Category Archives: Newspapers

April 12, 2006

At 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the San Andreas fault near San Francisco snapped and slipped some 13 feet. The resulting earthquake destroyed hundreds of buildings and initiated a fire that raged for three days, gutting the commercial and cultural capital of the West Coast. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people lay dead in the ruins of almost 30,000 buildings.

This April 18, San Francisco celebrates, warily, the centennial of the Great Earthquake and Fire — the archetypal American natural disaster.

Read the rest on the NYT site…

April 9, 2006

MY wife doesn’t like Los Angeles. “The cars,” she says, “the smog — it’s a wasteland!” In the decade Nina and I have been married, I have never come close to convincing her that the cradle of global popular culture has any redeeming qualities — but it’s always fun trying.

More than most cities, serious online legwork is a prerequisite to rooting out L.A.’s charms, but they are multifold: even before we arrived I knew our problem would be time, not money.

Read the rest on the NYT site…’

November 20, 2005

FROM the rooftop patio of Medjool, a new restaurant in the Mission district of San Francisco, the entire neighborhood is laid out like a flamboyant mosaic. Ranks of painted ladies – San Francisco’s ornate wooden Victorians – rise to Twin Peaks in the west, the hills that block the city’s infamous fog and make the Mission one of the city’s warmest and sunniest neighborhoods. This terrace is the perfect spot for watching the cottony wave of evening fog roll into downtown, for the sky in the Mission remains crystalline. (more…)