“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
By Ron Kroichick, Staff Writer Updated April 28, 2026 (SFChronicle.com)
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Warriors head coach Steve Kerr has not been shy about expressing his views on social issues, including politics, and gun violence. Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
As Steve Kerr’s future as Golden State Warriors head coach twists in doubt, one thing remains abundantly clear: Kerr will continue to speak his mind on political issues, no matter the ramifications.
The latest example came when Kerr sat down last week for an interview with the New Yorker. The story posted Sunday on the magazine’s website, amid lingering uncertainty about whether Kerr will return to the Warriors next season — and suggestions his public candor on politics doesn’t always sit well with others in the organization.
Kerr did the interview as a favor to his mom, Ann Kerr, he wrote in a text exchange Monday with the Chronicle. The author of the New Yorker piece, Charles Bethea, wrote a profile of Ann Kerr in 2018.
At one point in the interview, after Steve Kerr praised his dad Malcolm’s intelligence, patience and dignity, Bethea observed, “A different kind of leadership than you see nowadays.”
“I think we’re as weak as we’ve ever been as a country, at least in a long time, because our leadership is so misguided,” he said, without mentioning President Donald Trump by name. “There’s a lack of humility, a lack of dignity, a lack of understanding of the world, a lack of embracing other perspectives. The belligerence.”
Malcolm Kerr was a UCLA professor and Middle East scholar who became president of American University of Beirut. He was assassinated outside his office in January 1984 at age 52. Members of what became Hezbollah (a militant group allied with Iran) claimed responsibility for the killing.
Given Steve Kerr’s interest in politics, and his deeply personal connection to the ongoing Middle East conflict, Bethea then asked him about the war in Lebanon and Iran.
“My dad was killed by Iranian proxies 42 years ago,” Kerr said. “I have no regard for the Iranian regime whatsoever. But the answer does not lie in starting a war and killing innocent people.
“Imagine being a parent of one of the 175 girls who died when their school was bombed. Their loss, their suffering. … How are they going to feel about America? Violence begets violence.”
Kerr spoke to the New Yorker on April 20, three days after his team’s season-ending, play-in tournament loss to Phoenix. In his postgame news conference that night, Kerr expressed uncertainty about his coaching future — his contract runs out this summer — and noted all coaching jobs have an “expiration date,” sounding ready to walk away.
Then, last week, two reports suggested Kerr’s penchant for political commentary has ruffled feathers within the Warriors. ESPN’s Marc Spears, appearing on 95.7 The Game, referenced Kerr speaking out on issues involving social justice, racism and gun violence before adding, “I’ve heard maybe he’s being stifled a little bit in that regard. I’ve heard maybe some people are tired of his voice. … If it’s true people want him to be a little more quiet, I’m sure that might not sit too well with him.”
Later in the week, the Athletic’s Nick Friedell cited league and team sources as saying, “Kerr’s desire to speak candidly on social and political issues has at times caused internal frustration.”
Kerr declined the Chronicle’s interview request Monday. A Warriors spokesperson said owner Joe Lacob and general manager Mike Dunleavy wouldn’t be available until after Kerr’s situation is resolved.
Later in the New Yorker interview, while reflecting on his blunt criticism of Trump after he was first elected president in 2016 (including calling him a “buffoon”), Kerr acknowledged he needed to soften his tone given his role as the public voice of the Warriors.
“I was so disgusted I didn’t hold back,” he said of his ’16 rant. “I’ve learned I need to be better in terms of representing our organization in a way that I could still let my feelings be known but not get too personal. I’m representing a large group of people.”
Kerr has long railed against gun violence, including a May 2022 news conference hours after the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers. He slammed U.S. senators for not voting on legislation calling for universal background checks.
More recently, in January, Kerr criticized Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials for their role in the killing of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good. Kerr condemned Good’s shooting by an ICE agent, saying, “It’s shameful we can have law enforcement officers who commit murder and seemingly get away with it.”
About two weeks later, the Warriors were in Minneapolis when Alex Pretti, one of thousands of protesters of the government’s immigration policy, was killed by Department of Homeland Security officials. Kerr expressed his sympathy, then eventually waded into the issue of immigration reform.
“We’re really hopeful the protests here and nationwide will lead to a much better solution for immigration,” Kerr said. “It’s not like they’re rooting out violent criminals. They’re taking 5-year-old kindergartners, U.S. citizens, and detaining people. Immigration is a problem that needs to be addressed by Congress, legislatively, not by military force in the streets pulling people from their homes.”
Later that week, Kerr acknowledged he “misspoke,” knew ICE was arresting criminals and apologized for the comment. He repeated his criticism of the government for detaining people who “should not be detained” and the manner in which it was apprehending people.
Among other notable quotes in Kerr’s interview with the New Yorker:
• On the divisiveness in the U.S., which he said was happening before Trump: “He definitely has taken advantage of that to gain and consolidate power, and he’s using it to drive a wedge between all of us. He’s not the only one who’s done that, but he’s the president. He’s got the most power. But calling the president a buffoon, I kind of regret that even though I felt it in my heart.”
• On whether he regrets not speaking out when the NBA reprimanded then-Rockets general manager Daryl Morey for a tweet supporting anti-government protesters in Hong Kong: “Yeah. I was wrong. We had a lot of players on our team (who) were doing business in China. A lot of our players would go there in the offseason and the NBA had this huge relationship with China. … I didn’t handle it well. I was trying to walk the company line and not make the NBA mad.”
• On the oft-discussed possibility he could pursue public office after his coaching career: “I don’t have any desire to go into politics. I love basketball. This is my world. All of my friends and my people are in this world. And whether I keep coaching the Warriors or not, I imagine I’ll be involved in basketball.”
That Kerr agreed to the New Yorker interview — his only public comments since the April 17 news conference in Phoenix — shouldn’t come as a surprise. Ann Kerr always has had an affinity for the magazine.
In October 2024, during a Chronicle interview for a profile of his mom, Steve Kerr feigned anger about Ann (instead of him or one of his brothers) joining his dad for UCLA-USC football games when Steve was a kid. He recalled how she loved the atmosphere of the big college football rivalry — and how she typically brought a copy of the New Yorker with her.
