Illuminated Media

As of this writing, secret police are cruising the streets of at least one American city, hustling citizens engaged in First Amendment-protected acts of protest off the streets in unmarked cars, where they are detained without charges in federal buildings. Stated so plainly, is it really alarmist to accuse our president of playing at Pinochet? […]

Someone put me on a panel about Big Tech — Google and Facebook, mostly — and then someone else wrote an article about it. The event was at City College, and was staged by the Press Club of San Francisco. Check out the article here. It was a fun panel. Also starring the extremely astute […]

I don’t know where my old Muffs cassette is these days, but that band carved out a little space in my music-loving heart, and I was so sad to learn that their frontwoman, Kim Shattuck, has died way too young — age 56, of ALS. It’s not just their catchy little snarky/world-weary/get-over-it ditties. It’s the […]

Here’s what I remember about President George Herbert Walker Bush, on the occasion of his passing. In 1990, on a meandering cross-country road trip, I drove out of Yosemite National Park to see an enormous column of smoke reaching into the sky, so titanic and towering I at first wasn’t able to make sense of […]