The Republican convention of July 1952 was the first televised national convention. Although my younger brother Hugh was only four years old, he sat, transfixed, for all five days. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Earl Warren,…
Posts published in “Essays”
Say what we will about the silliness of Hillary Clinton claiming to be dead broke when she and Bill exited the White House in 2001 to make way for George “Picasso” Bush, at least her ridiculous boast brought to light the collective insanity of the obscenely wealthy.
"I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. ....It is the use of paranoid modes of…
City governments from San Francisco to Fort Bragg have figured out that Airbnb rentals are often subverting local business, zoning, and taxation laws and regulations.
Sacramento, my sports town, and I'm not talking about the NBA Kings. It's World Cup soccer, the USA Track and Field championships, MLS minor league soccer and Triple-A baseball. USA! The soccer chant heard round…
When I was four, my parents gave me a toy drum kit, and then later in second grade I took piano lessons for awhile, then along about 6th grade I started really getting interested in…
Ithaca, New York — Come mid-May in the Finger Lakes of central New York the landscape transforms itself as if overnight. Little more than a month ago there was ice on the Lake Cayuga and…
Funny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as simple as pie: to get somebody on the telephone. It’s especially…
A loud, crashing sound startles my young farm-hand Emily Danler awake in the dark of the night. She camps out in order to start picking berries at sun-up. My dog, inside, barks. After a physically-demanding…