Good morning. It’s Tuesday, May 9.
- Nearly a third of downtown San Francisco is now empty.
- A bid to revive the famed Mavericks big-wave contest.
- And people displaced by Dodger Stadium seek reparations.
Statewide
1.
Democrats hoped Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has missed more than 90 votes since getting shingles in February, would return to Congress this week. But she’s refused to offer a timeline. On Sunday, Sen. Richard J. Durbin became the latest prominent Democrat to signal his impatience with Feinstein, who is 89. “I hope she does what’s best for her and her family and the state of California and makes a decision soon as to whether she’s coming back,” he said. Washington Post | Mercury News
- N.Y. Times editorial board: “It’s a deeply saddening situation, but even the most dedicated public servants cannot serve forever, and they may be the last to realize or act upon their incapacity.”
Northern California
2.
An astounding 31% of the office space in downtown San Francisco is now empty, the city’s worst vacancy rate on record. That amounts to 18.4 million square feet of available real estate, or the equivalent of 13 Salesforce Towers. The Controller’s Office has estimated that the hollowed-out core could eventually cost the city as much as $200 million in annual lost property taxes. The S.F. Chronicle mapped every vacancy.
3.
A decade ago, Elizabeth Holmes was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Now she has a new persona: devoted mother. The black turtlenecks and deep voice are gone. “Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn’t,” she says now. The reporter Amy Chozick spent several days with Holmes, who has shunned the press for years, as she awaited prison in one of the most notorious cases of corporate fraud in recent history. N.Y. Times
- The Times piece drew criticism from several journalists, who viewed it as an exercise in reputation management. “This is abysmal,” wrote the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner.
4.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland filed for bankruptcy Monday as it faces more than 330 child sex abuse claims brought under a California law that extended the statute of limitations. The Diocese of Santa Rosa filed for bankruptcy protection in March, and the Sacramento and San Diego dioceses are also considering the move. A group for clergy sex abuse victims said the latest filing was a ploy to hide information. “The Diocese of Oakland is morally bankrupt, but they do not deserve to be declared financially bankrupt,” it said. Oaklandside | A.P.
5.
Lesley Hu wanted to vaccinate her 9-year-old son, Pierce. Her ex-husband, Stephen O’Loughlin, was adamantly opposed. For O’Loughlin, it started with an interest in Tony Robbins and his idea that nutrition was an essential building block of self-improvement. Then he got into anti-vaccine conspiracies. One day in early 2021, Hu went to pick up Pierce from his school in San Francisco and he wasn’t there. The reporter Eric Pape told the story of the tragedy that would leave Hu forever broken. Atavist Magazine
6.
“I am a white person.”
A UC Berkeley professor of anthropology, Elizabeth Hoover, admitted in an open letter that she “incorrectly identified” as Native American after researchers questioned her ancestry. She conceded that identifying as Mohawk and Mi’kmaq had afforded her professional opportunities but insisted she had been misled by family lore. Critics, including academic colleagues, accused her of lying and demanded that she be fired. Washington Post | Inside Higher Education
7.
The big-wave contest at Mavericks, 20 miles south of San Francisco, is among the most storied in surfing. But it hasn’t been held since 2016, for reasons involving politics, territorial disputes, and gender equity debates. Now a 24-year-old who doesn’t surf named Elizabeth Cresson is trying to revive the event, a costly gambit she undertook in part because she was appalled by the contest’s rancor toward women on the waves. Some are hoping she fails. Washington Post
Southern California
8.
A new study estimated that nearly 3,600 fast-food workers in Los Angeles County are homeless. The median annual earnings of fast food workers statewide in 2020 was about $15,000, a paltry sum to survive in regions like greater Los Angeles, where median rents are more than $23,000 a year. A fast food industry group called the study, which was commissioned by a union, “bogus.” LAist | L.A. Times
9.
Dodger Stadium is home to the seven-time world champion Los Angeles Dodgers. But in the 1950s, the land it was built on belonged to hundreds of families living in communities called Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. The story of their displacement has been well documented in books and film. But now they’ve been inspired by the reparations movement to seek their own form of justice. The land, they say, should be returned to them. N.Y. Times
10.
Last week, video of a man racing to stop a baby in a stroller from rolling into a busy street in Hesperia went viral on social media. The hero, Ron Nessman, had been sitting on a nearby bench after interviewing for a dishwashing job at Applebee’s, an effort to get back on his feet after years of homelessness. “Right place, right time. I assessed it and just did it,” he said. Within days, Nessman was offered at least five different jobs, including the Applebee’s gig, which he accepted. KTLA | CBS Los Angeles
11.
Online sleuths had been trying to identify the woman in the pink beret for more than two years. She was captured in a variety of videos and photos participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Then a couple weeks ago the FBI tweeted two photos of the woman. “I stopped dead in my tracks,” said a man who identified himself as her ex-boyfriend. “I’m like, ‘That’s Jenny.'” He sent a tip to the bureau, which charged Jennifer Inzunza Vargas, of Los Angeles, with four federal counts on Monday. NBC News
12.
The plants look like they come from the alien world in the movie “Avatar.” But the plants and the colors are real. The photographer Craig Burrows collects specimens from near his home in the Los Angeles area, then blasts them with ultraviolet light, which causes them emit to hidden, psychedelic colors. It’s the same thing that happens with a black-light poster, Burrows told WIRED. “The flower literally glows.” Colossal | WIRED
Correction
Last Thursday’s newsletter misstated Jenny Craig’s valuation. The weight-loss company was not valued at $224 billion. (That figure was an estimate of the entire weight-loss market in 2021.) Jenny Craig was valued in 2002 at about $115 million.
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The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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