Well, at least the poobahs cleared a path to the annual orgy of Christmas, which, along with the S&P 500, have become proxies for the American economy. Lately, the Christmas season starts directly after Halloween,…
Posts published in “Essays”
After two weeks spent exploring the northlands I think the funniest thing I saw was a bumper sticker that said “I drove the Alaska Marine Highway!” Why funny? The Alaska Marine Highway is a ferry…
My brother, a software systems analyst and project manager, sent me the following quote from the book Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies by Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda that my brother says sums up…
I just returned from the California State Grange Convention in Sebastopol Grange last weekend. The state Grange is definitely on the rise even in the strange adversity from its National affiliation. A vigorous collection of…
Along with the souls of a few forlorn and unlucky violin works of the eighteenth century, Henry Eccles’s G Minor Sonata published in 1720 has spent much of its afterlife in the Purgatory of the…
E.M. Forster, best known for his novels Room With A View, Passage To India and Howard’s End, published a great short story in 1909 entitled The Machine Stops, an extremely prescient imagining of a future we may soon inhabit. Forty years before the advent of television, Forster foresaw computers and the worldwide internet, the demolition of the global environment, and the total collapse of technological society.
When I was a child, I wrote “I hate Daddy” on the flowered yellow wallpaper above my bed in my room in Baltimore. When my friends asked why and how I'd gotten away with this,…
For the past couple of months this column has been following a young man from the Mendocino Coast named William and his encounters with Mendocino County’s mental health system. William suffers from schizoaffective disorder and…
Del Berg, of Tuolumne County, is the last known member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, one of the nearly 3,000 Americans who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain in the opening years of World War II.