“Words are events, they do things, change things… transform both speaker and hearer… feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her magnificent meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and each other two centuries after Mary Shelley prophesied that “words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”
I have been thinking lately about words, the power of them and the prison of them, the way we task them with containing the inarticulable and then come to mistake them for the contents, the way they are still our best hope for bridging the abyss between us in order to be understood. And yet outside of music and mathematics, the dream of a common language is just a dream. We speak of language as if it were unitary, forgetting that within any one tongue are nested infinities — the slang of subcultures, the vernacular of different generations and heritages, the private lexicon of lovers. When the parts we live with try to speak to each other, they speak in different tongues we keep translating to discern the whole and articulate it to others, to say who we are and what we want, how we suffer and how we like to be loved.
Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will… to challenge and assist.
“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” Rich wrote in her epochal collection The Dream of a Common Language. We speak our loves to make them true, to make them tender. To say “I want you” is to walk right up to the edge of the abyss and leap, hoping to be caught; it is to say “I want to live.” A generation after Pablo Neruda made words an object of desire, hooks makes desire the subject of words:
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.
[…]
To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language.
We are not, however, merely the users of language — we are its makers. Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great revelation of Einstein’s relativity was that spacetime — the fabric of the universe — tells matter how to move and matter tells spacetime how to bend. Language is the fabric of our lives. Language tells thinking how to move and thought tells language how to bend. We can bend ideas with words, we can even break them to make a mosaic of the pieces in the image of the world we want to live in, in the shape of our desires.
Reflecting on desire as the antidote to dualism, the most primal integration of the body and the mind, hooks writes:
To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular… There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do… liberating ourselves in language.
A man knocked repeatedly on the door of the Beloved, longing for union with the Divine. A voice from within asked, “Who is it?” He answered, “It is I.” But the door remained closed, and his longing grew more intense over the years.
Finally, after long years of inner transformation, he returned to the door and when asked again, said, “It is You.” In that moment the door opened effortlessly.
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207-1273) Persian Sufi Poet and Mystic
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
As a journalist, I’m always doing two things: Reporting and writing. My reading falls along the same lines. I read one kind of book because I’m interested in a topic and want to mine it for details, context or ideas (reporting). I read a second kind of book because I want to see how different people are making and telling stories (writing).
The first kind of book is pretty specific to what I’m working on and tends to be works whose main job is to inform. Sometimes that means academic tomes that maybe five other people have read, but I also read a lot of popular history, especially histories of California. The second kind of book is much more wide-ranging—fiction, nonfiction, essays etc.
Obviously the two piles blend together a lot; anytime you read a book, even a bad one, you see someone do something you hadn’t thought of before, and it informs how you approach your next piece. Here are some books (and an art show) that I read or consulted or was inspired by while writing my new book Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America. Warning: They are all over the place, but are a mix of books about housing, cities and places, and works whose narrative methods I found intriguing and useful.
For this generation of housing writers, it is the work against which so much else is measured. Desmond calls himself a sociologist and is a professor at Princeton, but actually he’s a journalist who at a relatively young age has established himself as America’s preeminent chronicler of poverty. Poverty is a tough topic. It’s always there, always sad—and always hard to say something new about. Evicted sparked a national conversation about the never-ending shame of having so much want in a country with so much wealth. By shifting perspectives from a landlord who is exploiting tenants while struggling to maintain a middle-class lifestyle to renters who are constantly on the edge of homelessness, the book sees no boogeymen but only a rotten system that we’re all caught up in one way or the other.
My current favorite book. In a world in which seemingly every reporter is opining too much and tweeting too much and first-person essaying too much, MacFarquhar is a relative enigma. She’s not a hermit or anything; you can find interviews and TED Talks and whatnot. But she steers clear of the first person, leaves out most interview quotes, and tries to inhabit her subjects by using free indirect speech. The effect of these decisions is to elevate her vision while reducing her presence. It’s original, brilliant and makes for some of the best writing I’ve seen in any form.
Methods aside, Strangers Drowning is a timeless story about extreme altruists—do-gooders whose lives are so dedicated to helping people that they end up sacrificing most of their personal, professional and family lives. It seems weird to call such a cerebral book a rollercoaster, but the emotional progression of reading it is intense. You start the book feeling like a selfish piece of garbage. Toward the middle you’re convinced that her subjects are defects who have been cursed with the mirror image of psychopathy. By the end you just go “people are crazy, man,” and leave it at that. It’s a journey into the soul that becomes a journey into the mind and leaves you scratching your head at the remarkable complexity of kindness. I’ve bought maybe ten copies of this book to give out as gifts, and gave two to sources during the reporting of Golden Gates.
