By Joe Mathews It’s hard to find a villain who can bring Californians together. That’s one reason why Charlie Manson’s death produced so many media remembrances. Manson represented the time, a half-century ago, when Californians shared more experiences—even fear of the Manson family. Today, we’re too polarized to agree on who is the bad guy. […]
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To the community, The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has a vote scheduled for Thursday that could have a deleterious effect on us internet users. This 2 1/2 minute NBC report explains it. Our internet freedoms of choice and access — as well as costs — are at issue. While we public mere mortals don’t control […]
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By Russell Morse, San Francisco Chronicle My introduction to Pacific News Service came in 1996, when I was an angry teenager housed at San Francisco’s Juvenile Hall. Officially, PNS was a nonprofit news service based in San Francisco, but it had many projects, including the Beat Within, which facilitated weekly creative writing workshops with the […]
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By Larry Weitzman The issue at hand is whether the city of Placerville can legally contract with a private contractor to issue parking tickets. The law has been clear since April 23, 2002, that it cannot do so, yet Placerville has continually contracted with a private company to handle this service. By flaunting the law […]
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Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Nov. 18, 2017, Los Angeles Times. It’s been a year since Californian banned most stores from handing out flimsy, single-use plastic bags to customers. It was the first, and remains the only, U.S. state to do so. But guess what? In the end, this momentous change was not […]
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To the community, The United States Forest Service admits it has mismanaged our forests for the past 30 years. Now they are experimenting with massive daily burn projects, while concealing and refusing to discuss their serious impact on our health. The general public does not realize that the USFS no longer tries to extinguish wildfires, […]
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By Sallie Krawcheck, New York Times My first job out of college in the late 1980s was at Salomon Brothers, a trading house of cigar-smoking, expletive-spewing strivers. One day, I leaned over a colleague’s desk to work on a spreadsheet, and heard loud laughter from behind me; one of the guys was pretending to perform […]
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By Daniel R. DeNicola Public ignorance is an inherent threat to democracy. It breeds superstition, prejudice, and error; and it prevents both a clear-eyed understanding of the world and the formulation of wise policies to adapt to that world. Plato believed it was more than a threat: He thought it characterized democracies, and would lead […]
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By Richard J.S. Gutman Driving north on Highway 95 through Connecticut, I noticed a billboard advertising a local diner. Its immense letters spelled out: “Vegan, Vegetarian, Gluten-Free and Diner Classics.” I knew a seismic shift had occurred when Blue Plate Specials—hands-down favorites for nearly a century, such as meat loaf, hot turkey sandwiches, and spaghetti […]
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By Rogers Brubaker Anxieties that new communications technologies and media formats would undermine democratic citizenship go back more than a century. In the late 19th century, critics worried about sensationalistic “yellow journalism”; a cartoon from that era even used the phrase “fake news. And indeed the newly cheap mass newspapers—in reckless disregard of facts—helped push […]
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