Senior sports enterprise reporter Ron Kroichick has worked at the San Francisco Chronicle since 1995. Kroichick writes about the Warriors during the NBA season, and various other topics — from the 49ers and major-league baseball to college football and basketball — the rest of the year. He’s also the Chronicle’s golf columnist, covering the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and all major championships in Northern California.
Kroichick has earned numerous writing awards, including first-place Sports Feature recognition from the San Francisco Press Club for his 2024 piece on UCLA faculty member Ann Kerr, the mom of Warriors coach Steve Kerr. Kroichick also teamed with Lance Williams to land top-10 honors in Investigative Reporting (from the Associated Press Sports Editors), for their coverage of the 49ers’ contentious relationship with the city of Santa Clara.
San Francisco Democratic Party Mar 11, 2026 Tom Steyer Entrepreneur; Candidate for Democratic Nomination for California Governor ——- California Gubernatorial Fireside Chat with SF DCCC Chair Nancy Tung This fireside chat will feature the various major Democratic candidates running to be California’s next governor in conversation with Nancy Tung, who is currently serving as the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, about the biggest issues facing the state of California. Gubernatorial candidates will each have a 15-minute period to share their vision for the future of the Golden State one-on-one with Chair Nancy Tung.
Donald Trump’s picture could soon be on every new U.S. passport.
The State Department is finalizing a plan to put the president’s face in the travel document, The Bulwark reports, citing two sources with knowledge of the passport redesign, one of whom provided pictures. The new passports will include Trump’s second inaugural portrait superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, along with his signature in gold.
According to The Bulwark, there will be a “limited run” of 25,000 of these Trump passports, which are still waiting to be approved. While the current U.S. passport includes an image of Mount Rushmore, which has the heads of four presidents, this would be the first stand-alone image of a U.S. president, living or dead, in a passport. No foreign passports have included pictures of heads of state, and U.S. passports have previously carried the signature of the secretary of state, but not the president.
Trump has made a habit of putting his name on things in his second term as president, from the U.S. Institute of Peace to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He’s put banners with his face on federal buildings and created a website for prescriptions called TrumpRx.gov.
This new passport is supposedly part of the 250th anniversary of American independence, and comes as the Treasury Department hopes to produce two coins with Trump’s face on them: a $1 coin with Trump’s face on it for general circulation and a commemorative coin that would be “as large as possible.” The president seems intent on having Americans feel shame every time they open their wallet or travel overseas.Share This Story
Annie Karni, Congressional Correspondent – The New York Times
Stephan: Every Black Republican Representative is leaving the House. The Republican Party has become a White Supremacist cult. Here are the facts.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries speaks at the Congressional Black Caucus’s press conference. Credit: Brooke Sharp / Medill News Service
Eight years ago, Kevin McCarthy, then the House Republican leader, embarked on a push to recruit more Black Republicans to run for Congress, arguing that the G.O.P. needed to diversify to survive.
By 2022, his efforts had yielded modest success, helping pave the way for four Black Republicans to be elected to the House that year, which boosted the total number of Black Republicans serving in Congress to five, including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
That progress is about to be erased.
All four Black Republicans in the House are leaving Congress next year: Three are seeking statewide office, and one is retiring because redistricting in his state effectively boxed him out of his seat. The exodus is a reflection of the striking and persistent lack of diversity in the G.O.P. ranks of Congress, something that Mr. McCarthy has acknowledged is still an issue even years after his efforts to address it.
Stroy Moyd tried to open his comedy club at various locales in San Francisco, to no success. Then he looked at the Mid-Market neighborhood. Now he’s among a new wave of entrepreneurs bringing new life to the beleaguered area.Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Of all the places Stroy Moyd imagined opening San Francisco’s first Black-owned comedy club, Mid-Market was last on the list.
After two years, more than 80 locations toured and repeated rejections from landlords unwilling to bet on a young Black entrepreneur without deep pockets, it was the only place where he heard “yes.”
The Function Comedy Club and Cocktail Lounge sits across from the mostly vacant former Twitter headquarters at 10th and Market streets, a stark symbol of the neighborhood’s boom-and-bust cycle that spiked before the pandemic with venture-backed tech and private equity groups taking over buildings that had been home to nonprofits and social services. Now many of those buildings are empty and storefronts boarded up. Nowhere to be found are the sort of buzzy restaurants, bars and boutiques that fuel nightlife and draw crowds to the main drags of neighborhoods like North Beach or the Marina.
Moyd may not have planned to be here, but he is part of a small, determined wave of entrepreneurs betting on Mid-Market at a moment when much of the city’s focus is on reviving other corners of downtown. It’s an early sign of something like an organic rebirth as some in the neighborhood are vying to shift its identity away from a failed tech hub into an arts and theater district. Mid-Market is already home to five major theaters that, in a good year, attract upward of a million people to everything from Broadway musicals to hip-hop concerts.
“If you look at a thriving arts and culture district, it encompasses the entrepreneur, the denim maker down the street, the restaurateur, the guy who pours his love and soul into his cafe and is a welcoming third space to people,” said Fernando Pujals, executive director of the Mid-Market Business Association and Foundation. “All the bones are here.”
Years after the start of the pandemic, many of those invested in the neighborhood say conditions are finally improving. Yet the commercial retreat from Mid-Market is still visible on nearly every block.
The once-bustling Twitter building is now 96% empty. A 65,000-square-foot Whole Foods has been shuttered for three years after closing abruptly amid safety concerns. The historic Hotel Whitcomb remains boarded up after sustaining tens of millions of dollars in damage during its use as a pandemic-era shelter for the homeless. Office vacancy in the surrounding district hovers around 45%, with retail not far behind. It was so bad that during the depths of the pandemic, some in the local real estate community wouldn’t bring clients to the area. A gaping hole occupies the northeast corner of Market and Van Ness, which a developer excavated for a 47-story mixed-use project that was put on hold three years ago.
