Good morning. It’s Wednesday, June 12.
- Elon Musk blurs boundaries with women at SpaceX.
- Vallejo is said to cover up man’s death in custody.
- And Kanye West guts an architectural treasure in Malibu.
Please note: The newsletter will be off Thursday and Friday. Back in your inbox on Monday.
Statewide
1.
In 2014, California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 47, a measure designed to reduce jail populations by reclassifying some felony drug and theft offenses as misdemeanors. But critics say it inadvertently emboldened repeat offenders. Now voters are expected to get a chance to reconsider the tradeoffs after officials announced Tuesday that a ballot measure to roll back parts of Proposition 47 qualified for the November ballot. S.F. Chronicle
2.
Several female employees at SpaceX have said that Elon Musk showed them an unusual amount of attention or pursued them, according to an investigative article on the founder’s “boundary-blurring relationships.” One woman accused Musk of exposing himself to her. Another said he asked her to have his babies. Former executives and employees said there’s an understanding: “Musk, a charismatic leader with many fans who call him a genius, can act with impunity.” Wall Street Journal
3.
As many as 95% of the planet’s fungal species have yet to be described. A group of California mushroom foragers are doing their part to reduce that figure using DNA sequencing. Mandie Quark, a mycologist with California’s Fungal Diversity Survey, said foragers are regularly identifying novel fungi species: “We could probably go outside right now here in California — or really, wherever you are at in North America — and we could easily find a new species of mushroom or fungus that hasn’t been described.” N.Y. Times
Northern California
4.
In 2016, a Vallejo police officer responded to a call for help locating a female patient who wandered off from a hospital. Instead, he detained another patient, 49-year-old Darryl Mefferd, outside the facility. Within an hour, Mefferd was dead. A source who saw body camera footage said the officer put “his whole body weight” on Mefferd‘s back: “He sat on him for 10 minutes.” Still, the coroner ruled the death a drug overdose, and the city hid the case from public scrutiny. Three outside forensic pathology experts now say it was likely a homicide. Open Vallejo
5.
The billionaire-backed group hoping to build a city from scratch on pastureland in Solano County gathered enough signatures to put the proposal before voters in November, officials said on Tuesday. Now they just need to convince residents, many of whom have strong misgivings about the consequences for habitat, traffic, and water. Jan Sramek, the former trader leading the project, said the decision before voters is nothing less than “a referendum on what do we want the future of California to be.” KQED | L.A. Times
- Sramek recently discussed his vision on the California Sun Podcast.
6.
On March 3, 2023, the U.S. Postal Service was booted from its office in Bolinas by the landlord, forcing residents to start driving 40 minutes round-trip to the nearest alternative. Fifteen months later, the west Marin County haven for artists and musicians is at its wit’s end. Locals have picketed, composed a protest song, and sent thousands of letters, in hand-painted envelopes, to USPS officials. “We kind of went into the valley of despair, and we’re just trying to crawl back out,” said Enzo Resta, a longtime resident. L.A. Times
7.
In the redwood forest along the Russian River, one of the trees is not like the others. In the late 1800s, logging was so frenzied around the river community of Guerneville that it earned the nickname Stumptown. But for reasons no one knows, one specimen escaped the saw. Known as the Clar Tree, it is believed to be the oldest redwood in Sonoma County, having sprouted in the time of Jesus Christ. It’s also the tallest, towering above the canopy at nearly 280 feet. See a drone view of one of Sonoma County’s last old-growth survivors. 👉YouTube
- Last year, a conservation deal ensured permanent protection of the Clar Tree. There’s now talk of creating a public trail up to the giant redwood. Save the Redwoods
Southern California
8.
In 2021, Kanye West bought an architectural treasure in Malibu designed by the Japanese master Tadao Ando — then turned it into a ruin. The New Yorker recounted how the mercurial artist hired a handyman from New Jersey named Tony Saxon to carve out the home’s interior:
” … he wanted no kitchen, bathrooms, A.C., windows, light fixtures, or heating. He was intent on cutting off the water and the power (and removing the house’s cable and wiring, which ran through the concrete in plastic tubes). He talked of clarity, simplicity, and a kind of self-reliance. ‘He wanted everything to be his own doing,’ Saxon told me. In one cheerful text from Ye to Saxon, in response to a report of the day’s demolition, he wrote, ‘Let’s gooooo . . . Simple fresh and cleeeeeean.'”
9.
Many people expected film and television jobs to bounce back after the strikes last fall. They haven’t. Aside from the pandemic years, employment in L.A. County’s motion pictures and sound recording industries hasn’t been this low in more than 30 years. Jonathan Kuntz, a film historian, cited evolving consumer tastes. “The very basis of what made Hollywood universally popular in the 20th century was the theatrical feature film. That seems to be ending now,” he said. “It seems the audience has moved on to other things.” L.A. Times
10.
Some opponents of Temecula’s socially conservative school board president are celebrating what they believe to be his imminent ouster. A week after a recall election, the vote count on Tuesday showed Joseph Komrosky trailing in his bid to remain in office by about two percentage points. Elected to the ostensibly nonpartisan board in 2022, Komrosky was part of a trio of members who drew headlines for their efforts to ban critical race theory, restrict flag displays, and scrub textbook references to gay-rights leader Harvey Milk. Patch | Riverside Press-Enterprise
11.
In the summer of 2020, as racial justice protests swept the country, Disney announced that it would overhaul Splash Mountain, the popular flume ride with a storyline inspired by Song of the South. The decision drew pushback from some fans who accused the company of ruining the Disney experience. Now the replacement is here: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, based on a Black princess. Todd Martens, an L.A. Times critic who got a preview, loved it. “The mood is one of pure uplift,” he wrote. N.Y. Times
12.
The world’s most beloved avocado — the Hass — brings in more than a billion dollars a year for growers. The Pasadena man who brought it into the world earned about $4,800 for his patent and worked as a mailman until his death from a heart attack at 60. The essayist Maria Popova pondered the meaning of it all:
“Today, every single Hass avocado in every neighborhood market that ever was and ever will be can be traced to a single mother tree grown by a destitute California mailman in 1926 — tender evidence that every tree is in some sense immortal, and a living testament to how chance and choice converge to shape our lives.” The Marginalian
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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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