Every reporter who has expressed even a modest interest in history has at some point had an editor say some version of “this is a newspaper not a library.” Hannah-Jones has become one of the most decorated journalists of her generation by breaking that rule, most prominently with The New York Times’s 1619 Project, and here in Living Apart, which is essentially a long magazine article turned eBook.
The premise of this piece is how the federal government neglected to enforce the 1968 Civil Rights Act by refusing to use the cudgel of Housing and Urban Development infrastructure money to force exclusive suburbs to build affordable housing and curb restrictive zoning practices. This decision, originally made by the Nixon Administration, continued for four decades, perpetuating segregation long after fair housing—passed in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—was the law of the land.
Given that this piece was published in 2012, the trick of the story, like a good amount of Hannah-Jones’s work, is to pull history into the present by showing how decisions made decades ago continue to guide us today. The most remarkable thing about the reporting is that it leaves zero question that the Nixon Administration knew exactly what it was doing in neglecting to enforce fair housing. They also knew this decision would cause great harm to American unity and have consequences for many generations.
In a batch of talking points for the president, George Romney, Nixon’s HUD chief and the father of Senator Mitt Romney, warns that de-segregationist housing policies are needed to prevent “our nation from being torn apart.”
President Nixon refuses, but understands the consequences. “I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools,” Nixon wrote in a memo Hannah-Jones unearthed.
This is one of those “both buckets” pieces. I consulted it several times while writing Golden Gates, first for the housing stuff, but also to guide my thinking on how to make Chapter 4, which starts at the close of World War II and ends in the early 1980s, resonate today. My solution was to weave in the story of a developer who moved to California as a 10-year-old during the state’s 1960s population boom and started his career during the housing crisis of the 1970. Later, the book catches up with him as 65-year-old developer today, to show just how little had changed.
There’s nothing I can say about Joan Didion that hasn’t already been said, so let me take this opportunity to say that I don’t care how many times you’ve read Slouching, you haven’t experienced it in full until you’ve heard Diane Keaton’s reading of the audiobook. I missed my BART stop listening to it because I got so carried away by her voice.
For years I’ve wanted to write a brainy essay about the differing ways in which Joan Didion and Jane Jacobs handle the chaos of youth and urbanity, but it’s never really gelled and therefore remains more of a feeling than a coherent thought. The writers are just so different, and their fields of study so distinct. And yet, in my mind I always pair them because of the opposite emotions I walk away with after reading them. Whereas Didion sees chaos everywhere, Jacobs—who is a better pure reporter—sees the underlying logic of systems that appear disorderly on the surface. There’s a basic optimism in that: Messy stuff works. People are adaptable. Life goes on. One of the most discouraging things about politics is the way people become advocates for policies over outcomes, which means the same batch of advocates can sometimes be the cure and other times be the disease. Jacobs was an advocate, but she’s also fluid and thoughtful, presenting guidelines for good urbanism yet allowing that they have to flexible and malleable for cities to remain vibrant.
I read Karen Russell the way novelists read poets: To see where the boundaries are. Fiction or nonfiction, writing is a bizarre exercise. You encounter a person, idea, dream or scene or emotion, then try to recreate the same details and feeling with a bunch of marks on a page. And you do this in hopes of forging some strange telepathy with people you’ll never meet. It’s hard stuff, so even though I’m squarely into journalism, I still find it enriching to spend time reading novelists and short story writers who are opening new pathways. It reminds me that nothing is impossible, that the word “indescribable” is bullshit, and that however much difficulty I’m having rendering some scene, someone else is struggling with something infinitely more difficult.
In terms of my reading experience, I liked the title story of Vampires most, but the one that made the greatest impression on me is “The Barn at the End of Our Term.” It’s a story about President Rutherford B. Hayes being reincarnated as a horse. If you asked me to explain why I found this interesting, I couldn’t do it. But Karen Russell could, because she can do anything.
Look, everyone needs to unwind with a little detective fiction now and then. And if you’re going to do detective fiction, you might as well dive into one of America’s greatest literary traditions, which is detective fiction about LA. There’s so much out there—Raymond Chandler, Michael Connelly—but I always come back to the Easy Rawlins series.
Easy is a stereotypically complicated protagonist, and his best friend is a sociopathic murderer, but once you get past all that, you realize that some of the best stuff in these books is all the domestic juggling Easy has to deal with in the midst of his detective work. Property is central to this story and Easy’s evolution as a character. He’s struggling with the mortgage in the first book, upgrades to landlording in the second, and by the time of White Butterfly is a small-time mogul who has gone to some lengths to hide this fact. Real estate is a hustle that a stunning number of people—rich, poor and middle—have all got their hands in. In this way Easy is just another ordinary American trying to find his way to passive income.
