John Freeman

1 week ago | altaonline.com | John Freeman

Imagine if you strolled into a bookstore today and picked up a novel in which the action revolved around a detective investigating the spread of a virus called Jes Grew, a pandemic making people dance and move and become susceptible to Black culture.

1 month ago | altaonline.com | John Freeman

It could have been called so many more accurate things. A number of these possible names lurk in our cities and rivers or perch atop mountains and beaches. Take Malibu, where the Chumash people lived as far back as possibly 7,000 BCE, the name coming perhaps from their word Humaliwo, which means “where the surf sounds loudly.” Or Milpitas, whose name comes from the Mexican Spanish for “cornfield.” Perhaps a place as big as the Golden State shouldn’t have been given one name but many?

1 month ago | altaonline.com | John Freeman

One of the most boring things in the world is listening to an athlete be interviewed. This is not because athletes lack intelligence or personality. It’s because what makes athletes great is their ability to spend countless hours repeating actions so frequently that when their body has to perform them, they do not have to think, Take the shot, curl into a flip turn, stay at this pace. Feint left, hook right. They simply do them, beautifully.

1 month ago | crimereads.com | John Freeman

Noir is a form I came to love when I began living in New York City, but it’s a feeling I first felt in Sacramento. I grew up in the suburbs east of Sacramento in the 1980s and my father worked downtown. We’d take the bus into the city, so fragrant with its million trees, so empty of pedestrians in many places; it was a regular Saturday event, when my dad would go in to work on weekends, writing grants for the family service agency he ran. The stony silence around the capital. The dry soft air.

2 months ago | altaonline.com | John Freeman

The word consequence does not appear in the King James Bible. Oh, there are punishments reaped and fates that are sowed—but consequences, that very behavioral term, are not to be found. Perhaps a consequence, coming to us from the late Middle English, from Old French, as in “to follow closely,” is not a word for the New World. A world tipped toward the present and away from the past, even if all the effects born from the past are evident to be seen.