Good morning. It’s Tuesday, Nov. 29.
- Major storm set to swirl into Northern California.
- Elon Musk threatens to go to war with Apple.
- And powerful photos on fentanyl in Los Angeles.
Statewide
1.
“There’s no safe place anywhere.”
“You don’t invite scrutiny in this town.”
“There has never been a time where I haven’t had nightmares about someone walking in and opening fire on us.”
In rural California, gay and transgender people said the deadly shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs was a reminder of how isolating it can be in conservative America. L.A. Times
2.
An atmospheric river is poised to sweep into Northern California starting Wednesday, progressing slowly south while dumping meaningful rain and feet of mountain snow, meteorologists said. It’ll be cold. Forecasts showed temperates plunging into the low 30s across much of Northern California and parts of greater Los Angeles, while flirting with single digits in the high Sierra Nevada. Accuweather | S.F. Chronicle | L.A. Times
☀️ Brighten someone’s day.
3.
The largest higher-education labor action in U.S. history is now in its third week. Since Nov. 14, nearly 48,000 academic workers across the University of California system have picketed for better pay and job security. With final exams days away, students and faculty are increasingly alarmed about disruptions to research and grades. Tanzil Chowdhury, a bargaining team member, said university officials had chosen to stall rather than negotiate: “And we find that unconscionable.” KQED | L.A. Times
4.
During the debate over whether to dam the Sierra’s Hetch Hetchy, John Muir argued that its beauty rivaled that of Yosemite Valley, calling it “one of nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples.” He lost that fight. Ever since, environmentalists have dreamed of draining the valley. The group Restore Hetch Hetchy produced a gorgeous little film on rock climbers scaling its towering granite walls. Vimeo (~10 mins)
See 13 photos of the valley before it was dammed. SierraClub.org
Northern California
5.
On Monday, the world’s richest man attacked the world’s most valuable company. In a flurry of tweets, Elon Musk accused Apple of threatening to pull the social network from its App Store. “Do they hate free speech in America?” he tweeted. Earlier this month, Apple executive Phil Schiller, who oversees the App Store, deleted his Twitter account. The timing, shortly after Musk reinstated the account of former President Trump, raised eyebrows. Bloomberg | N.Y. Times
Twitter is reinstating roughly 62,000 accounts that were suspended. Internally, employees are calling it the Big Bang. Platformer
6.
In early 2019, Vallejo police officer David McLaughlin tackled a bystander who was filming a traffic stop from his front porch. Video of the incident went viral. Now the city has agreed to pay the bystander $300,000. It’s not the first settlement involving McLaughlin. Vallejo agreed to pay $270,700 last year after he was captured on video pulling a gun on a man while off duty during an argument outside a pizzeria. Vallejo Sun
7.
A shuttered pizza place in downtown San Francisco epitomizes the city’s struggling restaurant industry. Zero Zero was positioned better than most to survive the pandemic: to-go orders, lowered rent, and federal aid. But business never returned to its pre-2020 levels. So on Nov. 12, after 12 years in operation, owner Bruce Hill bid farewell to his final customers. He choked up talking about it. S.F. Chronicle | Eater San Francisco
8.
Cloudflare uses lava lamps to secure 10% of the internet. The cybersecurity firm — whose clients include Uber, Fitbit, and OkCupid — explained how randomness plays a crucial role in encryption. To create it, the company arranged dozens of lava lamps along a wall in its San Francisco headquarters and pointed cameras at them. Periodic photos of the groovy shapes are converted into numbers that feed virtually unhackable code. They call it the Wall of Entropy. Atlas Obscura | Nerdist
Southern California
9.
“Parts of Los Angeles have become scenes of desperation with men and women sprawled on sidewalks, curled up on benches and collapsed in squalid alleys. Some huddle up smoking the drug, others inject it.”
A powerful photo essay offered an unvarnished portrait of the fentanyl crisis on the streets of Los Angeles. A.P.
10.
Growing up in Orange County, Matthew Mellow, the tattooed fellow above, was an avid body boarder. During the pandemic, he found a calling on YouTube, where he preached about walking with Jesus and the evils of Covid-19 testing. “I’ve done the research,” he would say. In 2020, he convinced two other men to join him on a quest to rebuild the kingdom of Christ in the South Pacific. The reporter David Wolman wrote an exquisitely crafted article on the tragedy that followed. N.Y. Times
11.
The homes in a pair of subdivisions under construction in an arid valley just east of Lake Elsinore come with solar panels, batteries, smart thermostats, and electric heat pumps. The neighborhoods amount to first-of-their-kind microgrids that can keep electricity flowing during blackouts. They were funded in part with $6.6 million from the federal government, which wants to learn if they could be a template for future housing developments. Bloomberg
12.
When driving through Joshua Tree, architecture buffs will commonly pause to catch a view of the High Desert House. The property owners gave architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg free rein to follow his imagination on the project, which resulted in a lair with otherworldly “wings” that meld into the surrounding boulders. Fewer visitors get to glimpse the interior, which by some accounts is equally spectacular. A writer recently got a tour. 👉 Insider
Thanks for reading!
The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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