Good morning. It’s Friday, Sept. 4.
- California’s balcony solar customers tout savings.
- Outrage over murder warrant for Monterey County girl.
- And the 12 best-kept secrets in Golden Gate Park.
Please note: The newsletter will pause for Labor Day weekend. Back in your inbox on Tuesday.
Statewide
1.
Legislation to formally legalize plug-in solar in California is now awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. But some residents have already adopted the systems, also known as balcony solar, which cost as little as $300 and typically consist of a few panels, an inverter, and cables that plug into an existing outlet. Joe Tenenbaum installed four panels at his home in Orinda last year. He estimates they’re saving as much as $70 a month on electricity bills. “A lot of people have said this is a gateway drug,” he said. “I definitely want more.” KQED
Northern California
2.
Some officials are pushing back against the Monterey County sheriff’s decision to obtain a murder warrant against a 14-year-old girl believed to have given birth after being raped by her father. The newborn was found dead along a roadside on Aug. 1. The district attorney’s office released a statement distancing itself from the warrant. “Our priority is to ensure that this young girl is safe,” it said. Supervisor Wendy Root Askew said she was “deeply disturbed” by the sheriff’s characterization of the child. “People are angry because something feels fundamentally wrong here,” she said. Monterey Herald
3.
The publication of sexual assault allegations against Cesar Chavez in March led to a wave of renamings across California, as schools, parks, libraries, and more sought to shed their association with the late labor leader. But after nearly six months, holdouts remain. Last week, school board leaders in Stockton voted to leave Cesar Chavez High School as it is after a survey found that community opinion on changing the name was divided. “I don’t feel that we should jump on the bandwagon,” said Patrick Martin, a trustee. ABC10 | Stockton Record
4.
Chris Larsen, a crypto billionaire, contributed $500,000 this week to Theo Ellington, a moderate Democrat running for the Board of Supervisors. Among the largest donations ever to a single supervisor candidate, it’s latest show of strength from a tech community galvanized by what they see as an anti-business strain in San Francisco politics. An Ellington rival reacted on Thursday: “When tech billionaires and corporate interests are this invested in a district race, whose interests will actually be represented in office?” S.F. Chronicle | Mission Local
5.
One day in September 2023, a 32-year old man named Quinton Allen boarded a public bus in San Francisco and took a seat in the back. His head drooped into his lap. The bus driver tried to rouse Allen several times, without success. But he drove on, completing his route twice, as Allen died of an overdose of fentanyl and methamphetamine. Four hours passed before he flagged down a supervisor to call 911. Now a wrongful death lawsuit is headed to trial. S.F. Chronicle
6.
After July’s so-called Hugging Face incident, in which hundreds of autonomous AI agents broke loose and attacked another AI company, some researchers believe a frightening threshold has been crossed. One investigator described the hack as “more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover.” The New York Times explained: “This is not insular AI safety jargon — by ‘full-blown AI takeover,’ she means a scenario in which an AI system literally takes over the world, shutting humans out of critical systems and seizing political, economic and military power.”
7.
A paddock that’s home to a herd of massive bison.
A tiered garden where 80,000 tulips bloom.
And a place for meditation under a canopy of cherry blossom trees and Japanese maples.
Larger than Manhattan’s Central Park, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco abounds with treasures across more than 1,000 acres. The San Francisco Chronicle published a guide to its 12 best-kept secrets.
8.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talks with Jared Huffman, a Democratic congressman who represents Marin County and the North Coast. Huffman, whose new book is called “No Prophets,” argues that the Christian nationalist movement has abandoned democracy. He recalled the religious right of the 1980s. “I didn’t think I would ever wax nostalgic for the Moral Majority,” he said. “I didn’t like anything about it. But I can now see that that movement, as extreme that it was, was trying to work within a system of democracy. … That has changed.”
Southern California
9.
Paramount’s exit from California would be a disaster for Hollywood. And yet the state appears to be hastening the studio toward that outcome, argued the Hollywood Reporter’s Joseph Kahn:
“In the attention economy that rewards the gesture over the outcome, men like [Attorney General Rob] Bonta get to be both Judge Ito and O.J., scoring progressive votes while he stabs the film industry to death. If Paramount leaves, a lot of people in Hollywood won’t have a job on Monday. Bonta will. He’ll be fine.”
- A plane flew over the Paramount lot in Hollywood on Thursday towing a banner that read: “Ellison Is Trump’s B!tch!” Variety
10.
Two shootings, months apart, left four ostriches dead on Mike Matson’s ranch in the Mojave Desert this year, and he thinks he knows who is responsible. Matson moved to Newberry Springs about nine years ago to raise ostriches. The trouble began, he says, when a neighbor’s pit bull dug under his fence and killed an ostrich named Fiona, a beloved family pet. Matson called the authorities. The neighbor, in turn, accused Matson of harassment. The conflict only got uglier. L.A. Times
11.
This week, reporters got a first look at George Lucas’s $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens on Sept. 22 in South Los Angeles.
- The L.A. Times’ Sam Lubell called it “among the boldest, most contradictory buildings this city has ever seen. It’s synthetic yet organic, monumental yet welcoming, populist yet elitist.”
- Hollywood Reporter’s Gary Baum wrote: “The approach taken by Lucas, 82, is a striking throwback to the rich, eccentric autodidact’s cabinet-of-curiosities concept associated with Gilded Age figures like Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington and P.T. Barnum.”
- The Wrap’s Drew Taylor noticed that Lucas seemed anxious about how the press would react: “He shouldn’t have worried. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is one of the most exciting, jaw-dropping museums you’re likely to ever experience.”
Take a video tour.
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week.
- When Brian Gordon and his partner moved to the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a place that abounds with bears, he had never even seen one of the shaggy predators. Four years later, he’s grown fond of his wild neighbors, who routinely swim in his pool. Gordon’s Instagram feed, @poolbearlife has become a full-fledged hobby, with more than 80,000 followers. BBC
- John Law, a co-founder of Burning Man, told a reporter that he didn’t want to talk about the art party that he helped found in San Francisco in the late 1980s. But he couldn’t help himself. “It’s something that’s been annoying me for 30 years,” he said. SFGATE
- On July 16, a man with a history of erratic behavior took two frog biologists hostage at Northern California’s Gumboot Lake. As informal settlements increasingly take root in unpoliced national-forest lands, something like this was almost bound to happen, wrote the Atlantic’s Joshua Partlow.
- “I know why we try to keep the dead alive,” Joan Didion once wrote. “We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.” The essayist Maria Popova explored the lessons on letting go in Didion’s classic “The Year of Magical Thinking.” The Marginalian
- A man climbing without a rope on a near-vertical slab in the Sierra Nevada near Mammoth Lakes deviated from the established route and found himself stuck on a 6-inch ledge. He clung there, above a roughly 2,400-foot drop, for more than eight hours, before rescuers were able to reach him. S.F. Chronicle.
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