There was no need to feel sorry for anyone on another famous show whose central theme was munificence. As long as people were strictly fictional characters, anything went. We could revel freely in their defeats,…
Posts published in “Essays”
Arrayed behind the twenty-one-year-old Harry Belafonte on the night of his unlikely debut as a singer in January of 1949 was a quartet of modern music greats: Al Haig on piano, Max Roach on drums,…
One of the highlights of my mother’s life was when she saw Queen Elizabeth serenely glide by in her royal carriage, gloved hand awave, in the heart of London. I was standing right next to…
This is not a San Francisco gloom and doom story. There have been too many of them lately. San Franciscans feel sorry for themselves and wallow in despair. You might call this a health and…
The news of the “wild man of Oroville” went out on the wire. On August 30, 1911, the San Francisco Examiner carried a short piece titled “Last Lost Indian.” Alfred Kroeber read the report. His…
The American West was explored by white men half a century before the first colonists set foot on Virginia’s beaches, but it went virtually uninhabited by whites for another three hundred years. In 1539, Don…
In an April 4th ceremony in the vast and bleak plaza in front of NATO’s $1 billion, 250 square meter Brussels headquarters conducted in the presence of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and U. S. Secretary…
Statistics Assault us constantly, and are absorbed, even ones that, on their face, seem far-fetched. Two-thirds of high-school students can’t identify the United States, handed an unlabeled map, or name combatants in the Civil War.…
San Quentin Prison, which stands on a point of land just south of the Marin side of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, is the oldest prison in California and one of the most famous in the…