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Posts tagged as “essays”

Flying Rivers & Mega-Droughts

When it comes to areas of the world being racked by drought, one of the few that has had at least as hard a time as California is central and southern Brazil. Whereas the US's…

Easy In Washington Square Park

It’s commonly believed that more than 20,000 people are buried under Washington Square Park, used as a cemetery and home to freed slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Scoring Pynchon

The baroque density of Thomas Pynchon’s novels for half-a-century has dissuaded filmmakers from trying to turn any of them into movies. Paul Thomas Anderson’s valiant—or perhaps just plain crazy—cinematic confrontation with Inherent Vice is the…

Mendocino Talking: Mike Zarkowski

Mike owns Hobo Guitars in Ukiah. He has been a working musician all his life while also building and repairing guitars and other musical instruments.

Alan Watts Befriends Me (1969)

My first few weeks living at Waldo Point made me realize that I wasn’t going anywhere else anytime soon. I liked hanging out on the Sausalito waterfront, meeting Becker’s friends and neighbors, mostly boat people,…

Trillions

“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.” Yes, those were the words spoken by a man who was Governor of California and President of the United States, a man revered by millions of People With Small Brains. I stumbled upon that example of Reagan’s snotty idiocy while hunting for cogent things people have said about waste, and though Reagan was rarely cogent—and the world might be a better place had he, in his youth, sat for a few hours at a desk under which was stored a year’s waste from a nuclear power plant—his remark struck me as an apt preamble to the problem I want to discuss with you.

Jim Clark Could Give Pot Smugglers A Bad Name

A new movie recreates the March 7, 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama that was violently suppressed by law enforcement and shamed Congress into passing a voters' rights bill. Howard Zinn had spent time…

The Stony Lonesome: Mendo Rocks!

Here at the Stony Lonesome offices, high atop a glittering skyscraper rising majestically heavenward from the undulating dunes of Abu Dhabi, we are nothing if not brutally, transparently honest. Just this morning Vicki, my gorgeous…

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