The New York Times called this a “nonfiction masterpiece.” It is nothing short of that. The premise of the book—democracy in crisis—is the sort of amorphous topic that seems impossible to execute in nonfiction. There’s just so much going on. But Packer unpacks his tale one character at a time, and in doing so manages to accomplish his audacious goal of constructing an “inner history” of America.
The main stories are deep and well-told—the decline of a factory town, the growth of Silicon Valley, a starry-eyed optimist turned cynical political consultant—and along the way Packer gives readers a kind of cultural download via short, interlude biographies on subjects including Oprah Winfrey, Sam Walton, Raymond Carver, Andrew Breitbart and Jay-Z. Like all the best writers, you know exactly what Packer thinks without ever hearing him say it. The effect of reading this book is not unlike the effect of fading into a nine-minute Prog Rock song with multiple solos and time signature changes. You wonder how something so vast and complex can work while simultaneously appreciating that somehow it just does.
On the surface, it seems like a risky idea: The history of one year in New York, tracing crime, the mayoral election, and baseball. New York is a big and important place, but it’s not so big or important to make an easy sell of a book about a World Series whose outcome is well-known or a local election whose results most of America doesn’t care about. And yet, Mahler pulls it off. What makes this book so great, beyond the depth of reporting and the easy, vivid writing, is that it’s less a story about New York than a story about the nadir of American cities. Reading the book—the city teetering on bankruptcy, the Son of Sam murders, the 1977 blackout and looting—you wonder how the place can ever recover.
With hindsight, however, we know that shortly after the story closes, New York and big US cities across the country begin a slow recovery that 40 years later would result in the gentrification fights we see today. This makes Mahler’s book feel like a prequel to the modern American city, and the experience of reading it is a reminder of the adage that predictions are hard, especially about the future.
I suspect that in the year 2040 or so, someone (maybe me), could write a great book about how the San Francisco of 2019 or 2020 told us much about where America, cities and the economy was headed. In a way I tried to do that with Golden Gates, but as time goes on the implications will become clearer and gift some future author with a wealth of political and cultural detail of the sort that Mahler mines so expertly.
“Throughout history, the treatment and arrangement of shelter have revealed more about a particular people than have any other products of creative arts. Housing is an outward expression of the inner human nature; no society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.”
So begins Crabgrass Frontier, the definitive history of American suburbs. The book was published in 1985 but remains the best look at suburbanization and its consequences for American society. I suppose that’s not surprising, since an event as epochal as suburbanization would be expected to have staying power. Jackson goes through the whole thing, tracking suburbs from pre-history through early America and the Postwar boom. The suburbs, then and now, are built on transportation. As the book progresses, Jackson lays out how each successive leap of mobility opens more land—linear carriages and trains gave way to geometric freeways—available for urban development.
What’s most remarkable about this work is its capacity to look forward. At the end Jackson predicts that inner-city crime rates will fall precipitously and that over time far-flung suburbs would become poorer and less desired as central cities become safer and richer. Pretty bold prediction in the mid-1980s, but it was spot on, and we’re now living with the consequences.
The Color of Law is framed as something between a very long essay and a legal argument. In the introduction Rothstein lays out his case for America’s racially homogeneous neighborhoods being a consequence of de jure segregation (segregation by law or public policy) versus de facto segregation (segregation resulting from private practices). It’s a fascinating framing. As I read the book, I kept thinking about a theoretical court case in which black Americans could sue their government for the vast wealth transfers that occurred via lost housing wealth. How many trillions would it add up to?
Thus, while my tastes gravitate toward sprawling, character-driven books, the power of this one flows from the simplicity of the argument and Rothstein’s relentless focus in proving it. Rothstein did not discover racism, and he didn’t discover the Federal Housing Administration’s redlining guidelines or restrictive covenants either. Various authors, historians and essayists have trod this ground several times before. But the way he assembles this history is unique and abundantly helpful. Page after page and example after example he leaves zero doubt that segregation is not something that just happened but was planned and executed by a federal government whose societal debt will take centuries, if ever, to repay.
Ask anyone who is even remotely serious about California history what you need to read to get started, and the answer is always Kevin Starr. And it’s always the correct response: He is the master. This is where I note that, as much as I wish everyone was as fascinated with California as I am, Starr is not for casual readers. As the former state librarian and foremost chronicler of the Golden State, his books sag under the weight of their comprehension. Take Golden Dreams, which covers a relative burp of history—California from 1950 to 1963—yet is almost 600 pages and roughly 250,000 words. To get through Starr’s entire Americans and the California Dream series, which covers about 150 years, you’ll need to put aside time for seven more volumes and well in excess of a million more words.
