Recent reports that Zac Efron, who rose to stardom as the teenage heartthrob lead of Disney’s three High School Musical movies, is eager to do a to do a fourth film in the series sent…
Posts published in “Essays”
I went to see Woodward playing Redford Dustin Hoffman played by Carl Bernstein Martha Mitchell, who really blew the whistle never got mentioned. She got no credit on the silver screen. Barry Sussman, whose obit…
“If you don't like opera, why do you go?” People have been asking me this over the years because of this tendency I have to make fun of it. It so happens that I like…
The televised spectacle of the January 6th hearings will not restore democracy or halt the rise of the far right. The hearings are a desperate ploy by a doomed political class. The Select Committee to…
For planting this item in the East Bay Express, the Claremont Hotel in Oakland deserves a Perfy (the PR industry’s coveted Perfumes-of-Arabia award for best cleansing of a company’s image): “Some cities have wine trails.…
They’re driving on South Dora, arrive at the stop sign at Observatory Avenue and watch a man tug at his belt buckle, drop his trousers and squat a few inches above the sidewalk. The driver,…
When I walked into the day room of the Bay Area board and care facility where my friend Sally lives, a pall of gloom had descended on the place as bored-looking residents sat in front…
Accessibility of knowledge was crucial to the Enlightenment. That ethos was embodied in the celebrated Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, the first of its seventeen volumes appearing in 1751, the year after Johann Sebastian Bach’s…
I was in Nuremberg during the war crimes trials which followed WWII. My father, Brig. General Telford Taylor, was Chief Prosecutor during the second, American phase. The French, Russian and British staffs had gone home…