journalist

Out at First: What the Carmody Case Tells Us About Press Freedoms

It was more Keystone Cops than Law and Order. On May 10, wielding a sledgehammer and drawn guns, San Francisco police raided the apartment of Bryan Carmody, a freelance videographer who had leaked a police report on the death of popular and progressive public defender Jeff Adachi. The confidential account contained salacious hints of drug use and extramarital sex.

“There’s a message implicit in the denouement of this affair, and it’s this—messing with the press carries risk.”

Posted on June 20, 2019 - 3:29pm

Outside, Looking In: Q&A with Journalist Geeta Anand

With a wide smile and a penchant for laughter, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Geeta Anand is hardly as intimidating in person as she seems on paper. From her start at Cape Cod News, a free weekly newspaper, she’s gone on to cover everything from local courts and cops, to biotechnology and business, to foreign correspondence in South Asia, most recently for The New York Times. Her 2006 book The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million—and Bucked the Medical Establishment—in a Quest to Save His Children, was turned into a CBS movie starring Harrison Ford.

Posted on December 17, 2018 - 3:22pm

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Columnist

“Let’s go for a walk.”

Five seemingly innocuous little words, but they were enough to scare the hell out of me. I had read enough John le Carré spy novels to know what comes next: “…where we can talk without being overheard.”

From the Summer 2018 Our Town issue of California.

Editor’s Note: Goodbye

For most of the last ten years, this spot has been home to my 500-plus-word personal essays—somewhat eccentric attempts to lure readers into the magazine by riffing on the current theme. Themes that have included, among the 43 issues, global warming, electioneering, music, war, food, and power.

From the Summer 2018 Our Town issue of California.
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