I have them all, but if you’re going to read one book from the canon, Golden Dreams is it, because that was the period when California really took over the nation’s politics and economy. The book goes deep into the West Coast psyche, pulling together a vast trove of cultural, economic and political history mixed with long chunks of literary criticism. By the end you’ve covered subjects ranging from the architectural marvel of stacked multi-level interchanges to the horticultural tinkering that gave us freeway landscaping to the instructional images of Sunset magazine, the styles of Williams-Sonoma, the religiousness of Big Sur, and the highbrow strategy of the San Francisco 49ers’ offense. The book has an entire chapter analyzing the “Baghdad by the Bay” metaphor that Herb Caen deployed in his columns for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a lot.
Speaking of metaphors, after all this excess, Starr ends with stunningly elegant conclusion, which is that the result of California’s wealth and abundance was a rebellion to the simple designs and style choices that have come to define Apple products and gave rise to the concept we call “coolness.” “There was, to put the matter simply, a lot of money flowing through the society, hence a lot of jobs and careers open to talent, hence the filling in of domestic space with iconic manifestations of the new consumer lifestyle— stereophonic sound systems, electric appliances, modernist furniture, abstract art and sculpture, Space Age silver and flatware, fabrics in unprecedented colors, designer jewelry and eyewear,” he writes. “Hence the effort to keep this consumption under control by banishing clutter from interiors, appliance design, and related items… Coolness, from this perspective, constituted a kind of asceticism, an insistence upon choice and restraint, in a world filling up with consumer goods.”
Honorable Mention: Sandow Birk,In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias
Technically this isn’t a book (though you can buy one). It’s an art exhibit that I saw at the Laguna Art Museum in 2000, shortly after I moved to LA from San Francisco. The premise of the show, more than 120 artworks, is that NorCal and SoCal fought an actual war and these are the paintings that documented it. The result is a bunch of epic, oil on canvas scenes with names like “The Bombing of the Getty Center” and “SF MOMA and the Battle of San Francisco.” The concept is hilarious, the paintings are gorgeous, and the story is sly. If you’ve spent any amount of time in either SF or LA, this will resonate.
Conor Dougherty is an economics reporter at The New York Times. He previously spent a decade in New York covering housing and the economy for The Wall Street Journal. He grew up in the Bay Area and lives with his family in Oakland.
“God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.”
~ Walt Whitman
Walter “Walt” Whitman was a poet, journalist, and essayist who is considered one of the most influential American poets. Born on Long Island, New York, Whitman is often called the “father of free verse” for his expansionist style that rejected the rigid structures of European poetry. His most well-known work is Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems he revised until his death. (Wikipedia.org)
It was love at the very first line. I got off the bus in a strange neighborhood, a winter afternoon and already dark. It was after school and I was visiting my friend, Carolyn, to beg for help with math, at which I was hopeless. While taking off my coat in her bedroom, I spotted a thin paperback in the light on the nightstand, The Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I picked it up and read,
I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat . . .
Forget algebra. This was shocking. This was a woman talking about sex with a capital “S,” no bones about it. Not only that, in another poem it was clear that she didn’t give a damn about the boy-girl conventions we’d grown up with: basically that girls were not allowed to initiate a date, or much of anything:
I shall forget you presently, my dear So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year, Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever
What a possibility. You mean we had a choice? We didn’t have to wait by the phone, or freak out in the high school corridors, obsessing over signs and signals from the male sex as to our worthiness? We could just toss all of that to the winds?
Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking.
Sex for the sake of sex? There is such a thing as female satisfaction?
It was contrary to everything we believed. We knew nothing about our anatomy and heard only horror stories about the other. Understand this was 1965, when girls were not permitted to wear pants to public school, and we’d be sent home if our skirts were half an inch above the knee. We’d practically sworn to remain virgins until we were married, and anyone who wasn’t was a tramp.
But this was poetry. This was authoritative, like Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, who we were studying. In the Bronx High School of Science, a school of National Merit Scholars and future M.D.s, I was one of the few “creative” types. They dug quantum theory, but poetry was my language. I heard what Millay was saying, in a rebellious, free-spirited voice. Two years later in freshman year at college, everything would go to hell, but for now I was living with my parents, walled up like a prisoner inside their “middle-class values.” All I could do to express my frustration was to go around dramatically reciting revolutionary verse. Not many understood except our beloved English teacher, Ted Rifkin, who showed me a textbook with the famous Arnold Genthe photograph of Millay among the magnolia blossoms at Vassar. Mr. Rifkin kindly said I even looked like her. That was it. The thrill of my life. She was my idol and the bond was sealed.
Millay was not simply a voice for female sexuality and freedom. I found her life to be a blueprint for how to fully engage in the literary world I aspired to, and what it would demand: courage, confidence, mastery, anarchy, and appetite. She embodied all of it.
