An unbiased article that isn’t a deranged hit piece:

The tech elite in San Francisco aim to redraw political lines so that conservatives can feel at home on both sides, and progressives are boxed out of politics as dangerous communist radicals…Tan, Moritz, and others involved in the city’s self-described moderate movement believe they have an answer. They have founded or sponsored groups with generically liberal-sounding names like Grow SF (Tan), TogetherSF (Moritz), and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and have poured millions into local politics to advance solutions they often describe as “common sense.

I will say this, though: maybe Laura Jedeed should have written something that would have made a tech bro comment “this is a biased and deranged hit-piece.” I mean, this is basically a very good article on a stinky topic that very much needs more sunlight; she cites a lot of people doing good work, like the Phoenix Project folks, and for a NYC-based journalist who parachuted in to report on The Bay Area (which, like, she is that), she put in a lot of spadework, and dug up a lot of good stuff. But for an article whose real throughline is the correct assertion that politicized and well-funded “moderates” are the real radicals here (and that all of this is all mostly just a fairly transparent front for a MAGA-inflected anti-progressive wave of techfash “public safety” ghouls), the article not only goeskind of soft on “moderates” like Mark Dietrich, it centers them in the story, gives them a kind of main character status that makes it a lot more sympathetic and credulous to their own self-representations than it should be.

(Meanwhile, “Two of S.F.’s richest pressure groups, TogetherSF and Neighbors, will merge”)

“the boon and the bane of gardening: it forces one to think in terms of “plant time,” regardless of one’s own shifting hopes and desires.” 

“I will demand that the incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” Give him this: the man can preen.

“In Oakland, protestors set up a sanctuary community in the parking lot of the old Greyhound bus terminal on San Pablo Avenue, erecting tents and a resource station for people in need of shelter and support. The site was intended to act as a model for what sanctioned encampments could look like—that is, encampments that are not at risk of being swept and can provide unhoused residents with on-site access to service providers, community programs, and resources such as food, shelter, and harm reduction supplies.” 

New Oakland Council Off to Cacophonous & Unsteady Start

“Encampment sweeps are increasing across the state: A ‘know your rights’ guide for unhoused residents.” 

2025 criminal justice elections.

From 1,000 to zero: The loss of public news racks in San Francisco.

“For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.”

How a San Francisco Navy Lab Became a Hub for Human Radiation Experiments.

“What I’m really calling for is something like Tech Zionism” Srinivasan said:

At root, “exiting” implies the creation of a kind of marketplace of nations, a competitive landscape where people can pick and choose the countries they belong to in very much the same way you’d choose between different brands of cereal at the grocery store. 

“A new housing tower in Oakland was purchased by a local buyer in a deal worth millions, but about half of its recently assessed value.”

“Los Angeles no longer has a Fire Season” 

This “Los Angeles Firefighters Begged the City Not to Cut Funding” goes a lot farther and deeper than LA TIMES OWNER SAYS but then POLITICO CONTRADICTS.  

Mourning On-Demand: Digital Afterlife Services and Lamentation Economics.

Places like Paradise show us a lot about what rebuilding will look like: 

On a warm June afternoon at Paradise’s annual goat grazing festival, Wear and I sat at an information booth run by her organization, the Camp Fire Restoration Project. Halfway through our conversation, she motioned to a booth behind us where another group was giving away free tomato plants. “Before, you wouldn’t have even bothered,” Wear said. “Nobody was going to be able to grow tomatoes in Paradise, unless you had a clearing.” Now, the sun is hard to escape. It beats down on homes and businesses lining the Skyway, the Ridge’s main road stretching up the mountain from Chico. It bakes weeds and dirt covering hundreds of empty lots across town, the remnants of charred properties marked by driveways that lead to nothing. And lately, it also shines on newly constructed homes that are being sold to out-of-towners at a steadily increasing rate. 

Oakland Fire 1991 Local TV Coverage:

Sarah: “I don’t believe in God but it’s strange that the liquid we get out of the ground made up of compressed dead things from millions of years ago is what enabled us to build a fascinating complex world full of great beauty and great ugliness and extreme pleasures and extreme violence, and that this liquid made up of dead things when burned creates conditions that will kill us.” 

“As any honest firefighter or weatherman would tell you, no amount of money, or water, or firehose pressure would have made the difference in combatting this week’s historic conflagration.”

What’s on. I feel like I should go to SF’s museums more than I do. They have a bunch of art. But they’re all the way over there (pejorative).

Five Years after BBQ Becky. 

“I went to the second of three performances last night, and you bet I was surprised: I was mostly bored.” 

Cohen:

“The assumption is continually made that it’s the big flames” that cause widespread community destruction, he said, “and yet the wildfire actually only initiates community ignitions largely with lofted burning embers.” Experts attribute widespread devastation to wind-driven embers igniting spot fires two to three miles ahead of the established fire. Maps of the Eaton fire show seemingly random ignitions across Altadena. When you study the destruction in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, note what didn’t burn — unconsumed tree canopies adjacent to totally destroyed homes,” he said. “The sequence of destruction is commonly assumed to occur in some kind of organized spreading flame front — a tsunami of super-heated gases — but it doesn’t happen that way. “In high-density development, scattered burning homes spread to their neighbors and so on. Ignitions downwind and across streets are typically from showers of burning embers from burning structures.” This fundamental misunderstanding has likewise led to a misunderstanding of prevention. No longer is it a matter of preventing wildfires but instead preventing points of ignition within communities by employing “home-hardening” strategies — proper landscaping, fire-resistant siding — and enjoining neighbors in collective efforts such as brush clearing.

“the spirit of never-been Los Angeles, a city that exists in the deferred dreams and the haze…how to be incandescently angry at the city that I love, an anger that rises from a passionate drive to recover that lost future—a greener, safer, beautiful shared future”