Columns

100 years ago – November 4, 1920

All across America teachers are going on or threatening to go on strike and it disgusts me. It disgusts me that this is necessary; next to a parent or a preacher, who has more influence on our children, and our future, than a teacher? Americans...

If you’ve driven in the south end of town recently, you’ll see that the Healdsburg Avenue Improvements Project, commonly referred to as the roundabout project, is just about complete. All road surfaces have been paved and all pedestrian walkways are in place. Roadway markings and signs are currently being installed. Landscaping is the final major item to be completed; planting will begin soon and is expected to take approximately three weeks to complete.

There’s a lot of water flowing into Yosemite Valley. All the major waterfalls are gushing, including Vernal Falls. Unnamed waterfalls from snowmelt seemingly flow out of granite walls everywhere one looks.

I’ve been home for about 10 days, minus a few “essential” moments at work. I haven’t minded, honestly, because I’m an introvert Gen X’er who likes being at home. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t learned a few things in the last week.  1) I’m...

With Astronauts gracing the covers of LIFE and Look and other weekly magazines, the American space program was big news in the '60s. These brave test pilots were presented as the epitome of American maleness, and the only females we saw who were part of the space program were the women who quilted the multiple layers of fabric for each custom-fitted space suit! Fifty years later, Theodore Melfi’s perfectly named film Hidden Figures brings the unsung heroes of the space program out from the shadows—and we finally discover that several of the mathematical geniuses who made the program a success were female African Americans! In this retelling of the quintessential American fable, those dashing spacemen are little more than passengers aboard a heaving, clunking, fuel-spewing chunk of hardware. The real heroes are the genius “slide-rule-jockey’s-of-color” (beautifully portrayed by Viola Davis, Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae), who figured out how to loosen gravity’s inexorable hold on we frail human beings. It’s nice to have a film where the audience cheers for the underlying decency and determined humanity epitomized by the three women combating the solidly built wall of racism, sexism and chauvinism that were signatures for that time and place.

To many of us, especially to those now marching in our streets in protest over police brutality, this feels like a moment of inflection, when our community and entire nation makes a decisive change of direction and policy. These are very rare and hard-won...