San Francisco
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A Stranger on the Shores of San Francisco March 19, 2025
The tension between commerce and virtue was a familiar topic for the ancients. In Plato’s final work, The Laws, Cleinias asks the Athenian Stranger, widely considered a stand-in for Plato, whether or not to found a new city by the sea. He advises aga...
Where Has the Left’s Technological Audacity Gone? March 13, 2025
Techno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more.In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled “Effective Acceler...
San Francisco, Beautiful Lie February 28, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO – EARLY JANUARYThe question of where Northern California begins is a famously contentious question among Californians. Here there is a dispute between the Bay Area people and my people, the Southern Californians. Southern Californians b...
Urban Anarchy February 27, 2025
Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco–based homeless-services nonprofit, is an organization of many slogans. Those include, among others: No fuckery (“Fuckery is lying. Fuckery is injustice. Fuckery is letting ego override empathy”); Don’t look, see it thro...
Meet the Post-Trump, Working-Class GOP February 19, 2025
On Election Day Eve, I was covering Kamala Harris’s rally in Pittsburgh at the Carrie Blast Furnaces, a testament to the city’s steel glory, now a museum. The Harris campaign made a last-minute venue switch there to connect the San Francisco attorney...
