The staggering incoherence of the election campaign only mirrors the shocking incapacity of the American public, from top to bottom, to process the tendings of our time. The chief tending is permanent worldwide economic contraction.…
Posts published in “Essays”
So it’s Friday and I’m having one of those mornings where I feel certain the universe is an all-powerful sentient being picking on me for no good reason. Put another way, I’m feeling sorry for…
“Adults should face the fact that they don't like adolescents,” wrote Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, shortly after the Columbine school shooting in 1999, “and that they have used high school to isolate the…
Though there are far fewer examples of apples today than when I was a boy it is good to know that last weekend's gathering in Boonville was still called the Mendocino County Fair and Apple…
London — Like the Brits themselves the weather on the last weekend of the BBC Proms—the biggest and longest-running music festival in the world—couldn’t make up its mind. Blistering temperatures gave way to humid showers.…
You should never refuse a friend a favor, I thought to myself. You ought always be one upon whom counting can be done, like an abacus or the common hand. The lists to which your…
Wounded Knee. Enough said? Reason enough to be going to Washington DC to see the new National Museum of the American Indian. Not that the massacre history of the tribes in the museum's historic intent,…
Mr. Johnson was the reason I wrote “Chemistry” when asked to fill in the blank entitled “Major: ____” in the fall of 1962 when enrolling at Fresno State College. Mr. Johnson was my highly entertaining…
