Welcome to Gilead Unified School District
Welcome to Gilead Unified School District. No, no — seriously. The Handmaid’s Tale is a good analogy for a liberal community like SFUSD, which has already done the hard emotional work of imagining theocratic capture. Unfortunately, the real question Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting embodied and projected was this: What if the real…
BREAKING: SFUSD top lawyer Manuel Martinez reportedly leaving
San Francisco school community leaders are reporting that San Francisco Unified School District general counsel Manuel Martinez is on his way out just after completing a year on his 26-month…
San Francisco supervisors push for unified Market Street plan
A more coordinated effort is needed between San Francisco departments, city supervisors said at a hearing Monday afternoon. District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Mid-Market and Tenderloin, called…
Out and about April 30–May 6, 2026
The next several days bring an arts festival, cultural festivals, jukebox musicals, theater, and more. Read on for my picks. Thursday, April 30 The San Francisco International Arts Festival officially opened yesterday and features performances from spoken word to theatre and other performing arts to walking tours and lectures. Tonight…
Friends of Lowell launches legal strike against SFUSD’s ethnic studies mandate
The Friends of Lowell Foundation (FOLF) sent a formal demand letter to the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to immediately postpone the adoption of the “Voices” ethnic studies curriculum for two mandated semesters, citing clear violations of California’s open-meetings law, the Brown Act, along with inadequate public notice. The…
Matt Dorsey launches reelection bid, doubles down on recovery-first, public safety agenda
District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey kicked off his campaign for a second term on the Board of Supervisors on April 27 at Underdogs Cantina. A span of the city’s top political power brokers attended, chief among them Mayor Daniel Lurie, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, and three sitting supervisors: Alan Wong,…
Student journalists’ free press rights tested at Marin County high school
This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter. Administrators at an affluent Marin County high school district appear to have twice recently…
The bomb meant for my father
Ten days after the war in Ukraine broke out, I received a text from my longtime Vietnamese-American friend, Hieu. I knew her feeling immediately — sinking deeply with despair and grief. For nights we had…
Biopics in contrast: Michael Jackson and John Davidson
Biographical motion pictures are inescapable in a business that leans on the familiar or easily identified to exploit a built-in audience. Widely known these days as biopics, they come in many forms — covering historical…
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“Coming Soon,” by Nomi Kane | @Nomikane
The shot that gave me seven days
There is a clinic in San Francisco called the Maria X. Martinez Health Resource Center. You might walk past it and not think much of it. But for me, it was the first place I had ever walked into where nobody looked at me like I was a problem to…
Why justice keeps failing Asian hate victims
History repeats itself. As Garry Tan concluded in his most recent op-ed about why Asian hate so often goes unpunished, it is a cumulative effect of the loudest voices that influence a courtroom, from policy briefs and op-eds to grant-funded studies and legacy media. That voice has been dominated by…
What it means to have a dog when you’re homeless, and what San Francisco’s potential new law gets right (and wrong)
This Thursday, April 9, the public safety committee (made up of supervisors Matt Dorsey, Alan Wong, and Bilal Mahmood) will hear a proposed ordinance amending the Health Code to require that every dog in San Francisco, with certain exceptions, be sterilized (along with licensed, vaccinated, microchipped, and leashed in public areas).…
What we miss when the Board of Education skips its progress monitoring report discussions
Introduction At the last Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, March 24, Board President Phil Kim proposed — and received permission — to merge the eighth-grade algebra discussion and vote with the Progress Monitoring Report for Goal 2 (math). Predictably, the eighth-grade algebra discussion swallowed up the entire allotted time,…
SFUSD: Everyone supports ethnic studies. So why is San Francisco fighting over this?
At the heart of the controversy are two issues that divide supporters of ethnic studies. Background Ethnic studies grew out of a 1960s movement based…
City Hall this week: utilities, Mid-Market revival, Airbnb taxes, and homelessness funding
This week at City Hall, lawmakers will weigh a series of high-stakes decisions touching everything from future development infrastructure, and revitalization of Mid-Market to Airbnb’s…
Y Combinator launches its zine machine
It began as an enigmatic invitation on Partiful: a launch party for “Long Live SF — a celebration of the city of tomorrow — the…
‘Give recovery a chance’: Push for drug-free housing gains momentum, with Dorsey at the helm
On the steps of City Hall on Thursday, Supervisor Matt Dorsey held a rally to build support for his drug-free supportive housing legislation ahead of…
San Francisco Art Fair 2026 pushes back on the doom loop
The San Francisco Art Fair returned last week amid a cataclysm of news ranging from dastardly to jubilant concerning the state of the arts in…
Chiharu Shiota’s ‘Two Home Countries’ at the Asian Art Museum marks her first solo exhibition in the Bay Area
The Asian Art Museum’s spring exhibition, Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries, weaves memory, absence, and identity with dense networks of red thread and personal and…
Legacies, scams, and pitfalls
An ailing artist tries to thwart the plans of his assistant in ‘The Christophers’; a clan and empire are torn apart by murder and betrayal…
SFMOMA to unveil complete transformation of the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
The Fisher Collection galleries feature nearly 250 works by 35 artists, and beginning later this month, SFMOMA is unveiling its first updated presentation since the…
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