Around 4 a.m. on October 9, 2017, my family was awoken by someone frantically ringing our doorbell. I begged my partner not to answer the door. In my sleepy and panicked state, I imagined it would be the prelude to a home-invasion robbery.

He did answer the door. I heard muffled voices, smelled smoke, heard the wind whipping outside. It was his mom and stepdad and their two dogs, who’d evacuated from the swift-moving Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa in the middle of the night.

As they settled in with us in San Francisco, I turned to Twitter and the local news. In the San Francisco Chronicle, we saw images of fire ravaging their neighborhood, residents with hoses keeping the blaze at bay. Their house survived, thanks to those neighbors, but their fences and half their garden were reduced to ash. They were lucky; the fast-moving blaze burned more than 5,000 structures and killed 22 people. …

A veil of resinous incense enveloped me as I walked through the narrow, wooden doors of the St. Pancras Old Church in London. The small, stone-walled church stands atop a small hill not far from the St. Pancras hospital and railway station, and climbing up the slope and through its doors that cold January night felt like a kind of pilgrimage. But I wasn’t here for a religious service, at least not the traditional Christian sort. I was here to see one of my favorite musicians, Patrick Wolf.

Slowly the church filled with fans, a mixture of women and gay couples. An hour after the doors opened, the lights finally went down. From behind us burst the sound of the church’s pipe organ, plied by a black silhouette I assumed at first was Wolf. But then the singer emerged from the crowd at the back of the room, draped in black robes, black hair long around his face. He padded slowly down the aisle, inches from where I sat, like a bride going to the altar. …

Teachers, social workers stretched too thin to support complex students — or stop bullying

(Content warning: discussions of OCD, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and self-harm)

For many years, I worked as a full-time reporter covering cities and towns across the Bay Area. During those years, public schools were a regular part of my reporting. Between 1998 and 2009, I wrote often about Bay Area K-12 schools: funding, performance, pioneering programs and campuses, teacher pay and unions, and the struggle between public schools, charter schools and private schools. I saw how the long-term effects of California’s Prop. …

Listeners can make up their own minds about whether they’d like to support Rope Sect going forward. After everything I’ve learned, I won’t be.

(Content warning: references to neo-Nazis and white supremacy, and images of nooses.)

I fell hard for Rope Sect’s hooky, gloom-soaked melodies the first time I heard them, at the end of 2017. At the time, the Berlin band had released just a handful of songs, barely enough to make up a half hours’ worth of music, but I listened to it daily for months.

So I was incredibly excited to learn that Rope Sect is releasing its first full-length record, The Great Flood, in August. …

Nobody asked for your advice.

There’s a joke in the chronic-illness world: You mention a problem you’re having, whether it’s back pain, a clogged sink, or fake calls from the IRS. Someone responds, “But have you tried yoga?”

It comes from our experiences on social media in particular. When we talk about what it’s like to be in our tired, achy, unpredictable bodies, or just how we’re doing on a given day, we’re barraged with unsolicited advice. The most popular recommendation always seems to be yoga, though turmeric, homeopathy, restrictive diets and other notions come up a lot, too.

Don’t get me wrong. Yoga is great for some people, and for some kinds of aches and pains. But if the original poster says something like, “yoga made my joint pain worse,” the advice-giver often acts upset. “I was just trying to help!” they’ll say. Then the original poster is compelled to soothe the commenter, when they never asked for advice in the first place. It sucks. …

A look at how recording artists make room for altered states, even rituals, in their compositions

Author’s note: I originally wrote this article in the early 2000s for a pagan magazine called Crescent. At the time, I used the term “shaman” throughout the piece, a term which is appropriative. I know better know, and apologize for my ignorance. In this version, I have changed the language to refer to “mystics” instead.

This piece (along with its companion, which I published last week) also appears in my essay collection, Read the Music: Essays on Sound. You can buy a copy here or ebook here.

‟There’s a line in [your song ‘The Real’] that says, ‘I have opened all my doors so there’s nothing left to hide.’ And this line calls up images of Aldous Huxley, William Blake and of course the Doors’ ‘Break on Through.’ Do you believe that music can take us into those places where we are beyond the five senses, into the realm of the spirit?” …

Author’s note: I originally wrote this article in the early 2000s for a pagan magazine called Crescent. At the time, I used the term “shaman” throughout the piece, a term which is appropriative. I know better know, and apologize for my ignorance. In this version, I have changed the language to refer to “mystics” instead, with one exception.

This piece also appears in my essay collection, Read the Music: Essays on Sound. You can buy a copy here or ebook here.

Seattle’s Experience Music Project* opened in the year 2000, a majestic building that is part music museum and part teleportation device. At its heart is something creator Paul Allen calls The Sky Church: like the EMP itself, this central arena takes its inspiration from legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who envisioned that one day there would be a place where people from all different backgrounds could gather and talk about, listen to, and celebrate music. …

How my mom’s family passed trauma down, generation to generation

I was about eight when the kids at school figured out I was an easy target. During recess, a cluster of classmates would corner me under the maple trees on the edge of the blacktop and tease me about my red hair. They could have teased me about anything; I would have cried, regardless. But once I began to cry, they would tease me for that. “Your eyes are leaking!” one would cackle, pointing as the others laughed. …