Working on many projects over my 12 years in office, I have been reminded of the legacies of the Supervisors before me. Ig Vella, Janet Nicholas, Michael Cale, and Valerie Brown have all left their imprints in the planning of the Valley. Their legacies include... Continue
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By Seth Dolinsky Happy 2025. This is the second in a series of articles on our local farms, focusing on those committed to feeding Sonomans on a large scale. The first on the list is one of the oldest farms in Sonoma Valley, selling staples,... Continue
Well, 2025 is off to a raucous start, what with wildfires burning LA and winter freezing DC. So after a few weeks of grim determination, this correspondent has set aside those silly Resolutions until warmer weather, or 2026, whichever comes last. Thankfully, this year our... Continue
Human cancer is a little like Voldemort, the Dark Lord and Über Villain in the Harry Potter saga. Like Voldemort, Cancer is "he who shall not be named." Very often, people don't want to talk about cancer, when someone has it, when someone else has... Continue
Fallen leaves, yellow and brown, cover the courtyard. High in the branches, a few green stragglers hang on stubbornly. Looking up, I feel like I’m watching myself hanging on, and then suddenly, I’m watching myself watching myself. Who am I, the watcher or the watched?... Continue
My wife and I recently went to see “A Complete Unknown” about Bob Dylan, and it prompted a night of remembrance and reflection on my life in the mid-sixties. Brought up in the middle-class suburbs of New York City, I enrolled at NYU’s Institute of... Continue
My son Matt took Satchel to Mountain Cemetery on Veterans Day to honor Satchel’s great-grandfather, Calvin Frost, and dropped him off afterward to spend the day with me. In great excitement, Satchel bursts through the front door. “Oma! Oma! Did you know that Grandpa Cal... Continue
In 1979, as OPEC embargoed Middle Eastern oil, the price of gasoline rose 52 percent, groceries rose 9.5 percent, Citibank’s prime rate was over 15 percent and inflation rose 13.3 percent. Unemployment, meanwhile, was nine percent and the American economy became the solemn soundtrack to... Continue
The only Americans who’ve not heard of Luigi Mangione have been resting in the nation's cemeteries for some time. So there’s no need to rehash here the events of that December 4 morning in New York City when young Luigi shot a health insurance CEO... Continue
Some years ago I removed a stand of bamboo and replaced it with two 3’ x 8’ livestock troughs that I converted to raised garden beds. I’ve always been a gardening enthusiast, a self-confessed hortisexual who loves plants, but our home is shaded by big... Continue