This is the story of Shirley and Spike, as much as I know and can recall. A very odd couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was 1967 or so and my band was playing at…
Posts published in “Essays”
Tom Clark lived, for decades, as his health declined, on a busy street in Berkeley, in a house with many steep stairs. Crossing, haltingly, one of those streets he was struck by a car and…
The airwaves these days are thick with concerned talk about the world we are leaving to our children and grandchildren. Occasionally statistics are even thrown in – usually compiled by old folks like we are,…
One hundred years ago the Boston Red Sox scored only nine runs in a six game World Series, and won, four games to two over the even more hitless Chicago Cubs. Babe Ruth started and…
Eli Lilly got FDA approval to market Prozac in December 1987. The company had a brilliant strategy for making it a blockbuster: promote not the drug so much as the disorder — "Clinical Depression," a supposedly widespread "mental illness" that, by the way, Lilly's new "Selective Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitor" could supposedly treat.
I know what you’re all thinking: How’s ol’ Flynn doing? Oh, I know you’ve all got your own fish to fry, particularly in this parlous, combustible summer, and with the very flames licking at your…
I was starting my first year at Rutgers Law School in Newark, following a zigzag (should I say Zig Zag?) course that had taken me from a small hill farm in northern Vermont, to Harvard…
New characters in the panoply of history come to light at the Kelley House on a regular basis, often due to generous donations of time and materials to the archives and museum. A case in…
Two nights after we'd established our raucous brood in Mendocino County's serene summer hills, not far from the unsuspecting hamlet of Boonville, we got our first lesson in the psycho-pathology of the pre-pube criminal, the…