As a child, Edna St. Vincent Millay (named for the hospital where her uncle’s life was saved) insisted on being called Vincent. She and her two sisters were raised by an independent woman they adored (“Dearest Mumbles” in her letters) who divorced their father and supported them by being a nurse. Millay was gifted; she won her first medal for poetry age 14, the Pulitzer Prize at 31, and the Frost Medal for lifetime contribution to American poetry 20 years later.
At Vassar, which was then women-only, she had affairs with classmates, and in later years was openly bisexual. She moved to New York City where she helped found the Cherry Lane Theater. Famous for her red hair, green eyes and unabashed sensuality, she was known as “the gamine of Greenwich Village.” Despite proposals from luminaries such as Floyd Dell and Edmund Wilson, Millay chose to marry a Dutch coffee importer, Eugen Jan Boissevain, 12 years her senior. They were married for 26 years, and although both carried on flamboyant affairs, they remained devoted to each other. They lived the most romantic lifestyle—on a farm in upstate New York where they raised their own vegetables, and an island off the coast of Maine, where they swam naked in the icy water.
Millay was a celebrity poet. She was a riveting performer, which is not surprising, given her years with experimental theater in the Village, and an interest in drama that would lead her to write radio plays and opera lyrics. At the age of 20, it had been her dramatic reading of her poem, “Renascence” at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, that caught the attention of Caroline B. Dowd, a wealthy patron of the arts, who paid for her education at Vassar. In her prime, Millay traveled widely and drew big crowds, the superstar mystique enhanced by Eugen’s handling of her as if she were a precious doll, covering her shoulders with a sable cape and murmuring, “We’ve got to get you out of here,” as he protected her from fans.
Michael Ryan, Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at UC Irvine, describes the unique appeal of those performances:
The character Edna St. Vincent Millay invented to speak her poems was very much of her time and acquired for her a fame it’s hard to imagine a poet having today. She was adored by many readers who felt she was speaking what they really felt from a life that they both wanted and did not want to have but were happy to live through her.
In this she was precursor to the requirement of writers today that we be outsized public personalities, managing websites, newsletters, Twitter, and festivals, teaching aspirants by perfect example, while dedicating ourselves to our craft—a proposition that requires a split personality—one side nimble and responsive to trends, the other steeped in isolated work. For most of her life, Millay had the ability to integrate both, but at the height of her popularity she suffered the fickleness of critical opinion. Biographers say the “propaganda” poetry she wrote during WWII, denouncing the Nazi destruction of the Czechoslovak city Lidice, for example, hurt her reputation as a serious poet:
The whole world holds in its arms today The murdered village of Lidice, Like the murdered body of a little child.
I imagine the harshness of the critics contributed to her decline in the later years. Plagued by accidents and ill health, she grew isolated and afraid. She and Eugen drank too much. He died of lung cancer in 1949. Millay died the following year, in truly theatrical fashion. She had been been up all night correcting proofs, written a note for the housekeeper, and at dawn apparently started up the stairs. Eight hours later her body was discovered by a handyman, the wine glass and bottle still intact where she had placed them on the step above. She died of a heart attack at age 58.
I am grateful to have had Edna St. Vincent Millay as a model of inspiration, and happy to report that her influence is alive and well. When I tracked down my friend, Carolyn, for this essay, 50 years after we graduated high school, she not only remembered our shared delight in The Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay—she still owns the original book.
April Smith is the author of six previous novels, including her first best seller, North of Montana. She is also an Emmy-nominated television writer and producer. She lives in Santa Monica, CA, with her husband.
The Hawaiian Islands at sunset.Johner Images/Getty Images/Johner RF
By Christine Hitt, Hawaii Contributing Editor April 26, 2026 (SFGate.com)
In Hawaii, there are islands not found on any map that are said to appear and then disappear, often around sunrise or sunset.
Over a century ago, Hawaiian-language newspapers recorded eyewitness reports of offshore sightings. Hawaii had more than 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers, beginning in 1834. They documented everything from politics to daily life and largely remain untranslated, holding a wealth of information.
One of the most striking reports placed one vanishing island between Maui and Molokai. In an article from Dec. 1, 1900, in Ke Aloha Aina, a writer relayed a sighting of Kanehunamoku, which was visible offshore before fading from view.
“At five minutes past 5 on the early morning of Friday the 23rd, the mysterious supernatural land of Kanehunamoku was seen standing proudly between Maui and Kahoolawe. It seemed, in the arrangement of the islands, Maui, Kanehunamoku, Kahoolawe, and Lanai sat together to the eye. It was truly beautiful,” Moses Kaulahea wrote from Molokai. “Certain features on that wondrous land were clearly visible … At 6:20 [a.m.], when the sun rose, it began to disappear” and the space between Kahoolawe and Maui was empty again.
