ON a balmy fall evening in the Mission District of San Francisco, hundreds of people spilled onto Valencia Street, where they chatted happily for a few minutes before pouring back into bookstores, cafes and theaters. It was a giddy, animated crowd, but most of all bookish — a collection of fans and believers, here to listen to the written word.

The occasion was an event called Litquake, which, over the course of nine days, would draw some 13,000 residents and visitors to readings by scores of authors, many of them — like Maxine Hong Kingston and Daniel Handler (a k a Lemony Snicket) — local celebrities. The “Lit Crawl” finale alone featured more than 400 readings at bars, laundromats and even the police station in a single evening.

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MAY 2010 is looking like a good month for forests. In a couple of days, on the 27th, the Oslo Forest Climate Conference is expected to mark another step on the road to a comprehensive deal on tropical deforestation. And last week, on the 18th, an unlikely-seeming collection of forest-products companies and environmental organisations announced the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which should drastically change the way in which huge areas of Canadian forest are managed.

The forests wrapped around the planet at high northern latitudes (boreal forests, also called taiga) are second only to tropical forests in total area, and account for as much as 200 billion tonnes of stored carbon. About a third of the ring is in Canada, which has some 570 million hectares (1.4 billion acres) of boreal forest: only Russia boasts more. Only about 13% of that land is subject to the new agreement—but that is still an area greater than that of Spain and Portugal. The parties to the agreement, 21 companies which make pulp, paper and other wood products, and between them hold 70% of the boreal timber rights in Canada, and nine big environmental groups, ranging from the uncontroversial Nature Conservancy to firebrands like Greenpeace, say this is the biggest conservation deal in history.

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Coffee has been part of Bay Area culture from the start. Folgers and Hills Brothers started by providing java (a term coined on San Francisco’s piers) to thirsty 49ers. And there have long been boutique roasters like Caffe Trieste in North Beach, which has made Italian-style espresso since 1956, and Peet’s, which introduced its characteristic dark roasts in Berkeley in 1966 and led, through its descendant Starbucks, to a wholesale revision in the way America drinks coffee.

Today the pattern is repeating itself as small local roasters are expanding to make their marks in distant cities.

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Lung Shan is an unremarkable Chinese restaurant in the Mission District. But on Thursday and Saturday nights it’s rocked by an invasion of diners and chefs with much more than sweet and sour pork on their minds.

On those nights, Lung Shan becomes Mission Street Food, one of a number of pop-up restaurants that have opened in the Bay Area over the last couple of years in spaces not normally used for fine dining.

On a recent Thursday, Tommy Halvorson, the chef that night, ignored Lung Shan’s huge woks as he worked pans crammed onto its small stove. Behind him, Anthony Myint assembled sea urchin into sashimi with young coconut and candied pecans ($8).

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At high noon on Oct. 25, 2008, the zeppelin Eureka glided over the Golden Gate Bridge, around San Francisco’s waterfront, and then south to land lightly at Moffett Field in Mountain View — the first dirigible to grace the region’s skies since the days when Silicon Valley was more famous for its peaches than for its personal computers.

Alexandra Hall, the co-founder and chief executive of Airship Ventures, had hoped to make rigid-bodied dirigibles a regular presence in the Bay Area skies once again, ferrying well-heeled tourists on $495 rides above San Francisco Bay, conducting atmospheric experiments and serving as a flying billboard.

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At Om Shan Tea, the air is filled with the clatter of small earthenware teapots, the sound of ethereal gongs and flutes and quiet animated conversation. Tea drinkers cluster on reed stools around low tables surrounded by antiques from tea-drinking lands.

Oshan Anand, the owner of this year-old teahouse in the Mission district of San Francisco, sits at an antique tea table of dark wood and stone and pours tiny cups of pu-erh, the aged Chinese tea that, like wine, is often known by region and vintage.

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SAN FRANCISCO has a well-deserved reputation for restaurant fare that is freshly inventive, but with studiously authentic roots. Gastón Acurio, a celebrity chef in Lima, Peru, known for his novo-Andino cuisine, which adds modern sensibilities about freshness, presentation and technique to the culinary traditions of Peru, took note of this when considering where to open his beachhead restaurant in the United States.

“In San Francisco, people love to eat, and are open to new cultures and flavors,” Mr. Acurio said. “It’s the best place for us to start our dream of bringing our food to America.”

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Cars are becoming more connected, both to remote systems for navigation and information, and to each other

IN “KNIGHT RIDER”, a 1980s television show, Michael Knight fought for justice with the help of KITT, an artificially intelligent Pontiac Trans Am. The pair chatted amiably, with KITT sensing and reacting to nearby objects, navigating and looking up information about Mr Knight’s immediate surroundings and deadly adversaries. KITT could even drive itself. Thirty years on, many of the fantastical Pontiac’s features are becoming reality.

A modern car can have as many as 200 on-board sensors, measuring everything from tyre pressure to windscreen temperature. A high-end Lexus contains 67 microprocessors, and even the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano, has a dozen. Voice-driven satellite navigation is routinely used by millions of people. Radar-equipped cruise control allows vehicles to adjust their speed automatically in traffic. Some cars can even park themselves.

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“Why should it be absurd to suggest that the potato changed world history?” John Reader asks in “Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.” If the claim seems odd to those for whom the tuber is little more than a mainstay of comfort foods, Reader argues that its low-key ubiquity is an indication of just how central the potato is to our lives.

Beginning with evidence of 12,500-year-old domesticated potatoes at an archaeological site in Chile, moving to the Inca Empire and on to Renaissance Europe, Reader shows how potatoes (which today are the world’s fourth-largest food crop) have tipped the balance of subsistence.

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Ecstasy may be good for those who can’t get over something truly horrible

“I’VE been shot in the leg. I’ve been beat up. But that’s pretty minor,” says a 41-year-old American security contractor who spent four years in Iraq. “But when you get a vehicle blown out from under you and ambushed by six or eight al-Qaedas, it does tend to affect one a little bit.”

With a broken back, two broken feet and neurological damage, the man, who asked that his name not be used, spent the next three months in hospitals in Iraq, Germany and America. But though he was physically on the mend by the start of this year, he found himself incapacitated. “I was having nightmares right off the bat,” he recalls. “I couldn’t do anything. Mostly, I’d just retreat to a room and not leave.”

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is the persistence of debilitating psychological symptoms. It can include flashbacks and nightmares, increased arousal in the form of insomnia, anger and an inability to concentrate, and impaired personal relationships. Although lasting psychological damage from horrific experiences has been recognised since time immemorial, it is only since 1980, when veterans were still experiencing stress from the Vietnam war, that PTSD has been a formal psychiatric diagnosis.

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