David Talbot
SF Chronicle
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Past articles by David:
If bitter Swiftian irony is in bad taste, so is evicting the old
If you see an otherwise distinguished-looking gentleman being ridden out of town on a rail, covered head to toe with a steaming coat of tar, that would probably be yours truly. [...] they proposed that certain drastic measures be taken against me which, all in all, would make tarring and feathering seem the preferable choice. Today’s news has become so extreme and outlandish that people have… → Read More
Old people of San Francisco, your time is up
[...] about a quarter of our seniors are considered poor and need public assistance of some kind. [...] we have a growing housing crisis, with thousands of young, productive tech workers — who frankly are the future of our city — forced to pay exorbitant rents and to stuff themselves into veal-pen-like apartments. Even the mere threat of eviction is enough to get rid of some of these frail… → Read More
Legal system’s treatment of mentally ill is criminal
When mentally ill people are arrested, their prospects are usually bleak — even in the compassionate City of St. Francis, where the number of critical care beds at San Francisco General Hospital and other frontline mental health facilities has been slashed in recent years. According to a recent report by the Stanford Law School Justice Advocacy Project, the number of prisoners in California with… → Read More
Dorothea Lange’s haunting Depression photos evoke the present
William Faulkner’s memorable line from “Requiem for a Nun” never seemed more apt than it did Sunday, as I strolled through the powerful Dorothea Lange photography exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California. Lange, the greatest American documentary photographer of the 20th century, is best known for her iconic images of Dust Bowl survivors, which along with John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of… → Read More
Berkeley sociologist crosses over to Trump’s America
The great divide in America between the red and the blue gaped ever wider this past week as progressive Democrats, smelling blood, called for President Trump’s impeachment and his enraged supporters threatened a scorched-earth fight to the finish. Anger and Mourning on the American Right, is a fascinating and intimate look at the men and women who form the core of Trump’s support. Hochschild… → Read More
Readers blast their horns about Uber and Lyft
“Thank you for bringing up the subject of traffic congestion caused by the hordes of unregulated, amateur drivers flooding San Francisco’s streets,” wrote Tom Lawless. “My neighborhood, the Inner Sunset, has seen a big increase in near misses with pedestrians in crosswalks and the N-Judah blaring its horn at incompetent Uber drivers clogging up the street,” wrote Greg Dewar. “You didn’t mention… → Read More
On jammed SF streets, ride hailing collides with urban well-being
Or are they law-defying corporate predators, flooding city streets with their unregulated vehicles and exploiting their drivers — sorry, “independent contractors” — in the process? [...] with their enormous political clout in state and municipal offices, Uber and Lyft have resisted regulatory efforts — nowhere more successfully than in California, where the state Public Utilities Commission’s… → Read More
The Bay Area is still a literary haven from the mad digital world
Chances are that you have because you live in the Bay Area, where books continue to beckon readers, despite the insistent siren calls of digital media. Independent bookstores have found new life, even in the growing shadow of Amazon; festivals, readings and book clubs continue to proliferate; and authors are still managing to make the Bay Area a literary haven even as soaring costs of living… → Read More
A day on the 9-San Bruno: what Muni drivers cope with
Ken Maley, a longtime media consultant, is a frequent passenger on the line, which snakes its way from Visitacion Valley to the Ferry Building, gliding along Bayshore Boulevard, Potrero, Division Street and Market Street before finally reaching its downtown destination. Maley, who lives in North Beach, is a self-described “total public transportation person — I haven’t owned a car in years.” At… → Read More
Democracy is still alive inside SF’s gold-domed palace
The grand old palace of the people was hopping with events, including former state Sen. Mark Leno’s formal kickoff for the 2019 mayoral race, which he announced to a news scrum outside the Department of Elections office, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s declaration of victory in the long-running legal battle with Airbnb, which will force the short-term rental giant to abide by local law. The… → Read More
Where’s Ed Lee, our fading mayor?
Some 200 impassioned citizens showed up on a Monday evening at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts to hotly debate a temporary Navigation Center planned for the neighborhood, with at least as many people unable to enter the packed theater. The air was rife with angry tension — some residents fear the center will reinforce the Mission’s status as a “dumping ground” for the homeless, while… → Read More
Big Brother drummer holding onto the times that slipped away
[...] I didn’t gather you here today to mourn the past; I want to relive some of its glorious highs — before corporate greed, superstar pathology and digital piracy killed the music. Since it’s the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love (in case you missed the memo), our conversation naturally drifted in that direction. Getz arrived here in 1960 from New York, where he had grown up in a crowded… → Read More
Time to rename Justin Herman Plaza
After watching “Citizen Jane” — the excellent new documentary about writer-activist Jane Jacobs and her titanic struggles with New York urban planning czar Robert Moses, who preferred high-rises and highways to human beings — I got to thinking about San Francisco’s own Moses, Justin Herman. Back in the late 1950s and ’60s, when Herman ruled over the city as executive director of the San… → Read More
Gauging Gavin Newsom as he sets his sights on 2018
[...] he has a brain, and he uses it. Recently he’s added to his progressive credentials by championing a single-payer health care system for the state. [...] Newsom also had his heroic moments as San Francisco mayor — none more so than the day in February 2004 when he ordered City Hall clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Even gay Rep. Barney Frank scorned the young… → Read More
Saving the planet: a profile in courage
Let’s begin with Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, whose organization is helping lead the mass People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, with sister actions in Oakland and other Bay Area communities. For most of its 125-year existence, the Sierra Club was known as a narrowly focused conservationist group, a bastion of overwhelmingly white nature-lovers who didn’t give… → Read More
After police kill: DA Gascón’s dilemma
[...] he has brought no criminal charges in the more than 40 San Francisco police shootings that have occurred on his watch, of which 19 have been fatal. Gascón stuck to this pattern recently when he declined to file charges in the fatal 2015 police shooting of Amilcar Perez-Lopez, a 21-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who was shot six times by two plainclothes SFPD officers, with one bullet… → Read More
2 clashing lawmen spotlight SF’s divisions on criminal justice
In Gascón’s case, he won $1.5 million in September to establish his own investigative unit to probe fatal police shootings. [...] last month Mayor Ed Lee authorized an additional $200,000 to be spent by Adachi’s office on new staff to help defend detained immigrants — a figure that the public defender has made clear he wants to grow in the future. Many families in the city (including my own)… → Read More
Terrible postscript to SF’s eviction saga
The judge’s ruling notwithstanding, Canada’s grandniece, Iris Merriouns, insists that Canada was still living in the apartment, even as the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department posted the eviction notice Feb. 10. Twelve days later, a moving company hired and paid for by the landlords packed up Canada’s belongings of a lifetime, 100 cartons in all, and put them into storage. Emails between the two… → Read More
Planned Parenthood under siege; time to fight, again
When I was a student at UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, there were no abortion providers in the county, whose medical system was dominated by the local Catholic-run hospital. [...] my sister Cindy and several other feminist activists who were also Santa Cruz students founded the first women’s health clinic in the county and imported a doctor each week to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Cindy… → Read More
Ill-conceived aggression our legacy of being born in the U.S.A.
President Trump launches a barrage of Tomahawk missiles into the Syrian powder keg on April 6 — exactly 100 years after President Woodrow Wilson won congressional approval to plunge America into World War I, the European bloodbath that set the stage for so many of the next century’s nightmares. [...] he just spent more than $93 million to hurl 59 Tomahawks at a Syrian airfield, soon after… → Read More