Borrowing from others, I offer some lessons learned about life in this century and the last Today is my birthday. I am almost a quarter of the way into this new century after having been alive for more than half of the latter one. A recent podcast tipped me to…

A few weeks ago, the San Francisco Chronicle informed its paying readers — of which I am one to the tune of $1,011 a year — that it’s printed Sports section couldn’t report results of some games because of new, earlier deadlines. The editors promised us the latest news online. …

What strikes me when I return to California from Mexico is not the presence of affluence, but the extent of it, the width and breadth of the comforts and conveniences it buys, the immensity of the shopping areas and the efficiency of the paved corridors that connect them, the newness…

There is no more tenuous concept than time. Hours, days and years are inventions of man, an application of accounting and order to a life whose beginning is mysterious but whose conclusion is both clear and capricious. Time, as a mechanism, constructs a façade of stability behind which extends a…

Katie Kitamura’s novel is to be savored for is clarity and humanity Anonymity is antithetical to intimacy, is it not? To label something as anonymous is to proclaim not only mystery, but also distance, possible menace, and perhaps even tawdriness. An anonymous letter, an anonymous phon call, anonymous sex. …

Combined with Covid, it’s a killer of children’s dreams Poverty kills. Not all at once — although the bullets that breed in poverty will do that. Poverty kills slowly. It grinds and grinds and grinds. Until it reduces whatever hope you had to a dusty smudge of resentment, befouls whatever…

The list is long and you’re on it — the arithmetic of gratitude I have a life many would envy. The infrastructure is one of comfort: a small (by the standards of the neighborhood) but distinctive home; plenty to eat and drink; all the mechanical and digital accoutrements of the…

“COVID arrived in Oaxaca as a ravenous beast and feasted on the lives of the poor.” I have not told you about Oaxaca, the last visit, now a full month ago, because there is so much to say, even though most of it is the same, and so little of…

Bookshelf — Wildland, The Making of America’s Fury, Evan Osnos Immediately after Donald Trump got elected in 2016, friends from other countries like Mexico, Venezuela, or Spain asked me: How did this happen? How could Americans vote for such a thuggish clown? I never developed a succinct answer from the…