Good morning. It’s Friday, Oct. 9.
- Fresno politicians denounce immigration crackdown.
- Despair over OpenAI’s “mathematical carpet-bombing.”
- And an emotional return for the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Statewide
1.
“They’re looking for brown people.”
Local politicians and activists gathered outside Fresno’s City Hall on Thursday to denounce what they described as a campaign of indiscriminate stops of Latinos by immigration authorities throughout the San Joaquin Valley this week. Miguel Arias, a City Council member, urged immigrants to skip this year’s Big Fresno Fair, a state fair that opened this week. “The corn dog is not worth putting your family’s safety at risk,” he said, “and no police agency, including ours, can ensure your safety because we cannot intervene in whatever the federal agency is doing.” Fresno Bee | Fresnoland
- YourCentralValley.com mapped more than 30 recent incidents of ICE activity across the valley.
2.
In California, the annual number of injuries from e-bike collisions rose from two in 2020 to 1,566 in 2024, researchers from UC San Diego found. That children are allowed to operate such vehicles can seem egregious to families who have been struck by tragedy. Allister Carlos didn’t allow e-bikes at his home in Orange County. But last year his 15-year-old son Ethan climbed on one without his knowledge and was killed. “It’s the next wave of epidemic, up there with guns and school shootings,” Carlos said. Bloomberg
Northern California
3.
“Breathtaking.”
“Devastating.”
“A mathematical carpet-bombing.”
Mathematicians struggled on Thursday to take measure of what OpenAI’s math breakthroughs will mean for their profession. They worry that AI’s easy solutions will supplant human fluency in the language of math. They worry that the insights gained through struggle will be lost. They worry that young mathematicians will see no point in pursuing the mysteries of their field. Meanwhile, argued science writer Konstantin Kakaes, “the rest of us will stumble into a world run by machines whose workings nobody understands.” The Atlantic | N.Y. Times
4.
In an interview broadcast on Thursday, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie told CNN’s Dana Bash that the city had “lost its way” before he took office in early 2025. Asked what he means, Lurie said:
“I mean, we got so, entrapped in our progressive values and talking about progressivism that, we weren’t taking stock of what was happening on our streets. We had 810 people die of overdose in San Francisco three years ago. There’s nothing progressive about that.”
- Under Lurie, San Francisco has launched repeated crackdowns on open-air drug markets. Yet the problem has not gone away, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Thursday.
5.
In 2012, two friends in San Francisco found that they both loved reading but disliked the pressure of coming up with smart takes for book clubs. The seeds of the Silent Book Club were planted. Fourteen years later, as digital distraction and loneliness have become more entrenched, the club has expanded to include more than 2,200 chapters in 70 countries. Mike Bogan said that since joining a San Jose meetup in July his reading cadence has shot up to about a book a week. “There’s a really distinct energy with this group,” he said. Mercury News
6.
Over the past seven years, the Swiss-French artist Saype has created giant murals of intertwined hands at more than 20 locations around the world as part of an ephemeral land-art project. After 45 hours of spraying a mix of charcoal and chalk paint, he unveiled his latest artwork Wednesday on the grass next to the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco, pictured above. It was expected to last about a week, before nature wipes it away. “The painting doesn’t belong to me anymore,” he said, “it belongs to the locals.” S.F. Chronicle
- See Saype’s murals around the world.
7.
A shirtless man with a cigarette dangling from his lip seen driving a old San Francisco public bus around Oakland shot to internet stardom this week after video was shared on Reddit. A transit official told the San Francisco Chronicle that retired buses are sometimes auctioned off. One such bus, with all the seats ripped out, was offered for $7,997 in Sacramento last year. It might need a jump start, the listing cautioned. SFist
8.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talks with Aaron Horwath, an AI industry professional who wrote recently about a sense of melancholy permeating the AI workforce. Some companies have starting demanding their workforce use AI in every possible instance, Horwath noted. Suddenly, he said, many employees have found their work lives reduced to “just hitting enter in Claude and attending meetings.” Inevitably, people begin to ask themselves, “what actually is my value?” Horwath said.
Southern California
9.
After 321 days at sea, much of it in combat in the Arabian Sea, the USS Abraham Lincoln arrived to an emotional homecoming in San Diego on Thursday. The aircraft carrier became a subject of intense scrutiny after reports that eight sailors in the Lincoln strike group had tried to take their own lives. Jason Tisdale, who was among hundreds of loved ones awaiting the ship’s arrival Thursday, choked back tears as he was interviewed by a reporter. “My son makes me very proud,” he said. N.Y. Times | S.D. Union-Tribune
- See photos of the celebration, and video of the Lincoln pulling into port.
10.
The New York Times convened a panel of local thought leaders to rate the candidates for Los Angeles mayor: Karen Bass, the progressive incumbent, and Nithya Raman, her even more progressive challenger. On average, they gave Raman higher marks on housing policy and disaster preparedness; they favored Bass on delivering services and handling the Trump administration. The public mood, they agreed, is dire. “This is the most frustrated L.A. residents and L.A. voters have been in the 40 years that I have been observing and studying Los Angeles,” said Fernando Guerra, a politics professor.
11.
In an essay published in 2017, the former Vanity Fair design director Charles Churchward coined the term “School of Los Angeles” to describe the “highly romanticized vision of humanity” represented in the work of leading celebrity photographers in the 1980s. What they had in common, he wrote, was their drive to idealize their subjects “nearly to the point of idolatry.” L.A.’s Fahey/Klein Gallery just opened an exhibit on the photography movement that produced, as Churchward put it, “a kind of glamour industrial complex.”
- More than 50 of the images are available to view online.
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week.
- Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford University neuroscientist, got the call after midnight informing him that he had won a Nobel Prize for medicine. He stayed up all night. Then his kids woke up. Their blissed-out reactions upon hearing the news, captured on video, went viral. A.P.
- As climate anxiety forces a rethinking of the built environment, some architects are offering visions of what future homes might look like. Hafsa Burt has created prototype homes that are minimalist, fire-resistant, and powered by the sun. Wallpaper* explored her latest “thought experiment” in Amador County.
- Plentiful anchovies have lately helped attract an especially robust network of marine life to Monterey Bay, making for outstanding whale-watching. Sanctuary Cruises shared some fantastic drone video captured last Friday of orcas cruising off the coast during the golden hour.
- An architect couple bought a Cold War-era radio tower in the Santa Monica Mountains and converted it into an event space. The result is one of the most unusual structures of its kind in Los Angeles, with a swimming pool, gravel courtyard, and the still intact 75-foot tower. N.Y. Times
- See pictures of S-A-L-T (Sea-Air-Land-Tower).
- Earlier this year, one of California’s wildest dining destinations opened in Escondido. At Mkutano House, nestled in an elephant preserve inside San Diego Zoo Safari Park, diners sip cocktails as nine of the largest land animals on Earth amble around as close as 15 feet away. SFGATE
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