Meditations

Other than a downpour during the night a couple weeks ago, it was the first rain of the year. Living in a land where it doesn’t rain for four or…

A collision between the partisan hopes of the left and the nationalistic delusions of the right is intensifying in the United States. Which will prevail, the Constitution, or authoritarianism?

When I lived in San Francisco I knew an Argentinean fellow who, as a student, had been swept up in Guerra Sucia, the “Dirty War”—a period of extreme repression from…

Ignoring the culture that gave rise to Trump and Trumpism, and ignoring the fact that Americans just don’t like each other anymore, mavens of the media drop chestnuts like this:…

Arriving by bike at the little creek at the edge of town, I find that the recent rains have turned it into a small torrent. Sitting under a cobalt sky,…

Hindsight, the cliché goes, is 20/20. In truth, hindsight is only as clear as one’s perception of the present.

Driving down the short, steep grade into the canyon just beyond town, I passed a score of young people with shovels and buckets, obviously returning from trail work. From that…

You know things have come down to it when a mainstream pundit begins her otherwise boilerplate column with: “In the end, which is where we live now…” So is the…