Good morning. It’s Wednesday, Aug. 7.
- Why Californians pay some of the highest power bills.
- Concessionaire makes a mess of Yosemite National Park.
- And Elon Musk declares “war” in suit against advertisers.
Statewide
1.
California’s utilities are spending billions of dollars to bury power lines, insulate wires, and build solar and wind farms, passing the costs to households. The result for Jessica Simpson Nehrer, a resident of Borrego Springs, has been a doubling of her electricity bills from two summers ago. In June, she paid $1,873.90, exceeding her $1,200 rent. A nearby grocery store tried raising the thermostat to 85 degrees. The chocolate bars melted. Wall Street Journal
2.
“The experience is total garbage.”
At Yosemite National Park, the guest services conglomerate Aramark is responsible for the restaurants, hotels, shuttles, pools, gas stations, and more. On its watch, guests and employees have endured maddening wait times, rotted buildings, and meals that call to mind hospital plates with industrial-grade meat. Bloomberg published an investigation on “the mess at Yosemite.”
3.
The Michelin Guide, the influential culinary compendium, announced its 2024 star recipients, including 85 in California. San Francisco reasserted its place as one of the world’s great food cities with 28 starred restaurants. That amounts to roughly one Michelin-rated restaurant for every 29,000 residents, compared to one per 160,000 residents in Los Angeles, and one per 124,000 in New York City. Bloomberg | L.A. Times
- See a map of California’s starred restaurants. 👉 Michelin.com
Northern California
4.
In the summer of 2015, Adrian Gonzalez, then 15, lured his 8-year-old neighbor, Maddy Middleton, into his apartment in Santa Cruz with the promise of ice cream. He then raped and killed her, disposing of her body in a dumpster. Gonzalez confessed. As a juvenile, he was supposed to be freed when he turns 25 years old this October. But on Tuesday, a judge took the exceptional step of denying his release. Instead, she scheduled a jury trial to determine whether he poses too great a danger to the public. Santa Cruz Sentinel | KRON
5.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X sued a coalition of advertisers on Tuesday, accusing it of conspiring in a boycott that cost the company billions of dollars. “We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words,” Musk wrote on Tuesday. “Now, it is war.” After Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022, dozens of brands cut their spending, citing a surge in hate speech on the platform — some of it endorsed by Musk. Analysts said the new litigation would only further alienate advertisers. N.Y. Times | Bloomberg
6.
Amit Elor, a 20-year-old from Walnut Creek, clinched gold in women’s freestyle wrestling on Tuesday to become the youngest Olympic champion in American wrestling history. The Washington Post declared her the most dominant female athlete in America: “In her four matches, she outpointed her opponents by an aggregate score of 31-2, smothering one opponent’s head into the floor, leaving another in tears and mercy-ruling her semifinal opponent.”
7.
“Your entire appearance screams holiday glamour.”
“I love everything about you.”
“Purple for the win.”
A dapper British comedian named Troy Hawke wanders the streets of the world’s cities paying flowery compliments to strangers. His schtick is sometimes not appreciated. But on a recent visit San Francisco, everyone seemed to match Hawke’s positive energy. YouTube (~3 mins)
Southern California
8.
Last year, homelessness among veterans in Los Angeles fell by a quarter, while homelessness among other people in the region rose. The success came as part of a federal rental aid program that has quietly demonstrated how to make progress on a seemingly intractable problem. “It is the best initiative on homelessness that the federal government has ever developed,” said Philip F. Mangano, who helped launch the program. “The best. By far. If we can do it for veterans, we can do it for others.” N.Y. Times
9.
In November, LAist revealed that an Orange County supervisor, Andrew Do, had directed millions of dollars to his 22-year-old daughter’s nonprofit without disclosing his family connection. Now the county is demanding that the nonprofit, Viet America Society, return $2.2 million after it failed to explain how the money was spent. The funds had been earmarked for feeding needy seniors during the pandemic. LAist
10.
For decades, surf territorialism was the unwritten law of the land in Palos Verdes Estates, where a band of local thugs known as Bay Boys chased outsiders off the beach. This week, a long-delayed trial kicked off that seeks to determine whether the affluent city turned a blind eye to the harassment. Cory Spencer, a plaintiff, testified on Tuesday that a local surfer ran over him in the water in 2016, cutting his wrist. Back on the bluff, another local warned, “This is what we do. It’s not going to get better for you.” Courthouse News
11.
The trees of Los Angeles may well be the most underrated reason to visit, the New York Times wrote. Take Laurel Canyon. As flora life goes, it’s chaos: “130-foot-tall Canary Island pines, native California bay laurels (the source of the neighborhood’s name) and coast live oaks, Aleppo pines from Syria, giant eucalyptus originally from Australia — all growing up and out in every direction, branches resting on utility lines, massive trunks leaning into rooftops. There is nothing manicured about Laurel Canyon — the landscape is wild and the scale is humbling.”
12.
In the early 1990s, the photographer Stefan Ruiz captured kids with their lowrider bikes in Sacramento, San Jose, Watsonville, and Cupertino. They idolized “the guys with the cars,” Ruiz said, but they were too young to drive, so they tricked out their bikes instead. Ruiz pulled a selection of photos he had stored away in boxes for an essay in the New Yorker, “Boys on Their Bikes.”
Get your California Sun T-shirts, phone cases, hoodies, hats, and totes!
Thanks for reading!
The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
Make a one-time contribution to the California Sun.
Give a subscription as a gift.
Get a California Sun mug, T-shirt, phone case, hat, or hoodie.
Forward this email to a friend.
Click here to stop delivery, and here to update your billing information. To change your email address please email me: mike@californiasun.co. (Note: Unsubscribing here does not cancel payments. To do that click here.)
The California Sun, PO Box 6868, Los Osos, CA 93412
Wake up to must-read news from around the Golden State delivered to your inbox each morning.