I’m a New Mexican now, fully, but I remain a Californian by birth, family history, upbringing and nostalgia. That is where my family’s history comes together. My mother’s parents were part of California’s first great invention of itself in the early 20th century. My father came west after the Second World War to become part …
Continue reading ‘Train Leaving On Track Five For Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga’ »
Blog post of the week: David Appell’s riff on dogs and the fragility of modern existence. update: Shortly after posting, I saw this AP story: About 40 people, mostly Somalis, have drowned while crossing the Gulf of Aden on their way to Yemen in a desperate attempt to escape gunbattles back home, security officials and …
Great post from Chris Anderson that will be near and dear to the heart of every journalist I know: dealing with press release spam. This is where PR firms buy massive mailing lists of reporters and just send their “news release” about SoftwareVisCorpMeta’s new release 4.6.1, which has many interesting new features for the underwater …
On this most sacred of holidays, it’s worth pausing a moment to consider actual pirate attacks.
Big Toe and Icebat at the Village Inn Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I was going through some photos I took Thursday night when I found this. Nora and I went to the Village Inn on Central, in part because they have sugar-free apple pie and in part because it’s an endlessly amusing place. Apparently Big …
Went back to the full text in my RSS feed. Sorry for the delay, Luis. I just forgot.
I swear to god. I am not making this up. That’s Rob Browman on the left, who founded Inkstain with me back in 1998. Winning an Emmy. I swear to god. Rob’s a video producer now at MediaStorm. He and his colleagues won the Emmy for a remarkable piece about a young man’s emigration from …
I’ve been incredibly busy lately, with a couple of fun but time-consuming outside projects going on, so I secretly harbored a fantasy this year: that the New York Yankees (my chosen baseball organization) would not make the playoffs. That likely labels me as not a true fan. Maybe that’s so. Being a Yankee fan takes …
Ed McGaffigan, former aide to Sen. Jeff Bingaman, long-serving member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the guy whose endless patience helped me understand, deeply, how government really works, died today. I will repeat what I wrote in January, when it was clear that Ed was dying: Reporters depend on the generosity of smart people, …
Nov. 2, 1989, was a strange day for me. It was the last day the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner published. I did a summer at the HerEx back in 1985, as an intern, and I largely hated every minute of it. We were the scrappy second paper to the much larger Los Angeles Times, all “it …