The hidden islands
In English, Kanehunamoku can be translated as the “hidden land of Kane,” Kane being one of the major deities in Hawaiian tradition. In some accounts, it is described as one of 12 islands of Kane, a group of sacred and elusive islands associated with spiritual beings.
In her book “Hawaiian Mythology,” Martha Beckwith writes, “Today they are called the ‘lost islands’ or ‘islands hidden by the gods.’ At sunrise or sunset they may still be seen on the distant horizon, sometime touched with a reddish light. They may lie under the sea or upon its surface, approach close to land or be raised and float in the air according to the will of the gods.”
Beckwith noted that there are ancient chants and stories about these hidden islands going as far back as the 12th century. Kanehunamoku also appears in the Kumulipo, the ancient Hawaiian creation chant. She also describes stories of when Kanehunamoku appears, where “one can hear cocks crowing, pigs grunting, see flickering of lights and waving of sugar cane and persons moving about the island.”
In a Feb. 23, 1912 article of Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, another eyewitness account reads less like folklore and more like a modern-day paranormal sighting. (Hawaii, in particular, is today known as a hotspot for UFO sightings.)
A husband and wife were fishing from shore, when they noticed the sea behaving strangely 3 miles south of Mahukona off the Kohala coast of Hawaii Island. “The sea seemed to boil, exactly as if there were fire beneath it, boiling like a cooking pot,” S.D. Kehena Boy wrote from North Kohala. Later that night, they described seeing “something like moving lights or lanterns, not just one but many lights coming in a line from the ocean, heading straight toward where they sat.”
The lights eventually went out. In their place, “there stood in the sea a great dark thing, like a piece of land” about 100 to 200 yards offshore. They said they could make out what looked like trees and vegetation and even figures moving across the island, though no voices could be heard. The couple overwhelmed with fear, covered themselves and waited through the night.
By morning, it was gone.
“Well, then, was this Kanehunamoku? Or was it a supernatural being?” the writer asked. “These new things we are seeing are quite extraordinary.”
Theories behind the sightings
Not everyone thought Kanehunamoku was a mystery. Some writers in Hawaiian-language newspapers tried to explain what people were seeing.
In 1865, D.M. Collegiate wrote a letter to the editor of Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, suggesting that reports of a physical island were due to a visual phenomenon, comparing it to other optical effects reported at sea, like ships in the sky or other mirrored or refracted images. He calls them wailiula, the Hawaiian word for mirage.
Modern references similarly liken the phenomenon to being an atmospherically related mirage.
One type of mirage, a Fata Morgana, has resulted in illusions of ships floating in the air. In his journal via the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Scott Kikiloi also suggested that the ancient stories of vanishing islands relate to how Hawaiians saw the erosion of islands down to islets and atolls, disappearing over time or reappearing later. Moku Papapa is an example of a low-lying island last seen southwest of Niihau that has disappeared and is still a mystery today.
Whether believed to be a real land or a mirage, Kanehunamoku’s story and connection to Kane endures, preserved in Hawaiian-language records as both explanation and experience. That’s not something that will ever disappear.
Editor’s note: SFGATE recognizes the importance of diacritical marks in the Hawaiian language. We are unable to use them due to the limitations of our publishing platform. The Hawaiian language newspapers were translated with the help of AI and reviewed by fluent Hawaiian language speaker and journalist Kuuwehi Hiraishi.
Christine Hitt is the Hawaii contributing editor for SFGATE. She is part-Native Hawaiian from the island of Oahu, and a Kamehameha Schools and University of Hawaii graduate. She’s the former editor-in-chief of Hawaii and Mana magazines.
I have been working in the field of Gender-Specific Medicine and Men’s Health for more than fifty years. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that men’s health and women’s health cannot be separated. If we improve men’s health, we will also improve the health of women and vice versa.
There are many reasons a man might become interested in the actress Sharon Stone. It is a surprising fact of my professional life that seeing Sharon featured on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, led me to write my best-selling books, Male Menopause and Surviving Male Menopause. Here’s how it happened.
While browsing through my local bookstore, I was drawn to a copy of Vanity Fair magazine. Well, to be absolutely honest, I was drawn to the cover photo of Sharon Stone, nude to the waist, with her hands cupping, but only partially covering, her breasts. Sharon was staring seductively into the eyes of the reader, with two-inch letters emblazoned across her bare midriff proclaiming, ‘WILD THING!’ I was sure there was something important Sharon had to tell me.
However, I never read the article to find out, because just to the left of Sharon’s blond hair, right below the April 1993 dateline, were the words that grabbed me by the throat (actually a bit farther south than my throat) — “Male Menopause: The Unspeakable Passage by Gail Sheehy.” Those words spoke in a quiet but insistent voice.
