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Posts published in “Essays”

Tooch Colombo, The Last Great California Hunter

Tooch Colombo isn’t like me, most of my friends and family members. When he wants to eat meat he doesn’t go shopping at Safeway or Whole Foods. At the age of 75, he goes for…

Is College Worth It?

While president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson asked a group of alumni a provocative question: Would Abraham Lincoln have been a better president if he had been college-educated? Wilson answered his own question with a…

My Encounter With Augustus Owsley Stanley

In 1967, there was a concert in Pittsburgh, with the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs and me, playing the part of a stand-up satirist. There were two shows, both completely sold out, and…

Lurching Right at PBS & NPR

The tumultuous managerial shakeup at National Public Radio headquarters for trivial verbal miscues once again has highlighted the ludicrous corporatist right-wing charge that public radio and public TV are replete with left-leaning or leftist programming.…

Sports Notes

In one of the early Sports Notes columns, we boldly predicted that Roger Federer would become the greatest player in the history of the tennis. That was almost ten years ago when Federer was 20…

Spy Rock Memories, Part 4

As soon as you give something a name, it begins to die, says an old Chinese proverb, and its corollary might be that as soon as you get comfortable somewhere, things start going wrong. I…

Bosco: The Curse That Keeps On Giving

In the more than a third of a century since Douglas H. Bosco first carved himself out as a fixture of the California North Coast's power structure, one of the surest guides to locating systemic…

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