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In a few short months, state Senator Scott Wiener may come one step closer to his long-stated goal of replacing Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and attaining a measure of the power that comes with succeeding a Democratic Party icon. Recent polling has Wiener leading what is expected to be a close

Where did San Francisco’s environmental movement go? This seems a rather naive question since concern for the climate is everywhere in the city’s political language. But that saturation conceals a troubling shift. Environmentalism in San Francisco has not been defeated in public debate. Rather, despite the indisputable reality

A few weeks ago it was revealed that San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie spent about $1 million on consultants to burnish his image during his first year in office. While the tone of much of this coverage was critical, although conceding that it was perfectly legal, there is another way

Last month’s shooting death of Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers has created a split in Silicon Valley. The Pretti incident has become the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back: The tech industry is finally speaking out against the

Last week, many Americans watched in horror as video footage chronicled the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was executed by an ICE agent during a Minneapolis protest. Pretti’s death was the second in a single month at the hands of ICE. Weeks earlier, Renee Good,

Mayor Daniel Lurie delivered his first state of the city address last week, using the occasion to deviate for a moment from his usual promise to combat a non-existent crime wave by sending more police onto mostly quiet city streets. Instead, Lurie took a page from recently elected New York

The San Francisco Charter, the 548-page document that serves as the city’s constitution, is getting a rewrite at the behest of Mayor Daniel Lurie. To that end, Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman have appointed 31 San Franciscans to review and recommend changes. Revisions will then be

A new book by Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, painstakingly chronicles the rightward move of Silicon Valley’s tech titans, culminating in their embrace of President Donald Trump. Once considered reliably liberal, Musk and his peers have taken up authoritarianism with a relish

The year 2025 saw the inauguration of San Francisco’s 46th mayor, Daniel Lurie, a political neophyte and an heir to the billion-dollar Levi-Strauss fortune. It also saw the shift to a more conservative Board of Supervisors. But all was not rosy in the so-called moderate camp. Last November, saw

It is fair to say that the Marina District is not the favorite neighborhood of progressive San Francisco. Over the last few decades, it has earned a reputation as being home for affluent Yuppies, and later tech workers, who are out of step with the more avant-garde cultural, and at

Moving through any American city, how many ways are we surveilled? Through security and traffic cameras, cellphones, GPS, expenditures and other online activity. With political leaders in alignment with startups that believe they can “eliminate all crime in America,” we must understand that surveillance without restriction is not only technologically

Now that we are removed from the despotism of the last century, there is a tendency to deny the signs that signal the beginning  of fascistic policy. The notion that the technocrats who influence and run our city are essentially benign is the result of careful branding, one that allows