Mid-Market has been here before. After the Great Recession left the corridor lined with empty storefronts, city leaders offered tax breaks to lure tech firms in a bid to bolster its economic base. The Financial District’s offices had to reach near capacity before the city’s attention shifted to Mid-Market, downtown’s main artery connecting City Hall to the Embarcadero. Even then, it took a relentless focus from City Hall to attract investment to the neighborhood.
For a time, it worked: Companies moved in, housing was built, and the neighborhood flickered to life briefly with the promise of a dense, around-the-clock downtown corridor. There were bike shops and restaurants — one business sold handcrafted toffee and another offered flights of chai. But even before the pandemic emptied offices, that momentum had begun to slip. Today, with many of those same firms gone in search of cleaner, safer surroundings or contracting their operations in the era of remote work, Mid-Market has largely returned to where it started before the 2009 tax break.
And yet, a different kind of risk-taker is beginning to fill the void: Entrepreneurs like Moyd, often with fewer resources and less institutional backing, are moving into the very spaces others abandoned — drawn to the possibility of building something new, and hopeful that others will follow.
“Ideally, this strip would be full of shops, food and bars,” Moyd said. “But that takes a lot of effort, energy and consistency.”
He pointed to the millions of dollars in grants and funding that has been doled out to lure businesses to the Financial District and other parts of downtown. Earlier this month, a new group formed by corporate and philanthropic leaders to back Mayor Daniel Lurie’s downtown revitalization strategy unveiled a $25 million business revitalization fund providing grants and loans to small businesses activating a commercial corridor north of Mid-Market.
“They need to move that over here,” Moyd said. “In order for this neighborhood to do well, we need the city of San Francisco behind us.”
Diana Ponce De Leon, of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said the city is actively recruiting businesses to the Mid-Market area, helped a nonprofit buy a building and is providing grants to support businesses moving into vacant storefronts. An entertainment zone created between Fifth and Sixth streets was activated with block parties last year.
“We are leveraging everything we have in the area,” she said. “I feel the energy is there. People are interested. It feels cleaner. We still need to bring back the foot traffic.”
With or without the city’s help, businesses are starting find their way back into the neighborhood. Walk by the southwest corner of Seventh and Mission into the night and you might hear music drifting from the Roar Shack, an arts space run by the Living Earth Show, a nonprofit that creates and performs experimental chamber music. It’s the first new independent music venue to enter the neighborhood in years.
The Roar Shack fills the space vacated by nightclub Mr. Smith’s, which closed in 2019. Building owner Max Young, who also operated Mr. Smith’s, said the block had become so overrun with drug dealers and loiterers that he felt it was unsafe for patrons and staff. The two office suites upstairs, which had been occupied by tech companies, also emptied during the pandemic.
Now the whole building is full again, with two new startups taking space on the upper floors. The streets are much cleaner and the drug-dealing less conspicuous.
“The Mid-Market story is kind of rewriting itself right now,” Young said. “It’s not perfect. It’s not Disneyland. But it’s a huge difference from where we were.”
A few blocks to the west, the massive food hall on the ground floor of the former Twitter building that was nearly empty a year ago is filling up with a new generation of vendors selling empanadas, gnocchi, boba, caprese sandwiches and açaí bowls.
“A year ago I was like, ‘What am I even doing here?’” said Joy MacDonald, who manages the market. “Now it’s cleaner outside, there are more people walking by. We get a lot of people coming in and saying, ‘I haven’t been here in years.’”
Ground floor activation was often an afterthought for both new residential and office towers, but for Mid-Market’s recovery it will be key, said Benjamin Kochalski, a partner with TMG Partners, which has a long history of investing and developing in the neighborhood.
A neighborhood’s recovery “doesn’t start on the 30th floor of a building,” he said, adding that Mid-Market’s offices are unlikely to benefit from increased office tenant interest until higher-demand space in the Financial District is absorbed.
“It’s not ‘main and main’ as it relates to office space,” said Chris Pearson, senior vice president of development for Hudson Pacific Properties, describing the neighborhood’s competitive position for attracting the latest wave of tech startups. Hudson Pacific recently filed plans to convert one of its two Mid-Market office buildings into housing.
Organizations like the Mid-Market Foundation are stepping in to act as the intermediaries between the neighborhood’s landlords and small-business tenants. Pujals, the foundation’s director, said the organization helped subsidize the Roar Shack’s first year of rent.
The group keeps a database of all of the neighborhood’s ground floor commercial vacancies, and a list of landlords willing to provide concessions or support. Between Fifth and Seventh streets, the foundation has identified seven turnkey spaces ready for occupancy.
There has been “incremental” progress, Pujals said, along with setbacks. The Red Tail Wine Bar, which the foundation also supported in opening at 992 Market St., closed after just a year of operation in Mid-Market.
One of the challenges to revitalizing the neighborhood’s ground floor ecosystem is its large number of sizable cold-shell spaces, which require significant up-front capital to activate.
Pujals believes that with focused investment, both the arts and tech can flourish side by side in the neighborhood despite the fact that museums and arts venues across downtown have been struggling.
“If we were to lean in and center investing and fostering this creative economy in the neighborhood, I think that you would see a secondary wave of office lease up as the broader downtown begins to fill up as well,” Pujals said.
That thesis is being tested in real time on the northern edge of Mid-Market, where nonprofit Community Arts Stabilization Trust purchased the historic Warfield Theatre at 988 Market St. for $7.3 million last year, about half of what the building sold for in 2015. With public radio station KALW as the anchor tenant, CAST has been working to transform the nine-story building into “Warfield Commons,” a hub for arts, culture and media nonprofits. Today, the building is 90% leased.
A block away, landlord Shervin Shoustary recently landed a robotics startup as a new tenant at 965 Mission St. Shoustary said tours with AI and robotics companies are increasingly resulting in signed leases at his building, and credited the city’s focus on public safety and cleanliness in the area. “We are seeing great results,” he said.
Julian Dash, owner of the Holy Stitch sewing factory at 1059 Market, has seen this cycle before: First comes the blight and vacancy, then the priced-out creatives that leave their “thumbprints” on disinvested spaces, driving property values up, he said. “The suits usually follow.”
