Nobody Knows

When I was eighteen, I spent several months working as a bus girl at a diner. It was a cheerful-looking place, facing San Francisco Bay. The kitchen was L-shaped: the…

Strandings

The footage is eerie, a plunge through a dim world of lush seaweed, the underwater forests of the treeless Arctic. Objects swim into view: a bell, a small fish, a…

Preaching to The Choir

Once, on a river-rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, I traveled with a charming, good-humored man who happened to run an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He liked…

Now and Then

The present is by common definition the instant between the not yet and the already, a moment as narrow and treacherous as a tightrope. But you might instead define it…

Occupied Territory

One morning, as I walked on the quiet, mostly wooded King Mountain trail above San Francisco Bay, a dog not much smaller than I and possessed of much sharper teeth…

Facing the Furies

In 1979, a catchy Kenny Rogers song called “Coward of the County” made it to the top of the country charts. It’s about a man named Tommy, whose father, a…

Tyranny of the Minority

Think of our democracy as a house we built in 1776, big enough only for Christian, property-owning white men. Over the next two centuries, various groups struggled to make it…

The Monument Wars

For years, whenever I was in New Orleans, I used to run past an equestrian statue just outside the voluptuously green City Park. Though it is situated at a major…

Coming Apart

In early 2015, fire ravaged a three-story building at the corner of 22nd and Mission in San Francisco. The blaze killed Mauricio Orellana, an immigrant from El Salvador, and destroyed…

Division Street

Chances are that you are living the good life, at least in the most fundamental sense. You have the liberty to leave your home and the security of a home…

Giantess

The radical is so often imagined as the marginal that sometimes the truly subversive escapes detection just by showing up in a tuxedo instead of a T-shirt or a ski…

The Ideology of Isolation

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that…

The Habits of Highly Cynical People

On April 24, 1916 — Easter Monday — Irish republicans in Dublin and a handful of other places staged an armed rebellion against British occupation. At the time, the British…

Bird in a Cage

There are two things I think about nearly every time I row out into San Francisco Bay. One is a passage from Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain, in which he…

Power in Paris

Can the earth be saved by bureaucrats in long meetings, reciting jargon and acronyms while surrounded by leaning towers of documents? That is what’s supposed to happen in France this…

The Mother of All Questions

I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of people was…

In the Shadow of the Storm

Ten years ago this month, on the day Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I was at Camp Casey, an informal encampment outside George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch, listening to…

Shooting Down Man the Hunter

Sooner or later in conversations about who we are, who we have been, and who we can be, someone will tell a story about Man the Hunter. It’s a story…

Abolish High School

Ididn’t go to high school. This I think of as one of my proudest accomplishments and one of my greatest escapes, because everyone who grows up in the United States…

The War of the World

On a single day in July of 1943, more than 500 Allied planes bombed Rome, killing 1,500 people. The city got off lightly compared with Naples, which was attacked 200…

Poison Apples

Thirty years ago, Apple Computer launched a new product with a messianic commercial in which legions of blank-faced, coverall-clad workers march, as if in a trance, through a strange industrial…

Cassandra Among the
Creeps

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf…

The Octopus and Its Grandchildren

When an 1882 cartoon in San Francisco’s Wasp newspaper depicted the Southern Pacific Railroad as an octopus with the whole state of California in its far-reaching tentacles, it launched an…

Are You Sleeping?

In search of a good night’s rest

Insomnia

If only sleep could be hoarded, accumulated, and traded; if only you could store it up for a rainy day or borrow it from friends or buy it on the…

The Separating Sickness

How leprosy teaches empathy

News From Nowhere

Iceland’s polite dystopia

Detroit Arcadia

Exploring the post-American landscape

The Uses of Disaster

Notes on bad weather and good government

The blue of distance