A stern visage, the very picture of 19th century rectitude, looked down on passersby from a banner at the corner of McAllister and Larkin, fin de siècle San Francisco. The banner celebrated the adjacent law…
Posts published in “Essays”
In 1968 I was a 17-year-old philosophy major living in the dorms at U.C. Riverside. Along with all the usual adjustments to living away from home, like eating dorm food, one incident is nearly as…
I ditched my last substance addiction on May 28th, 1988. I was at a party talking to the wife of a friend. As we conversed, I put a Marlboro into my mouth and said, —You…
Word on the street is, things are pretty rough out there, "out there" being the world in general and the United States specifically. I hear, and read, about it every day, in forum after forum,…
We are looking more and more like France on the eve of its revolution in 1789. Our classes are distributed differently, but the inequity is just as sharp. America’s “aristocracy,” once based strictly on bank…
It there’s one comfort to be had in the mad scrum of high summer tourism it is that the crowds can still be escaped, even with just a few deft steps or well-chosen road miles.…
At a New York museum last week I noticed two objects on exhibit, one of them a mirror, the other a camera that was focused on the mirror. The mirror and the camera, which we…
Donald Trump is a living, walking ad for the importance of the humanities. He’s too old to have coasted through the 1960s untouched by any of its idealism and issues of social justice, but there…
UDJ reporter Ashley Tressel gravely misrepresented my July 11 remarks to the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors during public comment on the county’s new cannabis cultivation regulations. What I said was that my partner and…