A 15-year fixture on Market Street, Dash has watched waves of attention crest and recede on Mid-Market, where he has occupied multiple storefronts. Dash described himself as one of Mid-Market’s “longest-standing activators.”
Previous efforts to breathe life into Mid-Market failed because they resulted in services and businesses that proved inaccessible to the very communities that are essential to its vitality, according to Dash.
“My base rent is like $6,000 per month. Next door, the same ground-level space is going for $20,000,” he said, referring to a property that once served as a former adult entertainment venue before it was replaced with a modern eight-story new development — or as Dash put it, a “fancy, stereotypical condo building.”
The rent sought for that building’s languishing, 7,100-square-foot ground floor storefront is still lower than the city’s average for retail spaces, which according to Costar, is about $40.65 per square foot. But, for Dash, the stubborn vacancy next door is “indicative” of Mid-Market’s biggest problem: “Maybe some things are being forced into a district that wasn’t built for that.”
Dash believes the businesses that find success in Mid-Market are those that serve as “assets to the community.”
“I fix people’s clothes and give young people a place to learn, and my business is growing,” he said.
With many questions still surrounding tech’s office needs in post-pandemic San Francisco, some of Mid-Market’s institutional landlords appear to have shifted strategies. Hudson Pacific, which once rented its 22-story office tower at 1455 Market St. to Uber, is now banking on a different type of office tenant to fill the void: public agencies.
The landlord signed a long-term lease with the city to backfill vacancy in the building — the deal provides the city with the option to purchase it next year.
“It’s a 1.1-million-square-foot building. If that were to just sit there empty in perpetuity, it’s going to drag the rest of the market,” Pearson, of Hudson Pacific, said. “To have actual tenants in the building now with city employees occupying it, is going to help lift all ships in that area.”
The deal with Hudson Pacific ushered in a potentially broader shift that some city officials are now actively exploring. Mid-Market Supervisor Matt Dorsey recently nixed a deal that would have allowed the San Francisco Employee Retirement System, the city’s pension fund, to exit its longtime offices in the neighborhood and relocate to the Financial District.
“I have been saying for many years that San Francisco’s most underutilized resource is Market Street,” said Dorsey, while addressing a roomful of early-stage founders, techies and researchers inside of the newly launched Frontier Tower at Sixth and Market streets earlier this month.
The 16-story tower, once valued at $62 million and home to flexible space provider WeWork, was languishing with vacancy just a few years ago, leading to its sale at a 90% discount in 2024. It has since been reborn as an underground tech coworking hub with more than 700 members — proof that Mid-Market still appeals to the startup world.
Dorsey said that he believes technology will continue to play a big role in Mid-Market, alongside the city. He plans to call a hearing to determine what the city “can do with its assets to put skin in the game on Market Street.”
“I want to make sure that Market Street is a showplace from the Castro to the Ferry building, and people will wonder why it took this long,” Dorsey said.
David Seward, chief financial officer of UC Law San Francisco, agreed with Dorsey that “the city should take some responsibility for mitigating some of the damage.” The law school, which has invested $500 million in building an academic village just off Market Street in the Tenderloin, was part of a 2020 lawsuit over the dangerous conditions on the sidewalks and in the doorways, calling it a public health menace.
“The emptying of the Twitter building was negative. Whole Foods’ decision to pull up stakes was negative. And some of that was driven by city policies that were adverse to activation of the community,” he said. “I believe Mid-Market is the key to the Tenderloin’s revitalization and for Union Square as well.”
Mid-Market, to others, is a proving ground. Tech may have a reputation for being fickle about the neighborhood, but the new generation of future-minded optimists building the city’s latest innovation hub at one of its most challenged intersections is betting on creating something more enduring.
“One of the great things about San Francisco is that it’s a city that constantly reinvents itself, and Mid-Market in particular has always been the pivot point in the city — it’s the center point,” said biotech founder Elliot Roth, a member of Frontier Tower. “How do you enable positive change in the city? You don’t want to do something that’s just a brief, momentary interjection. You want something that’s sustained and builds for the long term.”
J.K. Dineen covers housing and real estate development. He joined The Chronicle in 2014 covering San Francisco land use politics for the City Hall team. He has since expanded his focus to explore housing and development issues throughout Northern California. He is the author of two books: “Here Tomorrow” (Heyday, 2013) and “High Spirits” (Heyday, 2015).
Laura Waxmann covers the business community with a focus on commercial real estate, development, retail and the future of San Francisco’s downtown. Prior to joining The Chronicle in 2023, she reported on San Francisco’s changing real estate and economic landscape in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic for the San Francisco Business Times.
Waxmann was born and raised in Frankfurt, Germany, but has called San Francisco home since 2007. She’s reported on a variety of topics including housing, homelessness, education and local politics for the San Francisco Examiner, Mission Local and El Tecolote.
Even when the White House Correspondents’ Dinner goes smoothly, it’s a huge embarrassment to journalists. And in the wake of Saturday’s shooting that interrupted the event, the spectacle of journalists cozying up to politicians is likely to get even worse.
Notice that Trump said “we.” He’s not supposed to be in charge of the event – he was a guest of the press – but he will surely use security concerns to big-foot the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) and dictate the terms of his return appearance, unless someone has the sense to call the whole thing off.
WHCA President Weijia Jiang of CBS News has been deferential to Trump despite his ongoing campaign to feed the 1st Amendment into a wood-chipper. (See my newsletter from two weeks ago with a sample of Trump’s outrageous attacks on the press.)
As Jiang wrote in a first-person piece published yesterday, she welcomed Trump’s appearance this year because she hoped it would “restore some normalcy between the Trump administration and the press. Maybe I was naïve, but I wanted it to be a room we don’t see enough of in Washington: a bipartisan one.”
Jiang said Trump told her after the shooting, “I saw a room that was just totally unified.” She added: “Unity isn’t a word we hear much these days. But that’s how I felt, too.”
