Each of us, if we live long enough, is a part of history. Between the time I was born in 1960 and now, terrorist planes crashed into and toppled Manhattan’s Twin Towers. America landed on the moon and the world grappled with pandemics, one of which, HIV/AIDS, killed upwards of 20,000 San Franciscans. One U.S.…
Lots of indicators suggest that we Americans are struggling. Twice as many should-be students are missing more than 10 percent of the school year than before the pandemic. Drug overdose deaths rose roughly three percent in 2023, after several years of double-digit increases; well more than 70,000 dead annually. In the first six weeks of…
Facts are facts. The sun rises and sets as expected by the clock, even if time itself is subject to deeper exploration. Black men are incarcerated at much higher rates than whites. The earth’s temperatures are rising more or less as predicted by complex, data-driven, climate models. Smoking cigarettes elevates the chance of getting lung…
One of my dominant childhood memories is of my father’s constant quest to get something for nothing. He’d pile my three sisters, my mom and me into our station wagon and troll the streets for shopping center and bank openings offering free cookies, balloons, and plastic key chains. I’d eaten hundreds of those flower-shaped shortbread…
Ask pretty much any San Franciscan what’s wrong with their City and they’ll quickly come up with a passionate, well-considered, response: too many mentally unstable people living on sidewalks; streets are filthy; schools aren’t effectively educating students, especially Hispanics and African-Americans; local government spends too much and is too ineffective; retail crime and car break-ins…
California Housing Element Law requires that San Francisco catalyze creation of sufficient accommodations to meet its Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) goals, as approved by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. RHNA mandates construction of more than 82,000 units within the City between now and 2031, with income-specific tranches. Despite this goal, San…
Take this quiz to determine if you’re a real San Franciscan! 1) Which vehicle would you rather be stuck behind? a) A Cruise or Waymo driverless vehicle.b) An Uber driver who commutes from Stockton.c) A Tesla.d) A kid straddling a recycling bin bombing down a steep hill. 2) Your restaurant check indicates several charges at…
It’s 1:30 a.m. Debbie and I are sound asleep, naked under the covers, when our daughter, Sara, along with her cousin, Sophia – both college seniors home for the summer – burst into the bedroom and flip on the lights. “Mom, Dad! I need your help! Logan is missing!” Sara shouts. “Sara!” I shout back,…
The View doesn’t have so much a business model as a business prayer. Every month, we hope that enough ads are booked, subscriptions taken, and donations received that we can afford to publish the paper. This admittedly not excellent system has lasted 53 years. More than 600 monthly editions, upwards of 100 million pages of…
Phishing texts – smishing – regularly pop up on our cellphones. These obscure messages are purportedly from people who know us, or sent by innocent mistake, but their real purpose is to wheedle into a conversation that results in the provision of personal information. Below are smishes I received, and responses I wanted to, but…
“At least now that your kids are well beyond grownup,” I said to my 88-year-old mom, “you don’t have to worry about them anymore.” “I still worry,” she retorted. “I worry about you, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren.” “You mean it never ends!?” “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.” For those of us with children, worry is…
“I’m bored,” my adolescent self would periodically announce to my mother, who’d generally respond by telling me to go play outside without lifting her eyes from whatever book she was reading. What I really meant was, “I’m lonely.” Loneliness is a complicated feeling, the mole sauce of emotions; rich, dark, with many subtle flavors.…
Michael Moritz’s “Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco,” published in The New York Times, provoked the expected reactions from resident luminaries. Mission Local’s Joe Eskenazi picked at the weak spots underlying Moritz’s proposed political remedies, like a doctor, who, after completing a patient’s annual checkup, shakes his head sadly. Tim Redmond,…
Would you do business with someone who has declared bankruptcy twice, charges notably high prices for their product, which they regularly fail to deliver? What if their commercial practices resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people, triggering a manslaughter charge for the demise of a mother and her eight-year-old daughter? Is this somebody…
Home for winter break, my daughter, Sara, was eager for help deciding which study abroad program to take during her last semester in college. Society, Culture and Gender in Amsterdam? Social Movements and Human Rights in Argentina? International Perspectives on Sexuality in Prague? More than 20 different opportunities, in a dozen and a half countries,…
What do you do when, decades into a relationship that you’ve molded your entire life around, you discover your bond is toxic? Bad for you, and bad for everyone around you. Especially the children. California has entered the acceptance stage of the “carbon crises,” moving well past denial, though pockets of anger and depression continue…
Dogpatch, Mission Bay, and Potrero Hill know about being knocked down, pushed to the ground, staying there for years before climbing back up, head held high. For the last third of the 20th Century, as the industrial age and wartime winds that created portside prosperity faded, these neighborhoods, economically dependent on the waterfront, suffered high…
California is blessed with an abundance of open spaces, protected in different fashion by a quilt of public and private entities. The federal government controls roughly half of all Golden State lands, under the jurisdiction of the U.S Forest, National Park, and Fish and Wildlife services, among other agencies. About three percent is owned by…
California faces a conundrum. We want to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), principally by replacing fossil fuels used in transportation and buildings with electricity generated by renewable energy. Yet, the state’s electricity prices are among the country’s highest and still rising. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) customers pay roughly 80 percent more per kilowatt-hour…
Sad to say, we’ve drifted into a world in which this editor of a half-century old neighborhood newspaper feels a twinge of fear when contemplating writing about redistricting municipal supervisorial districts. To characterize the debate over how best to right size district lines in the face of population changes as “heated” would be akin to…
In Mendocino County, 523 acres of rugged forest is studded with the ghostlike stumps of ancient redwoods harvested during a logging boom that eliminated 90 percent of the species on the West Coast. But about 200 acres were spared the saw, still dense with old-growth redwoods. The land was the hunting, fishing and ceremonial grounds…
I had a vision, or perhaps it was a dream, of my death. I was sitting by myself on a Northern California cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The place was vaguely familiar, reminiscent of the Marin Headlands. I’d scrambled down a steep slope to settle onto a flat perch with a view of forever. Time…
Last month Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors out of a boatload of cash by falsely claiming that her company, Theranos, would transform blood testing with technology that relied on just a tiny sample pricked from a patient’s finger. The centrality of blood in this tale of greed, hubris, and by-gum-I’m-going-to-change-the-world-with-two-straws-and-a-rock – along…
The Nazis discovered the family hiding in France and put them on a train to Auschwitz; mom, dad and two sisters. “We argued the entire way,” said the sole sibling survivor. “About whose fault it was we were captured.” The rest of her family were gassed to death immediately after they arrived at the death…
Teeth are strange. We’re born with the seeds of two sets, the first marching forth as we become toddlers, then, having done their duty, falling out and being replaced in adolescence. Nothing else in the body works quite this way. Skin constantly sheds and is replenished. Hair and nails need to be trimmed. None…