Remember that song from the ’80s by Yes? “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” When I heard that as a kid, I misheard the lyrics. I was convinced they were singing about the “owner of the lonely horse.” (I also thought Starship “milked this city.” I was wrong.) It was not until I was nearly [...]
When trains cross certain borders—entering China from Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, for example—they have to stop and change wheels. The wheel assemblies, called trucks or bogies, used on trains in Mongolia (and Belarus and Kazakhstan and pretty much all of the old Russian Empire) won’t work in China. These two countries have different rail [...]
Some time back in the summer of 2008, I joined my friend Mark Sung for a short trip to the Mendocino coast. We meant to go camping, but the tent spots were full and we ended up fishing until about 4 a.m., anyway. Actually, we weren’t fishing for fish, but crabbing for crab.
Mendocino’s a pretty [...]
A great talent whom I’d meant to write more about sooner. He died today. I knew his work through the New York Review of Books, for which he’d been drawing for nearly 50 years. Some of my favorites of his include:
He drew with an appealing wit and detail. The circumstances of the job meant that [...]
A lot of text, lately, on this blog, so I’ll keep this brief. This is a picture I took after some rain in downtown San Francisco. This is Maiden Lane, near Union Square, a stretch of high-end boutiques and shops. A pair of opera singers used to set up at one end and sing, but [...]
It’s fun to take pictures from high up. A few years ago, a friend working as a wedding planner let me roam around the top floor of the Bank of America building as she set up someone’s wedding ceremony. These were the best sustained views of San Francisco I’ve ever had.
In the picture above, you [...]
Read Part I and Part II of Devoted to a Fault. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. The following was reported in late 2007 and early 2008.
The 1868 Earthquake Alliance held its April 2008 meeting in an Oakland building undergoing a seismic retrofit. In the lobby, plywood [...]
This is Part II of this article. Read Part I here. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. The following was reported in late 2007 and early 2008.
At 7:53 in the morning on October 21, 1868, a major earthquake struck the Bay Area. It had a magnitude of about [...]
The following is part one of a three-part series of posts. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. It was reported in late 2007 and early 2008.
Hayward Phil Stoffer squinted through the glass to see a sign of the past and, almost certainly, the future of this part of [...]
All of California may not one day fall into the ocean, but right now, parts of it do.
Erosion occurs all along the coast. Every ocean wave pounds on the bluffs and scours the beaches.
Here is the Pacifica Municipal Pier.
It’s shaped like an “L” — you can see that it makes a right turn toward the [...]
Last week, with June 4 marking the 20th anniversary of the crackdown on the student protests in Tiananmen Square, Chinese officials blocked filming around Tiananmen by physically blocking shots. Below, the experience of BBC’s Beijing correspondent.
Umbrellas are one of the things I remember from Korea, Japan and China. As a boy, I think I [...]
Inevitably, I will post at least one of the seemingly numerous videos available of Ira Glass telling people how to tell stories. But until then, I’ll stick with the video below. It’s a clip from a Woody Allen film.
If you haven’t seen his Hannah and Her Sisters, I’m spoiling things a bit by putting [...]
Click here to subscribe to the feed.
No problem. Let me know if you have any questions. 
