The rains fell so redundantly this spring that I tired of checking the forecast in the newspaper. I took to wearing a green raincoat with plastic overalls on sunny days, sweating as I carried buckets…
Posts published in “Essays”
There are so many smellier corpses in the New York Times’s mausoleum, not to mention that larger graveyard of truth known as the Fourth Estate, that it’s hard to get too upset about what Jayson…
Everyday chaos slips closer: a scream, a senior center closing, gunshot lead-in on the five o'clock news. Outside construction workers tear up the street while mean little women let their mean little dogs piss on…
I spent every night at the Washoe House, playing cribbage with the bartender, between my sophomore and junior years of college, although I was only 20 — too young to drink legally. Tony didn’t care.…
In a few weeks my mother and I will be gone from Anderson Valley, a place I have lived in and loved for three decades
In early 1969, less than a year after his Baath Party seized power, Saddam Hussein spoke to an aggrieved family who complained that one of their number had been unjustly executed. Spurning a suggestion that…
Found objects — objets trouvés, if you opt for high-toned Gallic terminology — have always appealed to artists. Recently read about a scavenger who’s harvested bushels of discarded paper shards, selections from which will be…
One of today’s prevailing myths is that the American media has a liberal bias, that it is a press fueled by left ideology. Leftists, of course, disagree with this notion, claiming that the media is…
On the face of it, Hill Road correctional facility inmate Kenton Kor seems to be the kind of career criminal the three strikes law was designed to keep behind bars. In and out of jail…