Arrrrrrg. The press isn’t supposed to seek unity with politicians. It’s supposed to seek the truth. That’s easier to accomplish – and to get the public to believe – when you’re not clinking champagne glasses with the people you’re reporting on. Jiang and other WHCA members may have good intentions, but if so, they’re such myopic journalists that they don’t understand the authoritarian threat we face. Or maybe they realize it, but refuse to pass up the opportunity to wear expensive clothes, eat tasty food, and boost their social standing – democracy be damned.
In any case, it appears that the co-stars of Washington’s next buddy movie are Trump and Jiang. At his post-shooting news conference, the president had high praise for the WHCA chief, calling her “madam chairman,” and let her ask the first question.
Plans for a dinner do-over are unclear. Jiang wrote: “Trump insists we are having the dinner again in 30 days. Let’s see.” Some Washington journalists think it would be best not to attempt another dinner this year, but Trump tends to fixate on his stupidest ideas. If the dinner does happen, look for the WHCA and the White House to work in lockstep, billing it as a patriotic gesture – an act of “unity.”
Will the event return to the Washington Hilton or will Trump push for another venue? He was quick to note that the Hilton was “not a particularly secure building” and argued that the shooting showed the need for his beloved ballroom, which he has tried to ram through, despite a legal challenge.
Beyond the arrangements for an “even nicer” makeup dinner, there are more reasons to think Saturday’s gunfire will work to Trump’s advantage with the press.
The gunman’s anti-Trump political views are already being used by the right to depict political terrorism as a left-wing problem, when it’s actually more common on the right. If journalists don’t accept the right’s spin, Trump will accuse them of covering up leftist violence.
Also, I fear the shooting will create a stronger emotional bond between Washington journalists and the people in power. It’s human nature for people who go through a harrowing event together to become closer. Politicians and the press – two groups that have a naturally adversarial role in our society – shared a jarring experience in which they faced a common danger. I’m not saying the shooting is likely to make Trump more empathetic – he’s still Trump, after all – but it might lead to a less aggressive posture by the journalists of the WHCA.
And it’s not as if White House reporters were tough on Trump before the shooting. They frequently treat his comments with wide-eyed gullibility, even though he’s the most prominent public liar of our time. They regularly normalize and sanewash his unhinged behavior.
“You know why I do it?” he said. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
If journalists accept that version of “unity,” we’re doomed.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has played a key role in helping Trump trash America’s global standing, yet Politico cited his “savvy handling of foreign conflicts” in a story last week as if it were an established fact.
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on April 22, 2026.
(Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“We cannot allow unlimited outside spending to distort our elections or drown out the voices of working people.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders is leading a coalition of Democratic senators pushing for the party’s leaders to require candidates to swear off billionaire- and corporate-backed super PACs, or political action committees, in this year’s primary elections.
Five of the senators are members of a group of Senate Democrats known as the “Fight Club” that has formed to oppose Schumer’s preferred candidates in contested Democratic primaries, many of whom are closely aligned with the party’s traditional corporate backers.
While the senators applauded the DNC’s resolution last month broadly condemning the influence of dark money in party elections, calling it an “important first step,” they said Democratic leaders needed to take more “concrete steps to curb the influence of dark money,” particularly the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
“Corporate-funded super PACs are shaping the 2026 elections as we speak, and the scale of their resources is unprecedented,” the senators said. “Crypto-aligned groups are preparing to spend $200 million, and AIPAC-affiliated groups already control more than $90 million. The AI industry has already spent over $185 million this year alone. These sums are being deployed to influence Democratic primaries and overwhelm candidates who rely on grassroots support.”
April’s broad anti-dark money resolution was passed by the DNC in lieu of one that directly singled out “the growing influence” of AIPAC, specifically over its more than $100 million spending blitz in 2024 to oust progressive candidates. Despite a dramatic shift toward opposition to Israel among Democratic voters over the past three years, that resolution was voted down by a DNC panel.
AIPAC continues to dump massive amounts of money behind its preferred candidates. The senators’ letter notes that “in Illinois alone, outside groups spent over $50 million in recent Democratic primaries.” Nearly half of that money was spent by AIPAC, which secretly funneled money to support its candidates using shell groups that appeared to be unaffiliated.
The group has used similar tactics in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Ala Stanford, a candidate for Pennsylvania’s 3rd District in Philadelphia, was recently revealed to have received $500,000 worth of backing from AIPAC through a super PAC despite claiming to have received no support from the Israel lobby.
Meanwhile, in Maine, a clique of Republican billionaires who back Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)—including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Palantir CEO Alex Karp—also recently dropped $2 million to fund an ad campaign seeking to hamper the chances of the Democratic Senate primary front-runner Graham Platner.
“We cannot allow unlimited outside spending to distort our elections or drown out the voices of working people,” the senators said in Sunday’s letter.
Super PACs like AIPAC, AI and crypto are buying elections with billionaire money.
We'll never address the major crises facing our country as long as that continues.
We must overturn Citizens United and kick billionaire-funded super PACs OUT of Democratic primaries NOW. pic.twitter.com/weZGwx0izI
The senators noted Schumer’s past statement that overturning the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the door for the flood of corporate money into elections by allowing individuals to independently spend unlimited amounts in support of candidates, was “probably more important than any other single thing we could do to preserve this great and grand democracy.”
They said that while reversing the ruling remained a “critical long-term goal,” the party “has the authority—and the responsibility—to act now with clear, enforceable rules.”
“National and state parties should require all Democratic candidates to sign a pledge opposing billionaire- and corporate-backed super PAC spending on their behalf in Democratic primaries,” they said. “The DNC, state parties, and committees working to elect Democrats to the House and Senate have many potential tools at their disposal to enforce that pledge, including withholding endorsements for those who make endorsements in the primary, and they should use whatever tools necessary to do so.”
Sanders has said that simply requiring candidates to take a pledge is not enough and that party leaders need to be diligent about holding them to it.
“If the Democrats are going to be honest and consistent in terms of their concerns about money and politics, they’ve got to clean up, in my view, their own house immediately,” he said in an interview on Saturday. “That means getting super PACs out of Democratic primaries, congressional as well as presidential.”
