Marcy Burstiner

Here in Humboldt County, many people are worried that Walmart has acquired a lease to open a store in the Bayshore Mall, though we have heard no official acknowledgement of that. I’m more worried about some other Walmart acquisitions. In September it acquired OneRiot, which is a company that sends customized and targeted ads to […]

When I read that the federal government might close eight local post offices I thought: Do we still need rural free delivery? Who needs snail mail these days more than once a week? It seems the last time I needed mail service was back in the 1990s. As a business reporter I needed annual reports. […]

The height of my writing career came on Oct. 16, 2006, when The New Yorker published a letter I wrote commenting on a story on bioeconomics (scientists stick people in an MRI machine, ask them to make financial decisions and watch their brains tick). Two people I knew saw the letter and were suitably impressed. […]

As we celebrate Independence Day it is important to remember that we wouldn’t be independent were it not for an unfettered press. Troublemaking writers such as Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine and John Dickinson rallied reluctant colonial citizens to fight a government they believed oppressive. But should we impose our ideas of a free press on […]

Could a robot write this column? That’s the question that popped into my head when a colleague forwarded me a story on National Public Radio about a company called Narrative Science that developed software that can take data and spit out news stories. In one case, NPR reported, the robot wrote a terrific story about […]

A political cartoon in Sunday’s Times-Standard showed Snow White looking askance at an old woman who offers her an apple. “Is it from Japan?,” she asks. It was one of two cartoons on the topic of radiated food in the four-set on the Sunday opinion page. It’s the top story in my head these days. […]

On Dec. 4, I was one of many people who attended the North Coast Journal’s Christmas Party at its new offices in Old Town. Everyone had a great time. Judy Hodgson, the publisher, had crab piled high in one office. In other offices you could find pizza pies and sushi plates and much beer and […]

In many communities, if you buy a 100-year-old house, preservation laws restrict what you can do with it. You can’t flatten it and build a new faux Tudor McMansion, for example. If the land you buy has old growth trees on it, you are sometimes restricted in what you can do with that land. It’s […]

It’s a humdrum day. You drive home and see your neighbor check his mailbox. You stop for five minutes to say hey. You talk about nothing, really. The weather, your in-laws’ upcoming visit, some funny story about his dog. Then you each go back to your respective lives. We know little about the people who […]

The home of former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss burned down last week in a place called Pahrump in the Nevada desert. No one was hurt. Is that something you needed or wanted to know? I read it in the San Francisco Chronicle. It irritates me that I lack the memory to retain new pieces of […]

Years ago I interviewed Chandra Muzaffar, a Muslim academic who co-founded a multiethnic group called Aliran that pushed for equality and social justice in Malaysia. He said that in his country, people have freedom of speech. But more important is freedom after speech. The government arrested him later that month. I thought of Muzaffer when […]