Good morning. It’s Monday, Sept. 28.
- Grape farmers struggle as demand for wine falls.
- Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is lampooned on SNL.
- And an investigation into the “In-N-Out spatula hero.”
Statewide
1.
Californians are sharply divided over a proposed a billionaire tax to shore up health coverage. But whatever the outcome of the ballot measure, there’s no question about the plight facing the state’s publicly funded healthcare. President Trump’s budget bill last year is projected to cut $1 trillion from Medicaid through 2034. James Suver, CEO of Ridgecrest Regional Hospital, said he’s weighing reductions in maternity care, physician recruitment, and emergency-room service. “Our future under the most likely scenario is not looking very good,” he said. Bloomberg
2.
Creekside camping and hot springs near Mount Shasta.
A cabin in a redwood forest near the Mendocino coast.
A mountaintop camp with sweeping views near San Diego.
Hipcamp, the popular booking site for private camping and glamping, released its 2026 list of “50 favorite places to camp in America right now.” See them all here.
Northern California
3.
Wine sales have plunged more than 20% in five years, prompting growers to take roughly a quarter of California’s vineyards out of production. Industry experts blame changing tastes, competition from cannabis, and tariffs, among other factors. Bill Berryhill, a third-generation grower near Lodi, said he’s facing another year of wasted grapes. “It’s just sickening,” he said. “You raise a beautiful crop, and it’s really a nice vintage this year, and you drop it on the ground. It’s sad. All your work is just down the toilet.” A.P.
- Sonoma County’s Gundlach Bundschu winery, founded in 1858, filed for bankruptcy last week, making it the latest casualty of the wine crisis. Press Democrat
4.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece, told the European country’s energy minister that the Trump administration could topple any country it wants, according to a Wall Street Journal report. During a dinner attended by Greek and U.S. officials, discussion turned to the collapse of the Romanian government. Guilfoyle, a San Franciscan who was married to Gavin Newsom before becoming a MAGA figure, told the group, “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here,” according to a source who was there. The conversation became heated.
5.
In an editorial endorsing state Sen. Scott Wiener to fill the House seat of outgoing Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Chronicle puzzled over why Pelosi had decided to instead back Supervisor Connie Chan, whom it called a “demonstrably weaker candidate.” The board offered a theory: “Political insiders whisper that Pelosi is not-so-secretly trying to keep the seat warm for an eventual run by her daughter Christine. We won’t speculate.”
6.
Rogue OpenAI agents this summer tried to hack the U.S. Education Department and used aggressive tactics to access data on a United Nations website, researchers revealed. The incidents are the latest in a growing catalog of unexpected behavior by artificial intelligence models as tech leaders warn of potential doomsday scenarios. California’s Rep. Ted Lieu, who chairs an AI task force, said tech companies may need to focus on retraining models instead of restraining them. “It doesn’t understand morality and consequences and evil and good,” he said. N.Y. Times | Wall Street Journal
- In an interview aired Sunday, Bill Gates reiterated his belief that we are underestimating the dangers of AI. Left unchecked, he said, it could cause “a billion deaths.” NBC News
7.
A “Saturday Night Live” sketch spoofed Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, with cast member Jane Wickline portraying him as a stuttering megalomaniac: “I may have been alarming in my recent interviews, but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me.” Torn by exchanges with his Gollum-like dark side, Wickline’s Amodei at one point confesses: “AI is the devil and I its maker.” The Atlantic said the sketch captured the AI disconnect.
- Amodei was expected to dine privately with President Trump at the White House on Sunday night. Trump has dismissed Amodei’s AI warnings as a “hoax.” N.Y. Times
8.
During a Giants game last week, broadcasters had a laugh as a woman in the stands juggled a baby and three trays of ballpark food while her husband appeared to fail to help. They dubbed her “mom of the year.” But after a video clip went viral, the mom, who identified only as Erika, responded in a Substack post, explaining that the interaction was entirely misconstrued. Her husband faced an avalanche of vitriol, including demands that he kill himself. “What was a few moments of amusement on your broadcast became days of real pain for our family,” she wrote. SFGATE | NBC News
Southern California
9.
“It is going to keep rising, and rising.”
Sea level rise is reshaping one of Southern California’s quintessential beach towns. In San Clemente, erosion has eaten away at the beach, pushing the shoreline landward. Crumbling bluffs have damaged oceanfront homes and forced the repeated closures of a passenger rail line. The situation has grown so dire that residents in the largely Republican city are now considering taxing themselves to pay for the beach restoration. A.P.
- Disaster modelers estimated that El Niño could cause up to $3 billion in losses from flooding and mudslides across California this winter. Bloomberg
10.
Immigration arrests surged in San Diego over the summer, with July recording the most arrests of any single month of President Trump’s second term, an analysis found. A number of enforcement actions near schools has outraged educators and created an atmosphere of fear among students. “It’s an impossible environment to effectively teach children when they are afraid, rightly, that their families will be torn apart on the way to school,” said Allison Ohle, who leads a literacy organization. EdSource
- Thousands of San Diegans marched on Sunday to call for the dignity of migrants and refugees. The afternoon event “evoked vibes of a 1960s peace march,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
11.
Presley Gerber, son of supermodel Cindy Crawford, was found dead the day after entering a sober living home in Santa Monica this month. His death has focused scrutiny on the Resolutions Living home, which operates in a regulatory gray area. It’s co-owned by a psychologist named Reza Nabavi, who was charged with felony drug possession in 2002 after Oakland police found him asleep in a car with a gun, meth, and a 15-year-old girl. The area was known for prostitution. L.A. Times
12.
One night around 1 a.m. a few weeks ago, a young man named Luca Opperman saw a woman threatening employees with a tree branch inside an In-N-Out in Lake Elsinore. He jumped through the drive-through window “like Spider-Man,” grabbed a spatula, and squared off with the woman in what would later become a viral video.
An editor let journalist Thomas Fuller devote a surprising amount of space to explore what kind of person becomes an “In-N-Out spatula hero.” It pays off. N.Y. Times
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