I first heard of Bill Cosby in 1964 when I was working as a counselor at a summer camp for kids from East Palo Alto. One day, as I was imitating my fast-talking uncle Howard to entertain my group of ten and eleven-year-old boys, one of my charges opined, “You sound like Bill Cosby.”
Posts published in “Essays”
We returned four days later (Thursday, Dec 4) at another low tide. Three more inches of rain had fallen the previous couple days. The river was noticeably muddier, and the mouth's channel was deeper and wider.
Historically the response to the crisis of overdevelopment is more development. This is why so many civilizations undergo their most intensive building activities in the final years before collapse.
The journey up the coast was choppy, the boat too far out to get a good look at the shore. While the other passengers spread out in sleeping bags over the deck, 15-year-old Tommy Bogue…
According to new research by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the richest one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold eleven per cent of the nation’s total wealth. That is a higher share than the top .01 percent held in 1929, just prior to the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. And keep in mind we are speaking of the reported wealth of the top .01 percent, which is very likely a small fraction of the wealth they have secreted offshore.
It’s now over three and a half years since the earthquake-triggered nuclear disaster in Japan, and concerns regarding the impacts continue. In Japan itself, the impacts have been huge and disastrous indeed, depending on location…
Each day in Florence begins simply enough. After the breakfast dishes and setting out washing to dry on the terrace (dryers are still not in common use by most Florentine citizens), we walk down to…
Lucky and Cherry lived on the second floor of an old two family house in Newark, New Jersey. Above them was the unfinished attic with its casement windows, which would be blown open by strong…
I'm in a private prison now, after spending a couple of years at the notorious sinkhole Tehachapi. It's run by a company called Geo — not, I'm pretty sure, the GM subsidiary that made those…