The Entroporium

On a week when my home state has signed into law one of the world’s most sweeping environmental policies, it’s fitting to take a brief look at one of San Francisco’s other major contributions to the greening of America. This one, though, took place over 50 years ago. In the early 1950s, the California Division [...]

Ars Technica posted an interesting article on US soldiers’ use of personal technology in Iraq. It brings to mind a number of questions about not just how Americans look to the less-developed world, but also about the ability to keep troop discipline and our operations under wraps. And that’s just the start. In a world where copyright violation is considered a serious problem and child labor is often used to make “Frauda” knock-off bags, is it really appropriate for our military to be shopping for bootleg DVDs in the local markets, encouraging that kind of commerce?

Tradition: Our primeval ancestors’ language and communal behavior were music-based. “This wasn’t language as we know it, in which words are assembled to convey meaning, but was more like a phrase of music. The individual notes mean nothing, but the sound as a whole can touch us to the quick. Or, in the case of [...]

Howard Dully during his transorbital lobotomy, Dec. 16, 1960. George Washington University Gelman Library For fear of being one of those bloggers who write “Guess what I heard on NPR today,” I still need to recommend this remarkable story. Howard Dully, a 56-year old man, spent two years researching the circumstances behind his lobotomy at [...]

Up on the playa, someone asked me to tell her something about me that might surprise her. After thinking for a moment, I came up with the most shocking thing I could think of in that place at that time: I am a diehard, dyed-green Oakland A’s fan. (The shock is the baseball fan bit, [...]

A friend of a friend of a friend sent out this account by E-mail yesterday. Last Saturday he managed to get into the city. Here’s what he saw: Everyone, I just returned from my first trip to Louisiana this weekend since Katrina. I spent the entire trip back trying to decide if I wanted to [...]

I get back from my annual Burning Man-forced news blackout and frickin’ Armageddon hit a huge swath of the country. I knew going up that things were going to be bad; my last news as my radio signal faded in the desert was that the levees had broken and the water was spilling in. I [...]

The news that Teenage Fanclub would release its first record in five years came as a welcome surprise. I had assumed that Scotland’s finest working pop band had thrown in the towel, and when the news rolled out that Tortoise’s John McEntire would be producing, this became easily one of my most anticipated releases of [...]

In the dark days before MP3 blogs and the internets, it was a lot harder to come by music news out of the mainstream. Now put yourself back in 1981 and 14 years old. Even for a kid working in a record store, there were very few outlets to find out what the latest on [...]