In the fall of 2020, during the reign of deep Covid, I worked in-person as a frontline behavioral healthcare counselor at a residential complex for adults with serious mental illness. It was a strange ...

In other matters, studies suggest playing Mozart’s music to plants has a positive effect on their growth. At Petaluma’s Lagunitas Brewing Company, they’re playing music to beer. Albeit, their approach ...

Jessica Vega’s connection to Sonoma CAN’s Head Start began in childhood. Her mother, Maricruz Reynoso, worked at CAN and knew how critical preschool was to childhood development. Years later, Jessica ...

Rebecca Pennington loves seeing the transformations of her hot yoga and pilates students. The owner of Energize Hot Yoga Santa Rosa for 14 years, she’s seen participants’ strength, posture, muscle ...

Even after decades practicing personal injury law, Neal Kuvara still enjoys helping injured people. He calls it “solving cases,” and it typically begins with a one-on-one conversation. “I try to talk ...

Grief leaves its mark in silence, in questions, and sometimes—in stories. When Susan Swartz died by suicide in 2020, the columnist’s daughter, bestselling ghostwriter Samantha Rose, began writing ...

President Joe Biden’s recent disclosure of an aggressive, metastatic prostate cancer diagnosis has cast a somber shadow over the Democratic Party. The cancer, characterized by a high Gleason score of ...

Sonoma Botanical Garden’s Sunday Funday series returns this summer, kicking off Sunday, June 22 and then picking back up Sunday, July 13 and finally, Sunday, Aug. 10. Packed with fun for all ages, ...

ARIES (March 21-April 19): I think you’re ready to establish new ways of nourishing and protecting what’s valuable to you. Your natural assertiveness will be useful in setting boundaries and securing ...

SECOND THOUGHTS Christopher Johnston (seated) is beginning to wonder about his wife, Judy (Heather Berger), and her obsession with doing everything just so in their idealized married life, in the play ...

Fixing Forests I just visited the redwood country and wilderness forests that stretch from the cool coastal range to snow-topped alpine ridges in the interior mountains in Northern California. Hiking ...

Like many jacks-of-all-trades, I’ve long yearned for a “unified field theory” of my career. I’m not a Renaissance Man in the conventional sense since the scope of my interests is limited to media, ...