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Join May Day Strong’s Mass Call ahead of Friday’s day of action (Weds 8pm ET/5pm PT). You’ll hear from organizers mobilizing across the country about the importance of economic disruption as a tactic in fighting authoritarianism and how you can take part in the day of action this Friday (If you haven’t already, find a May Day event near you. There are already more than 3,000 events planned across the country.)
Tell your Republican representative: No more bankrolling ICE brutality. After keeping the DHS shut down for months because they refuse to enact reforms that Americans overwhelmingly want for ICE and Border Patrol, the GOP is trying to use a legislative process known as budget reconciliation to shovel as much as $140 billion more into the coffers of those agencies — on top of the $170 billion they got in last year’s Big Ugly Bill. The House could vote as soon as tomorrow to advance this package, so if you have a Republican representative, call them today to tell them you don’t want another penny of your taxpayer dollars funding these violent agencies.
Join Fight Back With Friends (Tues, 6:30pm ET/3:30pm PT) Fight Back With Friends is a monthly program that empowers you to connect family and friends with civic action. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about how you can support folks in your circles to show up on May Day, with all the tools, tips, and scripts you’ll need to be effective and make an economic impact across the country. And don’t worry if you’re new to Fight Back With Friends! We’ll have a full training after we walk through the call to action to help you become familiar with the process.
Demand that your representative say NO to the regime’s efforts to expand its domestic spying capabilities. Section 702 of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is a War on Terrorism-era relic that skirts the Constitution to allow warrantless domestic surveillance by the federal government — but it’s set to expire, or be reauthorized, this week, possibly as early as tomorrow. Tell your representative: They can either greenlight AI-fueled warrantless mass surveillance, or uphold the Constitution. And after you’ve emailed your representative via the link above, please follow up with a call.
Tell your senators and representative: No ICE concentration camps, anywhere. The regime has been scouting and purchasing commercial warehouses to expand its network of ICE prison camps — but local, state, and legal opposition has successfully stopped or slowed 13 such projects. As Saturday’s Communities Not Cages day of action made crystal clear, Americans absolutely do not want to be a nation that warehouses humans, anywhere. Ever. Follow up on that amazing day by telling your Members of Congress to publicly oppose new warehouse-style camps and any public spending to build, renovate, or operate such facilities.
As a journalist, I’m always doing two things: Reporting and writing. My reading falls along the same lines. I read one kind of book because I’m interested in a topic and want to mine it for details, context or ideas (reporting). I read a second kind of book because I want to see how different people are making and telling stories (writing).
The first kind of book is pretty specific to what I’m working on and tends to be works whose main job is to inform. Sometimes that means academic tomes that maybe five other people have read, but I also read a lot of popular history, especially histories of California. The second kind of book is much more wide-ranging—fiction, nonfiction, essays etc.
Obviously the two piles blend together a lot; anytime you read a book, even a bad one, you see someone do something you hadn’t thought of before, and it informs how you approach your next piece. Here are some books (and an art show) that I read or consulted or was inspired by while writing my new book Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America. Warning: They are all over the place, but are a mix of books about housing, cities and places, and works whose narrative methods I found intriguing and useful.
For this generation of housing writers, it is the work against which so much else is measured. Desmond calls himself a sociologist and is a professor at Princeton, but actually he’s a journalist who at a relatively young age has established himself as America’s preeminent chronicler of poverty. Poverty is a tough topic. It’s always there, always sad—and always hard to say something new about. Evicted sparked a national conversation about the never-ending shame of having so much want in a country with so much wealth. By shifting perspectives from a landlord who is exploiting tenants while struggling to maintain a middle-class lifestyle to renters who are constantly on the edge of homelessness, the book sees no boogeymen but only a rotten system that we’re all caught up in one way or the other.
My current favorite book. In a world in which seemingly every reporter is opining too much and tweeting too much and first-person essaying too much, MacFarquhar is a relative enigma. She’s not a hermit or anything; you can find interviews and TED Talks and whatnot. But she steers clear of the first person, leaves out most interview quotes, and tries to inhabit her subjects by using free indirect speech. The effect of these decisions is to elevate her vision while reducing her presence. It’s original, brilliant and makes for some of the best writing I’ve seen in any form.
Methods aside, Strangers Drowning is a timeless story about extreme altruists—do-gooders whose lives are so dedicated to helping people that they end up sacrificing most of their personal, professional and family lives. It seems weird to call such a cerebral book a rollercoaster, but the emotional progression of reading it is intense. You start the book feeling like a selfish piece of garbage. Toward the middle you’re convinced that her subjects are defects who have been cursed with the mirror image of psychopathy. By the end you just go “people are crazy, man,” and leave it at that. It’s a journey into the soul that becomes a journey into the mind and leaves you scratching your head at the remarkable complexity of kindness. I’ve bought maybe ten copies of this book to give out as gifts, and gave two to sources during the reporting of Golden Gates.
Every reporter who has expressed even a modest interest in history has at some point had an editor say some version of “this is a newspaper not a library.” Hannah-Jones has become one of the most decorated journalists of her generation by breaking that rule, most prominently with The New York Times’s 1619 Project, and here in Living Apart, which is essentially a long magazine article turned eBook.
The premise of this piece is how the federal government neglected to enforce the 1968 Civil Rights Act by refusing to use the cudgel of Housing and Urban Development infrastructure money to force exclusive suburbs to build affordable housing and curb restrictive zoning practices. This decision, originally made by the Nixon Administration, continued for four decades, perpetuating segregation long after fair housing—passed in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—was the law of the land.
Given that this piece was published in 2012, the trick of the story, like a good amount of Hannah-Jones’s work, is to pull history into the present by showing how decisions made decades ago continue to guide us today. The most remarkable thing about the reporting is that it leaves zero question that the Nixon Administration knew exactly what it was doing in neglecting to enforce fair housing. They also knew this decision would cause great harm to American unity and have consequences for many generations.
In a batch of talking points for the president, George Romney, Nixon’s HUD chief and the father of Senator Mitt Romney, warns that de-segregationist housing policies are needed to prevent “our nation from being torn apart.”
President Nixon refuses, but understands the consequences. “I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools,” Nixon wrote in a memo Hannah-Jones unearthed.
