The City of Sonoma’s decision to surrender a silly idea about imposing an utterly unnecessary mini-roundabout, i.e. “traffic circle” on Third Street West – ostensibly to calm traffic and make bike riding safer – is worthy of praise. Third Street West traffic demonstrably doesn’t need... Continue
Letter From The Editor
The Sun now shines on its own. This month, the Sonoma Valley Sun became a fully independent nonprofit, a newspaper that belongs to the community it serves. For the past two years, we've operated under the generous umbrella of a nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Now, with... Continue
I’m in the habit of taking Albus the dog on a two or three-mile run through the mostly deserted and incrementally disintegrating campus of the Sonoma Developmental Center, five or six days a week. Those frequent, regular visits give me a first-hand, evolving image-capture of... Continue
There’s something telling in the fact that the White House press office assigned “spokesman” Davis Ingle, currently number eight out of 11 in the White House press corps depth chart, and all of 26 years old, to inform the global public that President Trump no... Continue
In the late 1960s, as a junior reporter in Washington, D.C., I had the great good fortune of living in an apartment, at the intersection of 23rd and G Streets Northwest, about a 15-minute walk from the Lincoln Memorial and the now infamous reflecting pool... Continue
Like a lot of journalists navigating the evolving digital landscape, I found myself out of a job after Whole Earth, the national magazine for which I was publisher, closed its doors in 2003. The offices were in the historic Dollar Mansion, also known as the... Continue
During the Indiana chapter of my boyhood there was a deep gorge that channeled the East Fork of the Whitewater River through the middle of town. And in that gorge, on the banks of that river, there was an enormous, abandoned, multi-storied brick warehouse where,... Continue
On January 17, 2025 – three days before Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time as President of the United States, a Trump bitcoin – called a $Trump – was released in the cryptosphere, hosted on the Solana blockchain platform. One billion coins were... Continue
The relentless rain that is pebbling the skylight over my Glen Ellen desk is both a welcome relief and an annoying distraction. A relief because, in this climate change-driven world, fresh water becomes a more precious resource every year, and annoying because the rain was... Continue
The cover on this issue of the Sun caused some discomfort, among our own staff. Too sensational, too scary, too much out of context. All of that is to some extent true. But in my view necessary. In October, 2017, the Nuns fire burst out... Continue