I had already been dealing with menopause issues as my midlife wife was going through the change. At first I was skeptical about the possibility that men might go through hormonal changes, but I decided to do the research.
Male Menopause was published in 1997 and soon became an international best-seller. It has since been translated into more than fifteen foreign languages. My follow up book, Surviving Male Menopause: A Guide for Women and Men, was published in 2000. Although we have learned a great deal about the “change of life” for women, there continues to be a great deal of confusion and controversy surrounding the whole concept of what goes on at mid-life for men.
As Sheehy recognized in the 1993 article, “
If menopause is the silent passage, ‘male menopause’ is the unspeakable passage. It is fraught with secrecy, shame, and denial. It is much more fundamental than the ending of the fertile period of a woman’s life, because it strikes at the core of what it is to be a man.”
I was one of the early researchers who was speaking out about Male Menopause (also called Andropause or Manopause). Here are a few of the important things I’ve learned over the years and have shared in my books and articles.
What is Male Menopause?
Male Menopause begins with hormonal, physiological, and chemical changes that occur in all men generally between the ages of forty and fifty-five, though it can occur as early as thirty-five or as late as sixty-five. These changes affect all aspects of a man’s life. Male Menopause is, thus, a physical condition with psychological, interpersonal, social, and spiritual dimensions.
What is The Purpose of Male Menopause?
“The purpose of Male Menopause is to signal the end of the first part of a man’s life and prepare him for the second half. Male Menopause is not the beginning of the end, as many fear, but the end of the beginning. It is the passage to the most passionate, powerful, productive, and purposeful time of a man’s life.”
What Are The Most Common Symptoms of Male Menopause?
Loss of libido and sexual desire, particularly with the partner you are with.
Increased fantasy about having sex with others.
Difficulty developing and maintaining erections.
Increased irritability and anger.
Taking longer to recover from injuries and illness.
Having less endurance for physical activity.
Increased anxiety and worry.
Loss of self-confidence and joy.
What I Have Learned About Male Menopause
Over the years, I have found two common views: (1) Male Menopause doesn’t exist. Only women go through a hormonally driven change of life. (2) If men do go through a change, it is only a hormonal change and can be “cured” by giving men supplemental testosterone.
I’ve learned that neither of these views are true. Men do experience a change of life, whether we call it Male Menopause, Andropause, or Manopause. I called it Male Menopause because I believe there are more similarities than differences between what women and men experience. I also believe, as does Gail Sheehy, that it is much more complex than simply a loss of hormones but impacts all aspects of a man’s life.
For most of human existence our lifespan was quite limited to around forty years. Men and women rarely lived long enough to experience a “change of life.” Life was a climb up a mountain and we reached the peak when we were in our 20s and had produced children to keep our species going. Then, it was a quick decline down the mountain once the children were old enough to survive.
But now humans can live into our 80s, 90s, and beyond. There is another mountain to climb and what we call Male Menopause is simply the transition to the second mountain. If top of the first mountain is called “Adulthood,” the peak of the second mountain, is “Super-Adulthood” or “Elderhood.” That is why I say that “Male Menopause is not the beginning of the end, as many fear, but the end of the beginning.”
Too Many Men Are Dying Before Their Time
These are confusing and challenging times for most people, but particularly for men. It has been said that “Old age is not for sissies.” While many men are embracing the later years, too many are losing hope and giving up. The suicide rate for men is much higher than the rate for women and gets even worse the older we get.
Take a look at this chart from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC):
Suicide rate among adults age 55 and older, by age group and sex: United States, 2021
We see the men’s death rates on the left and women’s on the right for four different age groups, along with the different rate for all ages 55-85+ in black. Death by suicide is a huge problem for men as we age, particularly after retirement age.
For those ages 55-64, the suicide rate is 3.4 times higher for males compared to females. 65-74 the suicide rate is 4.6 times higher for males. Between the ages of 75-84 the male/female ratio is 8 times higher for males. And for those 85 and older the suicide rate is nearly 17 times higher for males than females. There are challenges men and women face as we age, but clearly older men are feeling pressures that women do not experience and are losing hope for a better future. This needs to change.
Welcome to the Second Mountain and an Expanded Understanding of Midlife and Aging
My friend and colleague, Chip Conley, is transforming our understanding of midlife and what we can look forward to as we prepare for and climb the second mountain of life. Says Conley,
“The midlife crisis is the butt of many jokes, but this long-derided life stage has an upside.”
In his new book, Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, he expands our vision.
