TIME FLIES · PRINT ENDURES
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The bird next door: the time an Oakland turkey rose to captivate the world
The wild turkey of Morcom Rose Garden became world famous for being beautiful, quirky, rather hostile, and definitely insane — not unlike Oakland itself.
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All cooped up
These three beauties showing how shelter-in-place is done. But their social distancing still needs some work.
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“Everybody Lies”
The Google search box is the new confessional box for a digital age. A place where deepest fears and forbidden wishes find new, unfiltered expression. In this new confessional, we don’t seek salvation— we seek information. And the questions we ask it often reveal things about us that were previously hidden, or misunderstood. Subtitled, “Big
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“Rise of the Robots”
What I’m reading : “Rise of the Robots,” by Martin Ford. Humans have a love-hate relationship with automation. We love automation when it gives us dishwashers, washing machines, and robot vacuum cleaners to relieve the drudgery of menial labors. But we hate automation when it enables telemarketers to endlessly spam our phones, corporations to displace
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Books I skipped this week
I had every intention of reading these books, but after reading the first some-odd pages, I became consumed in other things, and skipped…. Is it acceptable to recommend a book one hasn’t read? That’s neither here nor there in this moment. I liked what I read in the opening pages of each book. For reasons,
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“A Gentleman in Moscow”
Imagine being a member of the wealthy aristocracy in a grand city in the early 20th century. Your days and nights are filled with social encounters and clever repartee in every breathing moment. Servants are all around you, never betraying any hint of resentment at their confinement to a lower station, nor anything but utter
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Wheelbarrow full of books
I never pass up the opportunity to push a wheelbarrow full of books.
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“The Secret of Thunder Mountain”
The photos tell the story of this vintage adventure from 1952. Set in the deserts of the American Southwest, at the dawn of the nuclear era. A land of grit and desolation, where bold and wild characters search for rocks worth more than gold. Fran Striker’s journalistic writing style lends credence to the stark comic
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“Little Fires Everywhere”
Where do we follow the rules, and where do we justify breaking them? Do our pasts determine what we deserve in the future? And is it ever possible to leave your past behind? These are some of the questions I hope the novel raises. —Celeste Ng, from the Penguin Readers Guide Little Fires Everywhere, by
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“Lost in a good game”
Is it worse for young people to experience killing and death IRL (in real life), or in a video game? This is not merely an academic question. Deranged individuals now regularly commit IRL mass shootings using IRL weapons of war to murder innocent people. Yet those weapons of war only exist because they are used
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“What is not yours is not yours”
I’m loving this collection of dreamlike short stories that turns on the idea of keys as a metaphor for our hidden perceptions. A refreshing stream of clear, evocative, sparse yet mesmerizing prose that ebbs and flows into ever deeper locks of subconscious meaning and insight as each story unfolds. The tales are interlocking, but in
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“Barracoon”
The story of Oluale Kossola, survivor of the last known slave ship to cross the Atlantic, told in his own words. In 1927, famed anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston spent three months with the then-eighty-six-year-old Lewis to preserve his story. Kossola vividly describes being captured by a rival village in Africa as a young
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“The Soul of an Octopus”
Strange and beautiful, weirdly intelligent, cold yet emotive, octopuses are in a word, fascinating. Octopuses see and feel the world around them in profoundly different ways then we do. Each tentacle has its own network of neurons—a mind of its own. What I love about this book is how the author describes her interactions with
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“The Man in the High Castle”
Conquered. Occupied. Stripped of power and privilege. Dick’s classic 1962 novel imagines life in an America that lost World War II. The Nazis and Japanese fascists have conquered the United States and divided it into territories, the spoils of war, over which they rule supreme. The Pacific States are controlled by fascist Japan– the South
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“Cadillac Desert”
California has had abundant rainfall this year. Reservoirs are full and snowpacks are impressive. We’ve had so much rain that complaining about it has become de rigeur. So why am I reading this 30-year old treatise on “the American West and its disappearing water”? Partly because I recently spent a week in the Mojave desert
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“Zardoz”
A gigantic stone head levitates over a futuristic grass-covered landscape, spewing guns from its cavernous mouth to its bloodthirsty followers below. Sean Connery (a.k.a. the original James Bond) is among them as Zed the Exterminator. He’s bare-chested in a red loincloth, and sports a black ponytail and 1970s handlebar moustache. A dazzling menage of bizarre
