The more time you spend in California, the less sense its politics make. It’s progressive, of course. But the style of progressivism in the West Coast is distinct from that in the East, in roughly the same way that Silicon …
San Francisco’s progressive racism
The ugly xenophobia that has cropped up in certain corners of the GOP has an unusual cousin in an unexpected place.
The progressive Mission District in San Francisco has become ground zero for a form of Lefty nativism that scorns …
The rise of California’s vanlords
For outsiders experiencing it on YouTube, homelessness in San Francisco has a sort of up-close profile — overdoses and open drug deals, vacant and filthy faces, bodies sprawled on dirty concrete or, sometimes, just standing, bent incredibly in half, forehead …
Why London is beating America’s cities
As America’s cities continue to decline, as even ardent boosters warn of “an urban doom loop”, how does London remain a global powerhouse? The straightforward answer is that it retains an old advantage: its origins as a former imperial capital.…
Was China behind Sam Altman’s ousting?
The blink-if-you-missed-it four-day drama at the tech firm OpenAI requires deep attention. On the surface it looks like power shenanigans; underneath lies a tale of humanity’s future and geopolitics.
The strange saga began a week ago, when the board of …
Yayoi Kusama doesn’t need a race reckoning
“I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty from life.” So says the titular character in “Pickman’s Model”, a short story by HP Lovecraft about how artists make monsters — or become them. Pickman’s paintings …
Tech bros are destroying weird Austin
Not so long ago, Silicon Valley was a magical land where unicorns flourished; anybody with an idea, seed capital and a little luck could become richer than all the kings of folklore. These days, things aren’t so rosy. Silicon Valley’s …
A very modern Jesus Revolution
In 1967, a cloud of idealistic young Americans descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district for the Summer of Love. At the epicentre of the hippy counterculture, they rejected materialism, conformity and war, instead embracing art, spirituality, community and psychedelic drugs.…
Western society is built on stigma
The backlash against The Whale seems to have taken Darren Aronofsky, its director, by surprise. The film concerns a gay online English instructor named Charlie who is dying from congestive heart failure, an ailment hardly unrelated to his weight of …
The trial of America’s progressive prosecutors
“Getting here was the easy part,” Chesa Boudin said in a victory speech after his 2019 election to the position of San Francisco district attorney. Three years later, despite presiding over a steep descent into lawlessness in the city on …
California’s progressives are in retreat
“I’m asking myself, ‘What the hell is going on?’” said Gavin Newsom to the assembled cameras, “It looked like a third-world country.” California’s progressive governor was in his state’s largest city because of a piece of viral content: images of …
Why America is losing the war on drugs
In the summer and early fall of 2020, as protests and riots swept across the United States, a new consensus began to emerge among progressive activists, writers and politicians. Given that black men, from George Floyd to Daniel Prude, were …
Anti-racism betrays Asian students
After the tragic killing of George Floyd in 2020, much of the virtue-signalling that followed focused on an unexpected target: admissions processes. Activists claimed children “of colour” weren’t getting their fair share of places at good schools — or, to …