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Hi, I’m Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times. I survey more than 100 news and social media sites daily, then send you a tightly crafted email with only the most informative and delightful bits.
Each weekday at about 6 a.m., you’ll get an email like this.
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Good morning. It’s Wednesday, May 13.
- California hopes to get rich from $3 trillion IPO wave.
- Red-legged frogs return to Yosemite National Park.
- And Jason Collins, NBA’s first openly gay player, dies.
Statewide
1.
SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all preparing to go public in what analysts say will be the largest wave of initial public offerings in history, injecting an estimated $3 trillion in the U.S. equity market. California is expected to be among the biggest beneficiaries of billions in new tax revenue. “This is going to be galactically huge,” said Peter Leroe-Muñoz, general counsel for the Bay Area Council. “IPOs of this scale are rain in the desert for state and local finances.” Politico
2.
Dispatches from the campaign trail:
- Three consecutive polls have shown Xavier Becerra leading all Democrats in the race for governor. The latest had his support at 20%, six percentage points ahead of the next Democrat, Tom Steyer. Steve Hilton, a Republican, led overall. SFGATE
- “There are no ethical billionaires.” As Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager, meets with voters on his “California You Can Afford” bus tour, he has been dogged by skepticism over his billionaire status. Washington Post
- A union aligned with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass funded an ad purportedly attacking Republican rival Spencer Pratt. Yet the ad — touting views popular with conservatives — seemed designed to help him advance to the Nov. 3 runoff. Bass would rather face Pratt than the progressive Nithya Raman in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. L.A. Times | L.A. Daily News
3.
Jason Agan, a math teacher at a Bay Area high school, was deemed “unfit to teach” by a state panel after students reported him for unwanted touching. The school fired him, but he was not barred from teaching elsewhere. Agan took a job at a second school then a third, where he again faced accusations over his behavior and touching. An investigation by ProPublica and KQED found nearly 70 examples of California failing to revoke the professional licenses of teachers after determinations that they engaged in sexual harassment or misconduct.
Northern California
4.
One day in 1955, the story goes, a worker at Yosemite’s Ahwahnee hotel put a few bullfrogs in the property’s pond as a prank. The invasive species proliferated, wiping out the population of native red-legged frogs. Wildlife officials spent decades removing the bullfrogs, and in 2016 began reintroducing red-legged frogs reared at the San Francisco Zoo. Last week, in a symbolic ceremony, they released the 10,000th specimen, declaring the species officially self-sustaining. “They have proven that they can persist on the landscape,” said Rob Grasso, a park ecologist. S.F. Chronicle
5.
In February 2024, Maria Del Rocio Ramos Hernandez faced a cascade of horrific news: Her husband had killed himself in a state of distress after being caught seeking sex with a 13-year-old boy, according to police. Jaime Rodriguez had fallen into a full-blown panic after being greeted by investigators in a sting operation in Danville. Placed in the back of a police van, he somehow managed to hang himself with his restraints. Now Hernandez is suing the county for damages, the East Bay Times reported on Tuesday.
6.
After a sophomore at Palo Alto High School was accused of using artificial intelligence to compose an essay, his family compiled a nearly 1,200-page evidentiary dossier including drafts, notes, and the document’s revision history to refute the claim. Then the family made the school an offer: change his grade on the assignment from a D to a B and they would drop the matter. The school refused. So last week, the family filed a civil rights claim in federal court, framing the boy’s treatment as anti-Asian. Palo Alto Online
7.
Founded in 1997, the WNBA used to pay players as little as $15,000 a year. Last Friday, Gabby Williams took the court for the Golden State Valkyries as part of the first cohort of $1 million-a-year players, competing for the first billion-dollar women’s sports franchise. The San Francisco Standard reports: “The Bay Area has become the epicenter of a women’s sports boom backed by not just passionate fans but serious money — that billion-dollar valuation, record revenues, and investors who see women’s sports not as a cause but as an asset class.”
8.
The New Yorker wrote about what it’s like to be a tween in San Francisco:
“At four feet eight, she is small for her age, but manages to occupy space laterally. She moves with a noodle elasticity, and is prone to breaking into dance moves while going about her business: a full-body wave from wrist to wrist, an entire sequence from a Katseye music video. The first time we met, we were mid-conversation when she inexplicably dropped into a side split, grabbed her ankles, and rolled backward, placing her toes on the floor behind her head. ‘At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do an aerial’ — a hands-free cartwheel — ‘and I can kind of do one now,’ she told me, harrowingly assuming the starting position.”
9.
It was 50 years ago this month that unknown wines from Napa Valley outmatched the finest French bottles in a blind tasting in Paris that shocked the wine world. The upset on May 24, 1976, was dubbed the Judgment of Paris and it helped jump-start what had been a backwater agricultural community. The wine journalist Dave McIntyre noted that U.S. wine would have improved without the Paris tasting: “But progress might have come slower. And the story would certainly be much less interesting if the Judgment of Paris hadn’t prompted the whole world to ask, ‘Why not here?'” WineLine | Wine Spectator
Southern California
10.
Jason Collins, the 7-foot NBA center who became the first openly gay player in any of the four major American sports leagues, died from an aggressive form of brain cancer, his family said on Tuesday. He was 47. Collins was born in the San Fernando Valley and starred on teams at Harvard-Westlake High and Stanford before becoming a journeyman in the NBA, playing for six teams in 13 years. In 2013, he wrote an essay for Sports Illustrated: “I’m a 34-year-old N.B.A. center. I’m Black and I’m gay,” it began. It was an open question at the time whether it would end his career. N.Y. Times | Washington Post
11.
A guerrilla artist has made a canvas out of Griffith Park, affixing signs that tell the story of a boogeyman with a rubbery face who lives in underground pipes. He is known as the Hiding Man and, it is said, he is watching you. A typical sign reads, “DO NO ACT LIKE A TRASH OR YOU WILL BE TAKE TO A NEW LIFE IN PIPE.” L.A. Material reports:
“People don’t always treat Griffith Park well. They litter, and they cover rocks in graffiti, and they do sexual stuff and play loud music. … Indeed, part of what people love about The Hiding Man project is that it’s a critique of entitlement, societal collapse and urban decay.”
12.
Sophie Jaffe, a 42-year-old mother and relationship coach, has built a 196,000-person following on Instagram with posts about her laissez-faire parenting style, which includes allowing her 13- and 15-year-old boys to roam Los Angeles unsupervised. Jaffe said it’s not that she doesn’t get anxious about what her sons are getting up to: “But I would rather them be out, making memories, than sitting on their videogames.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the era of the tiger mom is being replaced by that of the “beta mom.”
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