Born October 19th, 1862 Auguste Lumière—the elder of the two brothers, who later became the world’s first filmmakers—would have celebrated his 150th birthday last week. If one defines the cinema as the projecting of a…
Posts tagged as “essays”
One of the first lessons that my mother learned as a beginning teacher in Boonville in 1956 was to become friendly with as many of the staff at the elementary school as possible in the…
Tourists in California are missing a great opportunity. Where else can you travel north-south on either of two major highways and be so close to so many prisons - pardon me, correctional facilities - some in plain sight. And not just any prisons. Famous prisons, notorious prisons, prisons immortalized in song.
October 24th marks the birthday of Sarah Josepha Hale 224 years ago. Practically every English speaker recognizes her eight line poem by its first five words: “Mary had a little lamb…” Sarah Josepha Hale was…
We reached the top of the cliff, and the blue Pacific spread like infinity before us. “The ocean, the ocean!” the children cried, springing from their seats in delight. There was no place for a…
“The chief cause for the impending collapse of the world—the cause sufficient in and by itself—is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life:…
In 1998, novelist and journalist Jane Futcher and her partner, midwife Erin Carney, joined a Year to Live group in Marin. The impact was profound: based upon the writings of Stephen Levine, the meetings, during…
In 1950 the journal Mind featured a curious proposal for determining if a computer could think. Submitted by code-breaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing, the idea was that an examiner would pose questions to a…