The fact that people of color are punished disproportionately by drug prohibition is now widely acknowledged in the United States. Just last week in the New Yorker David Remick quoted the President stating: “Middle-class kids don’t get…
Posts published in “Essays”
Thirst is interesting. One can go weeks without food — especially if starting out corpulent — but only days without water. Rationing ratcheted many down to the minimum required for hydration.
You might have missed the news, or simply not given a hoot, that Stephen Hawking recently announced there are no black holes. Thus thousands of astronomers, physicists, science teachers, and graduate students are in various stages of shock that the foundation of their careers has been decreed by Mr. Black Hole himself to be a misconception, and that their decades of work have been about what isn’t there, and that billions of dollars spent on black hole-related research was essentially a big waste of money, not to mention time and space. Oops.
There were buckets of rootstock everywhere and long tables laid with cuttings; the varieties were abundant and the prices affordable.
In my neighborhood I’m surrounded by Spanish speaking Latinos who work as gardeners, maids, dry wall and bulldozing construction, nannies of Anglo children and checkers in my local Ralphs market. Only on Cinco de Mayo or when my attention is drawn to a rash of gang killings are they truly visible to me.
Oxfam recently noted that a mere 85 individuals possess as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population! Why do we, the masses, tolerate this? Probably for the same sort of reason that more people can name the members of the Baseball Hall of Fame or the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame than any living rich person beyond Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and a Koch brother.
I first came to Berlin in 2003, just after the great Claudio Abbado, who has died this week in Bologna, had passed the baton to Simon Rattle after more than a dozen years at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic. While living in Berlin, I had the chance to hear Abbado only once in what turned out to be his penultimate visit as guest conductor to the Philharmonie, one of the world’s greatest concert halls of any era, and proof that warmly welcoming and imaginative public buildings could be created in the harsh climate of the Cold War and, almost literally, in the shadow of the Iron Curtain.
You have probably heard the provocative news that the New York Times recently declared the village of Mendocino and the surrounding scenic coastline to be the Third Best Travel Destination in the World. Not the best place to visit in America or in the Western Hemisphere, but in the entire world.