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AI: Final weapon or final healer?
Part 1: The Wound, Enthroned
“Know thyself”—the timeless injunction of Socrates, father of the Western wisdom tradition, to his students.
Science Fiction
I exhaled. The session had taken the afternoon. I had read the output, critiqued it, resubmitted it to...
Oakland students fight sex trafficking with their voices
Dream Youth Clinic occupies a small, gray building in Oakland right off I-980. Colorful murals and a spattering of posters cover its interior, creating a space that welcomes youth affected by sex trafficking.
“We try to make young...
Frederick Noland draws Black history
Frederick Noland is the unofficial oracle of lesser-known stories about Black people in America, and especially in the Bay Area. As an Oakland-based visual storyteller, the New Yorker cartoonist and California College of the Arts adjunct professor...
New documentary tracks vanishing small-town theaters
Zoe Muth’s songs are saturated with sadness and a sense of loss. Her voice reaches Iris DeMent’s level of earnestness and the way she yearns for the possibility of a better world. Muth’s sorrowful tone isn’t yet...
The Hellas blend punk, ska and cumbia
Through a maze of blue-splattered walls, the Hellas have carved themselves a home base in a north San Jose rehearsal studio. Inside their space, one wall is covered in posters that feature previous shows, while the rest...
Broken Dreams delights with reinvention
When I sat down at The Temple Club a decade ago to interview Geoffrey Deetz, he and his wife, Quỳnh Như Nguyen, were a few years away from taking over Le Colonial in 2021. Pilloried in 2019...
Truong Tran confronts language and identity
What happens when language is permanently fragmented without one’s control?
While far from a debut project, Truong Tran’s How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir is still laden with firsts. It marks the first time he has written solely...
