Wasting time, money, and energy on The Marijuana Highway… (What's done is done and all I can do is look back with regret but that's not helpful so it's time to just move on but…
Posts published in “Essays”
California, percentage-wise, has the most human beings living in poverty of all 50 states. Its economy is foundering as techies search ever more fruitlessly for toe holds in an economy based substantially on fanciful, clickable…
“They took a clean-cut kid and made a killer out of him, that’s what they did.” –B.D. As atheists and intellectuals, Theodore and Wanda Kaczynski were atypical among second-generation Polish-Americans who had been raised Roman…
At a high school graduation one year, I was talking with a teacher about the kids who don’t want to move away. While so many of their classmates can’t wait to leave, some kids are…
To the average browser looking at a shelf of used books on Western Americana at Grassroots Books in Reno it wasn’t much. A weathered old publication called California Journal of Mines and Geology, Volume 49,…
In California, when the issue is water, the ironies seem to string out in seamless succession. Bill Warne, the man who built the California Water Project, was in government service nearly all his life, and…
I recently spent three days in the town of Sonoma, visiting friends and revisiting familiar places like Oak Hill Farm that I wrote about in Field Days, my book about farms, farmers and field workers.…
In the early 1980s, a faithful correspondent, Wanda Tinasky, who purported to be a literary bag lady who lived under bridges on the Mendocino Coast, turned out to be an erudite former San Francisco beatnik…
The NY Times showed extreme contempt for readers June 6 with a front-page story hedded “US Officials Detect Signs of Kyiv’s Counteroffensive.” Why pretend that US officials aren’t involved in major strategic decisions? Who do…