Two recent comments, published in opposition to the planned new courthouse, suggest security measures are overrated as there’s no history of breaches or escape attempts within anyone’s memory. Ahem. I have a memory, and it…
Posts tagged as “essays”
The lyricist and composer Sammy Cahn once quipped that Burt Bacharach “was the only songwriter who didn’t look like a dentist.” Many, indeed millions, were similarly bewitched by the looks of this greatest song-master of…
The Temporary Inmate “Charles Pernasilice, Haunted by the Violence at Attica, Dies at 70,” said the hed above a photo of a lanky, handsome young man standing outside a municipal building with his right fist in…
The Governor of Georgia was waiting on the front steps of his mansion as our vehicles approached. You wouldn’t have guessed that he was the Governor of Georgia, as he was dressed in white pants,…
Looking at Richard Avedon’s black-and-white photos of the Chicago Seven which peered out at me in a recent issue of The New Yorker felt like seeing the dead. That’s not surprising. With the exception of…
No better human being exists than a good cop, and no worse creature than a bad one. The truth is, the good cop and the bad cop are often the same cop, at different moments,…
In early 1950s television, Richard Carlson starred in “I Led Three Lives.” Each episode started with a dramatic voiceover: “This is the fantastically true story of the Herbert A. Philbrick, who for nine frightening years…
The Salton Sea, its glory days long gone, is now a 35-mile- long growing hazard to public health for miles around, a mortal danger to the water fowl migrating on the Pacific Flyway, death to…