“What if we could reframe our thinking about the natural transition of midlife not as a crisis, but as a chrysalis: a time when something profound awakens in us, as we shed our skin, spread our wings, and pollinate the world with our wisdom?“
We know midlife and aging is not all sweetness and light. It isn’t easy letting go of old ways that no longer work for us. We all know what happens to the caterpillar. As Conley reminds us,
“When it is fully grown, it uses a button of silk to fasten its body to a twig and then forms a chrysalis. Within this protective chrysalis, the transformational magic of metamorphosis occurs. While it’s a bit dark, gooey, and solitary, it’s a transition, not a crisis. And, of course, on the other side is a beautiful, winged butterfly.”
Learning About Men’s Health, Male Menopause, and How to Live Well in the Second Half of Life
There is a lot we need to learn about life in the second half. Chip Conley suggests that there are three stages of midlife:
1. Early midlife (Age 35-50)
During early midlife we tend to experience some of the challenging physical and emotional transitions — a bit like adult puberty. We realize we are no longer young, but not yet old.
2. The second stage of midlife (50-59)
This is the core of midlife in our fifties when we’ve settled into this new era and are seeing some of the upside. We begin to see opportunities for growth and finding passions we never knew we had.
3. Later midlife (60-75)
We are still young enough to see and plan for what’s next, our senior years. Says Chip,
“At 63, I am just getting acquainted with this third stage, but I do know it’s also when our body reminds us it doesn’t want to be forgotten.”
I turned 82 last December and am well into the stage of Eldership. It’s a time when we are called to share what we know and have learned over our lifespan. Three years ago, I started the MenAlive Academy for Gender-Specific Healthcare. The Academy offers programs for both men and women who want to learn about the unique mental, emotional, and relational issues that men face. It also offers programs for healthcare providers who are working with men and their families.
As my colleague Marianne J. Legato, M.D., Founder of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine says,
“Everywhere we look, the two sexes are startingly and unexpectedly different not only in their normal function but in the ways they experience illness.”
If you would like more information about the MenAlive Academy for Gender-Specific Healthcare, drop me a note to Jed@MenAlive.com and put “MenAlive Academy” in the subject line. If you’d like to read more articles like these, I invite you to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter.
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
By Katie Dowd, Managing editor April 26, 2026 (SFGate.com)
A file photo of the view of Lope National Park located in Central Gabon, April 13, 2013. Desirey Minkoh/AfrikImages Agency/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A California man was killed by a herd of elephants during a hunting trip in Africa, his family confirmed. Ernie Dosio, 75, was the owner of a Central Valley farm management company.
Dosio, who was a well-known big game hunter affiliated with the Sacramento Safari Club, was on a trip with Collect Africa, the New York Times reported. The travel company bills itself on its site as an “African Species Collecting Concierge.” According to family friends, Dosio was hoping to kill a yellow-backed duiker, an antelope known for its timid personality, in the Lope-Okanda rainforest area of Gabon.
While hunting on April 17, Dosio and two other hunters unexpectedly came upon a small herd of female elephants and their calves. The adult elephants charged repeatedly, and Dosio was killed when he was gored by one of the elephant’s tusks, the Times reported. His remains are awaiting repatriation to California; he lived in Lodi at the time of his death.
The news came as a shock to loved ones in the Central Valley, where Dosio was the millionaire owner of Pacific AgriLands, a farm management company that works with wineries. The Central District Elks posted on Facebook that he was a “pillar of our Community,” and Dosio’s son told the Daily Mail that the family was thrown into chaos by the news.
“The day it happened we heard it was buffalos — and different crazy things,” Jeff Dosio told the outlet. “The lawyers got called before the family. There’s just some things that just don’t make sense.”
A close family friend who spoke with the Times said Dosio had been on many hunts in Africa and “knew the risks.” Photos of Dosio’s home attest to his controversial hobby: trophies of a rhino, lion and numerous deer and antelope species can be seen.
Katie Dowd is the SFGATE managing editor. She started her career at SFGATE in 2011 shortly after graduating from UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in the Bay Area.
The word opulent is etymologically related to opus through a shared Proto-Indo-European root that connects the concepts of “work” and “abundance”.
Shared Root: Both words derive from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *op-, which means “to work, produce in abundance”.
Latin Evolution:
Opus (Latin): Means “a work, labor, exertion”.
Opulentus (Latin): The adjective from which “opulent” is derived, meaning “wealthy, rich; splendid, noble”. It is rooted in ops (“wealth, power, resources”), which is a sibling word to opus.
The Connection: The connection between them suggests that, in a classical sense, opulence is the result of accumulated work, labor, or productive ability.
Dissimilation:Opulent developed from a suffixed form, likely op-en-ent-, which changed to opulent- to avoid repeating the ‘n’ sound, a linguistic process called dissimilation.
Word Family: Through the same opus root, opulent is related to other terms like opera, operate, cooperate, and magnus opus. Sesquiotica +6
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will… to challenge and assist.
