Good morning. It’s Friday, Sept. 18.
- Sikh truck driver from Sacramento is stabbed at rest stop.
- Wayward humpback whale swims up the Sacramento River.
- And a masterpiece of American modernism in Berkeley.
Statewide
1.
Child marriage is legal in California, making it one of just three states with no minimum age to wed. Even more surprising: Both the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood have staunchly supported the law, each arguing in essence that forbidding children to marry would trample on their personal autonomy. The progressive groups’ outsize influence over California’s Democratic politics has helped to scuttle nearly a decade of efforts to outlaw child marriage, CalMatters reported.
2.
Dispatches from the artificial intelligence crisis:
- OpenAI and Microsoft believed that scraping news websites to train their AI models posed an “existential threat” to those publications. But they did it anyway, filings in a lawsuit brought by the New York Times revealed on Thursday. One executive called it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.” Wall Street Journal | The Wrap
- The backlash to data centers has spread to communities across the U.S. But what about the home of the companies driving the demand for computing power? Residents in Silicon Valley are fighting against them there too, Reuters reported.
- Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday raised the possibility of a special legislative session aimed at addressing concerns over AI’s potential risks to humanity. “We’re looking to see what we can do in the next few weeks,” he said. Politico
3.
Some of the most striking homes recently listed in California:
- In 1952, a physicist recruited an architect to build him a home in the Berkeley Hills that would exemplify “precision, clarity, logic, and innovation.” The Kip House, pictured above, became a classic of West Coast residential design. Yours for $1.4 Million. *Wallpaper
- For many years, Dolly Parton had a secret hideaway in the quaint Central Coast town of Solvang. Built in 1920, the cottage has a white picket fence, a miniature windmill, and a stained-glass window above the front door that bears the country legend’s name. Asking price: $2 million. L.A. Times
- Also on the market: a rare Eichler in San Francisco, a Big Sur retreat once owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an off-grid compound on the banks of the Yuba River, and a tiny $50,000 cabin in Joshua Tree.
Northern California
4.
A Sikh truck driver from Sacramento said he was in a Wyoming rest stop bathroom Sunday when a man approached from behind and stabbed him 17 times. “I don’t know why this happened,” the victim said. The authorities arrested Andrew Kris Bzdak, a 45-year-old truck driver from Southern California, and charged him with attempted murder. No motive was disclosed, but South Asian and political leaders condemned rising anti-Sikh rhetoric. “We never thought in this country that we will ever gonna think about things like this,” said Raman Dhillon, a trucking industry leader. NPR | Cowboy State Daily
5.
After Canadian stores pulled American alcohol from their shelves in response to President Trump’s tariffs last year, McManis Family Vineyards in San Joaquin County was hit hard. Canada accounted for 40% of the family business’s annual export sales, or roughly 75,000 cases. That figure fell to about 1,000 cases. On Thursday, the company, founded in 1990, said it was selling its property, winery facility, and vineyards. “It was a very hard decision for myself and my family,” said Ron McManis. Sacramento Bee
6.
In December, a worker laid off by Google started a hiking club for jobless tech employees in the Bay Area. Its membership has since swollen to more than 1,700 people. As trillion-dollar startups deliver fabulous wealth to their workers, the un(PTO) group represents the flip side of the AI boom, Bloomberg reported. Nico Crisafulli, a 55-year-old single father, was laid off from his web development job in July. “Some days I wake up and I’m like, maybe I’ll just open a flower shop,” he said. “That sounds much nicer, to be honest.”
7.
A wayward humpback whale entered the San Francisco Bay and made its way up the Sacramento River, reaching close to the Rio Vista Bridge some 60 miles from the ocean. Denny Glover, who was fishing nearby with friends on Wednesday, couldn’t believe his eyes. “Then we saw another spout and there’s no mistaking the size of a whale spout,” he said. For longtime Bay Area residents, the sighting brought back memories of Humphrey the whale, whose similar journey in 1985 made front-page news. KCRA | ABC10
- See video of the whale captured by Glover.
8.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talks with David Perlis, author of the new book “Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast.” Perlis tracks how the midcentury bohemia across the Golden Gate from San Francisco gave rise to Star Wars, Zen thinkers, and the Grateful Dead. Along the way, Perlis argues, Marin quietly helped shape modern America.
Southern California
9.
A married couple and their 13-year-old daughter were found dead in their San Diego home Wednesday after “loud bangs” were heard inside, police said. The woman’s father, Gerald Austin, 78, said on Thursday that he was told his son-in-law shot his daughter and granddaughter. Austin said his daughter had taken her husband, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, to seek mental health help at a Veterans Affairs facility on Tuesday, but was turned away. Austin insisted that his son-in-law was a “great guy.” He added, “I’m telling you, it was PTSD. It was not him.” S.D. Union-Tribune
10.
Michael Kimmelman, an architecture critic and a two-time Pulitzer finalist, visited Los Angeles’ Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and was sufficiently dazzled:
“Design-wise, the museum’s galleries seem an afterthought, its circulation, a puzzle. But this is one you won’t want to miss. Both surgically somber and proudly over the top, the Lucas is a weird kind of wonderful and an instant city landmark.” N.Y. Times
- Perched atop the museum is a restaurant called Skywalker Grill. It’s already one of L.A.’s toughest reservations. L.A. Times
11.
The Himalayan flood of Aug. 26 had echoes of one of California’s most devastating but little-known tragedies. On March 12, 1928, a dam failed and unleashed a wall of water that barreled 50 miles through a canyon just north of Santa Clarita, obliterating roughly 1,200 homes and leaving more than 400 people dead. It was California’s deadliest disaster aside from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Erik Olsen recalled the St. Francis Dam disaster in a piece for California Curated. “The cause was different,” he wrote, “but the destruction is hauntingly familiar.”
- See 12 archival pictures from the St. Francis Dam disaster.
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week.
- By 2016, gray whales off the West Coast had bounced back from the slaughter of the commercial whaling era to number roughly 27,000 individuals. Then they started dying again. Scientific American reports: “As scientists gather more evidence, it is becoming increasingly apparent that gray whales are starving to death.”
- On a Tuesday in April, Christina Lacourte went to her son’s bedroom to wake him for school. She found him turning blue. He left the home in a body bag. Lacourte thought the autopsy would cite fentanyl. “Instead,” the New York Times reported, “it included a word new to her — ‘cychlorphine.’ It remains the only time it has appeared on a San Francisco coroner’s report.
- Los Angeles police corralled a group of young people on motorized minibikes who had blocked the 6th Street Bridge on Sunday afternoon. Scores of people were arrested. Notably, some parents participated along with their children. ABC7
- California’s stoic redwoods forgo the colorful showboating of the fall. But the trees and plants surrounding them don’t. Active NorCal called Calaveras Big Trees State Park, only a few hours from the Bay Area, “California’s most underrated fall color show.”
- See Calaveras Big Trees pictures from last fall.
- The travel writer Alex Crevar went on an epic cycling trip along California’s North Coast, with stops in Crescent City, Klamath, Trinidad and Eureka. His report in the New York Times includes gorgeous photos.
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