This is one of those “both buckets” pieces. I consulted it several times while writing Golden Gates, first for the housing stuff, but also to guide my thinking on how to make Chapter 4, which starts at the close of World War II and ends in the early 1980s, resonate today. My solution was to weave in the story of a developer who moved to California as a 10-year-old during the state’s 1960s population boom and started his career during the housing crisis of the 1970. Later, the book catches up with him as 65-year-old developer today, to show just how little had changed.
There’s nothing I can say about Joan Didion that hasn’t already been said, so let me take this opportunity to say that I don’t care how many times you’ve read Slouching, you haven’t experienced it in full until you’ve heard Diane Keaton’s reading of the audiobook. I missed my BART stop listening to it because I got so carried away by her voice.
For years I’ve wanted to write a brainy essay about the differing ways in which Joan Didion and Jane Jacobs handle the chaos of youth and urbanity, but it’s never really gelled and therefore remains more of a feeling than a coherent thought. The writers are just so different, and their fields of study so distinct. And yet, in my mind I always pair them because of the opposite emotions I walk away with after reading them. Whereas Didion sees chaos everywhere, Jacobs—who is a better pure reporter—sees the underlying logic of systems that appear disorderly on the surface. There’s a basic optimism in that: Messy stuff works. People are adaptable. Life goes on. One of the most discouraging things about politics is the way people become advocates for policies over outcomes, which means the same batch of advocates can sometimes be the cure and other times be the disease. Jacobs was an advocate, but she’s also fluid and thoughtful, presenting guidelines for good urbanism yet allowing that they have to flexible and malleable for cities to remain vibrant.
I read Karen Russell the way novelists read poets: To see where the boundaries are. Fiction or nonfiction, writing is a bizarre exercise. You encounter a person, idea, dream or scene or emotion, then try to recreate the same details and feeling with a bunch of marks on a page. And you do this in hopes of forging some strange telepathy with people you’ll never meet. It’s hard stuff, so even though I’m squarely into journalism, I still find it enriching to spend time reading novelists and short story writers who are opening new pathways. It reminds me that nothing is impossible, that the word “indescribable” is bullshit, and that however much difficulty I’m having rendering some scene, someone else is struggling with something infinitely more difficult.
In terms of my reading experience, I liked the title story of Vampires most, but the one that made the greatest impression on me is “The Barn at the End of Our Term.” It’s a story about President Rutherford B. Hayes being reincarnated as a horse. If you asked me to explain why I found this interesting, I couldn’t do it. But Karen Russell could, because she can do anything.
Look, everyone needs to unwind with a little detective fiction now and then. And if you’re going to do detective fiction, you might as well dive into one of America’s greatest literary traditions, which is detective fiction about LA. There’s so much out there—Raymond Chandler, Michael Connelly—but I always come back to the Easy Rawlins series.
Easy is a stereotypically complicated protagonist, and his best friend is a sociopathic murderer, but once you get past all that, you realize that some of the best stuff in these books is all the domestic juggling Easy has to deal with in the midst of his detective work. Property is central to this story and Easy’s evolution as a character. He’s struggling with the mortgage in the first book, upgrades to landlording in the second, and by the time of White Butterfly is a small-time mogul who has gone to some lengths to hide this fact. Real estate is a hustle that a stunning number of people—rich, poor and middle—have all got their hands in. In this way Easy is just another ordinary American trying to find his way to passive income.
The New York Times called this a “nonfiction masterpiece.” It is nothing short of that. The premise of the book—democracy in crisis—is the sort of amorphous topic that seems impossible to execute in nonfiction. There’s just so much going on. But Packer unpacks his tale one character at a time, and in doing so manages to accomplish his audacious goal of constructing an “inner history” of America.
The main stories are deep and well-told—the decline of a factory town, the growth of Silicon Valley, a starry-eyed optimist turned cynical political consultant—and along the way Packer gives readers a kind of cultural download via short, interlude biographies on subjects including Oprah Winfrey, Sam Walton, Raymond Carver, Andrew Breitbart and Jay-Z. Like all the best writers, you know exactly what Packer thinks without ever hearing him say it. The effect of reading this book is not unlike the effect of fading into a nine-minute Prog Rock song with multiple solos and time signature changes. You wonder how something so vast and complex can work while simultaneously appreciating that somehow it just does.
On the surface, it seems like a risky idea: The history of one year in New York, tracing crime, the mayoral election, and baseball. New York is a big and important place, but it’s not so big or important to make an easy sell of a book about a World Series whose outcome is well-known or a local election whose results most of America doesn’t care about. And yet, Mahler pulls it off. What makes this book so great, beyond the depth of reporting and the easy, vivid writing, is that it’s less a story about New York than a story about the nadir of American cities. Reading the book—the city teetering on bankruptcy, the Son of Sam murders, the 1977 blackout and looting—you wonder how the place can ever recover.
With hindsight, however, we know that shortly after the story closes, New York and big US cities across the country begin a slow recovery that 40 years later would result in the gentrification fights we see today. This makes Mahler’s book feel like a prequel to the modern American city, and the experience of reading it is a reminder of the adage that predictions are hard, especially about the future.
I suspect that in the year 2040 or so, someone (maybe me), could write a great book about how the San Francisco of 2019 or 2020 told us much about where America, cities and the economy was headed. In a way I tried to do that with Golden Gates, but as time goes on the implications will become clearer and gift some future author with a wealth of political and cultural detail of the sort that Mahler mines so expertly.
“Throughout history, the treatment and arrangement of shelter have revealed more about a particular people than have any other products of creative arts. Housing is an outward expression of the inner human nature; no society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.”
So begins Crabgrass Frontier, the definitive history of American suburbs. The book was published in 1985 but remains the best look at suburbanization and its consequences for American society. I suppose that’s not surprising, since an event as epochal as suburbanization would be expected to have staying power. Jackson goes through the whole thing, tracking suburbs from pre-history through early America and the Postwar boom. The suburbs, then and now, are built on transportation. As the book progresses, Jackson lays out how each successive leap of mobility opens more land—linear carriages and trains gave way to geometric freeways—available for urban development.
