five days (as of last week) into an historic statewide lockdown, Fort Bragg is feeling the strain. Like Mendocino County as a whole, the town is seeing a marked surge in interfamily disputes, domestic violence,…
Like his father before him, Terence Hallinan was prevented from practicing law by the California Bar Association. Vincent Hallinan's license had been suspended for three years (1957-1960) after he was convicted of federal income tax…
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO I pulled one of the dumbest stunts of my life: I started a band with a 14-year-old bassist who’d never played bass, a 12-year-old drummer who’d never played drums, and considerably older…
I read with great interest Chris Calder’s two great articles back to back on Sheriff Kendall in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. What spiked my interest was that the Sheriff came to Santa Rosa when he…
Last January, before all hell broke loose, Seven Stories Press republished Upton Sinclair’s 891-page anthology, The Cry for Justice, subtitled An Anthology of Social Protest with the original introduction by Jack London and a new introduction by Chris…
Greetings from the epicenter. A capital of culture is a nice place to be, but not the capital of a virus—or so you would think. Yet it’s sometimes better to be in the middle of…
Sitting in the morning sun on the front porch of my house next to the Cascadilla Gorge in Ithaca, New York earlier this week, I listened to a cardinal singing to the accompaniment of the…