I decided Ramparts Magazine should check out the roots of the New Jerusalem. The question was what, if anything, the hippie phenomena represented besides a pleasant excursion into love, fun and flowers by the overprivileged…
Posts published in “Essays”
Tracey crept up on you bit by bit. Eventually, you’d sense yourself relenting. The fastidious rational brain no longer bothered calculating how much of his rap was mythological, which anecdotes apocryphal, or what percentage of…
For all their breathtaking immensity, dams are oddly vulnerable things—a vulnerability that is shared and greatly intensified among the millions of people who depend on them. The engineers who have built them have gone to…
I was peacefully sipping my second cup of coffee and cycling through the morning’s newspapers back in the day when my 16-year-old daughter strode into the kitchen and plopped herself down across from me at…
Wayne McGimsey takes a quick but wistful look out the large picture window of his Boonville house, strategically located between Anderson Valley Market and Lauren’s Restaurant, before he begins to talk about times past. If…
When you drive into the Owens Valley from the south, on your left to the west is the most magnificent mountain range in the Sierra Nevada. Majestic Mt. Whitney, tallest peak in the continental United…
Cadillac, “American Standard for the World,” may be making a mistake in its slick and glossy magazine ads. In the foreground we see the latest 1975 model looking for all the world, give or take…
Saturday, July 8 — It was “Hello Kitty” day at the bayfront ballpark. The meaning of that seemed unclear to most attendees other than some very cute little kids with cat ears on. It was a…
Consider “Over the Rainbow.” Light, fragile, wistful, brimming with yearning and hope, young Dorothy sings about what she knows: Birds, trees, lemon drops and rainbows. Listeners know the same from our own fragmented memories. Judy…