Let's catch up.
There's a Massive Restaurant Industry Bubble and It's About to Burst, Thrillist
AS SOON AS HE WALKED THROUGH THE DOOR, Matt Semmelhack knew it was over. He'd been away from his San Francisco restaurant AQ for less than a week, but when he got back, it just felt different. It went beyond the usual concerns of the modern restaurateur. "I wasn't worried the lights were properly dim, or the regulars were in the right booths," he says. Instead, Semmelhack was just looking at his staff -- people he hangs out with on weekends, people whose livelihoods he supplies, some of his closest friends -- and all he could see was the money each one of them was costing him, flashing in front of him like a video-game score. "I knew right then," he says, "we had to shut it all down." Read more.
The Transamerica Pyramid Used to Be a Cool Artists' Colony—For, Like, a Hundred Years, Curbed SF
It's gone now, but for almost a century, 628 Montgomery Street was the center of the San Francisco art world. It was also the heart of the underground political world, the early LGBT community, SF's first cheap-eats foodies, Gold Rush-era cocktail aficionados, ancient hipsters, seminal drag queens, and 49er-time indie magazines.
Frida Kahlo hung out there when she was in San Francisco, for example. Mark Twain, who worked at a newspaper in 628, met a fireman in the basement steam room who told him incredible stories—the fireman's name was Tom Sawyer.
The first lesbian bar in the U.S., Mona's 440, started when teenage Mona Sargent got a loan from her neighbors down the hall in this same building.
Pisco Punch was invented in the ground-floor Bank Exchange Saloon.
A lot of the painters of the Coit Towerfrescoes lived at 628. Famous anarchist Emma Goldman visited her partner Alexander Berkman's radical magazine The Blast there. Writers including Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Ambrose "The Devil's Dictionary" Bierce, and California Poet Laureate Ina Coolbrith worked there. It was called the Montgomery Block. Read more.
Facebook Bans Local Writer For Calling Trump Supporters 'Fascistic', Then Apologizes For 'Mistake,' SFist
Facebook is once again having to apologize for the actions of one of its community policing operatives after San Francisco-based writer Kevin Sessums was issued a 24-hour suspension for referring to Trump supporters as a "nasty fascistic lot." He was told he had violated the platforms "community standards," and he immediately took to Instagram to make his case for why this was "arbitrary censorship," writing, "To be censored and blocked rightfully naming the rise of fascism is a form of fascism itself and corporate collaboration... We are living in dangerous Orwellian times." Read more.
A Selection of the 30 Most Disappointing Under 30, New Yorker
Tim Harris, twenty-seven: Started a Bay Area "summer camp" where exhausted tech bros can "unplug" for two thousand dollars a weekend. Read more.
Beyoncé Makes History Yet Again, Vanity Fair
Last April, the Los Angeles Times wrote a story about the annual music jamboree in Indio, California, titled "Coachella: Plenty of bros, but where are the female headliners?" The piece noted that Björk was the last "female-centric" act to headline Coachella—in 2007. Now, 10 years later, a woman is finally on the list of headliners, and she's one we (and the Grammy Awards know quite well: Beyoncé. Read more.
A Brief Look at Cutty Bangs: San Francisco's Weird, Beloved Liquor Store Tradition, VICE
When it comes to drinking within our borders, there are plenty of ways to do it like a give-no-fucks San Franciscan. Examples include drinking a tall boy of Tecate out of a paper bag in Dolores Park, getting kicked out of the backyard of Zeitgeist for lighting up a joint alongside your heavily garnished Bloody Mary, or pounding Fernet shots with a bartender until you end up in the El Farolito line at 3 AM. And then, there are cutty bangs. Read more.
