The Hitch is right; San Francisco hasn’t got it. Not anymore. From Vanity Fair (the emphasis is my own): It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape [...]
Gray skies are a common feature of many photos coming from Sichuan. Word is that it’s been raining. The destruction that follows an earthquake’s shaking is often the result of fire. San Francisco in 1906 is the classic example: in much of the city, whatever the shaking didn’t break later went up in flames. The [...]
Hard times around the globe these days. Earthquake in China. Cyclone in Burma. Tornados in the U.S. An enormous volcano on the verge of collapse in Chile. Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a story about a possible earthquake here in the Bay Area. One thing I’ve learned is starkly visible in [...]
A note to all Lightroom users that the latest update, 1.4, is apparently rotten. Adobe acknowledges it and requests all who’ve updated to roll back. There are instructions, see them here.
Matt Krupnick published an article about the fallout from the dean search at Berkeley’s journalism school in the Contra Costa Times yesterday (“UC Berkeley mum on why dean hire bailed out”). I think it’s worth a read, if only for the summing up that hasn’t appeared anywhere else–and he did a good job considering few [...]
In my last post, I mentioned that the spill isn’t just oil, but bunker fuel. What’s bunker fuel? It’s the stuff that runs big engines, like in an oil tanker or cargo ship. And it’s cheap, which is why these high volume users use it. Last year, I interviewed Dave Culp, an engineer who designs [...]
Wrote this on Tuesday: John Peabody has a nice rundown of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s meeting on the surprise withdrawal of Dianne Lynch as incoming dean. She is, and will remain, dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. To recap: Lynch was the favorite candidate among the finalists [...]
Too many people would have been too unhappy with me if they’d heard about this after the fact. So: tomorrow, Tuesday, October 23. Jeopardy!. Check your local listings.
Grace Paley died two days ago. She was a sweet and humane poet and short story writer, one of those individuals for whom many will admit a familiarity with the name if not a specific knowledge of the work because some high school English teacher somewhere along the line (but a fan, truly) assigned a [...]
In June, the Chronicle ran a good story about a woman who discovered—and pursued—the person who had stolen her identity. It is engaging to read and a lucky score for the Chronicle, a story like that, one that unfolds cinematically and neatly. There are advantages to being the only show in town, as far as [...]
The Chronicle‘s Matier and Ross reported this morning that California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s official car was broken into recently. It was parked in San Francisco’s Civic Center, “Right across from City Hall, in plain view of the mayor’s office,” he told the Chronicle. Nearly everyone I know who owns a car in San Francisco [...]
The amazing, disappearing honeybee has become the sleeper hit of journalism. It has slowly gained momentum over the last nine or ten months and now it seems like just about everyone has heard of it, even if they don’t really know anything about it. Most coverage follows the same beaten path: bees are disappearing, did [...]
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