What’s most remarkable about this work is its capacity to look forward. At the end Jackson predicts that inner-city crime rates will fall precipitously and that over time far-flung suburbs would become poorer and less desired as central cities become safer and richer. Pretty bold prediction in the mid-1980s, but it was spot on, and we’re now living with the consequences.
The Color of Law is framed as something between a very long essay and a legal argument. In the introduction Rothstein lays out his case for America’s racially homogeneous neighborhoods being a consequence of de jure segregation (segregation by law or public policy) versus de facto segregation (segregation resulting from private practices). It’s a fascinating framing. As I read the book, I kept thinking about a theoretical court case in which black Americans could sue their government for the vast wealth transfers that occurred via lost housing wealth. How many trillions would it add up to?
Thus, while my tastes gravitate toward sprawling, character-driven books, the power of this one flows from the simplicity of the argument and Rothstein’s relentless focus in proving it. Rothstein did not discover racism, and he didn’t discover the Federal Housing Administration’s redlining guidelines or restrictive covenants either. Various authors, historians and essayists have trod this ground several times before. But the way he assembles this history is unique and abundantly helpful. Page after page and example after example he leaves zero doubt that segregation is not something that just happened but was planned and executed by a federal government whose societal debt will take centuries, if ever, to repay.
Ask anyone who is even remotely serious about California history what you need to read to get started, and the answer is always Kevin Starr. And it’s always the correct response: He is the master. This is where I note that, as much as I wish everyone was as fascinated with California as I am, Starr is not for casual readers. As the former state librarian and foremost chronicler of the Golden State, his books sag under the weight of their comprehension. Take Golden Dreams, which covers a relative burp of history—California from 1950 to 1963—yet is almost 600 pages and roughly 250,000 words. To get through Starr’s entire Americans and the California Dream series, which covers about 150 years, you’ll need to put aside time for seven more volumes and well in excess of a million more words.
I have them all, but if you’re going to read one book from the canon, Golden Dreams is it, because that was the period when California really took over the nation’s politics and economy. The book goes deep into the West Coast psyche, pulling together a vast trove of cultural, economic and political history mixed with long chunks of literary criticism. By the end you’ve covered subjects ranging from the architectural marvel of stacked multi-level interchanges to the horticultural tinkering that gave us freeway landscaping to the instructional images of Sunset magazine, the styles of Williams-Sonoma, the religiousness of Big Sur, and the highbrow strategy of the San Francisco 49ers’ offense. The book has an entire chapter analyzing the “Baghdad by the Bay” metaphor that Herb Caen deployed in his columns for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a lot.
Speaking of metaphors, after all this excess, Starr ends with stunningly elegant conclusion, which is that the result of California’s wealth and abundance was a rebellion to the simple designs and style choices that have come to define Apple products and gave rise to the concept we call “coolness.” “There was, to put the matter simply, a lot of money flowing through the society, hence a lot of jobs and careers open to talent, hence the filling in of domestic space with iconic manifestations of the new consumer lifestyle— stereophonic sound systems, electric appliances, modernist furniture, abstract art and sculpture, Space Age silver and flatware, fabrics in unprecedented colors, designer jewelry and eyewear,” he writes. “Hence the effort to keep this consumption under control by banishing clutter from interiors, appliance design, and related items… Coolness, from this perspective, constituted a kind of asceticism, an insistence upon choice and restraint, in a world filling up with consumer goods.”
Honorable Mention: Sandow Birk,In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias
Technically this isn’t a book (though you can buy one). It’s an art exhibit that I saw at the Laguna Art Museum in 2000, shortly after I moved to LA from San Francisco. The premise of the show, more than 120 artworks, is that NorCal and SoCal fought an actual war and these are the paintings that documented it. The result is a bunch of epic, oil on canvas scenes with names like “The Bombing of the Getty Center” and “SF MOMA and the Battle of San Francisco.” The concept is hilarious, the paintings are gorgeous, and the story is sly. If you’ve spent any amount of time in either SF or LA, this will resonate.
Conor Dougherty is an economics reporter at The New York Times. He previously spent a decade in New York covering housing and the economy for The Wall Street Journal. He grew up in the Bay Area and lives with his family in Oakland.
By Katie Dowd, Managing editor April 26, 2026 (SFGate.com)
A file photo of the view of Lope National Park located in Central Gabon, April 13, 2013. Desirey Minkoh/AfrikImages Agency/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A California man was killed by a herd of elephants during a hunting trip in Africa, his family confirmed. Ernie Dosio, 75, was the owner of a Central Valley farm management company.
Dosio, who was a well-known big game hunter affiliated with the Sacramento Safari Club, was on a trip with Collect Africa, the New York Times reported. The travel company bills itself on its site as an “African Species Collecting Concierge.” According to family friends, Dosio was hoping to kill a yellow-backed duiker, an antelope known for its timid personality, in the Lope-Okanda rainforest area of Gabon.
While hunting on April 17, Dosio and two other hunters unexpectedly came upon a small herd of female elephants and their calves. The adult elephants charged repeatedly, and Dosio was killed when he was gored by one of the elephant’s tusks, the Times reported. His remains are awaiting repatriation to California; he lived in Lodi at the time of his death.
The news came as a shock to loved ones in the Central Valley, where Dosio was the millionaire owner of Pacific AgriLands, a farm management company that works with wineries. The Central District Elks posted on Facebook that he was a “pillar of our Community,” and Dosio’s son told the Daily Mail that the family was thrown into chaos by the news.
“The day it happened we heard it was buffalos — and different crazy things,” Jeff Dosio told the outlet. “The lawyers got called before the family. There’s just some things that just don’t make sense.”
A close family friend who spoke with the Times said Dosio had been on many hunts in Africa and “knew the risks.” Photos of Dosio’s home attest to his controversial hobby: trophies of a rhino, lion and numerous deer and antelope species can be seen.
Katie Dowd is the SFGATE managing editor. She started her career at SFGATE in 2011 shortly after graduating from UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in the Bay Area.
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