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…
Posts published in “Essays”
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…
Berkeley, 13 April 2020 — It had to happen. And now it has. People, not statistics or anecdotes, have died. They’re people, caught up in the pandemic, who my family knew. One, in his early…
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned what follows here in this space before, and I hate to repeat myself, but it has particular relevance now. I'd hate to be one of those people who repeats a…
Would the AVA's resident expert on the media, Flynn Washburne, regard this story as newsworthy? Probably not! After all, it’s not about his backyard and not about anyone he knows. Chances are, you don’t know…
With daily news of the spreading Coronavirus in my mind I picked up a two-door Toyota
That ominous cracking sound you hear is the Noyo Center For Marine Science cabal falling through the ice. Can't hear it? Maybe you're not in the club. The Noyo Center, Fort Bragg’s ocean-oriented, not-for-profit whalebone…
Ever see the sign for Burke Hill south of Ukiah and wonder who Burke was? Here's part of the answer. Alexander Burke was born in Sparta, Tennessee in the summer of 1813. At age twenty…